Category: I do these sorts of things so you don’t have to

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My Least Favorite Month of the Year

Sure, when I was a wee tad, I occasionally heard strange word pronunciations (strange to my ear because I lived in a somewhat literate family environment and began reading at an early age), like “warsh rag” for “wash cloth” (“warsh” never seemed to be accompanied by “cloth” for some reason) and “drore” for “drawer”. Somehow, though, I was never exposed during my formative years to people who simply could not pronounce the months of the year correctly. Hence my least favorite month of the year, a time of the year nowadays when I have to continually bite my tongue to keep from shouting

least-fav-month

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Can You Spot the Fake?

can-you-spot-the-fake

Answer: It’s the guy with the bad golf swing who’s also poorly photoshopped to back up the laughable claim that he goes skeet shooting “all the time”.

Note: the photoshopped pic purporting to be of The Zero with his saddle oxfords, golf gloves and a shotgun turned up in a Tweet from New Republic with a link to a fake White House site. TNR, of course, is just anther limb of the Democrat Octopoid Hivemind. Since it was caught out, it’s tried to blame its stupidity on Twitter.

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Apart From Innumeracy and Grammar Failures, Moderately Interesting. . .

What? Oh, this article about the feds making those who unlock their dumb phones criminals. Sure, the info is pretty much useless to Olde Phartes like me who just use a cell phone to make calls (don’t try calling my cell phone, cos I won’t answer), but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Still, how many times can one read something like,

“There’s more than a few ways around this. . . “

. . . without gagging and searching for a way to dopeslap, then tar, feather and hang the author from the highest tree?

There ARE. . . ways, idiot. Count it out. Plural. Got it? (No. He can’t count and can’t parse a simple sentence in English. Typical Hiveminder.)

Continue reading “Apart From Innumeracy and Grammar Failures, Moderately Interesting. . .”

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Can I Get Disability Payments for This?

I have a disability that is a constant burden. In my daily walk of life, it causes me many, many difficulties that weigh me down, reduce my ability to work or even have enjoyment of life. It’s severe and debilitating.

I simply caNOT understand–or many times even remember–that most people LIKE being stupid, ignorant and blind to the world around them.

Most people cannot (solely because they don’t want to take the vanishingly small effort to do so) understand that

x+y=z, therefore z-y=x

. . .or that a basic grasp of such things are, in the very a natural, ordinary and proper human existence, useful in so very many ways that if one were to stop to list them there would likely not be enough (electronic) ink to do so.

And that’s just scratching the surface of things most people do not even take for granted, because they remain obstinately blind to them.

But it’s not just that basic, almost first grade level, algebra’s usefulness in kitchen management, carpentry, shopping and much, much more eludes them (because they are too intellectually lazy to be able to win a game of checkers against a head of cabbage), no, it’s not just that. It’s also that such folks view any use of very simple math extending beyond extremely basic addition and subtraction as magic, only invoke via calculators of some sort. (But then, such folks also do not usually even understand the formulae they must use to input data into a calculator beyond simple multiplication, division, addition and subtraction.)

My disability is that I just do not get that.

Algebra, statistics (and the calculus necessary to understand how statistical formulae work; without that, one is far too easily manipulated by phony statistics. . . just sayin’), gemoetry, etc., are all extremely useful tools–as ways of thinking about our world around us–for anyone wishing to

save money
save time
save effort

. . . that it boggles my mind that so very, very many not only are utterly incapable of even seeing the daily multitudes of applications of simple maths like algebra and geometry but are actually dismissive of such simple maths as non-utilitarian (though few such folks would even understand what I just wrote).

I have tried and tried, but my disability seems to prevent getting my head around that mindset.

So, when a salesman (of construction materials in the case that came to mind) clicks away on a calculator and comes up with something that simply cannot be, given the physical constraints of a job, the materials involved, etc., because he unthinkingly applied the wrong sets of criteria AND improperly applied a wrong formula, pencil and paper proofs might not be enough to demonstrate the flaws. . . and searches at that business for someone who DOES understand what the problems are might go all the way to the top of the food chain (as it did; the owner of the business understood the simple maths involved *sigh*). One out of four persons (two out of five, including me), 25% (or, if I were included in the population count there, 40%) could do the simple math.

That’s pretty typical. When I’m in the room, the number of folks getting simple math goes up. When I leave, the general IQ drops. No, seriously, and I’m not really all that smart or math-or-letters-literate*. Really. About half my extended family, for just one population sample, can better me there. And while the IQ scores I was once a bit ambivalent about (I turned down an invite to a local chapter of MENSA while in college–issued by a psych prof who had a legitimate access to my records–because I just didn’t, and still don’t, feel that smart”) say I should be bright enough to grasp why people choose to be dumb, I just still don’t see it.

