How do “bottomless cups of coffee” work, anyway? I mean, if they’re bottomless, how could they be cups, and how could they hold coffee?
Somebody wasn’t thinking when they made that one up.
So, I Got An Email The Other Day About How to Stop Procrastinating
Haven’t gotten around to reading it yet. Maybe tomorrow.
Yet Another Cavil, Gripe, Grumble, Complaint
Full Curmudgeon Mode, I suppose… *sigh*
Something I’ve noticed more and more recently–and even worse, found myself unconsciously influenced by!–is a growing occurrence of sentence fragments used in the place of complete sentences. It doesn’t seem to matter what the genre is, either. I’ve seen it (of course *arrgghh!*) in the simperings, whinings and blatherings of the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind, in academic writing and in fiction. The use of sentence fragments that are nothing more than prepositional phrases in place of complete sentences is especially pernicious.
I suppose some may be excusable in casual writing as some sort of contemporary method of adding emphasis to a preceding sentence. Maybe. But it’s seeming to become pervasive, invasive and influential as it corrupts clear, concise writing.
It’s irritating, especially when coming from the pens of otherwise capable, competent, effective writers. Are they simply trying to write for the ADD/ADHD crowd, those whose attention spans can’t grasp the use of commas, conjunctions, semi-colons and other means of joining independent clauses, and who even stumble over the simple addition of a prepositional phrase modifying or expanding upon an independent clause?
Thankfully, my writing style does drive off those whose grasp of English falls within the parameters of “Me, Tarzan. You, Jane” or “See Dick. See Jane. See Dick run. See Jane run.” I really don’t want or need anyone reading my screeds who’s too lazy, inattentive or stupid to understand sentences longer than three or four words…
Oh, well. It’s not as though I gave a rat’s patootie; it just chaps my gizzard a wee tad.
/rant off
Wisdom of the Ages
From Forward the Mage by by Eric Flint, Richard Roach and Jim Baen: How to deal with enemies:
Whenever you can, stab ’em in the back.
Better yet, stab ’em in the back in the dead of night.
Best of all, stab ’em in the back in the dead of night while they’re asleep.
If you’ve got to stab ’em in the front, try a low blow.
If none of that works, then use all your skills as best you can, you stupid dummy.
Git ‘er done.
*heh*
Amazingly Talented
I have an amazing lip-reading ability. For example, I do watch Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind “news” programs every now and then, but I mute the sound when I do. That way, when, say, The Zero is featured in a clip, I can amaze others present with my lip-reading ability. For example, in the clip the following graphic was extracted from…
“Lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie.”
See? Amazing.
(BTW, I also have the ability to read minds. I know this because I got absolutely nothin’ from Biden.)
Metaphor Inflation=Imagination Deprivation
I can recall a time well over half a century ago (OK, I was four years old) when I went around “touching” things with an imaginary eleven foot pole that I “wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole”.
And then I read recently,
They’d be fools to touch it with a 40 foot pole.
*sigh*
Stocking Up on Rodent Patootie
The older I get the more things I find about which I just don’t give a rat’s ass.
I’m sure it’s just me…
No, really.
OK, I can understand and accept execrable grammar in dialog. Heck, I write in a way I find nearly inexcusable myself pretty regularly here, for effect. But when ALL David Weber’s characters in ALL his books have difficulty properly using adverbs… (almost) ALL the time (and always when forming adverbs from adjectives or using adjectives in an adverbial position, if you’d rather), it grates a wee tad.
Just sayin’.
(I keep wanting to send Weber–or his editors/proofreaders–a link to this page. *heh*)), it grates a wee tad.)
Well, It Ain’t Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder
In answer to Aggie’s “assignment” (which I found out about here), submitted late because the Damned Dog ate my homework:
“That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It”
I am an Olde Pharte, the embodiment of the stereotypical irascible curmudgeon with a heart of antimony. When I do have to interact with people, I enjoy most twisting their tiny little brains into knots and leaving them thinking we were having fun, when in fact I was having fun mocking them.
Almost no one catches wise.
