Dummy Words
Last night, I was setting up an account on Virb, a new social networking site that is like a mashup of MySpace and facebook. (Franky, I think it trumps both of them.) While customizing my profile (virb.com/twelveone), I looked at the preview for my page and it had some dummy text shown as a way of judging text color and size, etc. The text was pretty familiar, in that it was the standard “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…” jumble that is seen in undeveloped web and blog templates. But, it has always bugged me that, though it appears to be just garbled letters, it also might be a meaningful phrase in, say, Latin.
So, I Googled it. And, lo and behold, I came across a really neat (as far as geekiness goes) website devoted to the origin of the use of the phrase as dummy text (it first appeared as such about 500 years ago!) and the origin of the text itself, complete with translation of the original source. It even has a generator that will make up paragraph after paragraph of it. All in all, very interesting. If you like useless information. 
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