Category: Ranting

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I Blame the Hivemind

For at least a couple of decades now, anyone who has watched the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind so-called “news” shows has been programmed to eliminate the ability to discern clear distinctions as to many things, but the most egregious–and most consistent–destruction of reason has been the twisting of time. How many times have you heard *cough* “news” *cough* readers refer to events that occurred some time in the past as happening contemporaneously with the reader’s babbling?

Past tense for past events, idiots. But no, in *cough* “news” *cough* readerland present tense is fairly consistently used to refer to past events. And so an essential anchor of reason is eroded daily and common folk attempting to be writers begin to write such drivel as,

The sun rose rose over San Antonia [sic] de Bexar as a Blood [sic] red omen of what the day will [sic] bring to the men of the Alamo.

Good Sharkey, Colonel god! Past tense, properly used, mixed with future tense speaking of a (long) past event! Oh, why not. *sigh* If the past is present, then surely the past is future as well. Time means nothing.

OTOH, any literate person who’s not been lobotomized by watching *cough* “news” *cough* shows would have written,

“The sun rose rose over San Antonio de Bexar as a blood red omen of what the day would bring to the men of the Alamo.”

It’s still a bit overwrought for me, but at least the conditional is dealt with properly. It’s not just aspiring web “journalists” committing such gagamaggot faux pas with English, no. Such superbly dumbass writing abounds in traditionally published works, from newspapers to books from traditional publishing houses (which at one time employed literate proof readers and editors) and in the speech of *cough* “news” *cough* readers inhabiting the Hivemind, the political and entertainment classes and even Academia Nut Fruitcake Bakeries.

Is it any wonder these dumbasses who consider themselves an elite that’s fit to rule the hoi polloi are making a mess of everything they touch? They cannot consistently deal with speaking clearly and rationally on simple subjects.

And the sheeple eat it all up with a spork (because they cannot be trusted with a real fork).

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Suspension of Belief

Good fiction–written or portrayed on film or stage–requires suspension of disbelief, but that, in turn, requires an at least minimal amount of competence from writers, editors, directors and actors in order that an intelligent and reasonably literate audience not be offended into rejection of the fiction the putative artists are attempting to portray.

It’s usually the little things. In dramatic performances, props and settings don’t have to depict things in meticulous detail in order to be believable within a story’s framework, but such things should at least evoke a credible representation of places and things that advance a story. Items evoking a late 1950s setting should not dominate a late 1960s plot line, for example, and in film, closeups of patently fake stage blood or grossly incongruous weather and lighting, etc., are distractions that any director with half a brain ought to avoid.

So, too, are problems with actors portraying behaviors that their characters engage in daily, routinely–behaviors, “business” in acting terms, that the characters are supposedly competent to perform–and botching the action, sometimes almost too clumsily for words. *sigh* And actors portraying certain professional acts incompetently are complete turn-offs for anyone with even minimal knowledge of competent performance of those actions. My “favorite” is idiots making a hash of portraying music conductors. In fact, in a lifetime of viewing dramatic fiction, I have seen actors portraying the conducting of musical performances do a credible job just twice. The rest of the time the portrayals range from simply stupid and incompetent to offensive.

In written fiction, one of the surest signs of a writer whose characters are little more than babbling descriptions by a blind man of faded shadows of statues based on paintings made from blurred photos of reflections in a carnival mirror is when the writer tries to create a character by listing the things that character owns–usually invoking some currently trendy brands of whatever objects the writer associates with the sort of person the writer thinks he’s trying to evoke. Usually wrongly.

Of course these kinds of things are common in most fiction nowadays, so finding anything contemporary that at least minimizes these sorts of distractions is a Good Thing.

But at least I’m not dealing here with the even more poorly-depicted fiction in newspapers and network news. That’s even worse.

A brief addendum. I’ve mentioned the Brit mystery show I’ve been watching. I’m currently in season seven (of fifteen), and although I still enjoy the incidental instrumental music a great deal and the scenery and sets just as much, one thing has become increasingly grating: the murders. Almost every one of the persons murdered in the stories has been a complete idiot, characters intent on lending Darwin a hand in weeding the gene pool, as it were (though an unfortunate number are portrayed as having reproduced before their stupidity eliminates them).

I’ll let one typical “victim” stand in as a proxy for almost all the rest. After bludgeoning one cooperative soul to death with a handy cudgel, the murderer continues to stand over the body of his complicit victim. As he’s standing there, another useful idiot approaches and says, “What have you done?!?” and very helpfully kneels over the body as if to say, “Me! Me! Kill me next, please!”

Of course, the murderer obliges.