And then…
It was a typical Thursday evening, and I was out, walking the Damned Dog. (I refuse to call my wife’s animated mop by the anthropomorphic name she gave it; as much as I despise people, it’s an insult to most of even the self-lobotomized among humanity to use a name one might in the phone book to describe this creature.) As usual, the Damned Dog was taking its damned time voiding its bladder and bowels—a necessity at night if I want to avoid stepping in “presents” deposited on my path to paying the mid-nightly water bill.
Well, it was a typical Thursday evening until, “Psst! Hey, mister! Can ya gimme a hand?” came at me in a whistling, oddly mechanical sotto voce from the shadows beside old lady McIntyre’s garage.
WTF? Whoever it was looked to be really short and sounded almost as though he were whispering through some sort of brass musical instrument. Well, even though I only had The Animated Mop as my great defender, I didn’t feel threatened by a midget whispering through a trumpet. If he (she-it?–couldn’t tell) had a whole brass band with him (she-it?), that could be a different situation, though. Oh, well, “Who are you? What do you want?”
“I’m kinda stuck here.”
OK, button on my cap light. WTF?!? No, seriously, WTF?!?
Yeh, it was apparently an “it” and… and shiny, with what appeared to be tentacles. And its head? Stuck. In the hole it appeared to have poked through the side of the garage.
“How’d ya get stuck?”
“Ate too much, I guess.”
“Too much what?”
“Too much hydrocarbon.”
“What?”
“The vehicle inside this building was just full of bunches ‘n’ bunches of hydrocarbons, and I gorged on the stuff until I’m just too full to get out by the hole I came in by. Can ya gimme a hand?”
“What do I get out of it?”
“Interstellar goodwill?”
I considered the situation. I had a good knee brace on my right knee, and my left leg and hip hadn’t been acting up all that much recently, so I figured I could handle a little physical exercise.
“OK, hold still,” and I hauled off and booted the nasty lil bugger’s head into old lady McIntyre’s back yard. So maybe I didn’t consider what the lil critter had been eating and maybe its head did draw a spark off a trash can on its way to the back yard. These things happen. My eyebrows will probably grow back, old lady McIntyre’s insurance will replace her garage and car and the Damned Dog looks better with no fur.
That’s my story and I’m sticking with it. Stop laughing at me, or I’ll hit you with my cane. (The knee brace wasn’t quite as good as I thought.)
How Does One Miss Something That Is Not There?
I mean, seriously, how can you even acquire a target that doesn’t exist? Aim at a donut hole in a non-existent donut? At a zero with the rim kicked off? No, really.
*heh*
Oh, well, absinthe makes the heart race, or something like that…
In other news, while I like the service in general, Amazon really, really, really needs to take a look at its Cloud Drive limitations. I mean, download only ONE file at a time? Really? How very… 20th Century. For example, whenever I get another 100 or so mp3s stored there, it’d be handy to download ’em in one batch (for local archiving locally, transferring to a super small 8GB mp3 player–for use while doing yardwork, etc., where the Kindle Fire might *cough* not be the right device, etc.) rather than one. At. A. Time. Just sayin’, Amazon…
If you like Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum–or even merely like to read the S. Plum books in order to mock the “life” of a fictional character whose “life” is more dysfunctional than your own *heh*–you might like the less dysfunctional female sleuth found in Dani Amore’s Death By Sarcasm. Some folks might be put off a tad by the constant, repetitious, almost metronomical (notice the scesis onomaton? *heh*) sarcasm–weak, middlin’ and somewhat fierce but constant, unending, continual. OTOH, I liked it. 🙂 Unfortunately for my tiny lil tightwad heart, it was good enough that I’ll soon crack open my coin purse to cough up a carrot ($0.99) for the author. I like to encourage good writing, and the author’s second book (Dead Wood) is also better than some (*cough* Evanovich *cough*) books I’ve paid much more for.
Fun stuff, Maynard. The second novel noted above doesn’t include never-ending lame jokes to accent an overarching ironic theme–perhaps a plus for some–but does have one small structural weakness in the plot. It wasn’t enough to cause anything but a minor pause in my devouring of the book. A $0.99 murder mystery of the caliber of either of these books is a crime… against support of good writing.