My accent or dialect is closest to that found in Irving, Texas, or Baton Rouge or New Orleans, Louisiana, according to a New York Times quiz.
I find this a bit odd, considering I’ve never lived in any of those cities, and Irving, as part of the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, is a place I specifically endeavor to avoid. The map suggests that my dialect is common to much of Texas, though, so I guess it’s okay. Continue reading
![By Lars Karlsson (Keqs) (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/800px-Keqs_young_european_hedgehog1-300x199.jpg "By Lars Karlsson (Keqs) (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons")
With all this idiocy, we need a bit of cute around here. Have some hedgehog.
Speaking at a Young Americans for Freedom event on Friday, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) offered an unusual assessment of what happens when “the government is going to be the principal provider of health care for the country.” “It’s actually a pretty clever system,” the former presidential candidate explained, “Take care of the people who can vote and people who can’t vote, get rid of them as quickly as possible by not giving them care so they can’t vote against you.” [Emphasis added.]
The prevailing interpretation is that he’s saying nationalized healthcare is a way for the party in power to effectively kill people who don’t vote for them.
Look at what he said, though—while grammatically awkward, his statement allows for healthcare for “the people who can vote.” It’s the “people who can’t vote” who wouldn’t be getting healthcare, which makes no sense if the point is to stop them from voting. The only way this makes sense is if the people who aren’t voting for the party in power have already been disenfranchised somehow. Perhaps Santorum said too much here…
Or perhaps I’m overthinking the whole thing, and Rick Santorum is a fool talking out of his ass. Apply Occam’s Razor here.
Photo credit: By Lars Karlsson (Keqs) (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-2.5], via Wikimedia Commons.
(NOTE: I have not been feeling very verbose in recent days, so much of my blogging activity has consisted of quoting extensively from other people’s work. This post will be no different.)
Via ethanham.com
Emily Conyngham has an excellent post at Open Salon entitled “Seven Steps to Becoming a Superior Writer.” Note that she did not say a good writer, or even a successful one, but a superior writer. Presumably, the sort of writer who always wears turtlenecks and emits self-importance that way that some of us emit perspiration. But I digress—she might be as big of a smartass as me, if not bigger. Here are a few enjoyable highlights:
1. If at all possible, arrange to be born in a small town, raised with traditional values, which you can laud as building your backbone. The insular environment can be reworked to other purposes; you escaped in the nick of time, with only your wits and a battered hand-me-down suitcase, as soon as you could save bus fare from your job shoveling pig swill. It does not hurt to have been poor, or at least poorer than your stupid neighbors. You can mock those gomers later, when you’re a degreed city dweller.
***
3. Hold grudges. These are precious fuel. Hopefully, you were tormented by the other children for being different. You should Never, Ever forget their cruelty, especially that of Homer Finkelheimer, who will don a different disguise and appear in Every Single Thing you write. Your repeated mutilations of his sorry carcass will become the art for which you will be famed. To be a “Finkelheimer” will become part of the common lexicon, synonomous with the nether regions of the male anatomy.
*** Continue reading
That’s what I learned from one clever Rice student today (h/t Bob):
Via thebiglead.com
My alma mater, folks.
UPDATE: It’s worth noting that the ESPN/PENIS sign upstaged a marriage proposal directed to someone named Jordan Taylor (h/t Bob again). Sorry, Jordan.
I’m a huge Metalocalypse fan anyway, and this may be the show’s greatest scene. Besides that, this could be useful in many Internet discussions.
Via lady-of-the-wasteland.tumblr.com
Via lady-of-the-wasteland.tumblr.com.
I’ve been pondering (since I brought up the subject) whether “douchebag” is too sexist to be effective in any way. I really have no idea, and at least some opinion is split on the matter. A couple of good discussions are here and here, including an exploration of why the concept of douching itself is more sexist than the term “douchebag.”