*sigh*

How many idiotic characters will the writers dispose of before the show ends? The answer: both too many and not enough… No wonder the British Empire is no more. 😉 But… given that the show is still so much better than the fare that attracts viewers in droves on American TV, perhaps that indicates something about an inevitable decline of American society and even–maybe–America’s place on the world’s stage, as well.

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Impending Doom

Every day, I see evidence that those in our society who make their living by the written word are increasingly influencing the remaining few who bother to read at all with illiterate pronouncements, accelerating the slide into nonsense. Case in point (just one of many over the last few days alone):

“Clearly, the tablet and mobile worlds have begun to impact the desktop OS in a major way. This begs the question: Can the desktop survive?”

Methinks the writer has no idea what a petitio principii fallacy is.

Beg the question=”take for granted without basis or justification”

I just hate it when “mass man” semi-literacy (or should I say “cultural illiteracy”?–w/a tip o’ the tam to E.D. Hirsch, Jr.) debases writing this way. But that’s what happens when supposedly literate people have been trained–certainly not educated–via less than literate organs such as pubschools, contemporary “higher ed” and the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind. Ah, well, I suppose it’s just one more evidence of society’s slide into a Dark Age, when more and more people don’t even know much about what they don’t know… or care. And it is, of course, this increasingly self-enstupiated, self-deluded, autolobotomized group that seems to be guiding the course of our society. But then of course,

“In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history are in the majority and dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance.”

Continue reading “Impending Doom”

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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

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I Don’t Do Book Reviews, But I Do Rant

Really. Well, I do discuss some books with my Wonder Woman and sometimes other family members from time to time, but actually reviewing the books I read would cut too much into reading time to do it. 😉 And, frankly, the voices in my head have spent so much time over the last seven years escaping from my control and putting words down on this blog that I sometimes begrudge the time they’ve stolen from my reading.

But, just read another book Dead Wood by Dani Amore, on the Fire (really nice reading experience, BTW), and one thing really hit me. From my own limited experience with people in the “recording industry” in combination with a better understanding of how music (no, the real stuff) is made and just music knowledge in general, the portrayal of the dirty underbelly of the “music industry” is spot on.

And it’s not pretty. In fact, it’s just as ugly as the crap it churns out and feeds to the ever lower, most common denominator of society, dragging sense and sensibilities ever lower in a never-ending spiral into the sewer of faux “art”.

In case you’d missed it before, I have about two ounces of respect and appreciation (combined) for recording “artists” nowdays, and I reserve that respect and admiration for the very (very, VERY) few who deserve it. Clue: you’ll not find ’em on anyone’s Top 40 list. In fact, most of the increasingly brain dead public wouldn’t even recognize what real musicians produce as music, or if they did would in any way, shape, fashion or form be able to appreciate it, let alone grasp the least bit of it, since it would take a soul not completely seared by lapping up the toxic sewage common in the offerings of the contemporary “music” industry.

rant /off

BTW, How sweet it is to have all my fav recordings of all my fav artists and their performances available to stream to the Kindle Fire while WiFi-ed to any network. Combined with either some very nice ear buds or (the other really excessively nice Xmas present) the Grado headphones, it’s only about three orders of magnitude less enjoyable to listen to them than doing so live. That’s a plus, really. Sweet, sweet, sweet. *ahhh*

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Sometimes, I Just Have to Say, “No”

A while back, I decided to give a Windows “news and tips” site a whirl and submitted a secondary email address in order to receive notices of site updates. Since then, it’s yielded a few interesting tidbits, but sometimes, “a few interesting tidbits” just doesn’t cut it.

Recently, a portion of a topic line stood out, as at least 2/3 of the topic lines received in updates from the site have. Again, not in a positive light. The portion–this time–that made me wince: “The reason behind its name revealed !”

WTF is with the (usual and customary, from this source) space between the last word and the punctuation? It’s stupid. And, as I said, usual from this source. But that’s just the normal quality of punctuation usage from this source. What about word usage and grammar?

In the same email update: “Not why it a browser.”

?!? Yes, that’s the entire sentence fragment posing as a sentence. Where’s the verb?

And then, “…to make it running as fast and stable as new.” No, dumbasses, “to make it RUN as fast and stable as new” would at least be marginally acceptable, although “fast and stable” in this context is problematic.

“Since the last couple of days I’m seeing… ” Obviously English is a second language for the writer. Either that or the writer is a recent American college graduate.

I’ve only scratched the surface of the ear-grinding English constructions in just this one email. I can’t take it anymore. Unsubscribing, with prejudice. *heh*

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Silly Seasoning

I get email offers from Mother Earth News all the time. It’s all because I purchased a set of 40 years of MEN on CDs some time ago (now, that was a good buy: buried in those CDs, along with all the hyperventilating about Evul Capitalizm Destroying the Wurld is also a wealth of very useful how-to stuff… and the hyperventilating is amusing) Yeh, yeh, I know I can unsubscribe, but I find the blatant commercializing of greenie values funny.

