Grammdæmonium

My Favorite Things Michigan

2011-10-30T11:07:00.000-07:00

If you've been following this as casually as I've been updating it, you may or may not know that I'm a huge admirer of Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabbarok's economics blog Marginal Revolution. If not, I recommend you check it out--and don't be fooled by the "economics blog" description--Tyler and Alex both have the ability to boil down the many complexities of economics into general, effective, everyday language.

Among the vast and varied number of subjects discussed, one of the best is "My Favorite Things..." a tag used by the two that covers the cultural highlights of a particular city, state, or country. And since neither of the two has gotten around to covering Michigan, my beloved home state, I figured I'd offer my own.

Favorite food: Gotta go with the obvious: Farmer's Home Cheeseburger. Behind that, Mackinac Island Fudge is overrated but still very tasty (it is fudge). There's also the pasties, which get better the farther north you are. The vineyards around the 45th parallel make a big deal about their wine, and some of it is excellent. I've found that any winery that also makes cheese can be relied on for delivering a good white.

City: Saginaw is a shell of its former self, and of the Tri-City area, I prefer Midland. Grand Rapids is nice, at least to visit, the same goes for Traverse City, and, in my experience, all of the UP. Detroit and Ann Arbor are nice, too, at least the, um, nice parts of them. While everyone focuses on the Detroit area, though, I think some of the best parts are farther north--anywhere near water is a plus.

Lake: Duh.

Author: There's a lot of local mystery writers based in the upper Lower Peninsula who've garnered much acclaim, but I'm ignorant of their work; so here's the big ones: I don't think anyone reads Theodore Roethke unless at gunpoint. I don't like Mitch Albom, and Elmore Leonard was born in Louisiana. Don't know much Joyce Carol Oates but would like to. Jeffrey Eugenides is a Nobel-Prize winner, but I didin't care much for Middlesex. Edna Ferber I haven't read. I think I'm biased against my home state. Yikes! My picks are Chris van Allsburg (born in Grand Rapids) and, though she was born in Canada, I can't not mention Isabel Patterson.

Novels: Need I mention the Michigan connection to the Nick Adams stories? The Time Traveler's Wife is set in South Haven, though I haven't read it (the book, that is, not South Haven, though I don't suppose I've "read" that either), and many of Elmore Leonard's novels take place in Michigan. Anatomy of a Murder is still a fun read.

Movie, set in: My personal favorite film, Anatomy of a Murder. I really liked Gran Torino and have a very, very soft spot for Street Boss. Never got into Grosse Pointe Blank. Beverley Hills Cop deserves mention, but the best parts take place in California. The reverse is true of Hardcore and True Romance. Tucker: The Man and His Dream is very underrated.

Director: This is a whollop of trivia. Did you know Francis Ford Coppola, Jerry Bruckheimer, and Roger Corman were all born in Detroit? Add to the natives as Sam Raimi, McG, and, of course, Michael Moore (I don't like his politics, but Roger & Me is a fantastic look at small-town life, and Moore at least is willing to put his money where his mouth is). Also, Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, also the creator of Freaks and Geeks, and he directed a plethora of Office [U.S.] episodes, Arrested Development episodes, Weeds and Parks and Recreation) was born in Royal Oak. Paul Schrader, author of Scorsese's best films Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Last Temptation of Christ and director of the film Hardcore, whose scene of George C. Scott breaking down and saying "No" has become an Internet sensation) was from Grand Rapids. But the award should go to Robert Flaherty, director of Nanook of the North -- makes sense for a Yooper born in Iron Mountain.

Television program, set in: Freak and Geeks

Actor: Bruce Campbell is not really that funny on his own. Ed McMahon I appreciate more for his inspiring Hank Kingsley. Taylor Lautner, Bob Eubanks, Casey Kasem, Dave Coulier, and Tim Allen are all rote (Grand Rapids, Detroit, Flint, St. Clair Shores, and Birmingham, respectively). Give me Selma Blair in Hellboy (Southfield), Sandra Bernhard -- Season 6 of Roseanne -- (Flint) -- but, most of all, Kristen Bell in Veronica Mars. Also have Judge Mathis and Jeff Daniels, the latter of whom is a serious contender. Escanaba in da Moonlight is pretty fun.

Musician: I'm not a huge Stevie Wonder fan, but he deserves a nod. There's also, of course, Motown, the Four Tops and The Temptations being some obvious, if not generic, choices. I love the best bits of Eminem and Madonna, as well as Iggy Pop and Sufjan Stevens. And we can't forget Bill Haley. But I think Al Green probably takes it.

Artist: Irving Couse is well known but it seems only within his own circles. He reminds me of Gerome.

Gamer: Sid Meier was born in Detroit. Civ 2 is his masterpiece.

Economist: I'm at a loss here. Though Robert Shiller was born in Detroit.

Entrepreneur: Duh. Though Herbert Doan was a wonderful and very, very intelligent man. Will Kellogg deserves mention, too.

The bottom line: When I think of cuisine I think of the UP, but the fudge and pasties don't do much for me. Michigan is a game wonderland, yet it's never embraced that fact. Pheasant, grouse, and venison should be key ingredients in the food, but they're ignored. It seems the best people who came out of Michigan left it pretty soon, my self, my sister, my girlfriend, and one of my closest friends included. Nevertheless, if you go by the people organically grown, Michigan may be one of the greatest states, culturally speaking, out there. Charles Lindbergh (born in Detroit) belongs somewhere, too. Must be something in the waters.

Whacky Italics

2011-06-08T14:05:00.000-07:00

I was recently scanning Tyler Cowen's book In Praise of Commercial Culture (which, if you haven't read it already, you should immediately after finishing this), particularly a section on television networks, and that got me thinking about the whole fiasco of proper citations.

The basic rule is that books, movies, television shows, albums, and so forth are generally italicized--The Political Writings of Samuel Johnson, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Arrested Development, Randy Newman's Faust, and so forth--whereas individual chapters, episodes, and songs--"Pamphilus on Condolence," "Dobbs," "Ready, Aim, Marry Me," "Bless the Children of the World," and so forth--should, of course, be in quotation marks.

Though maybe I shouldn't say "of course" because few people recognize this, and often the whole convention is disregarded and replaced with mere title-case capitalization--The Treasure of the Sierra Madre instead of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, for example (and I'll ignore, for now, the questions of when to capitalize articles and prepositions).

The advantage of italics/quotation marks over title-cases is clarity; when you're referring to a sizable number of books, movies, television shows, albums, and so forth, it's easier to make a distinction between individual installments and the whole damn thing. Title-case capitalization makes it murky because you never know if the author's discussing, say a specific episode or a completely different work.

But it's not perfect, and the passage I mentioned earlier, the one dealing with networks, got me wondering whether they should be italicized, television shows should be put in quote marks, and particular episodes of that show should be indicated by some other mark of designation (anything but bold). It somewhat made sense because the italic/quotation mark convention is tiered: Subsets of something larger are distinguished differently from their parent work--"Ready, Aim, Marry Me" being a subset of the program Arrested Development--but isn't Arrested Development a subset of the FOX network's programming? And thus shouldn't FOX be italicized, Arrested Development be in quotation marks, and "Ready, Aim, Marry Me" be in some other kind of designation (assuming that italics indicate the first set, quotes the second, the other the third, and so forth [and, again, not bold])?

In the case of television, the job is kind of done for us since networks are usually referred to in capitals--FOX, NBC, CBS, ABC--but three of those are acronyms--National Broadcasting Company, Columbia Broadcasting System, American Broadcasting Company--to say nothing of cable networks such as Showtime, Cinemax, and so forth. And for that matter, what about sports organizations such as the NBA, the NFL, the NHL and so forth? If we're going to follow the accepted format, shouldn't those be italicized and thus sports teams such as The Detroit Pistons, The Detroit Lions, and The Detroit Red Wings be in quotation marks?

I have no idea and am willing to leave it as is, since people will know what is part of what with the accepted convention, but the editor daemon in me cries out for consistency, or at least demands an excuse for keeping things the way they are, one that's not simply "People will understand regardless."

So my excuse is that excessive citations are unnecessary and, indeed, confusing. If you can follow a general line of thought, a simple mention that Arrested Development was produced by FOX should be all that you need. Likewise, people have enough difficulty using the standard convention anyway, so why complicate it by adding successive tiers of citation? Lame reasons I admit, but you're more likely to distinguish specific installments of a television show or a book from the show or book itself than you are the show or book from its network or publisher, aren't you?

And, in case you're wondering, the image I originally intended to accompany this post was of a stereotypical Italian, but I think we can all agree that a saucy Italian talk-show host is far superior to that.

Criminal Word Origins

2011-05-23T13:03:00.000-07:00

From the start, to tip meant to give somebody money, but four hundred years ago the money was given for a slightly different reason. It was part of the thieves' cant, a language used by the criminal underworld in Britain. You've probably used some of their secret code words today. The verb to "tout," which now means "praise something highly" started out meaning "to keep lookout and warn everybody if you saw the one time coming." They even gave us the idea to use "kid" to mean to joke with somebody (to them, it was treating somebody like a child).

Read more here. The first few are actually more surprising.

Pronunciations Paradox

2011-05-18T12:08:00.002-07:00

21 Reasons Why English Sucks: http://bit.ly/fSIMfG

I particularly like "7. Since there was no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present."

HT: THE Ron Gilbert

The Dreaded Apluralstrophe!

2011-05-15T07:05:00.000-07:00

The Dreaded Apluralstrophe!

2011-05-08T08:12:00.000-07:00

In lieu of something better (such as calling my mother to wish her a happy day), I google "Apluralstrophe" and was surprised that so many examples of it came up--hopefully the term has caught on, though I have yet to see any quidly as a result of it. Among my favorites is the image that accompanies this post and introduces yet another threat: The Dreaded Apluralstro-z! (HT to Apostrophe Abuse)

Check out some horrific misuses here.

Either/Or

2011-05-08T07:55:00.000-07:00

What's Wrong with It
This one isn't too hard to spot, but if you don't want to waste the time, I'll just go ahead and tell you: "Either" means "one or the other of two," so if you're using it to mean "one of three," you go to hell.

How to Fix It
Just replace "either" with "any." There are some other terms you could substitute for "any," but "any" is nice and short and conveys the sense of urgency the ad's going for.

Other Thoughts
You could take issue with using the number "3" instead of spelling it out (numbers one through nine are generally spelled out), but exceptions are typically made for headlines, ads, and some other instances for purposes of immediacy. The idea is to summarize the message in not only as few words as necessary but also in as few characters (likewise this is why you don't usually see compound adjectives, and thus hyphens, in headlines). But that's a topic for another day.

grok!

2010-11-10T16:54:00.000-08:00

I've seen the term "grok," but I've always treated it as a curiosity, never quite aware of what it actually meant, always thinking it was something out of a D&D manual. Probably third edition.

But it turns out that "grok" is a legitimate word--really! In fact, it's a term for one of the most beautiful concepts imaginable: to understand thoroughly and intuitively.

It was coined by Robert "Starship Troopers" Heinlein in his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land.

But such a concept deserves a better-sounding term to express it. I nominate "unithought," despite it's sounding like something from 1984. Any other suggestions?

