Category: Dumbasses

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Slow Boat from China

So, ordered an external enclosure for a laptop optical drive from an Amazon retailer knowing full well it would come by “slow boat from China,” since it wasn’t a critical piece of equipment and not needed tout de suite. Eventually, it arrived. Again, no problems with the six week delivery time, since I ordered it with an expectation that delivery would be glacially slow.

But.

It was neither as described in the product description nor as pictured on the product display. It was missing the ONE essential element that allows using a laptop optical drive as an external, portable drive: an interface card. The card was neither built into the enclosure nor flopping around loose in the box. I had a plastic box, a couple of short USB cables, and a faceplate. Useless, except perhaps for target practice.

Corresponded with the seller. Seller wanted pictures of what was missing from the box. Yes, that is indeed what was stated.

*head-desk*

After several emails back and forth (and a complete unboxing sequence sent, along with copies of the text and pictures from the product page for comparison), the company offered to “make me whole” by refunding all but $0.44 of what I paid them for the trash they sent me to dispose of for them.

*sigh*

But at least they didn’t ask me to send their trash back to them.

Still, one strike and the seller is OUT. I’ll never buy from this seller again. Seller “TOOGOO”? “Disrecommended”

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Exception Testing the Rule

“She drug [sic] her broken foot along. . . ”

Finally a misuse of “drug” to indicate a past tense of “drag” that, though still not literate, is at least understandable. After all, it refers to a zombie, and, as we all know, only illiterate, brain-dead zombies misuse “drug” when “dragged” is called for.

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Circular “Argument”

While traffic circles can quite often make good traffic control sense, sometimes. . .

Plunk one down in a place that will obviously benefit from it, but don’t think through the area’s demographics, and the benefits, while not exactly evaporating, just aren’t as strong, sometimes. Posit a locale dominated by elderly retirees (who are often better suited to parking their car than to actually driving it) on the one hand and 20-30-something young folks (who are ALSO often better suited to parking their car than to actually driving it), and imagine the “You go” No, YOU go”/”I’m-a goin'” “No, I am” messes.

Yeh, it’s real.

Meanwhile, I blow past the indecisive and brush off the importuning, shake my head, and wonder how long it’ll take the “old folks” to either learn or die off and the young folks to learn. . . or die off.

Yeh, yeh, I’m officially and Olde Pharte, but I don’t creep around corners or traffic circles, stop at yield signs (when NO ONE IS COMING! #gagamaggot), pull into traffic and drive slow in front of folks, etc., so I may be atypical.

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“Alright” Is NOT All Right

I know I have already said things like this before, but whether you are all ready to read it again or not, here is is again. All together now, repeat after me: “Alright is altogether all wrong.”

OK, I will make an exception. If a writer seriously wants to indicate that he is faux literate and does not want me to purchase his book or lend him my “eye time,” then he should go ahead and use “alright.”

That is all.

No, it’s not. Completely unrelated sidebar: Brit writers who set a story in the US? Stop referring to the second floor of a building as the first floor. Do that for stories set in “BrE-land.” Give “boot” the boot unless you are referring to footwear or kicking something. And for the sake of all things linguistic, learn how to express the subjunctive mood!

NOW that is all. For now.

*grumble-grumble-gripe-complain*

BTW, it’s not just me.

https://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/alright-vs-all-right

And there are more such worthy commentaries. Many, many more. And a few quislings who are perfectly happy to sully the English language with such despicable monstrosities as “alright.” And yeh, James Joyce apparently used “alright.” Once. That only condemns his “suckitudinous” writing even more. (That he used “all right” the rest of the time does not excuse the shitty nature of his books.)

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One Way to Ruin a Novel

Ran across a book recently where the writer chose the EASIEST way to ruin a “mystery/thriller” featuring loads of pseudo-forensics. Let me give you the three words that killed any suspension of disbelief:

Serrated hunting knife.

No, really. A murder weapon was determined to be a knife with a blade about six inches long with a serrated edge, THEREFORE it was a “hunting knife.” The serrated edge was the dead giveaway that the six inch blade HAD to be a “hunting knife.”

Quick, do an image search for “hunting knife.” Out of the first 50,000 images or so, how many had serrated blades? If you said more than five, then you found those few “hunting knives” made for people who have no idea how one is used and just think a serrated blade looks cool or “scary” or whatever.

Serrated hunting knife: #gagamaggot

Oh, there were other things that were evidence the writer didn’t have a clue about whatever subject was mentioned–“handwavium” determined how one character became wealthy, LOTS of wildly inappropriate “smirks” (*gag-spew*), off-scene “ghost characters” with no character or reason for existence, etc., but “serrated hunting knife” presented as being a hunting knife because it is serrated (“Ooo! I have a BREAD KNIFE that qualifies as a ‘hunting knife’ under this writer’s criteria!”) just takes the cake.

“Have you confirmed what kind of knife was used to cut her throat?”

“Yes. Six-inch serrated blade.”

“A hunting knife.”

Thereafter, “serrated hunting knife” is repeated ad nauseum.

Oh, BTW, I like knives a lot. I have several “hunting knives.” None of them are serrated. I have never actually seen (apart from the three pictures out of the first five or six pages I viewed in a casual search) a “serrated hunting knife,” and definitely not ITRW. I know they exist, because some folks are just stupid that way, but even those that do won’t have a six-inch edge that is serrated, only a small bit near the handle.

