yuhangyuan

China's first manned space mission may launch within the next couple of weeks.

The official Chinese word for an astronaut is "yuhangyuan", but some space buffs have been calling them "taikonauts" for years. Can't we just drop the use of different words for astronauts launched by different countries, and call them all "astronauts" as long as we're using English? The astronaut/cosmonaut usage is an awkward Sixties Space Race relic, not something you'd want to extend arbitrarily into a future in which all sorts of entities may launch people into space.

Iteration N+1

Sam managed to harass the insurance people sufficiently to get the latest in a series of profuse apologies, an acknowledgement that indeed we no longer owned the car for which they were charging us insurance and had absolutely no further relationship with them, an assurance that it was all taken care of, and our removal from their automatic payment system.

Today, they sent us a bill for a gigantic sum of money.

Sometimes the obtuseness of large organizations amazes me.