Numbers in Quotes

2010-11-10T12:35:00.000-08:00

I admire my old boss for many reasons--his wit, his humility (despite a mass of talent, clear thinking, and recognition within an industry that's prone to self-aggrandizement), and his way of beginning every tirade with the phrase, "You can't swing a dead cat without hitting..."--but chief among them was (well, is) his deep thinking on and succinct rationalization of grammatical points.

One of the best arguments he made was for writing out numbers in quotations.

This is something only a handful of sober-headed grammarians consider, because it's not covered in Strunk and White (well, maybe it is, I haven't read that crap in years; this is far superior).

Anyway, I favor writing out numbers in quotes, because, as my old boss used to say:

Old Boss [Going over some proofs]: Okay, there's a numeric in this quote; everyone uses numerics in quotes.

My Own Ignorant Self: Eh?

OB: You should always write out numbers in quotes; no one ever says, "I couldn't swing one zero zero dead cats without hitting a pheasant in South Dakota."

MOIS: That's a lot of dead cats?

OB: There's a lot of swinging.

That's a good point: For single digits, numerics work fine, but when you get to anything higher, that breaks down. Speech is usually taken as is, which means that everything said should be literally written. Hence, you should write, "One hundred" (or even "A hundred," but we'll get to that in a moment) instead of "100," which translates to "One zero zero."

Got it?

Okay, so it's fine to advocate writing out numbers, but what about really tough numbers, like, oh, say, "167" (and I write this because numbers in writing should use numerics when they're above nine [and we'll get to that in another moment])?

One sixty-seven should be written, officially, as I just wrote it (and the reason I did so was because, in writing, numbers should be spelled out if they begin a sentence [they appear
unsightly {and, to a larger extent, can lead to confusion}]), but it can get more confusing the higher up we go. For example, it'd be tempting to write a number complex as eighty-one billion, seven-hundred sixty-two million, four-hundred twenty-six thousand, seven-hundred eighteen as 81,762,426,718, and that's an argument I have sympathy for (seeing as how I just spent 20 minutes trying to wade through the proper terms for thousands); in fact, I'd go with numerics when it gets that high, because at that point consistency can lead to confusion, and the purpose of consistency is to alleviate confusion. It's kind of like the abortion issue of grammar: at what point is it not right?

I'd say that for now (November 2010) that'd be some place beyond the millions, because any number more complex than that would be confusing, and, in any writing, the best way to write is whatever gets your point across.

But most folks don't speak in numbers complex as 81,762,426,718, so if you have the luxury of jotting down only a few hundreds (which is why, in basic speech, recording what someone says, precisely, translates to writing, "A hundred" [because that's how everyone says it]), that' how you should write it.

Thank Your for Not Correcting My Grammar

2009-12-07T17:59:00.000-08:00

How to deal with grammar Nazis: http://bit.ly/7phCGp

2009-12-01T08:12:00.000-08:00

If your tweet today mentions AIDS, the color of your text will be red, Kudos, Twitter, for marketing a campaign of awareness through colored fonts.

words to ponder

2009-11-29T15:02:00.000-08:00

The writing community is full of lame-o people who want to be published in journals even though they don’t read the magazines that they want to be published in. These people deserve the rejections that they will undoubtedly receive, and no one should feel sorry for them when they cry about how they can’t get anyone to accept their stories.

The rest is here.

As the former editor of a bunch of magazines, I can attest. We'd get a lot of submissions, and about nine times out of 10 the reason we rejected them was because it was flagrantly clear that the authors had never read the magazine they were submitting to.

That's not to say we rejected them because they weren't customers (though being one helped), ... See Morerather they had no feel for the magazine or its type of content. Didn't matter how well it was written--some of the stuff we got from our regulars was only a few steps away from cocktail-napkin scrawl--it's just that they wanted to get published in Elle but wrote something for Maxim.

If you're still too lazy to read the magazine, at least do us editors a favor and check out the magazine's website--the writers' guidelines will give you an idea of what gets published.

My own tips for writing for submission are here.

the most delightful sentence I read today.

2009-10-31T06:12:00.000-07:00

"If there's one thing that can be said, it is that yesterday's cultural pessimists were more interesting than the pessimists of today."

HT: Marginal Revolution

risky vs risque

2009-10-26T06:21:00.000-07:00

"risky" is an adjective meaning, "attended with or involving risk; hazardous: a risky undertaking."

"risque" is also an adjective, but means, "daringly close to indelicacy or impropriety; off-color: a risqué story."

I notice a lot of people use "risque" when they mean "risky." Why, I have no idea, but based on their drawn-out enunciation of it, I figure it's because it sounds foreign and, hence, sophisticated. But to paraphrase George Orwell, never use a foreign term when there's an English equivalent--especially when said foreign term is neither foreign nor appropriate.

what's the shortest sentence in the english language?

2009-10-21T07:46:00.000-07:00

"Go" is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.

HT to our friend, Melissa.

cease and decease

2009-10-21T04:23:00.000-07:00

Here's one for you: If "cease" means, "to stop; discontinue," and the prefix "de" means, "removal, separation, negation, etc." then shouldn't "decease" mean the negation of cessation?

how to write nonfiction

2009-10-21T03:53:00.000-07:00

Bryan Caplan lays out 7 guidelines here.

2009-10-17T16:35:00.000-07:00

things to do at work when you're bored

2009-10-13T06:57:00.001-07:00

How this editor staved off ennui.

he's not right on the money

2009-10-09T08:01:00.000-07:00

I take on corporate giant Michael Moore in my review of Capitalism: A Love Story, read it here.

How to get your comment noticed on Roger Ebert's blog.

2009-10-02T09:15:00.001-07:00

In case you haven't read it, you can read Ebert's blog here.

The comments generally run in the few-hundreds, but, if you're like me (in that you want to read the blogger's responses to some of the comments) you look for the bold-faced end-notes that say Ebert: and then follow with his response..

With all the invective that goes on in the comments section, I'm surprised no-one's put words in his mouth. I don't think I'd do it--or if I would, not maliciously, but I figure that others would similarly be on the lookout for bold text, so were I to post a comment, I would include a bolded citation just to give other readers pause.

Some other bloggers, such as Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution, usually refrain from commenting in the comments section, and when he does, it's only to correct an improper citation or clarify a statement in the original post that his readers have misread--never to argue. And he does it without adding in bold his own thoughts to the comment. That may be the wisest way to do so.

I read a lot of blogs, and Ebert's is the first I've read that comments on comments in such a way. I hope it's not exploited, but it likely will be.

Anyway, here's my comment on his latest.

In the Words Part II

2009-10-02T09:14:00.000-07:00

Part II of my experiences in writing is up here.

In the Words Part I

2009-09-28T03:51:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the dearth of posts lately. I'm writing an autobiography of writing. You can read Part I here: http://frothygirlz.com/2009/09/14/in-the-words/

misuse of "official"

2009-08-19T09:41:00.000-07:00

via Frothygirlz

oh yeah

2009-08-13T05:16:00.000-07:00

Already I have heard from a few people who don’t want to see it “because it’s Japanese.” This is solid-gold ignorance. “Is it only dubbed?” I was asked. You dummy! All animated films are dubbed! Little Nemo can’t really speak!

That's your head-smack moment of the day, brought to you by Roger Ebert's review of Ponyo

notes on goats

2009-08-12T07:46:00.000-07:00

From Wikipedia:

Female goats are referred to as does or nannies, intact males as bucks or billies; their offspring are kids. Castrated males are wethers. Goat meat from younger animals is called kid or cabrito, and from older animals is sometimes called chevon, or in some areas “mutton.”

make no sence

2009-08-12T06:09:00.000-07:00

When did people start spelling "sense" as "sence"?

what's a kubrick

2009-08-04T09:05:00.000-07:00

"Kubrick" was chosen in honor of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. In further homage to the filmmaker, the Kubrick logo is designed in the style of the logo created for his movie A Clockwork Orange. By linguistic coincidence, the name Kubrick may also be seen as a hybrid word of the Japanese word kyu, meaning the number nine, and the English word brick.

More here.

evident vs apparent

2009-07-29T10:58:00.000-07:00

evident means "based on the available evidence"; apparent means "based on evidence that may or may not be factually valid."

Huh?

Think of it this way: When you say something is evident, like, It's evident that gravity's responsible for the trailer backing over the cat, you suggest there's little to no doubt that that's what happened. However, when you say, It's apparent that gravity's responsible for the trailer backing over the cat you leave some room for doubt.

guthrie et voltaire

2009-07-28T08:31:00.000-07:00

Arlo Guthrie on Woodstock, the nature of free concerts, and why he's a registered Republican.

My favorite line:

Have you ever seen “American Idol”?
No, I have never watched it. But I’m thankful we’re living in a world where we can actually afford to waste your time. What a great thing that is.

Somewhat related: Would you feel more insulted being called a Pollyanna or a Pangloss? Answer on Twitter, and I'll post some responses here.

thursday links

2009-07-23T11:11:00.000-07:00

The worst poem ever scrawled.

Are political differences merely rhetorical?

What the Headline?: 'I love Jon,' Gosselin's new galpal gushes

William F. Buckley: Ping-pong pilferer.

The worst actor ever:

Coates claimed that he wanted to improve the classics. At the end of his first appearance as Romeo he came back in with a crowbar and tried to pry open Capulet's tomb. In another of his antics he made the actress playing Juliet so embarrassed that she clung to a pillar and refused to leave the stage. Eventually no actress would agree to play the part with him.

more on print from trunk

2009-07-22T11:43:00.000-07:00

The more I read of Penelope Trunk, the more I wish I read more of her.

An oldie but goodie is her advice on how to get your blog mentioned in print. My favorite:

1. Don't pitch yourself, pitch an idea.

Yes, yes, yes, yes yes.

Unless you're a celebrity (or someone moderately famous and beddable [or just attractive and beddable]), you're going to be disappointed over how few people care to hear you talking about yourself.

One of the first things I learned in this business is that the people who have the fun jobs--writing editorials, the lyrical pieces, the humor column (well, to an extent)--are the guys and gals who made their bones by first writing really good, really informative articles--and that holds true in a lot of print mediums, not just magazines.

Number 5--answer questions strategically (read: succinctly, then flesh out the details if they ask) is another gem--the only thing I would add to it is, if you're explaining something, do it in terms of an anecdote. Nothing especially long--just four or five sentences--if you keep it interesting, informative, and short (and in that order), it'll be tough not to mention you.

Anyway, the whole thing's worth a read and available here.

Anyone else have some advice?

neglect vs negligence?

2009-07-16T11:37:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I give you guys the distinction between two words, now you can help me out:

What's the difference between the noun form of neglect and negligence?

Please don't paste the dictionary definitions--I read 'em already--give an explanation.

how much are freelancers paid?

2009-07-16T08:41:00.000-07:00

A friend recently asked me what the going rate is for a freelance article. Specifically, she said, "I have no idea how writers are paid or what I should look for."

And the more I thought about her question, the more my own sweeping ignorance became apparent. I've been in this business quite a while, but there's no way in Hell you could give me a summary of your article and whom you're submitting it to, and expect me to estimate how much they'd be willing to pay.

But I kinda feel like I should...

Anyway, it's a really good question, and while I can't give a ironclad answer, there are a few things I do know...

