Category: *heh*

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Not Just Sloppy Writing

The two people credited in a byline for an article that included the following should be whipped with a dangling participle, along with any editor who passed on their work:

“…the recently re-ignited 40-year-old cold case that has haunted the FBI for years.”

?!? OK, I don’t get paid to write anything, but even I know that is unnecessarily awkward. How about, “…the recently re-ignited cold case that has haunted the FBI for 40 years” instead? It’s even easier to write than the other, too. Clarity, simplicity, brevity: watchwords for reporters to observe carefully, IMO.

Of course, now that I think of it, where would the “journalists” of today find such writing to emulate? (And I’ll admit they’d not find it here, but then I don’t take anyone’s money for this gig.)

Just another small piece of the “literacy means more than just being able to painfully puzzle out those weird chicken scratches on paper” puzzle, along with idiot Hiveminders who don’t know such things as the difference between “affect” and “effect” or “than” and “then” (and don’t pretend you haven’t seen such abortions of literacy in print or heard them from Podpeople Pie Holes).

Such people don’t even qualify as subliterates in my book. That would be giving them too much credit.

OK, OK, these sorts of things have been around forever, I suppose. I just notice them more and more often nowadays. But… re-reading (and taking very little time to do so *heh*) a book from the so-called “Golden Age of Science Fiction” authored by one of its pillars, I ran across,

“…according to their desserts.”

Where the author meant, “according to their deserts.”

Yes, the first instance is incorrect and the second is correct. Check me, if you wish. I’ll wait. 🙂

OK, back now?

Now, that incorrect word usage may have been a slip of the typewriter 61 years ago, though since I’m conversant with this author’s work in print, and he was more literate than 99% of fair-to-middlin’-to-pretty darned good contemporary authors, even given the space opera-ish tone of his work, I suspect an error in transcription crept in along the way to the eBook edition.

And naturally, it went flying right past any proofreader or editor with nary a pause.

Chaps my gizzard, it does… *heh*

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A Kid Again

In 1959, we were a single income family, even though both of my parents were college graduates. My dad was making decent money working in a field not known for particularly good incomes. Still with five children, the budget was sometimes a tad tight. So, when my folks decided to buy a World Book Encyclopedia with all the trimmings, including ten years of “yearbooks” and a large (no, REALLY large, “library-sized”) two-volume dictionary set, our lil family library grew by almost 25% overnight, and I found my backup reading material for the next few years.

Yes, there was always at least one volume of the set under my bed, close enough for a night time “sneak read”. Sometimes, it was just one of the two dictionary volumes (yes, for reading), but most often it was just a volume chosen according to some topic that had caught my fancy, then kept for further reading as one article led to another and another and…

And that’s how I get to be a kid again. For the last 18 years the web has been my go-to reading material for times when I’ve exhausted my stash of new books. It’s also been my substitute for an encyclopedia, since I never run out of things to learn. And thanks to my *cough* encyclopedic reading habits over the years, I have a skill set and basic knowledge base that allows me to filter out most crap.

And the resources–good quality resources–are effectively limitless, now, and not confined to one book case. Heck, I find myself re-reading classics online that are in a book case that’s literally within the reach of my right hand as I type these words.

And on top of being a library with more than enough resources to keep me in learning material for life, the web’s a source of amusement (dumbasses a-plenty to poke fun at! Yipee! *heh*), entertainment (I have a full movie list at Crackle, for example), contemporary information (I’ll not say it’s “news”) and interpersonal interactions.

But most of all, it’s a resource just jam packed with information that’s either new to me or in a new format that makes sense in a different way or old information that’s fun to re-read, review and cogitate over.

Sweet. Kid. In a candy store. Unlimited candy budget.

*sigh* I’ve entered my second childhood.

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Am I a Cynic?

Just saw the opening to a cop show. If this were real life, I could see some sense in wiping out the gene pool that comprised the “sympathetic” characters.

Car stops by kid walking home from school. She gets in the car with a total stranger. (Too stupid to live.) Behind the car, her brother rides up on a bicycle. Hears his sister scream, sees her in the car. What does he do? He gets off his bicycle and starts running after the car! What?!? He was On! A! Bicycle! (Too stupid to live.)

The writers and director should be terminated. They’ve obviously already lobotomized themselves.