Shouldn’t I be getting some sort of disability payment from the nanny state for this painful, disabling disability?

Continue reading “Can I Get Disability Payments for This?”

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Well, That Was Quick

Started a book–a novel. As usual, I read the acknowledgements. It’s a quirk of mine. The guy started off thanking “. . .the most influential English teacher in my life,” who “also happens to be my mother.” So far, so good. When he gets to his father, though, he demonstrates that the most influential English teacher in his life either wasn’t influential enough or was just not a very good teacher with,

“Growing up you thrilled and terrified my friends and I with bedtime stories. . . “

As any literate person knows, “my friends and” in that sentence doesn’t negate proper English usage. Absent, “my friends and” the sentence reads,

“Growing up you thrilled and terrified I with bedtime stories. . . “

Sounds like the statement of a subliterate doofus, right? Well, “my friends and” doesn’t change that.

That’s one strike. I’ll give him two more and a plot or character failure before the book is ashcanned. That’s fair, isn’t it?

And someone, please, report his mother for being an incompetent English teacher, mmmK?

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Culling the Herd

See other posts on my reading addiction. It’s been out of control for more than 50 years. Recently, I’ve been able to put some books down before finishing them with a hearty, “&@## no! Not worth my time!”

I’ve just recently (OK, 5 minutes ago) created another, “Nope. Not wasting my time” category under fiction reads. Picked up a real goat-gagger (something I usually enjoy: lots and lots and lots of pages of small text on very thin, high-quality–at least for this day and age–paper). It promised fair to hold my attention for a good evening’s read. . . until I got to the four pages of background timeline covering a couple hundred years of back story and another four pages of dramatis personae.

Oh, &@## no! It’s supposed to be a story! If I NEED a set of references to keep the story straight, the guy obviously can’t just tell the story and get out of the way. I’ve done that sort of thing–read books where authors just canNOT just tell the story and paint the worldscape/background into the narrative skillfully, and it’s just a PITA. If an author can’t just do his job well enough to do paint the worldscape/background into the narrative skillfully, I’m not going to waste my time on his work. He’s banned from my reading list. Period.

Moving on. . .

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Better Hope TEOTWAWKI Never Happens. . .

. . . because civilization would truly collapse. Why do I say this? Because not only are young adults–you know, the ones who would have to carry the torch, as it were–largely illiterate (or at least massively subliterate and/or a-literate), but most of them don’t even know how to hold a writing implement like a pen or pencil.

Seriously. Watch a 20-something try to write anything with pen and paper. Almost every one I see nowadays has the most awkward, cramp-inducing grip imaginable. This, of course, results in nearly unreadable penmanship in many cases and is sure to induce the dreaded “writer’s cramp” in short order. Without the ability to comprehend the millions of volumes of written “dead tree” text (no matter how laboriously they may be able to decode those funny lil squiggles on the page) and thumb-text in “pseudo-L33T” on their ubiquitous dumb phones, the transmission of information is bound to die.

In short order, what was once civilization will be back to the Dark Ages where people don’t even know what used to be possible. Though it’d still be an order of magnitude more advanced than the typical Muslim society today, it’d be back to life as “nasty, brutish and short” in a generation.

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Cool Heat

We don’t have a fireplace in our cozy lil home, and there’s not really any good place to add one, but. . .

We are considering finally replacing our old (still pretty nice) Magnavox bottle screen TV with a much larger LCD screen perhaps sometime this year. Yeh, no real hurry there, since TV isn’t really the center of our universe like it is for some (although I’ll admit watching Downton Abbey on my lil 15.6″ lappy screen positioned about 15″ from my eyes or even on my Kindle Fire (original) is pretty nice).

Still, a new, larger, wide aspect screen would let me build a faux mantle and surround for a collection of fireplace videos. . . 😉 Heck, there’s even a forced air heat duct on that wall (which I want routed UNDER the EC, away from both the piano and the HTPC, in future). Right now, it’s closed off (because its close to the piano’s best location), but routed out somewhere near where the fireplace videos would be running would be nice on a cold winter’s night. *heh* Sure, no real radiant heat (well, unless I could route the computer’s waste heat differently, too* ;-)), but still, it’d be fun: some snap, crackle, pop and other fireplace sounds and views to accompany quiet conversation, snuggling, or just side-by-side reading, as is often our habit.

Continue reading “Cool Heat”

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Good News?

With all the “must miss” new TV shows coming up, it’s heartening to hear them promo’ed with, “Premiering, FebYOUWARY XX” since there is no such month as “Feb-You-Wary”.

Well, either that or the dumbasses doing the promos are too illiterate to be able to simply read, “February.”