First off, there's not really a set rate that everyone in the publishing industry agrees upon; payment depends on the publication.

However, most publications (at least in my experience) base their payments on a few things:

1) Circulation, circulation, circulation. If the pub has a large circulation, you should expect more; a nationwide magazine obviously is going to pay more than a local newsletter. The more people read the magazine, the more money the magazine has to spend on writers. To give you an idea, one of our magazines has a subscribership of 30,000+; for a 2,000-word article, we'd pay around $400--that's a pretty good deal.

2) Length of article. Most articles don't run more than 2,500 words; if they do, they're probably a feature (though not all features have to be that long), which usually pays more. Low-end pay for a 2,500 article is $100--and that's very, very low end. I doubt they want more than 2,500, but if you're not getting at least $100 for it--regardless of their readership--I suggest you don't do it.

3) Freelance versus staff. Staff writers are generally paid more--with our magazines it's usually $50-$150 more per article, so it's nothing ungodly--conversely, the grand-daddy of all writing gigs--working for The New Yorker--netted author Dan Baum $90,000 a year for 30,000 words--I understand that's their standard.

I can't speak for everyone, but with our magazines, we pay more to staff because we can count on them to consistently deliver content. That's a big plus. In fact, about 90% of our content is provided by on-staff writers. That's not to say we don't take many freelance submissions, because we do, but you can't always rely on freelancers to meet deadlines as much as you can staff. That's also why a lot of magazines will publish articles by the same freelancers--even if they're not as good as your article--we've worked with them before, and we can trust them.

Likewise, some staffed writers are contracted to write exclusively for one publication. Obviously, if you don't want them writing for anyone else, you have to sweeten the pot--quite a bit. But exclusivity clauses are generally not the case with most publications--usually just big-name magazines. Newspapers, I don't know.

4) Nature of the article. Technical writers are usually paid more than generalized writers--so if you're doing research for your piece or writing from a specialized field (such as giving medical, financial, legal advice), you'll likely be paid more than the opinion columnist. That's not set in stone, and the difference may be negligible, but it's worth mentioning.

5) Print versus web-based. Print pays much more. At least for now. The reason is a lot of publishers are still tinkering around with sustainable Web-based income. With print magazines (hard-copies), you pretty much have two revenue streams: subscriptions and advertisements. We make our money from subscriptions--though that's not the case with a lot of magazines.

For one, a one-year subscription pretty much guarantees us a specific amount of money for a specific period of time. Knowing that makes it much, much easier for the accountants and gives us a concrete circulation number we can then present to a potential advertiser.

Other magazines, especially ones with outrageous circulations like People make their money from advertisements. They can do it because they have a circulation of around 3.75 million, their paper quality is low, they're a weekly periodical, and, last I checked, the going rate for a 4-color full-page ad is about a quarter million. That said, pick up any copy of People and about thirty Subscribe Now! fliers will fall out.

They're already making a killing on ads, why would they want you to subscribe? Probably for the same reasons I listed above, but I suspect they also don't want you reading anything else: You only have so much time in the day to sit down and read something, and when you're a subscriber you feel a bit obligated to use that time reading the thing you subscribed to. So I think it's a way of keeping the competition down. Granted I don't have any evidence for that, but it seems right.

Now, the income from Web-based publications is mostly (if not totally) based on ads. When the Web was young, a lot of publishers tried to go with a subscription model and very soon found themselves out of business. If you do a Google search for...anything, you'll see why: There's a lot more competition, and most of it you can get for free. Not only that, but a lot of the competition is from blogs, whose posts tend to be much shorter than a full- or even medium-length article.

That puts Web-based freelancers and publishers in a Catch-22--the publisher's not going to pay 100 or so dollars for a freelancer to write a few sentences, and the readers are less likely to spend time going over an entire article when they can get the main idea from a few short blog posts.

Long story short, publishers don't make much from Web-based articles, so don't expect to be paid much for them.

amused vs. bemused

2009-07-08T05:05:00.000-07:00

amused means "pleasurably entertained or diverted"

bemused means "lost in thought"

2009-06-26T12:25:00.001-07:00

Happy portmanteau Friday! Here's this week's serving: Yar! + shorn = Yorn

atlas vs. gazetteer

2009-06-24T05:27:00.000-07:00

An atlas is a collection of maps; a gazetteer is a geographical dictionary.

alan moore on the origin of "taser"

2009-06-22T09:33:00.000-07:00

do you know the tasers that originated in America that are now standard issue for the police over here? Do you know what Taser stand for? You’d think it’d stood for something like a laser, which stood for Light and Stimulated Emission of Radiation, but it doesn’t. What TASER stands for is Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle. It was the idea of having some kind of generator built into a gun or a battery, and having a kind of harpoon with a way of trailing behind it, originated in a story about young inventor Tom Swift.

A fictional device that is now part of everyday urban living.

Moore...er more here.

2009-06-20T06:50:00.000-07:00

Which letter makes the better spy? "I" because it can double as "l" or "l" because it can double as "I"?

conference call

2009-06-20T06:06:00.000-07:00

Yesterday my friend Kyle called me to ask which would be more appropriate to write on a card: "Congratulations on graduating" or "Congratulations for graduating."

Me: Well, this is just off the cuff, but I'd say "for"; "for" makes it clear that the congratulations are given because the person graduated. "Congratulations on graduating," implies the same thing, but doesn't make it quite as explicit as to what you're congratulating the person for.

Kyle: That's what I said. By the way, I have you on speaker phone.

Kyle's Boss: So you say "for"?

Kyle's Intern: Yeah, but what about, "Congratulations on graduation day"?

Me: Well, with that you could be implying that you offer the person congratulations for something other than graduating. That make sense?

Kyle; Kyle's Boss; Kyle's Intern:...

Me: Uh, like, with "Congratulations on graduation day," you're just saying you give them congratulations on that specific day. You don't specify what the congratulations are for; you just specify when you're giving them--you could be congratulating them for baking a cake or existing or slaughtering a hen--anything.

Kyle; Kyle's Boss; Kyle's Intern:...okay...

Me: Though now that I think about it, "Congratulations for graduating" doesn't sound very good...

Kyle's Boss: Well, I can't rewrite too much because I already wrote "Congratulations" on the card.

Kyle: That's why we called you.

Kyle's Boss: Why not just "Congratulations [the name of the person graduating]"?

Me: That sounds better--even though you don't specify what the congratulations are for--though it's pretty obvious...

Kyle's Boss: Okay, good. And comma after "Congratulations," yes?

Me: Yup--and be sure to spell it "C-O-N-G-R-A-T-U-L-A-T-I-O-N-S," not "C-O-N-G-R-A-D-U-L-A-T-I-O-N-S."

Kyle: Awesome, dude, thanks.

Me: And I'd just like to say how great it is that we had this conference solely for the purpose of not having to buy another $4 card when the time and energy we just wasted was probably much more than...

*click*

100 Most Beautiful Words in English

2009-06-17T04:54:00.000-07:00

From Aestivate ("to summer") to Wherewithal ("means"), alphaDicitonary shares their 100 Most Beautiful Words in English.

Unfortunately they don't share their criterion for choosing those words; fortunately, it's not too difficult to see the beauty in many of them.

Who could resist the allure of ailurophile?

Ailurophile • Noun
Pronunciation: uh-lur-uh-fail
An ailurophile is a cat-lover, a fancier of cats—nothing more, pure and simple.

HT to Tyler Cowen

"lose" or "loose"

2009-06-11T12:57:00.000-07:00

Is it just me, or have a lot of people been misspelling "lose" as "loose" laately?

"loose" is that thing your skin gets when you're old: "lose" is when what you got gets gone

nosism

2009-06-11T11:06:00.000-07:00

nosism

The use of a plural pronoun to refer to a single person holding a high office, such as a monarch, bishop, pope, or university rector. It is also called the Royal pronoun, the Royal 'we' or the Victorian 'we'. The more general word for the use of "we" to refer to oneself is nosism, from the Latin nos.

Also known as the Majestic plural

ACRONYMS

2009-06-09T10:20:00.000-07:00

Acronyms:

Constantly typing out a really long name is a pain, that's why we have acronyms--FBI for Federal Bureau of Investigation; SSBTC for State Street Bank and Trust Company; LOL for "Laughing out loud," etc.

Reading long names is bothersome, too, but you should mention what the acronym stands for at least once, because you shouldn't expect your reader to know as much about what you're writing as you do...if they did, why would they read your piece in the first place?

Once you've written out the full name, include the acronym in parentheses--so it should read like this: "...the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was laughing out loud (LOL)...there were no survivors (twns)"

Now you can just refer to it as "the FBI" for the rest of your piece.

Yup, that's about it.

Mmm...

Sorry for the acrostic.

non-profit or nonprofit?

2009-06-09T10:06:00.000-07:00

Okay, people:

"Nonprofit" is one word. Or at least that's how you're going to see most other publications spell it.

So get rid of that hyphen.

I'm talking to you...

2009-06-07T23:56:00.001-07:00

Japan's 'herbivorous men' not after sex

what the ess?

2009-06-01T05:55:00.000-07:00

Nat: Okay: "heart's content": ess apostrophe, apostrophe ess, no apostrophe?

My Boss: Apostrophe ess.

Nat: But it's used as a plural--"their hearts--no apostrophe--content"--so ess apostrophe, right?

My Boss: Are they using "their" instead of "his" or "hers"?

Nat: "Their" as in "the trainer's and the dog's."

My Boss: Yeah, then go with ess apostrophe.

a delightful collection of sicilian swear words and expressions

2009-05-29T13:14:00.000-07:00

Fantasticnating post on the intentionally lost in translation from my darling cousin.

Twix = "The one with the biscuit and the moo."

kavya shivashankar

2009-05-29T07:30:00.000-07:00

won this year's national spelling bee by spelling "laodicean" -- lukewarm or indifferent, esp. in religion, as were the early christians of laodicea. the word the loser kid lost to or something like that was "maecenas" -- a generous patron or supporter, esp. of art, music, or literature.

okay, these are both greek terms, but they don't seem too difficult to spell, especially since they're pronounced (well, "maecenas" would be tricky still).

so it got me wondering if the words for spelling bees are getting easier. i looked them up, and actually, it looks like they've gotten much, much harder. compare the words from the 2000-2008 with those from 1970-1978:

1970 croissant
1971 shalloon
1972 macerate
1973 vouchsafe
1974 hydrophyte
1975 incisor
1976 narcolepsy
1977 cambist
1978 deification

2000 démarche
2001 succedaneum
2002 prospicience
2003 pococurante
2004 autochthonous
2005 appoggiatura
2006 ursprache
2007 serrefine
2008 guerdon

compared to the '00s' words, the '70s' words don't seem tough at all (narcolepsy? come on!)--in fact, the easiest word from the "modern" bees is "kamikaze," which was 1994's winner.

and the farther back you go, the easier they get--there's 1941's winner, "initials"; 1940's even-easier "therapy"; and 1932's laughable "knack."

anyway, full story here.

and does the nbs's seal remind anyone else of this?

2009-05-19T12:57:00.000-07:00

Throw Some D's

how important is good grammar?

