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).

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!”

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…

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…

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. 😉

Ponderables

If you were to have a Siamese twin, would you need an interpreter to communicate with him?

If you met your Doppelgänger would you need to speak German?

If you met an honest politician, would you… scratch that one.

Found an Interesting eBook

…but I’ve lost the link to it. Oh, there is is (Thanks, Sweetheart):

How to Find Lost Objects

Of course, it’s of only academic interest to me, as I have a Finder of Lost Objects “on staff”. Married her. It’s the Uterus Qualification. The one with the uterus is The Finder. You know the drill, “Honey, where did I put Xxxx?”

*heh*

Here’s a Suggestion for Weiner’s “Rehab”

“News” of the “who cares what his latest ploy is” variety:

Weiner seeking treatment amid growing pressure to resign

While the New York congressman seeks treatment at an undisclosed location, he will take a “short leave of absence” from Congress, Risa Heller said in a statement.

A Democratic source, familiar with conversations among Weiner and Democratic leadership about his fate, did not know what specific type of treatment Weiner would undergo.

What “type of treatment”? Frankly, I’m thinking his treatment should follow a line from an old Cheech and Chong bit, “Bailiff! Whack his pee-pee!” *heh*

Let’s Go “Precautionary Principle” All Over Some Greenie A**

Yeh. Greenies invoke their sacred “precautionary principle” to kill economies, kill people (think Rachel Carson’s utterly dishonest scam to kill people via malaria, et al by getting DDT banned)–as long as they’re little brown people in far away places–and shut down energy production, attempting to send mankind back to the stone age. F’n idiots. F’n malicious, toxic, evil idiots.

So, let’s exercise some “precautionary principle” all over some greenie a**:

Dead bodies demand organic food moratorium

Right now, someone nearby is buying organic bean sprouts. It may be the last thing he ever does. Last week’s E. coli outbreak in Germany – potentially traced to an organic farm – was more deadly than the largest nuclear disaster of the last quarter-century.

Indeed, in the past two years, two public safety stories have dominated global news headlines – an explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and a nuclear power plant meltdown in Japan. Yet in the recent German organic-food-disease outbreak, nearly twice as many people already have died as in the two other industrial disasters combined.

And that’s why I eat only food treated by poisons and irradiation to kill bugs and bacteria. It’s safer and thus better for me.

“Organic”* farming is now proven to be more dangerous than a nuclear disaster caused by the most powerful earthquake in recorded history followed by a massive tsunami… Therefore, following the “precautionary principle” so beloved to greenie weenies, “organic”* farming should be banned.


*”Organic” used as a neologism (ca. 1940s?) to denote foods grown without the use of “artificial” fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides is an especially stupid term. “Organic” compounds are hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are organic. Take any hydrocarbon molecular chain: it’s organic. Period. Most man-made pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers are… organic, except in the illiterate use of the word promoted by J.I. Rodale and his groupies. BTW, Rodale was born a few years later than my grandparents, all of whom ate normally-produced food, not Rodale’s “organic” crap, all their lives… and passed away, after long, productive and mostly healthy lives, a decade or more later than the Prevention “organic” health guru Rodale.

*feh*

I’m darned near positive it was all the chemicals in their food that prolonged their lives. Heck, their bodies probably didn’t even need embalming. 🙂