Case in point: the most recent mailout featuring–I kid you not–

Exclusive Offer: Eco-Friendly Products for Your Natural Kitchen

So much to mock, so little desire to spend the effort…

Linked in the email is a buncha overpriced crap you can get better versions of at Walmart, “Tarjhay” or Amazon.com, if you really wanted to. But I mean, who really wants reusable grocery bags? Just another thing to throw in the wash all the time. Plastic’s great. Plenty of uses 1 2 3, and anyone who really wants to pour money down a rat hole (instead of pounding sand in it like any sensible person) in today’s economy rather than have a useful resource they’re already paying for is, IMO, an idiot.

Oh, and there’s plenty of oil and more than enough inexpensive energy available with current known reserves and technologies to last mankind into as rich a future as we might want. All that’s required to make use of these things is to stop listening to the greenies, cut them OUT of the political system, let them rot on the vine. Real conservationists (what people who care about clean water, clean air, “clean” soil, renewable resources, and the like were called before the advent of the ‘environmental” religion) USE what is available as widely as they can, not simply crush anyone who wants to use it at all or play the “I’m morally superior because I wear sandals made out of roots and bark by third world slaves,” game.

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Phractured Frases

Yes, I meant to write that. And I know that the words are “Fractured Phrases”. So, why? Simple. Most people I see and hear botching common words and phrases do so unwittingly. And therein lies a stealth danger to society, especially a society built, as ours once was, on shared cultural memes that cut across multiple imported ethnic and cultural traditions, enabling the kinds of cross-cultural communications that created the Melting Pot Society.

The single largest factors in the destruction of a healthy common culture here in the US are the growth of illiteracy* in the US and the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind. The illiterate among us aren’t limited to those who cannot read at all but include those who simply do not read and those who, when they do read, read only crap and scarcely understand even that. Having not read much at all, they are easy prey for the lies about current events, history and civics that are the toxic stew served up daily by the Hivemind in entertainment (“news” and other crap on TV as well as movies and manufactured “music”) that is designed to misinform and twist values away from those which made America, at one time, a great nation.

But what’s this gripe I have against fractured phrases and words? Simple, really. I see an apparently growing trend toward the subliterate and illiterate who simply do not know the meanings of common words (look for consistent uses of “then” for “than” or “affect” for “effect” in a person’s writing, for a couple of common examples: subliterate tending toward illiterate) or are so lacking in grounding in any broader culture than the simplistic, twisted culture presented by the Hivemind that they botch even simple child’s games.

Really? Yes. I ran across a long, massively stupid, “discussion” on a social media site recently where someone asked why paper beats rock, rock beats scissors and scissors beats paper. About one in four answers made any sense at all. No, seriously. A failure of both basic literacy and any sense of a culture beyond the Hivemind. (BTW, rock-paper-scissors has been around for thousands of years. Apparently, it takes a modern American Hivemind-dominated culture to denude it of any coherence.)

Minor examples of a major problem. “Major problem” because these minor examples are much, much less than the tip of the iceberg.

Continue reading “Phractured Frases”

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Avoid This Printer

I don’t usually dump all over a piece of hardware, but I’ll make an exception in the case of the HP Deskjet F4580 AIO. I bought the thing because I read the wrong reviews, apparently. Oh, boy did I! *sigh* Nice, thought I: a wireless-enabled printer by HP, a company whose printers I’d always had good experiences with in the past. Cool. That way, I wouldn’t have to leave a computer on and connected to the network with printer sharing enabled in order for users on the network to print to it.

Besides, it looked like it’d save desk space, given that I’d be able to scan documents as well. (Sure, we have a couple of other scanners, but again, to not have to have it connected to a computer… and the space issue.)

I should just have bought a device to connect our 13-year-old, failing, HP workhorse printer to the network. I’d have gotten better service. Sure, the printer was failing, but still…

Oh, when it prints, it prints very nicely. When it scans, it does that nicely too. But. Keeping it connected is a PITA. Sometimes, the only thing that I’ve been able to do to get it to connect is to completely uninstall the thing (and the humongous software package that should NOT be required to install the printer) and then reinstall it. Again and again and again.

Router shows it’s connected? Nope. The printer isn’t. Print a document and the print queue shows it’s printing? Nope. Not until the thing’s turned off and then turned on again. A whole mess of things like that. HP’s diagnostic utilities and installation wizard and cleanup utility? All junk. Utter, completely useless crap.

Oh, and did I mention that we’d scarcely printed 10 pages of text (all black ink) before the damned thing (yes, I think it was designed and manufactured by demons in hell) was reporting both cartridges nearly empty?