2009-05-19T12:13:00.000-07:00

Penelope Trunk @ Brazen Careerist has an interesting post on grammar; I like these sentences:

Most grammar rules don’t matter, though. That is, if you get them wrong, the reader still can find the meaning.

Whether the particulars are true or not, I agree with the main idea: The best way to write is whatever gets your point across. (And yes, I'm aware of the grammatical failings of that statement.)

And grammar and spelling and the rules of the English language aren't as important as many people make them out to be (especially some of her commentors--ouch!) -- for many of the reasons she cites, and, I'd also add, because they're always changing. Case in point: "Today" used to be spelled with a hyphen.

Something I do quibble with, and at least one commenter pointed this out, too, are the two "grammar" errors in the statement

Over 28,000 children drew doodles for our homepage.

Vote for the one that will appear here!

According to Penelope,

The AP Stylebook says "over" is a way to move—a preposition. And “more than” must precede a number. Also, if you are voting for one, specific doodle, then the AP Stylebook tells you to use “which” rather than “that.”

They're not so much grammatical errors as they are inconsistencies with the AP Stylebook. (And if it's true that the AP Stylebook was set up to minimize printing costs, "over" would seem more correct than "more than.")

Despite that, I get her point:

Anyway, if Google is deciding that these rules are no longer useful guidelines, then we can all follow suit. And if you don’t, you risk being more newspaper and less Internet, and we know where that’s going to put your career…

tv blogging ducktales

2009-05-18T07:48:00.000-07:00

Curse of Castle McDuck

0:15: The more adorable the animal, the more delicious

1:20: Based on Hound of the Whiskervilles, which was based on Hound of the Baskervilles, which was based on Richard Cabell.

5:37: effin druids

Is it true that druids only come out at night? One of the tech guys at work is a druid, and I see him during the day...

Scrooge's great-great grandfather looks like Glomgold

Huey, Dewey, and Louie's use of logical deduction never fails to amaze--like in Castle Strangeduck they realize that a real ghost wouldn't need to open doors.

Back to the Klondike

0:45: Valentine's Day is a waste of time and postage stamps.

Did you know that all these stories were supposed to have taken place during the 1950s?

Glittering Goldie: Mae West as a duck?

In the comic, Scrooge forcibly abduckts (heh) Goldie

Scrooge as a hermit=Jerry Garcia as a duck

9:30: So Dangerous Dan and his lackeys just hide behind rocks all day?

13:00: Dangerous Dan's a douche.

Dime Enough for Luck

1:20: Gladstone sounds like Dominic Armato ...or Luke Wilson.

2:05: Who wouldn't take the car splash over walking into an open sewer and finding a dollar bill?

3:00: How would a silver dollar get through the coffee-pot spout?

3:30: Is Magica voiced by Natasha? Uhhh June Foray...(who, at 91, is still kicking--you go, June Foray!) Yes she is!

5:00: Good inflation joke. Because that's more or less what it is.

5:39: You could bypass all the traps by entering through the window in Scrooge's office.

7:00: One thing this series really had going for it was production values. Okay, the scripts had some flashes of brilliance but were mostly flat, and Webby was just awful--but they put up the cash to animate Huey, Dewey, and Louie--essentially one character but spread out into three, and they didn't cheat by recycling drawings. There's also a lot of costume changes in the show, and it's not wanting for characters, either, and I'm about seven minutes into the episode and there's already been about 30 backgrounds. The sunset where Gladstone's walking back to his house is gorgeous...and they'd never use it again.

7:29: Magica's outfit is priceless. Looks like the opening of Toejam and Earl.

9:00: Ducks with cleavage is creepy.

11:00: Scrooge's office is now at sunset. It's like they're flaunting the quality.

17:00: Lord of the Rings reference? Weird.

21:00: Really good episode--they even got the dichotomy between Gladstone trusting his luck and Scrooge relying on hard work.

Don't Give Up The Ship

4:47: Introduced to Duckworth--another thing this series had was personalities for each character.

4:50: Wow, tipping with cheese; anyone surprised at a callback joke in an animated series from the '80s?

5:00: Forgot about Admiral Grimmet. Unbearably hilarious.

8:30: Beagle Boys! In the comics you can't tell them apart, but in the series you can, in fact each one has a distinct personality--more proof of the high production values.

8:40: Okay, Burger Beagle is Curly; Admiral Grimmet is John Wayne; the Countess from Hotel Strangeduck is Zsa-Zsa Gabor; Gandra Dee is Sandra Dee, sort of; what other impersonations are there?

9:30:"The Junior Woodchucks are so committed to earning merit badges that they can't get into trouble."

Wrongway in Ronguay

0:00: Really? That's the name?

5:10: Oh, I get it. Clever.

19:00: Gold sail?

Cold Ducks

10:00: The point about colors is a disturbingly good observation. This show just continues to impress.

12:45: Webby naked...ewww...

13:00: Beak job, another good joke.

They set up the tuning fork (and didn't overuse it), walruses eating penguins, the giant walrus (a bit haphazardly), and the colors. This episode is a textbook case in planting and payoff.

What happened to El Capitan?

You can tell Ducktales was ahead of its time because the third episode references a movie where you see Faye Dunaway full frontal.

Too Much of a Gold Thing

0:03: Oh, there he is.

6:37: Looney Toons reference in the last episode, and now Indiana Jones. Clever, clever, clever.

7:00: Scrooge with gold fever doesn't seem much different from regular Scrooge.

13:26: Apparently sheer will can keep you alive for 400 years.

18:05: There's a lot of airplane escapes in this show.

Double-O-Duck

1:54: Another plane escape. Does this happen in every episode?

2:55: The people getting off the subway is laugh-out-loud funny.

3:04: "He looks more like Bruno than you-know-who-know." Three minutes in and this episode has already delivered three really good jokes.

13:34: The animaiton on this one is more cartoony--and funny, especially the fight with Feathers Galore.

13:40: Yet another failing of paper currency.

17:00: The pocket comb joke was good, the toupee scene is terrific. Is this the best DuckTales episode? It also inspired Darkwing Duck.

19:00: The bad guy dies. Dies. In a kids' show. So you have sex, violence, really good jokes (hair trigger: Ha!), and a, yes, moving Casablanca nod. And it's all Launchpad's episode.

Double-O-Duck apparently inspired Darkwing Duck. And I'm not ashamed to say Darkwing was the better series.

Duckworth's Revolt

Lost my posts on this, but the two things that stand out are 1) the theme slavery versus voluntary service and 2) the bad guys are vegetables.

1) All throughout the episode, other characters refer to Duckworth as a slave while he repeatedly insists that he works for Scrooge because he chooses to. That's an interesting theme, but it doesn't really go anywhere save for Duckworth's speech on freedom, which seems a bit heavy-handed and unnecessary.

2) I wondered Why vegetables? And then realized it's so you can tell them apart from the other aliens, who range from animals to minerals.

Sweet Duck of Youth

Standard adventure episode, but still enjoyable. Nothing really stands out, though you wonder why a conquistador would write in English.

The Status Seekers

Haven't read the Barks short story, but this one falls flat. Snootiness is not especially funny, and the upper-class Beagle Boys are a disappointment. Plus the jellyfish making it first with Scrooge's submarine then with the Beagle Boys' sailboat is just creepy. And, as usual, there's not much for Ms. Beakley to do, so they just make her save the day with peanut butter.

Random Observations

It's uplifting to see how well this series stands up, especially against all the other cartoons I watched in the '80s. Smurfs was bad; Pound Puppies was bad; Thundercats was bad; and rewatching He-Man makes you question any sense of taste and decency you ever had.

DuckTales, once you get past the wretchedness of Webby and skip all the episodes featuring Bubba, just gets better and better. Especially when you stack it against pretty much every other cartoon from the '80s (with the notable exception of Bakshi/John K.'s Mighty Mouse, and yes, I'm including The Simpsons in that--the Tracy Ullman shorts were pretty bad, as was the one episode broadcast in the '80s, Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire).

You wonder what made it stand out, and, if you're like me, when you wonder something, you head over to Wikipedia to find out:

The show was the most successful of Disney's early attempts to create high-quality animation for a TV animated series (earlier shows included The Wuzzles and Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears in 1985).

Disney invested a far greater amount of money into the TV series than had previously been spent on animated shows of the time. This was considered a risky move, because animated TV series were generally considered low-budget investments for most of the history of TV cartoons up through the 1980s.

So DuckTales had the funding, but (as is one of the show's most runningest of themes) money isn't everything; you could have three-cubic-acres of cash at your disposal and still produce a sucky cartoon.

Fortunately that wasn't the case, and it takes a only few episodes to see that the money went straight into the production values. In the first season alone there's got to be 30+ backgrounds per episode. Each one is individually detailed and painted, and yet it would be used for one shot and that's it. When the animators lifted the Beagle Boys from the comics, they had a free pass to use one character design for the whole gang; instead, they riffed on the standard Beagle Boy and came up with three distinct characters--each with his own equally distinct personality.

They also went back to Barks, and while, yeah, you can fault them for dumbing down his stories, more important is that they remained true to his characters--Magica DeSpell, Flintheart Glomgold, Gladstone Gander, Gyro Gearloose, even Glittering Goldie are all the same ducks they were in the comics, and the series benefitted immensely from the decision to keep them that way. And, despite a few black marks, the new characters are remarkably well constructed--Duckworth, Fenton Crackshell/Gizmoduck, Mrs. Crackshell, the revamped Beagle Boys, Admiral Grimmet--and soaring (then crashing) above them all is Launchpad, who's not only one of the few comic relief characters in the history of literature and television that's actually funny, but who shines in arguably the best episode of the whole series, Double-O-Duck.

In all, I think the success behind DuckTales is that it just did so much more than it needed to (and if you needed another example of its quality, just play the NES game--widely regarded as a classic of the console, and, for God's sake, to this day bands cover its music). Unlike other '80s cartoons, it didn't skimp on the art or constantly recycle backgrounds and character animations. The cast was large and varied, with the sorts of personalities usually reserved for a good sitcom. The music was terrific, too--I mean, who among you can't sing the theme song?

I'm not saying it's high art, but it's a bright spot in 1980s pop culture, which means it's among a handful of things from that era you're not ashamed to admit liking.

2009-05-16T19:55:00.000-07:00

Well, I guess I still can't through The Plumed Serpent. Sorry, D.H. I have absolutely no interest in your work...and yet, I still moderately admire you.

So, in your honor, I'm going out to nail a blonde.

How 'bout a novel that's sweet? Like Dickens...or Waugh...could devastate Elmore Leonard...

punctuating quote marks within quote marks

2009-05-15T09:52:00.000-07:00

"Ask yourself 'how' rather than 'why'."

What's wrong with it?

Punctuation. If you're asking yourself a question, you should punctuate it as such--which also means you need proper placement of your punctuation marks.

How do you fix it?

Since you're asking yourself a question, you need to format the question like you would any other statement, which usually means you put a comma in front of the spoken text, capitalize the first word, and, since it's a question, end it with a question mark.

That part's easy enough, but what about the period following "why"?

Since "why" gets a question mark, that's all the punctuation we need to end the sentence, but suppose it didn't end on a question: Would the period still go between the single quote mark and the double quote mark?

