Category: Dumbasses

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SPAM “Success!”

From a “Free English Tutorial” site, this SPAM comment caught my eye:

“English language has grow to be a prerequisite for pretty much something that we do, from applying your favorite social networking web sites like Twitter and Facebook and generally working with the internet to applying for strong jobs. We all know how a great deal a second language can enhance our careers”

Yeh, about that English language tutorial thingy. . . Tutoring folks to speak/write at the (illiterate) level of most Mass Media Podpeople or 20-something aspiring self-pup writers isn’t necessarily a success track, IYNWIMAITTYD.

Pro tip: don’t give up your day job digging ditches.

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“Helicopter Nanny State” Wants All Parents to be “Helicopter Parents”

“Don’t Leave Your Kids Near Judgmental Strangers” highlights once again the evils of “No Child Alone–EVER!” societal/judicial constructs.

Frankly, I think parents who are unjustly harassed by nosy parker buttinskis should go on the offensive and sue ’em (defamation? Something like that), demanding p-sych evaluations, background checks, and more. Put the (steel-toed, spike-soled) shoe on the other foot. . . and give ’em a really swift, hard kick in the “fundamentals” with it.

Repeatedly. Until, they go away and stay away.

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Stupid Book Blurbs (for Stupid Books?) Level: Grandmaster

Here’s one that starts badly with the first word and goes downhill from there.

“Shalthazar the dark wizard came to Llars seeking power beyond imagining, and got more than he ever imagined.”

*doh*

I’m almost sorry I missed this book. (But, I wasn’t really aiming, anyway.)

I’m also unimpressed by blurbs that mention an “affirmative action” award–you know, one reserved for some ethnicity or whatever “disadvantaged” multi-culti “lit-ur-airy” Balkan state group author who can’t write well enough to win a legitimate award.

Oh, heck. ANY award not decided strictly by everyday, ordinary readers of the book is bogus. In that vein, book awards should be based on (actual, real, legitimate) sales, and, in fact, the only awards that really count are those that go into the writer’s pocket.

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A Brief Comment About the Use of “Grammar Nazi”

“Grammar Nazi” is a term widely misused by folks on the Internet to refer to anyone who takes umbrage at illiterate abuse of language. It is a term of derision mean to the shield the user’s ego, usually after their own subliterate (or downright illiterate) abuse of English. Seriously insecure people are “offended” by others’ abuse of English being corrected.

Grammar~Syntax?Structure, logic, reason, all affecting the clear transmission of meaning. The more “noise” in the transmission, the shallower and less meaningful the transmission.

Phonemes (and their analogs in print) are just noise absent syntax and semantics.

Syntax: structure (99% of grammar). Affects semantics.

Semantics: meaning–the transmission of which is the sole justification for language.

“Now there abide these three: phonemes, syntax, and semantics; and the greatest of these is semantics.”

Where phonemes (and their analogs in print) are poorly transmitted (poor pronunciation or poor spelling), meaning is less well transmitted. Where syntax is garbled (spoken or in text) meaning is less well transmitted.

If these are important when speaking or writing in a “foreign” language (and they most CERTAINLY are!), then they are just as important when speaking one’s own, “native,” language.

Nazism does not apply, since fascist socialism has no place in any of these things.

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The Trumpery’s Fav “Bible Verse”?

[Sidebar: it’s not just subliterate, lying politicians who make up “scripture.” I’ve known more than a few literate “preachers” who have done so wittingly.]

I hear that The Trumpery’s favorite verse from “Two Corinthians” actually starts out that way. Two Corinthians Two:Two (Trumpery Standard Version) “Two Corinthians walk into a bar. . . “

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Silly Hivemind Podpeople

Saw a question posed by a Talking Head Podperson:

“Are the Presidential Debates ‘Rigged’ Against Trump?”

*duh*

If they were real debates, then The Trumpery wouldn’t have an even vain hope against even the worst public speaker on the national stage, the Queenie Cacklepants Cylon (Worst? Why, its Human Emulation Module is so defective that every time it engages, the thing looks and sounds like a deranged Bonobo chimp wearing a defective shock collar, that’s how bad the thing is).

As it is, with Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind Talking Heads posing their agenda-driven questions (no doubt directly from the Hivemind’s daily download from the mothership orbiting Uranus–well, it’s as ‘kind and gentle’ a spin to put on the Hivemind’s monolithic narrative as any), all The Trumpery has to do to energize his base s show up and berate the Hivemind Podpeople for their biased approach.

Nah, what would REALLY stack the deck against The Trumpery would be if Gary Johnson were included in the show trial “debates.” THAT would chap his gizzard no end. Oh, and the Queenie Cacklepants Cylon? It’d need a LOT more oil on its disposal chute’s hinges to try to dump enough fecal matter (salvaged from banal politicians, concentrated and stored for use in its pronouncements) to make any impact at all.

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The Iron Law of Bureaucracy at Work

So, fifth time in six years that “city” *cough* workers *cough* are “repairing” the water line to the house. Yeh, the guy in the hole didn’t like me sticking around to see that he was just putting a patch over the hole in their line. Replace the faulty line? Heck no! That would take work. *sigh*

But at least it keeps them busy going back and re-doing their crappy work.

One of the principles of Type II “Bureaucraps” is to NEVER actually solve a problem, because that doesn’t let them request more funding, more personnel (at the end of the “job” there were five “workers” busyworking the job. Oh, it never needed more than one to do the “work” and another to lean on a shovel and issue directions (which, when it came to the so-so use of the backhoe/FEL at least gave the guy five minutes out of two hours of legitimacy, but it needed five to eat up some time on some time cards), more “turf” to claim as their own.

And their supervisor, of course, set it all up the way it was run, from excess workers using equipment oin a manner assured to take the most possible time with the equipment used, to shoddy repair. All designed to eat up resources in the most inefficient manner possible and assure ANOTHER leak down the road.