Everybody (but me, the UNintended audience) is frantic! Agitated music and all that! The search is on!

And I’m bored already. I can hardly wait for good news that the fictional lil girl will not be passing on her genetic material to another generation of fictional characters. Please let it be so! (But I’m not holding my breath… or watching the rest of this drivel.)

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Reason #1,365,92 Why I Don’t Trust Climate Scare-ists’ Models

Just think about it for a few seconds. The comparative size, accuracy and reliability of the data sets used by Climate Scare-sim Cultists is minuscule, wildly inaccurate and unreliable (using their data setsd, their models have yet to be able to “post-dict” ANY climate and have proven wildly off in predictions to date, even with data cheating and outright lies to make their case) compared to your garden variety weather forecasters’ data sets. And yet, who really has found weather forecasters’ predictions to be all that close to what comes to pass?

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Yeh, It Still Kinda Freaks Me…

And something in the update that chaps my gizzard

I think I’ve commented about this before (but am too lazy to check *heh*). I’ve not removed the notice, because it’s so… weird, but here it is: on my lil notebook, Windows Update offers an update to the Norwegian language pack.

How did M$ know I have an interest in Norwegian? This is real paranoia time, folks. How. Did. M$. KNOW?!?

Later in the day, I caught the news about the events in Norway. Now that’s really creepy.

BTW, it really chaps my gizzard to have news outlets identify the shooter that’s been arrested in the Utoya Island shootings as a “fundamentalist Christian” instead of, more properly if “Christian” is cited at all, as an unchristian heretic (a description which would reflect more accurately on the views reports say he espouses).

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Important Distinctions

How I learned the difference between “ufda” and “feeda”… *heh*

Summer of 1978, coming out of a theater in MN (was a showing of Grease) into bright light. Two guys ahead of us. One pointed to some gum on the ground in warning with an “Ufda!” The other guy stepped in it anyway, lifted his foot and looked at it, then exclaimed, “Feeda!”

So (whatever “it” is *cough*), it’s “ufda” if you see it and “feeda” if you step in it.

Every time I see The Zero, I think, “Feeda!”

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Just One More Example

from the litter of our post-literate society:

“suaree”

While I admire creativity and good story telling, and I appreciate folks who put themselves and their work on the line, online, it does bother me a bit when I see repeated examples of this sort of evidence of a lack of literacy in someone who’s offering up an otherwise rollicking read. It’s not a typical misspelled word, and it’s certainly not a typo. No, it’s a word the author has heard but is not well read enough to ever have seen in print before (or at least not in something written by someone else who’s literate enough to know the word is “soiree“).

Oh, one example of such a thing is certainly not enough to bother me, or at least not enough to keep me from reading an otherwise well-told tale, and, frankly, in an unedited rough draft I’m more than willing to accept more than a few such problematic and weird spellings and even word usage errors (although instances of such things as the repeated use of “then” for “than” really grate [“greatly” *heh*] on my nerves *sigh*) in otherwise good yarns. Still, I wonder how such a person managed to get through high school or even eighth grade English… until I reconsider the state of pubschool education in these (dys)United States.

Oh, well. It takes a bit more work, but copy-pasting forum-published “fun-fic” into a file I can edit for grammar, usage and spelling corrections isn’t all that difficult. Really. *heh*

OTOH, when I read such things in a book that’s actually been through the eyes of proof readers and an editor and then made it to print, I do get a tad steamed.

In case you’d missed it, I do NOT accept “can laboriously decipher and sound out weird heiroglyphs” as “literacy” even though that seems to be the current “edumacational” definition…

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I’m Kind of Wondering…

…if it’s about time to have Son&Heir certified as a complete loony. He just came into the room grinning, bearing his most recent purchases: a pound bag of habanero powder and a full KILO bagful of Bhut Jolokia (“ghost pepper”) powder.

Sometimes I wonder about him…

*heh*

I’ll say this for him. He seems to have a stainless steel stomach. But the trip down there…

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Cheap Date

Just imagine – the Publishers Clearing House Prize Patrol rings a doorbell. Ding-a-ling. Someone opens the door and sees: roses, balloons, champagne, smiling faces, a video camera, and a huge Big Check that says they’ve won $5,000 A Week for Life!

*heart attack* *drops dead*

Cheap date*.

*analysis by my Wonder Woman. 😉