Nope. Logically it may make sense (though the most sensible place to put the period would be outside the double quote mark), but we do things strangely in America, at least when it comes to punctuation, so, as the style guide says:

When both single and double quotation marks occur at the end of a sentence, the period falls within both sets of marks.

Correct sentence:

"Ask yourself, 'How?' rather than, 'Why?'"

gray or grey

2009-05-15T08:13:00.000-07:00

According to dictionary.com (and as long as you're talking about the color), whether you spell it with an "a" or an "e" makes no difference; they're interchangeable.

That said, most people spell it "gray," while "grey" is most commonly seen as a surname, especially when the first name is some variant of "ane" -- Anne Grey, Jane Grey, Zane Grey, etc.

HOWEVER, at least according to Wikipedia, there is a distinction: "Grey" is the proper spelling in British and Canadian English, while "gray" is the proper spelling in American English.

And for no particular reason, the entry usefully points out:

Non-cognate greyhound is never grayhound.

spelling mistakes that are actually kind of cool

2009-05-15T05:00:00.000-07:00

like when people spell "definitely" as "defiantly"

i.e. vs. e.g.

2009-05-13T08:51:00.000-07:00

e.g. is Latin for "exempli gratia" -- for example

i.e. is Latin for "id est" -- that is

Both are used for clarification, but they're not interchangeable.

The use of e.g. should be followed by examples, for example, in the sentence

Be sure to eat your vegetables, e.g. carrots, peas, and lettuce.

The use of i.e. should be followed by a rephrasing of the statement, that is to say you don't list a series of examples, rather you reword and perhaps elaborate on what you said to make it easier to understand.

But it can get confusing when someone rephrases a statement by making an analogy, e.g.

It's like writing a book of poetry, i.e. it's like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

I'm not sure why this would throw many people off, but apparently it does, probably because analogies tend to be abstract, and when you're being abstract for the sake of clarification, well, much like that sentence, you look ridiculous.

The way I tell them apart is by substituting "such as" for "e.g." (just another reason to read rule v of the greatest treatise on writing there is), that usually makes it clear whether you're reading examples or a rephrasing.

If you still have trouble, you probably shouldn't be using the terms in the first place, i.e. you're a buffoon, e.g. an ape, a mongoloid, a fool.

liveblog, eastbound & down

2009-05-12T04:53:00.000-07:00

6:11 pm: Eastbound & Down marathon

6:12 pm: Anyone else notice how every woman in this show has really big breasts? Check out the scene in ep. 2 when Kenny makes the guest appearance at Shaffer BMW.

6:30 pm: Props to this show for having each episode pick up exactly where the last one left off. A lot of shows wrap everything up in their half-hour and things go back to how they were, like someone hit the reset button, so you feel like nothing was really accomplished. Eb&D doesn't give itself that luxury--episodes end on some ridiculous/tense/awkward notes...and then the next episode deals with them.

6:32 pm: I wonder over what timespan Eb&D occurs--the Shaffer appearance, ecstasy, brick through the window, and dui is all one night!

6:51 pm: $1,000 for the Major League balls, Kenny? That seems really low.

6:52 pm: one thing this series should have done is work on the rapport with Kenny and April. You don't really see what their attraction to each other is or where it comes from or how their personalities click. That scene in Foot Fist where Fred and his wife are waiting for a table does just that and is one of the best in the movie.

7:14 pm: The key to this show is that they make Kenny a tragic character.

7:15 pm: or at least sympathetic

7:15 pm: Ep. 5 is my favorite, but it's ep. 3 that elevates it from comedy to art. The first two are funny, but 3 really fleshes out the characters--Kenny realizes that people don't see him like he sees himself and begins to show a bit of empathy, and yet, it's still funny.

7:33 pm: Oh, Wayne dancing is an establishing shot. That explains why it's there. And it's eerie/funny.

7:47 pm: the barbecue takes place in the fall--odd that the show's not in sync w/ the broadcast season

7:59: Every comedian wants to do tragedy. Shakespeare pulled it off. Woody Allen, too. Eb&D did it. Not on the same level, but did it

7:59 pm: And in one show.

8:09 pm: Anyone else notice the religious metaphors in this show?

Took a break to catch Family Guy

8:39 pm: Oh. Housing market; that's why it's not in real time.

8:42 pm: Will Ferrel: Props to producing this show. You get a pass. But you're out of place in this show.

8:59: Buildup: Favorite moment in the whole series--and then there's Clegg huffing paint.

9:07 pm: There's the reference to The Natural in ep. 5, but there's also the direct steal from Five Easy Pieces at the end of 6. Eb&D's been renewed, so can't wait to see where that's going to lead.

aussie slang

2009-05-07T11:17:00.000-07:00

The Funny

Dux : top of the class (n.); to be top of the class (v.) - "She duxed four of her subjects".

Kangaroos loose in the top paddock : Intellectually inadequate ("he's got kangaroos loose in the top paddock")

Pommy's towel, as dry as a : very dry - based on the canard that Poms bathe about once a month

The Obscure

Ugg boots : Australian sheepskin boots worn by surfers since at least the 1960s to keep warm while out of the water. Also worn by airmen during WW1 and WW2 because of the need to maintain warmth in non-pressurized planes at high altitudes.

Feral : V8 ute (q.v.) sporting large heavy bullbar, numerous aerials, large truck mudflaps and stickers almost all over the rear window and tailgate. Sometimes seen with a Mack emblem on the bonnet and always with large (multiple) driving lights

Spruiker : man who stands outside a nightclub or restaurant trying to persuade people to enter

Brown-eyed mullet : a turd in the sea (where you're swimming!)

Bushman's hanky : Emitting nasal mucus by placing one index finger on the outside of the nose (thus blocking one nostril) and blowing.

The ???

Dingo's breakfast : a yawn, a leak and a good look round (i.e. no breakfast)

Dole bludger : somebody on social assistance when unjustified

Gabba : Wooloongabba

Many, many more here.

author rewrites

2009-05-07T10:35:00.001-07:00

Note to authors: If you're going to insist on rewriting the edited portions of your piece, let the editors know what changes you made--don't send it back in black-and-white like it's ready to go to press.

The reason is that, even if your grammar, syntax, and blah, blah, blah is impeccable, we're still going to proof it, because we need to make sure it conforms to the house style. And very few, if any, authors know the house style (unless they're also working in-house).

The best thing to do is use Word's "Track Changes" so we can see what parts you changed and what parts you didn't change.

And yes, we could use the "Compare Documents" feature, but it's just so much easier for us if you do it.

whisky or whiskey?

2009-05-06T12:45:00.000-07:00

I have about seven other posts in various stages of development clunking around here, but this one is a top priority:

whisky or whiskey?

I'd always been taught that it's whiskey in every part of the world except for Scotland and Canada, where it's whisky.

And after many bottles of research and clicking the first article on that popped up on Google, it appears I'm right.

Case in point: blogspot.com's automatic spellcheck doesn't recognize "whisky" (then again, it doesn't recognize either "spellcheck" or"blogspot.com" for that matter...).

So I'm going to go with whiskey, quite a bit of it in fact, and I suggest you do the same. Though in case you forget, here's how I remember:

If there's an "e" in the country's name, then they spell it with the "e"; if there's not, then they don't.

And as far as I know, Scotland and Canada are the only countries in the world that don't have an "e" in their names.

ellipses...again...

2009-05-06T09:04:00.000-07:00

ellipses are not semicolons; ellipses are not dashes--nor are they colons: They're ellipses

i have soiled myself

2009-05-04T07:22:00.000-07:00

Professional question: When someone says to you "I have soiled myself," does that mean they did #1, #2, both?

My cousin responds:

I am 98% sure that it means exclusively #2 (I think #1 would be, "I have wet myself") though I suppose a #2 would trump #1 in the event of a combination of the two occurring and then they would both count as "soil" - kind of like one masculine noun in romance languages informs the gender of the entire sentence - even if feminine nouns are present. Also, I wonder if the phrase could include vomit? Or would you then just say, "I am covered in my own sick"? These are pressing questions.

live blog of the last 1/2 of north by northwest

2009-05-03T17:17:00.000-07:00

2.00 pm: What is up w/ Hitchcock's exposition scenes? Here's one of the greatest directors of all time, and he doesn't even bother to make these scenes anything more than dull old people sitting around talking about stuff they already know.

2.30 pm: did you know Hitchcock was seriously considered to direct the first Bond film? And read Thunderball? It's bizarre but makes so much sense.

2.31 pm: Eva Marie Saint looks disturbingly like Scarlett Johansson or however the dickens it's spelled.

2.33 pm: Martin Landau attended the actor's studio w/ Steve McQueen.

2.34 pm: Landau hiding the gun he shoots Mason with. Classic Hitchcock. So much of his suspense centers around a machine.

2.35 pm: James Mason throws punches like a duck.

2.46 pm: Monogrammed matches. Touche, Roger Thornhill--and double for putting the world on hold while you put the apostrophe in "they're."

2.50 pm: just realized Eva Marie Saint's character's initials are EK--eek!

2.55 pm: apparently, in 1959, men wore only grey suits.

2.56 pm: evidently the entire last third of this movie was filmed on mattes.

3.00 pm: the fate of the free world hinges on Roosevelt's nose.

3.03 pm: James Mason also climbs like a duck.

3.05 pm: Cary Grant asks the bad guy for help. The bad guy doesn't help. Screenwriting at its best. No joke.

3.06 pm: Transition shot to Cary Grant metaphorically plunking EEK! Moral of the movie: James Mason is a duck.

3.07 pm: ducks are terrible creatures.

That's it for North By Northwest, but here's some more fun facts from Wikipedia:

The gray suit worn by Cary Grant throughout almost the entire film has taken on somewhat iconic status. A panel of fashion experts convened by GQ magazine in 2006 called it both the best suit in film history, and the most influential on mens' style, stating that it has since been copied for Tom Cruise's character in Collateral and Ben Affleck's character in Paycheck. This sentiment has been echoed by writer Todd McEwen, who called it "gorgeous".

In François Truffaut's book-length interview, Hitchcock/Truffaut (1967), Hitchcock said that MGM wanted North by Northwest cut by 15 minutes so the running time would be under two hours. Hitchcock had his agent check his contract, learned that he had absolute control over the final cut, and refused.

At the time, the United Nations prohibited film crews from shooting around its New York City headquarters. In an example of guerrilla filmmaking, Hitchcock used a movie camera hidden in a parked van to film Cary Grant and Adam Williams exiting their taxis and entering the building.

The title, North by Northwest, is often seen as having been taken from a line in Hamlet, a work also concerned with the shifty nature of reality. Hitchcock noted this in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich in 1963. Lehman however, states that he used a working title for the film of "In a Northwesterly Direction", because the film was to start in New York and end in Alaska. Then the head of the story department at MGM suggested "North by Northwest", but this was still to be a working title. Other titles were considered, including "The Man on Lincoln's Nose", but "North by Northwest" was kept because, according to Lehman, "We never did find a [better] title". The Northwest Airlines reference in the film plays on the title. The title is not an actual compass direction, the two closest directions being northwest by north (NWbN) and north-northwest (NNW), with the latter traditionally taken as the title's intended meaning.

emphasis

2009-05-01T06:12:00.000-07:00

When you want to add emphasis, there are many ways to do so.