I was already POed at HP for some of its crappy notebooks/netbooks it’s shoved out the door recently, but this thing takes the cake. The other day, it performed a partial print of a document four times before it printed the whole thing. And I’d cleared the print queue each time it tried and failed to print the thing and did not resubmit the document at all.

What a PITA.

Oh, and the scanning? Yeh, still pretty much need to have the nearest computer on, since one has to place the document to be scanned and it’s far easier to control the scanning from a nearby computer (wirelessly, there’s pretty much only one way: via the web interface; that’s not the way it’s supposed to be, but invoking the scanning facility via one’s graphics software or even the HP imaging software has about a 50/50 chance of working at best). Of course, since most printing/scanning away from my desk is from notebooks, bringing one in and doing the scanning (via the web interface) would let me leave the always nearby compy off, I guess…

All in all, aside from the demonically-engineered and manufactured piece of crap dropping its wireless connection willy-nilly all the freakin’ time, the sheer clunkiness of the thing is irritating.

Avoid it.

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It’s Probably Just Me…

…But, has anyone else noticed a growth of “life incompetence” in the population in general here in these (Dys*)United States? OK, time to back up and expand on my understanding of “competence”. I’ll let Robert Heinlein’s words stand in place of my very likely less competent *heh* attempt to do so:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Well, I’ve not butchered a hog (though I’ve butchered other animals), conned a ship or died gallantly, yet, but the rest of the list isn’t really all that hard, and I’d want to add a few things to it, were I to be its author. But Heinlein gives the flavor of my attitude toward “life competence” with the idea behind the list, ending with, “Specialization is for insects.”

A couple of simple examples should suffice.

The Sears Auto Hammer. Now, confession time: I own one of these. I’ve never used it, but I bought it to loan to some folks who just could not get the basic idea of using a hammer. Nothing against them; they’d not had anyone teach them how when they were tadpoles, nor had they had any life experience swinging a hammer, and they had a time-constraint they were working with that pretty much disallowed time to practice with a hammer to get their skills up to snuff (and so avoid ruining a bunch of trim on their house). So, a “Hammer for Dummies” approach was my assessment of the quickest, easiest solution for the situation, used by some really bright folks who are anything BUT “dummies” but were simply cursed with a decidedly narrowed skill set.

But the very fact that there is such a thing as an “auto hammer” speaks to a widespread incompetence with one of the most basic of hand tools. Anyone should be able to master the use of a weighted object attached to the end of a stick. And darned near everyone (save for the idle rich who can afford to pay folks to swing such weighted sticks for them) ought to at least master such things before moving on to power tools. (The idle rich probably should move right on to power tools… complete with not reading the directions or taking proper safety precautions. They can afford the multiple surgeries that would likely result.)

(BTW, I believe those folks have since mostly repaired their skill set, so the $100 auto hammer sits unused in one of my tool boxes, now. Anyone want? It’s going cheap. ;-))

And then there’s “righty-tighty/lefty-loosey”. (*huh*?!?)

Yeh, it’s almost universally standardized that turning whole classes of things to the right (clockwise) tightens and turning those same classes of things left (counter or anti-clockwise) loosens them. Light bulbs, screws and nuts, almost all kinds of threaded devices (save for threaded comments *heh*) with very, very few exceptions follow this rule.

And yet… *sigh* About every third loaf of bread I buy has the twist tie tightened on backwards. Once in a while I am called on by some cultural illiterate to help open a bottle or jar, because the cultural illiterate is tightening the lid by twisting the wrong way.

This doesn’t take literacy, folks, just basic functional competence.

The list can go on and on: folks who can’t solve simple problems because they have no concept of relationships between various weights and measures, people who are NOT tone deaf who nevertheless think they are reproducing pitches in their abominable attempts to “sing,” people who write letters to editors proving they didn’t understand the editorial they read and cannot write coherent sentences in English, etc., etc.

The new normal seems to be subliterate, incompetent, highly specialized morons.

BTW, apropos of nothing in particular *heh*, my collection of hammers (which includes four slightly different framing hammers–two of them “heirlooms”–a 2# machinist’s hammer, a small selection of ball peens, etc.) doesn’t see as much use as in days of yore, but a small range of differently purposed hammers should be among the first things acquired and mastered by anyone who owns a home. Screw that new big screen: get some hand tools and learn how to use them well! This is especially important nowadays as our political masters seem intent on creating an inflation/depression situation where fewer resources will be available to the average citizen and what resources there are will be much more expensive. Knowing how to use basic hand tools to effect home repairs could well be one of the things that lets you keep the wolf from the door in these growing-ever-darker days…

*(Dys)United States: bad, abnormal, ill.