Newsfeed nuggets

I felt pretty dumb the other day when a regular reader of this blog started telling me about something they'd found in the Google newsfeed (to your right on this blog) that I hadn't seen:

Becky Roeder, who did an MA in linguistics here a few years ago and her PhD at Michigan State in sociolinguistics, is now working at the University of Toronto. She's still remembered fondly here, and now she's come home in some sense: She's working on English in Thunder Bay, Ontario, surely part of the Upper Midwest under any reasonable definition. Here's the article from the Thunder Bay paper on her fieldwork. The word on the street around here is that the Wisconsin Englishes guys are cooking up something with Kate Remlinger, known for her work on Yooper. Heck, we could have a whole network covering the region if Becky runs with this topic.

Of course, after missing that important story, I felt obligated to start checking the newsfeed and stumbled immediately across this story on Kim Tu-bong, one-time leader of North Korea and notable historical linguist.