You can use italics, which add emphasis with elegance; you can use bold, which certainly stands out but is a bit of an eyesore; and you can use ALL CAPS, which makes you look like a troglodyte.*

Or you can be a real ass and use all three. Or use one, then halfway through your piece, use another--if you want to aggravate your editor, this works very well because we'll keep wondering if you had a legitimate reason for doing so.

The best thing to do is learn to write so you can get your point across without physically manipulating the font. Failing that, go with italics--but use them sparingly.

*(You can also underline or even use the "highlight" function, but if you're doing that, it's clear that some vicious parasite has crawled into your head and is gnawing on the parts of your brain that control sense and decency, so I suggest you consult a physician before writing any further. And stay away from those girls at the bus stop.)

11 best photos from of spelling mistakes

2009-04-30T12:19:00.000-07:00

The whole thing is here HT to 11 Points.

how to aggravate an editor

2009-04-30T12:12:00.000-07:00

from a fellow editor:

A tab is a tab, not five spaces. Likewise, center does not mean hit the space key until the text looks centered. If it wouldn't make my life even more difficult, I'd remove the space key from newsroom computers.

No effing ess.

between vs among

2009-04-30T05:47:00.000-07:00

Did I ever tell you kids about the difference between "between" and "among"?

No?

Maybe?

I can't remember either, but it's probably kind of mildly important, so I'll (possibly) repeat it:

Use "between" when you're referring to two things; use "among" when you're referring to more than two things.

That's about it. Really. No really--it's that easy.

What? Why would I lie about this?

Okay here're some examples:

Jim-Bob had to choose between his sister and the squirrel he loved.

The squirrel had to choose among Jim-Bob, Jim-Bob's sister, and its cache of acorns.

But while you're here and we're on the topic, ever wonder what the difference is between "among" and "amongst"?

I see people use "amongst" all the time, and I wonder if there's really any difference or if they're just being...uh...whatever attitude goes with attaching "st"s to the ends of words.

Anyway, as far as I can tell, there's no difference; the "st" is a holdover from the Middle English word "amonges," which probably means something like "co-mingle."

2009-04-28T08:18:00.000-07:00

Here's another word no-one can use without sounding like an @$$: "bloviate"

disney girls

2009-04-21T09:56:00.000-07:00

Disney's first black princess

Which inspired a discussion:

Sister: Yeah, Disney's marketing IS in full force! How many years did it take them to incorporate 'princessess' of different races & colours other than Caucasian?

Me: Well, Mulan was Asian; Pocahontas was Indian; Jasmine was Arab; Esmeralda was a gypsy; Ariel was half fish; that's pretty damn diverse.

Sister: That's what I meant, it took Disney quite a while to get those kiddies into film and that news reel made it sound like Disney was churning out movies with so many racially diverse characters.

Me: Well, how many years did it take them to make actual people the protagonists? They did it up a bit with Snow White and on and off through Cinderella, but then they relapsed into animals for about 30 years before they went back to people--even then they were reluctant to lose the animals altogether, so you got human/animal hybrids like the Little Mermaid and then humans and animals vying for the role of protagonist in Beauty and the Beast.

the plumed serpent -- chapter I part III

2009-04-21T09:12:00.000-07:00

Even before the bullfight begins, Kate feels "a chill of disgust."

It's ironic that both The Plumed Serpent and the other big bullfight novel, The Sun Also Rises were published in 1926; but whereas Hemingway's bullfights were honorable and manly-ish, Lawrence's is base savagery.

For one, "there was no glamour, no charm" to the audience; the Mexican plebs and patricians are contemptible little rotters, as are the protagonists, and the fight itself descends from confusion into utter brutality.

The bull is simply looking for a way out of the arena; ignoring the handlers until he makes his way over to one of the picador riding a veiled, "lean old" horse "that would never move till Doomsday, unless someone shoved it."

The picador pokes at the bull with his lance and the bull reacts by stabbing the horse in the abdomen, spilling his entrails.

Kate almost passes out from the horrific scene while a Bolshevik Pole nudges her, insisting that, "Now you are seeing life!"

Owen gets a bit nauseated, but Villiers eats it up, and Kate finds herself equally repelled by him. She asks why the horse doesn't simply run away, and Owen explains that the horses are intentionally blinded and feeble because that makes them better bull fodder.

Kate once saw bulls as fearful creatures and treated them with reverence, but now, within the cowardice and silliness of the fight, that illusion is shattered. She shouts at the bull to take out some of the picadors, but Villiers tells her that that's hardly ever the case.

'They say no toreador will face a cow, because a cow always goes for him instead of the cloak. If a bull did that there'd be no bull-fights. Imagine it!'

The whole scene seems like a pretty Marxian metaphor--with the picadors representing the bourgeois and the bull and horses the proletariat. The animals just want to escape while the humans make them kill each other for their own amusement. But so far it seems like the narrator has a pretty dim view of Marxists/socialists/Bolsheviks, so I'm not quite sure what to make of the analogy.

It's not really analogous with the characters--the bull and horses being the Mexican people and the picadors being Kate, Owen, and Villiers--because the three haven't done anything abusive to the Mexicans, or at least haven't done anything abusive that the reader knows of.

In any case, the bull gores another horse and Kate has enough. She leaves, and the audience gets pissed--leaving a bullfight, even one as pathetic as this, is a national insult.

two words i thought were two words but turned out to be one word

2009-04-17T08:21:00.000-07:00

"aftereffects" and "lifespan"

Huh.

**UPDATE**

Number three:

"pantyhose"

Huh. Huh.

movie drinking games

2009-04-17T06:51:00.000-07:00

Drink Every Time . . .

1. A graph is shown

2. Al quotes anyone

3. Anyone says "global warming"

4. Al talks about his childhood

5. A specific country is mentioned by name

6. Al says "a friend of mine..."

AND IF YOU REALLY WANT TO GET WASTED . . .
STOMACH PUMP ALERT! Every time Al goes to a new slide. STOMACH PUMP ALERT!

That's for An Inconvenient Truth, one of the better ones. Also good are Mask, Paris, Texas, and Rocky. The most dangerous is Noises Off!. And, of course, you have to check out Leaving Las Vegas.

As you might expect, the comedies aren't nearly as funny or clever as the dramas.

Do I really need to remind you?

2009-04-17T06:08:00.001-07:00

Before you go around telling everyone you're a writer and joining every writers' group in Christendom and getting it and everything literate else printed on your business cards, please learn basic grammar, the author's guidelines for whatever publication you're submitting to, and remove the goddamn hyperlinks!

2009-04-15T09:25:00.001-07:00

is it just me or did "anorexic" used to spelled with an h? You know, like diarrhea?

2009-04-15T07:25:00.000-07:00

Right now the Speedway by my apartment has pumps reading "premuim." Hilarious. I'll try to get a picture.

premier or premiere?

2009-04-14T12:00:00.000-07:00

My bosses and I just had a back-and-forth over whether it should be the "premier" issue or the "premiere" issue of our newest magazine.

As with most of our back-and-forths, we weren't quite sure either way and could only be certain that the required exhaustive research would be both time consuming and futile.

The adjective form of premier read:

3. first in rank; chief; leading.

4. first in time; earliest; oldest.

The adjective form of premiere read:

6. first; initial; principal:

That didn't help much...or at all. But further definitions explained that the adjective premier usually meant "most important" whereas premiere usually meant "inaugural."

Premiere seemed right, but we still weren't totally sure, so I checked on the AP Stylebook's "Ask an Editor" page (which is an invaluable [free] resource) to see if anyone had asked a similar question. They had:

What does AP style have to say about describing the first issue of a new magazine? Is it the premiere issue or the premier issue? Thanks very much. – from Sacramento, CA on Tue, Jun 19, 2007
We use "premiere" for a first.

But then I hate the AP and only defer to them when they're arguing for my side. Still, to stop with them felt dirty, so I googled some more and found this, the final nail in the coffin, ably provided by New York Magazine:

It was no mere typo. There must have been a conscious decision to use "premier" to describe the first issue of Condé Nast Portfolio, which nearly all copy editors, this reporter included, would have called a "premiere."

So, when you're referring to the inaugural issue of a magazine, you write premiere issue.

Or you could just write The inaugural issue. Either one is good.

what does denouement mean?

2009-04-10T07:06:00.000-07:00

–noun
1. the final resolution of the intricacies of a plot, as of a drama or novel.
2. the place in the plot at which this occurs.
3. the outcome or resolution of a doubtful series of occurrences.

What I want to know is when and why did everyone start using this?

I mean, I'm an English major, and I don't remember covering it in any class. Maybe at the college level we're expected to know it, but then I know we didn't cover it in high school--because in Freshman English our teacher was a firm believer in rote and made us memorize and regurgitate the terms and definitions of everything she deemed important. And while I have to admit that, going back over her definitions, they were pretty damn good, we never covered "denouement."

So where did it come from? More importantly, how do we stop people from using it instead of "outcome"?

2009-04-10T05:57:00.000-07:00

ACTION! The picador pulled his feeble horse round slowly, to face the bull, and slowly he leaned forward and shoved his lance-point into the bull's shoulder. The bull, as if the horse were a great wasp that had stung him deep, suddenly lowered his head in a jerk of surprise and lifted his horns straight up into the horse's abdomen. And without more ado, over went horse and rider, like a tottering monument upset.

SUSPENSE! 'Why doesn't the horse move? Why doesn't it run away from the bull?' she asked in repelled amazement, of Owen.

QUEER UNIFORMS! Two horsemen in gay uniforms and bearing long staffs had suddenly ridden into the ring.

All in the next book-blogging installment of The Plumed Serpent

what does everything's jake mean?

2009-04-10T05:53:00.000-07:00

From Phrases, Cliches, and Expressions:

Meaning: All is satisfactory.
Example: Don't worry mate - everything's jake.
Origin: The term has probably been used as much in North America as in Australia and authorities are divided as to where it originated. In any case, jake now seems to lack a distinctively Australian flavour. Perhaps most significantly, the term appears to have largely gone out of use everywhere. Thanks to ozlip.

the plumed serpent -- chapter I part II

2009-04-08T15:09:00.000-07:00

Owen gets padded down by the ticket-taker "feeling for firearms"; the narrator uses the verb "pawed," suggesting that the Mexicans are animals and hinting at some military unrest. Kate, ever the prude, feels a "shock of horror" wondering if she'll be padded down, too, before the group is lead through the cold concrete tunnel into the amphitheatre.

Owen shrugs the pawing off, unconcerned with the threat that's implied, but Kate feels trapped and uncomfortable. Obviously she doesn't want to be there, but she takes it in stride: "I think it's thrilling." Villiers, on the other hand, is looking for a thrill, which the narrator says is due to his age. Villiers is in his early 20s while Kate and Owen are in their late 30s and have what the narrator describes as a "will-to-happiness."

It's interesting that the narrator tells us so little about the three and even about the setting--the details are sparse, and while we probably know as much about Mexico as Kate, Owen, and Villiers, we know almost nothing about them save what we can guess from their dialogue and actions and what the narrator tells us.