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One of the Problems with the Internet. . .

Is that, apparently, something like 90% of the folks who use it have never read a book written by someone who is actually literate, or if they have didn’t understand any of the words, including “a,” “and,” and “the.”

Is that all? Well, no. Both my readers (*heh*) know by now that I can’t leave well enough alone, so. . .

Shining is toooooo haaaard for some folks. He shined his shoes. He shined a light. The light shone.

Drinking is hard, too. Drink, drank, drunk, NOT “I drink, I drank, I have drank.”

He hung a picture, but later he hanged by the neck (until dead, as the expression goes).

None of these–and many, many more–are any problem at all for anyone who even approaches literacy in English. . . which is why so many verbs are conjugated wrong every day on social media, in emails, and in articles written by “professional journalists.”

But that’s OK, because the perpetrators feel competent to “express” themselves in English.

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Crimes Against Literacy. . .

. . . in Xmas “movies.”

I caught a very strange sound, in passing as it were, from a made-for-TV “Xmas movie” that jarred me into stopping and paying attention for a moment. Yes, indeed some idiot had elected to have a “caroling choir” sing “Greensleeves” as a processional for a “Cmas wedding.” No, not the Xmas carol lyrics to “What Child is This?” but to the actual lyrics of Greensleeves.” As a supposed wedding processional.

Yes, as the “bride” made her way down the aisle, the “caroling choir” sang,

“Alas my love you do me wrong
To cast me off discourteously. . . “

*head-desk*

My brief attention turned immediately to mocking. Someone should give a dopeslap (using a brick bat) to every moron involved in that production.

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Quora Is. . . a Real Mixed Bag

Unlike Q/A fora that focus on one topic or are strictly information-seeking-and-sharing boards, Quora features just about any question anyone can come up with, which means it’s a site that has just about everything from serious questioners with folks making serious attempts to answer such questions to trolls baiting others and then “flinging monkey poo” at anyone who attempts a serious answer, to those like the dumbass who asked the following question:

“What’s one song that always gives you the feels?”

Anyone who uses the term “the feels” deserves no response other than raucous mocking. It’s a vague, stupid nonsense term that only self-made idiots would even contemplate (if contemplate they could) using. The Urban Dictionary (though that should be in “scare quotes” *heh*) tries to describe the term thusly:

“A word used to describe something that is intensely emotional on a level somewhere between you feeling empty and you on the floor in a ball weeping uncontrollably.”

In other words, it’s a term so broad and vague as to be meaningless, and yet this questioner wants to know,

“”What’s one song that always evokes vague, undefined, essentially meaningless emotions in you ranging from ennui to agony?”

#gagamaggot

OTOH, the stupidity of gargantuan proportions the question represents nevertheless did not prevent my mind from fleeing to a momentary wish that I could somehow know the tune Kipling had running through his head as he composed “The Last Chantey.”

Continue reading “Quora Is. . . a Real Mixed Bag”

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Had to *SMH* in Amazement

Saw a comment that was only moderately “gabberflastering” on a forum that shall go unnamed. Guy said he had to write in thew sharps and flats that were in the key sig to remind himself when he played through a piece.

Say what?!?

Whenever I taught music or directed volunteer music groups, I generally taught beginning music readers to use the “STARS” system or a variant that is even simpler, for those in volunteer choirs whose music reading chops were. . . only slowly emerging:

S – Sharps or flats in the key signature
T – Time signature and Tempo markings
A – Accidentals not found in the key signature
R – Rhythms ; silently count the more difficult notes and rests
S – Signs , including dynamics, articulations, repeats and endings

Every class session or rehearsal included using something likethe “STARS” system before reading every new piece. *shrugs* Regular exercise of “reading” through a new piece (or reviewing one not seen in a while) really aided in sight reading. Of course, “STARS” is just an extremely simplified version of score study any competent conductor does, but it seemed to be enough to alleviate the “write in the sharps/flats for reminder” issue. . . especially since each freakin’ line in a score begins with the key sig. . .

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Silly, Sad, or Disingenuous?

I have a dirty little pleasure. I lurk (and sometimes–rarely–participate) on Quora, mainly in order to keep track of just how low literacy and rhetoric can sink (is sinking, still) in these DisUnited States. Here:

In the wake of another mass shooting, do you support the NRA who is saying “anti gun doctors should stay in their lane,”or are you with the doctors who treat the victims?

Answering such a question is a waste of time, because the question is illegitimate on its face.

“. . .do you support the NRA who is saying ‘anti gun doctors should stay in their lane,’ or are you with the doctors who treat the victims?”

The questioner creates a class “anti-gun doctors” and sets the NRA against that class, but also, by asking if one—contra the NRA, in the questioner’s construction—is “with” (in support of) doctors who treat the victims, creating an equivalence between “anti-gun doctors” and “the doctors who treat the victims” implying that doctors who are NOT “anti-gun” don’t treat victims. . . or worse, implying there are not doctors who are not “anti-gun.”

All-in-all, it’s a question that was either formed poorly by someone who just cannot use English literately or it was formed by someone intending to semantically slant the question in an illegitimate manner. Either way, it’s a less than useful question from an arguably useless questioner.

But, frankly, on some issues, a question formed like this one would be better than most.