I return to my hallowed tradition of collecting oddities for the enjoyment of my reader(s). These are sort of some “greatest hits” collected over the past few months, but “This Past Six Months in WTF” doesn’t sound as good as “This Week…” Just go with it.
– The female southern bottletail squid was the topic of some discussion this week after io9 revealed that she, uh………swallows.
– A Chinese real estate company came up with a novel way to sell properties, by painting the floor plans on the backs of women in bikinis. Apparently, it’s working (h/t Sallie).
![Via bitrebels.com [Fair use]](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/body-painting-floor-plan-1.jpg "Via bitrebels.com [Fair use]")
Via bitrebels.com
– A county employee in Dallas offered perhaps the best excuse in the history of the universe for being late to work: Continue reading
The Lord’s Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, and there are 1,322 words in the Declaration of Independence. Yet, government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26,911 words.
David McIntosh, writing in National Review, October 24, 1995
I have seen variations on the above quote passed around via email and social media for years. The implication, I suppose, is that government regulations are needlessly verbose. According to Snopes.com, the sentiment long predates McIntosh’s article.
If you don’t think that the government has anything whatsoever to say if someone tries to sneak this into the stream of commerce, please stay away from my kitchen
I bring this up because of a broader tendency among people who do not know much about law or legislation to lament the inscrutability of legal writing, arguing that it should be written in a way that nearly anyone could understand. Scott Greenfield, in a post with the ridiculously awesome title “The Fallacy of Simplicity,” annihilates this argument (go read his post. I’ll wait.) Continue reading
At least one night a week has been relatively sleepless, for unknown reasons so far. Since I am not one to allow a single waking hour to go unwasted, though, it seemed like high time to play around with the auto-fill function on Google. All of these are 100% and and happened between 2:30 and 3:00 a.m. today.
A prominent feature of The Hunger Games books (no spoilers) is the annoyingly Twilight-esque question of whether Katniss will end up with Gale or Peeta, because even in the post-apocalyptic indeterminate future, apparently, young adult tropes demand a love triangle.
My point in bringing this up is that someone on Facebook just pointed out to me that the pairing of Peeta and Katniss may appropriately be dubbed PeeNiss.
Now it’s stuck in your head, too.
If you’re at all like me (and for the sake of your mental health, I sincerely hope you are not), you often wonder things like “Why does ‘Halloween’ sometimes have an apostrophe between the two e’s?” or “Why didn’t I just wear some dang sunscreen on Sunday?” For the sake of brevity, I will limit myself to addressing the former question today.
Image courtesy of Susan Morrow
The word “Halloween,” as it turns out, has its origins in a Christian appropriation of a pagan festival. This is similar to, you know, nearly every major Christian holiday celebrated today. According to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s blog:
Despite the “pagan” origins and traditions of the holiday, it eventually was transformed into a Christian observance, closely linked to All Hallows Day or All Saints Day, November 1. All-Hallows-Even (that is, evening) is the night before All Hallows Day. The apostrophe in the earlier spelling of Hallowe’en denotes the missing “v” of “even.” You’ll find many “e’ens” in nineteenth-century and earlier poetry.
Leaving out the apostrophe, it would seem, is a shortcut around a shortcut. The laziness in omitting the apostrophe is not a new phenomenon, though, so don’t give me any grief about the younger generation not respecting their elders’ apostrophes. This goes back at least to the era of the Founding Fathers (who were presumably too busy revolutionizing to worry about excess punctuation.) Via Katherine Barber, a/k/a the Wordlady:
Halloween has been written without an apostrophe since at least 1773, according to the OED, and among the people using that spelling were Robbie Burns and Queen Victoria. There is no more reason to spell it with an apostrophe than there is to write “fan’cy” (contracted from “fantasy”), “gam’ut” (contracted from “gamma ut”), “lau’nder” (contracted from “lavender”), or “goodb’ye” (contracted from “God be with ye”). I think you can let it go!
Now you know. If you own a black cat, keep it safe.
Photo credit: Image by Susan Morrow, used with permission.