The three are led to their seats in the "Sun" section, which is obviously meant for the lower classes, meaning the Mexicans themselves. The upper-class seats are in the "Shade" section, which is another dichotomy. "Sun" implies that the lower-classes are out in the open, in the light, and have nothing to hide, as opposed to the "Shade." However the Shade seats are located at the top of the amphiteatre, far away from the bloody and brutal action. And even though the three are seated "out in the open," they share little in common with the others seated there, which I think is symbolized by the fact that it's overcast; even though they're exposed, they're not, per se, in the light.

Other attendants, mostly male laborers and black-suited clerks and factory hands, file in, and the narrator describes them as "fattish," and "dark-faced," the women's faces are powdered, which suggests a similarity with Kate: They're both pretending to be something their not; the Mexican women physically, Kate psychologically.

The crowd amuses themselves by snatching a straw hat from an attendee and passing it around, to which Owen remarks, "Isn't that fun?" "That" instead of "this"--Owen's merely observing the action, not taking part in it.

Kate says she hates the common people and is reproached by Owen, who feels the same way but doesn't want to say it.

A military band enters and, at the urging of the mob, plays a song, which ends up being very short. Soon after, the seats begin to fill up, and Villiers stares down a filthy Mexican for taking the seat in front of him. The Mexican maintains that his seat is only temporary until he can join his friends, but Villiers is adamant about having a place to rest his feet.

And the narrator goes hog-wild:

Oh, home of liberty! Oh, land of the free! Which of these two men was to win in the struggle for conflicting liberty? Was the fat fellow free to sit between Villiers' feet, or was Villiers free to keep his foot-space?

I honestly have no clue what the narrator or Lawrence is doing here--he's not really taking anyone's side in the scuffle; he's just mocking them. In context I guess it kind of makes sense, as this is a light skirmish foreshadowing the dramatic bullfight, and it's ironic since the three insisted on sitting in the "common" section to be among the "common" people despite quite obviously having nothing but contempt for them.

But it's alienating because the reader doesn't really have anyone to identify with--not the Mexicans, not the three protagonists, and not the narrator--which makes the first chapter difficult to get into.

Anyway, Villiers puts his feet down--literally--and the Mexican sits on them. Force doesn't work, so Kate begins venomously insulting the Mexican's clothes, which finally gets him to leave. Meanwhile Owen simply glares at the Mexican in front of him. Brute force doesn't work, so the gang resorts to condescending insults.

Next: The Bloodiest Bullfight Ever Described!

what's the difference between repetitious and repetitive?

2009-04-08T08:34:00.001-07:00

From Kenneth Wilson:

Repetitious means “full of or characterized by repetitions” and especially “boring or tedious repetitions,” as in Her conversation was silly and repetitious. Repetitive simply means “characterized by repetitions”: Making these wooden handles involved several repetitive procedures on the lathe. Had the procedures also been repetitious, the worker would almost certainly have found them tedious; that they were repetitive does not insist on their tediousness.

words shape how we view the world

2009-04-06T05:38:00.000-07:00

William Shakespeare may have said (through Juliet's lips): "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet," but Boroditsky thinks Shakespeare was wrong. Words, and classifications of words in different languages, do matter, she thinks.

In our broadcast, Boroditsky does an experiment — two bags, both filled with rose petals, but with different labels — that proves the Bard wrong. Or so she says.

The whole thing's here.

book blogging: the plumed serpent -- chapter I part I

2009-04-03T10:47:00.000-07:00

I've never finished the whole thing, so maybe writing about it will get me to do so.

I don't own a copy, so I'm working from the edition posted on Project Gutenberg

The book opens in Mexico City the Sunday after Easter, on what is the last bull-fight of the season. Evidently this is a pretty important bullfight because we're told that four special bulls have been brought in from Spain, Spanish bulls being "more fiery" than Mexican bulls.

Perhaps it is the altitude, perhaps just the spirit of the western Continent which is to blame for the lack of 'pep', as Owen put it, in the native animal.

And with that we're introduced to the first character in the novel--Owen--and the first thing we learn about Owen is that he's "a great socialist" and that he disapproves of bull fights.

The first few paragraphs of any novel usually establish the major themes, and while it's too early to say what's important or what means what, already there seems to be a dichotomy between Easter, or the celebration of the rebirth of Christ, and a bull fight, which is a celebration of death. The significance of this will no doubt become apparent.

The absence of "fire" in the Mexican bulls seems important, too. Bulls are strong, sturdy, and virile beasts, and we don't usually think of them as lacking "pep." And since this is a D.H. Lawrence novel, I think it's safe to say that unpeppy bulls symbolize impotence, more specifically Mexican impotence.

But let's get back to Owen. "Owen" is a Welsh name, so it's a safe bet Owen's not a native to Mexico. That and the fact that he "shall have to go" to the bullfight even though he disapproves of them suggests that he's just visiting Mexico and wants to catch the sights. It also sets him up as a hypocrite.

His companion, Kate, agrees."Kate" is derived from Greek, but it's a common name throughout Europe. "Neither she nor Owen spoke much Spanish" confirms them both as tourists, but are they a couple on holiday? The narrator introduces them so offhandedly and provides so few facts as to their personal lives that we won't know for a while. In fact, right now we don't even know that they're traveling with a third companion, Villers.

As Kate and Owen reach the ticket counter, "an unpleasant individual" waits on them in American, further identifying the two as Anglo-Saxons. The ticket man (as well as the onlookers) insist they buy the premium tickets, but Owen, ostensibly under the guise of preferring to "sit among the crowd" opts for the cheaper tickets.

As soon as they do, Kate has second thoughts, but Owen, despite his disapproval of bullfights continues to insist they see one:

I don't believe in them on principle, but we've never seen one, so we shall have to go.

Owen's starting to look like a real douche.

Owen was an American, Kate was Irish. 'Never having seen one' meant 'having to go.' But it was American logic rather than Irish, and Kate only let herself be overcome.

Now we know the nationalities of the two, and though we still don't know what the nature of their relationship is, we see that Kate's subservient to Owen.

The next paragraph introduces Villers, who's the youngest of the group, also American, and the keenest on taking in the fight.

The three of them drive through the dilapidated streets of Mexico City, with the narrator placing particular emphasis on the "dreariness" of the day and the buildings. The Mexicans aren't much different either: The words used to describe them--"unpleasant," "lousy," "gutter-louts"--don't paint a very flattering picture. Nor are any of them named, either. They come off as vermin, scurrying around a run-down, cold, dreary city (which makes you wonder what the Hell the three protagonists are doing there).

Kate felt she was going to prison. But Owen excitedly surged to the entrance that corresponded to his ticket. In the depths of him, he too didn't want to go. But he was a born American, and if anything was on show, he had to see it. That was 'Life.'

But as bad as the Mexicans come off, Owen doesn't seem much better, maybe even worse, because even though he's a "great socialist" he doesn't feel anything for these people or even admit he's uncomfortable around them--to him it's all a show; it's not life but rather the idea of life.

And that's where I'll stop for now.

efficacy

2009-04-02T05:26:00.000-07:00

"Efficacy."

Everyone seems to be using this word; why can't people just say something's "effective"?

Instead you get these labyrinthine sentences whose meaning is lost among the author's struggles to squeeze in strange and terrible phrases like "the efficacy of which is especially efficacious."

I recently read a sentence that went something like

I find mulching's efficacy to be 75%

You could just write, "I find mulching's 75% effective" and be done with it. Even its definition sounds pretentious:

capacity for producing a desired result or effect; effectiveness: a remedy of great efficacy.

well, what has 2009 done for me lately?

2009-04-01T06:11:00.000-07:00

Just got done reading a friend's latest blog post, and that, combined with the very sudden deaths of two dear people (within a week of one another), my dog Sophie's cancer diagnosis, Grandma's medical problems, and some other personal sh!t, I'm going to go out on a limb and say, "I'll see you in Hell, first quarter of 2009."

So let's look on the bright side, because sure, 2009's yielded a few nice--even great things. And here they are:

Eastbound & Down. If you've been disappointed with The Office and are still waiting for Seth Rogen & co. to produce something really laugh-out-loud funny, this it. One reviewer said that Kenny Powers is the best character television's produced since David Brent. He's right.

The premise isn't anything impressive--Kenny's a former major-league pitcher down on his luck who takes a job as a substitute gym teacher--but it's all worth watching for Kenny. He's so well-realized that you almost like the throwaway lines best ("What's his name? Fuckin' Shrek? ...no, huh?"; "Do not stare at me with those dead eyes, you church-bitch...instantly I regret saying that"; "Work, drugs"). The supporting cast is very well-endowed, too.

Lose It! This application rocks--you can track the calories and nutrients of everything you eat, and it has a huge database of general and brand-name foods. If you can't find whatever the Hell you're eating, you can create a new entry; if you're cooking something, you can input all the foods that go into the recipe, and it'll give you the total calories and nutrients for that, too; if you exercise a lot, it has a large database of exercises and how many calories each one works off; if you want to reach a certain weight by a certain date, it'll set up a daily calorie-intake plan that'll help you reach your goal.

And it's free.

Gran Torino --Too bad the best movie of the year came out in January.

I don't know about you, but every Clint Eastwood-directed movie I've seen always seems very slow--High Plains Drifter, The Eiger Sanction, Pale Rider, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Space Cowboys, even Unforgiven--but Torino's four minutes shy of two hours with a plot summary that reads like stereo instructions, and it keeps you hanging all throughout.

Clint Eastwood being a badass and grunting for about the first half-hour is eerily captivating. Then there's another half hour of him reeling off every ethnic slur we remember our grandfathers uttering after a quart of Wild Turkey: Christmas Eve 1985. Then there's the brother from Drew Carey. And a dog. And drinking PBR and smoking and chucking a fat Chinese kid and mannin' up another Chinese kid and yeah, no matter how you summarize the plot it sounds boring...but I have yet to meet someone who didn't love it.

For you film buffs who think it's beneath you, imagine someone combined Ikiru with Tokyo Story and then lightly Dirty-Harry-ized it.

The Oregon Trail--technically not a 2009 offering, but Gameloft revamped it for the iPhone/iPod Touch. It's not free, but it's as fun as the old one--though you're not able to hunt whenever you want and then sell the meat off so, even though you're a teacher, you make it to Oregon City with several thousand dollars and kids so stuffed with bison/bear meat that even the piercingest of snake fangs couldn't penetrate their doughy legs.

There's a lot of mini games, too, including fishing, collecting berries, repairing the wagon, panning for gold, a Simon-esque game where you send telegraphs, and, of course, hunting. The only one that kind of sucks is where you navigate the river, so it's nice they carried that over from the original.

And your family can still get cholera and dysentary and snake bites and broken arms and legs and carried away by eagles and eaten by bears, and there's funny animations that go along with all of them. It's also a breathtaking sight when you blast away your first bald eagle. Sweeeet.

Merriweather Post Pavilion--I don't know, I like this album. And I'm ashamed to admit I heard about it on NPR.

100-square-mile vs. 100-miles square; alliteration vs assonance vs consonance

2009-03-31T05:37:00.000-07:00

John August ponders a misprint in the Los Angeles Times:

Solar power: A Friday editorial said that according to the U.S. Energy Department, enough sunlight hits a “100-square-mile” portion of the Nevada desert to power the entire country. It should have said “100-miles-square.”

I maybe would have caught the 100-square-mile, but I wouldn't have known "100-miles-square" without looking it up.

But I'm more interested in the claim, because it's pretty vague. If I were proofing this, I'd ask whether "country" refers to the contiguous United States, excluding Alaska, Hawaii, and all our territories and embassies and everything else, or if it includes those, too. And for how long? A day? A year? Indefinitely?

And even still, suppose someone built that 100-miles-square solar panel and the cost of energy plummeted: Then people would consume a lot more energy. I can't say how much more, but likely more than the 100-miles-square panel would provide.

"Elite Eight" is cacophonous to Don Boudreaux's ears:

So unlike many Americans at this time of year, I remain sane throughout this period of "March Madness." But all the alliteration is inescapable -- "March Madness"; "Sweet Sixteen"; "Final Four"; "Elite Eight."

Wait! "Elite Eight"? What a terrible term for the eight college basketball teams remaining in the annual NCAA tournament. It's not alliterative at all.

Now you're probably thinking, Wait! "Elite Eight" wouldn't be alliteration; it'd be assonance! (and if you're wondering what the difference is, "alliteration" is the repetition of a consonant sound; "assonance" is the repetition of a vowel sound [and if you want to get really technical, alliteration is a repeated consonant sound at the beginning of the words; whereas "consonance" is a repeated consonant sound anywhere in the words]).

But it's usually okay for alliteration to mean all those--repeated consonant and vowels sounds occurring anywhere in the word.

punctuation ellipsis

2009-03-27T05:26:00.001-07:00

Generally you omit punctuation from either side of an ellipsis. You can get away with leaving it in (and sometimes it's better to if the sentence is confusing without it), but I prefer not to because it looks pretty unsightly.

However there are some times when it's best to keep the punctuation in--a series, for example:

Into the room walked my friend Bob,...a philanderer,...and a mopist.

Or when it helps to clarify the sentence structure. My style guide gives this example from the Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to...establish Justice,...and secure the Blessings of Liberty..., do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

And in case you're wondering why the comma in the second ellipsis is on the right (following Justice) and the comma in the third ellipsis is on the left (following the ellipsis), it's because you keep the punctuation of the original quote. In the original, there's a comma immediately after Justice, but not one immediately after Liberty--however, there is one after all the stuff we cut after Liberty.

what does seigniorage mean?

2009-03-25T05:28:00.000-07:00

seigniorage:

the difference between the cost of the bullion plus minting expenses and the value as money of the pieces coined, constituting a source of government revenue.

Wikipedia breaks it down:

Instead of issuing gold certificates, a government converts gold into currency at the market rate by printing paper notes. A person redeems an ounce of gold for its value in currency, keeps that currency for a year, then trades the currency back in for an amount of gold at market value, which may yield a different amount of gold from that started with if its price has increased or decreased during that year.

If the value of gold has gone up in the interim, then the amount the redeemer receives in return for his paper notes will be less than he originally paid for them. Seignorage occurs.

Words of Wisdom from Stephen Fry

2009-03-25T05:12:00.000-07:00

And sharks are NOT dangerous. More people bitten by New Yorkers every year than sharks. Fact! Coconuts falling on head more dangerous. etc.

Bees, dogs, and lighting also kill more people a year than sharks. Don't have the data on the Dreaded Lightning bee-dog, though.

2009-03-22T17:37:00.000-07:00

Shoulda been "fewer" calories

where does becker take place?

2009-03-21T17:13:00.000-07:00

Becker takes place in the Bronx.

Not really a grammar question, but good to know all the same.

british banned words

2009-03-20T09:02:00.000-07:00

Tyler Cowen (via MissMarketCrash) gives us words that have evidently been banned by the British local government authorities:

across-the-piece, actioned, advocate, agencies, ambassador, area based, area focused, autonomous, baseline, beacon, benchmarking, best practice, blue sky thinking, bottom-up, CAAs, can do culture, capabilities, capacity, capacity building, cascading, cautiously welcome, challenge, champion, citizen empowerment, client, cohesive communities, cohesiveness, collaboration, commissioning, community engagement, compact, conditionality, consensual, contestability, contextual, core developments, core message, core principles, core value, coterminosity, coterminous, cross-cutting, cross-fertilization, customer, democratic legitimacy, democratic mandate, dialogue, direction of travel, distorts spending priorities, double devolution, downstream, early win, edge-fit, embedded, empowerment, enabler, engagement, engaging users, enhance, evidence base, exemplar, external challenge, facilitate, fast-track, flex, flexibilities and freedoms, framework, fulcrum, functionality, funding streams, gateway review, going forward, good practice, governance, holistic, holistic governance, horizon scanning, improvement levers, incentivising, income streams, indicators, initiative, innovative capacity, inspectorates, interdepartmental, interface, iteration, joined up, joint working, LAAs, Level playing field, lever, leverage, localities, lowlights, MAAs, mainstreaming, management capacity, meaningful consultation, meaningful dialogue, mechanisms, menu of options, multi-agency, multidisciplinary, municipalities, network model, normalising, outcomes, output, outsourced, overarching, paradigm, parameter, participatory, partnership working, partnerships, pathfinder, peer challenge, performance network, place shaping, pooled budgets, pooled resources, pooled risk, populace, potentialities, practitioners, predictors of beaconicity, preventative services, prioritization, priority, proactive, process driven, procure, procurement, promulgate, proportionality, protocol, provider vehicles, quantum, quick hit, quick win, rationalisation, rebaselining, reconfigured, resource allocation, revenue streams, risk based, robust, scaled-back, scoping, sector wise, seedbed, self-aggrandizement, service users, shared priority, shell developments, signpost, single conversations, single point of contact, situational, slippage, social contracts, social exclusion, spacial, stakeholder, step change, strategic, strategic priorities, streamlined, sub-regional, subsidiarity, sustainable, sustainable communities, symposium, systematics, taxonomy, tested for soundness, thematic, thinking outside of the box, third sector, toolkit, top-down, trajectory, tranche, transactional, transformational, transparency, upstream, upward trend, utilise, value-added, visionary, welcome, wellbeing, worklessness.

This is even more ridiculous than LSSU's banned words, and I doubt it'll be long before many--probably most--are rescinded.

It's unbearably difficult to keep a useful word down.

i eat babies...what?

2009-03-18T12:50:00.000-07:00

In college I hung around with the rugby crowd (though I was way too much of a wuss to actually play). From them I picked up a number of social vices, a notable one being the tendency to say very crude things in very inappropriate contexts.

Occasionally I'd catch myself, and I found the best way brush off the faux pas was following up each offensive statement with a short pause and a, "What?"

I found that people were less offended if I acknowledged the inappropriateness of what I just said and then questioned it. It seemed like I was sorry for what I said, and I was...

..at first.

Then I started testing how far I could go with it. I encouraged friends to try the same. In most cases, the results were the same--as long as we followed up each inappropriate statement with a pause and a, "What?" People were less likely to be offended.

Of course this is nothing scientific--we didn't have much of a control group, and I imagine that after a while our sampling group became more and more accustomed to offensive statements--but I notice many of my friends still do it...and still get away with it.

So try it!

what does verbiage mean?

2009-03-16T08:19:00.000-07:00

1. overabundance or superfluity of words, as in writing or speech; wordiness; verbosity.
2. manner or style of expressing something in words; wording: a manual of official verbiage.

However, many people use it to mean, "phraseology," which is closer to the second definition of verbiage: manner or style of verbal expression; characteristic language.

(For example, I just edited a piece where the author used "verbiage" to mean "phrase." [I suspect the author did it because "verbiage" sounds smart, but it doesn't when you use it improperly].)

Anyway, using "verbiage" to mean the second definition can be confusing to someone who takes "verbiage" to mean "overabundance of words," so it's probably best to stick to "phraseology" when you mean "manner of expression something in words."

how many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop?

2009-03-16T05:33:00.000-07:00

Boy: Mr. Owl, how many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?
Mr. Owl: Let's find out. A One... A.two-HOO...A three..
(crunch sound effect)
Mr. Owl: A Three!

This bothered me immensely when I was a child. Granted the narrator tacitly acknowledges that Mr. Owl didn't really answer the question, but I wanted to see him tarred and feathered (or tarred and skinned? He's a bird, so he's already feathered) and exposed for the fraud he is.

But to answer the question, here's Wikipedia:

Three independent research studies have been carried out to determine the answer. Engineering students at Purdue University devised a "licking machine" that showed an average of 364 licks are needed to get to the center. Using 20 human volunteers, the figure was 252. A doctoral student at the University of Michigan created another licking machine and came up with an average of 411 licks.

children's books

2009-03-12T08:29:00.000-07:00

Every [classic of children's literature] ... has the same reassuring pattern of 'home, away, home,' " [San Diego State University English professor Alida Allison] says. "The basic plot begins with a happy family situation. Then one extremely curious or transgressive child goes out on his or her own. And, no matter how 'bad' the child has been, he gets to come back home.

So, many of the classics of children's literature are bastardizations of the parable of the prodigal son? Because whereas the prodigal son was prepared to beg his father for mercy, that's not necessarily the case with these protagonists.

One of my college professors told the class that he once forbid his very young daughter from seeing the musical Annie, because in it, Daddy Warbucks spent his way out of every problem instead of taking responsibility. That's not the sort of lesson my professor wanted his daughter to absorb.

So I wonder what kind of a lessons are children's literature "classics" teaching children--that their actions, however vicious and perverse, will be absolved regardless?

Anyway, here's more on children's lit.

what is a ponzi scheme?

2009-03-11T05:23:00.000-07:00

Here's a term that's been in the news a lot, but how many people know what it means? Or its origin? Probably a small few. In fact, I've heard more people refer to it as a Potsie Scheme.

But no, for better or worse, it has nothing to do with Happy Days.

Wikipedia has a good definition:

A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to investors from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors rather than from profit.

"Ponzi" refers to Charles Ponzi, an Italian immigrant who made a lot of money during the 1920s by promising investors a 50% return on their investment in 45 days or 100% in 90 days.

Ponzi pulled it off (for a time) by paying the early investors with the later investors' money. The large profits accrued by the early investors would attract subsequent investors, whose money Ponzi would in turn use to pay off the early investors, and so on.

Bernie Madoff did pretty much the same thing, though his returns weren't quite so high as Ponzi's--which is probably one of the reasons it lasted so long.

majority rules pronunciation

2009-03-10T08:32:00.000-07:00

Russ Roberts interviews Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales:

It was also interesting to hear him pronounce the name of the web site. He calls it wi-key-pedia. I (and I think most everyone else) calls it wi--kuh-pedia. Hayek would be the first to point out that he cannot choose what it is called--the pronounciation emerges without being under anyone's control.

The full interview is here. The full post is here.

how to speak grammongoloid

2009-03-10T08:21:00.000-07:00

"No longer will we adhere to the dull, predictable structure of our traditional grammar system. This nation will now begin speaking, writing and listening to something fresh, exciting and different," said Clinton.

"Excuse me," added he pause long after a. "Meant I, the dull, predictable system our traditional grammar of adhere to no longer will we. Speaking, writing and listening to something fresh, exciting and different will this nation now begin."

More here.