Superglue. Seriously. It’s a decent wound closure device for small wounds, but learn how and when to use it. I have found that it actually tends to work better than most “liquid skin” products, because it tends to form a much stronger bond than most such products.
Sometimes. . .
Sometimes, I like to just groan, loudly. It feels good. My Wonder Woman does not usually appreciate this, but when I groaned a bit ago, she joined in–VERY LOUDLY.
“Thank you for validating me, sweetheart.”
That comment was not validated.
“Preppers” Ain’t Crazy, Well, at Least Not Most of ‘Em
I see a common misconception pretty often (Well, it’s common, so I would. *heh*) It goes something like this:
“Preppers are individuals who believe that, in the near future, life as they know it will be challenged or changed due to a major event.”
No, cupcake. “Preppers” are people who think that being prepared to deal with a wide range of emergencies should they occur is just the intelligent thing to do. Heck, preparing in advance to be able to deal effectively with a wide range of possible natural or man-made disasters IF any of them should occur, is certainly better than playing grasshopper and then mooching off others should, say, an extended power outage from a winter storm or a major flood occur.
While I’m sure there are a few tinfoil hat wearers who meet the pejorative criteria stated in the misconception, but I believe them to be the exception, not the rule. Yeh, I know a few whose tinfoil hats seemed to cause brainwave malfunctions leading them to not just go “off-grid” but move to third world countries to escape “the coming collapse of civilization,” but I can count those few on one hand and have fingers left over. 😉
Addicted to Books
“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a [library] for?” (with semi-sincere apology to Robert browning)
I have been “buying” anywhere between seven and 30-something books a week for years (larger numbers once ebooks became necessary when I ran out of space no matter how diligently I purged my personal library). I only read about seven books a week (down from the 20-something I used to read when I was a lad), but I do find I discard more ebooks after partial reading than I have ever discarded hardcopy. Writing and editing standards have slipped terribly.
Still, having all my hardcopy classic collection backed up in multiple formats, media, and locations (and adding to it) is a Good Thing, IMO. Sadly, my non-fiction Kindle is out of storage space, now.
Made Me Laugh. Stop It.
“‘I’ll Clean Trump’s Clock’ – Author Brad Thor Announces He Will Challenge Trump in 2020”
Urm, not if he politics as poorly as he writes. (His writing’s about on a par with Dan #gagamaggot Brown, IMO. OK, maybe a little better. Currently, there is no worse “bestselling” writer than Dan Brown. I found Thor’s stuff merely pedestrian and boringly predictable. Tastes vary, though.)
Thor’s stuff is good enough for made-for-Lifetime “C” movies, though. That’s better than Dan Brown’s stuff which is just stupid.
On second thought. . . There were plenty of stupid people around to vote for both The Trumpery and The Queenie Cacklepants Cylon in 2016, and it takes a certain kind of stupidity to find Thor’s books at all readable, so. . .
*sigh*
Someone, please save us from the ambitions of mediocre writers and conmen and corrupt pols. #gagamaggot
Still Waiting for a Better Face on the $20 Bill
This would still be several orders of magnitude better than having a thieving, plundering mass murderer like Jack(ass)son on a twenty. (Democrats like Jackson were part of the reason the Founders were wary of democracy.)
Yeh, Sorta, but Not
Are “learning styles” theories all they are cracked up to be? No. But are they myths? Absolutely not. Despite the fact that folks almost certainly do not have ONE “style” of learning that is hardwired into them, folks do seem to have preferred modes of learning, often different for different endeavors. The most basic classes of “learning styles” (actually, in this case, “modalities”) most often pout forth are kinesthetic, auditory, and visual, with many different variations and combinations and terminologies offered as theoretical possibilities using the basic “modalities”.
A preference or preferences, however, don’t mandate that a person cannot effectively learn in different ways. This is where the writer of the article and I part ways. Labeling learning styles a “myth” isjust silly. She even hints at the fact of the non-mythical nature of learning styles with the elliptical “admission against interest,”
“. . .a lot of evidence suggests that people aren’t really one certain kind of learner or another. . . ”
(implying, of course, that there are different ways of learning, just that, as anyone who’s ever taught OR LEARNED anything knows, different tasks may call for different ways of learning something).
Some things I learn best and most quickly by simply reading (and actually studying) text. Others, I learn best by simply observing elements closely and then getting hands on. Others seem to almost require visual, auditory, and kinesthetic modalities together to master (yeh, I can hear a piece of music and reproduce it, either in manuscript or via an instrument of my choice, but seeing a piece of sheet music, hearing it “in my head” in preview, then performing it–thus rehearsing–what I previously heard “in my head”), cementing them for me. *shrugs* Other things don’t seem to require all that much involvement for me.
But actual learning that lasts always takes one thing: doing what I have “learned,” putting it into practice, using it, reifying it, if you will.
I think that may be universal.
Is Literacy Moribund in These [Dis]United States?
I see it all the time, but again today some “misunderedumacated” subliterate stuck on the lefthand side of the Dunning-Kruger Curve pontificated on a subject he was–of course–completely unqualified (because of his ignorance) to comment on, and while doing so misused “wreckless,” because (again, of course) he did not know the differences between “reckless” and “wreckless.” Such subliterate (or really, by any reasonable standard, illiterate) people almost always misuse all or some of the following words (and more, many, many more):
rein/reign
affect/effect
than/then
here/hear
buy/by
accept/except
weather/whether
there/their/they’re
to/too/two
you’re/your
bear/bare
one/won
brake/break
complement/compliment
aloud/allowed
lie/lay
it’s/its
capital/capitol
principle/principal
stationary/stationery
sight/site/cite
since/sense
our/hour
red/read
reed/read
. . . and many, many (MANY) more such. *sigh*
Now, someone might plead, “Oh, but that’s just a problem in vocabulary.” No. If someone does not know the meanings of the words they read or write, then they are really no better off than someone who cannot decode those funny lil squiggles to obtain the words they indicate. Worse off, in fact, because they may well erroneously think they are literate (because by the standards of “misunderedumacationism” they have been lied to, having been told they are–why! they have a piece or pieces of paper to prove it! #gagamaggot).
Fluency =/= literacy. A person may have a wide verbal vocabulary of words they understand and still be illiterate.
How to amend this? Reading a lot of well-written text authored by literate people can eradicate this sort of illiteracy. It’s either that or do what I did as a lad (along with reading a LOT of well-written text): read dictionaries–and not just one! And not just any dictionary, either. I have a shelf full of dictionaries, and I have found the ones published before the 1970s to be the more literate of the selections I have. *shrugs* Make of that what you will. Oh, and not just in English (for English readers, which I assume are the only readers of this blog). Having dictionaries on other language, including English-German, English-French, etc., can be useful in understanding WHY such homonyms as “reckless/wreckless” are very, very different words.
But still, reading well-written text from literate writers (while having a good dictionary by one’s side 😉 ) is the single best way to become literate, once one has mastered the relatively simple task of decoding those funny lil squiggles that stand in for phonemes in written text.
Sidebar: only peripherally related to literate vocabulary. Saw a website the other day by someone who cited their creds as “EDd”. Sorry, cupcake. If you have a doctorate in education, you ought to know that is denoted by EdD or Ed.D. But maybe the cred referred to is a doctorate in “[misunder]edumacationism.”
P.S. Yes, I am well aware that the dumbed down definition of “literacy” is well accepted. Of course it is. “Edumacationists” can’t defend their failure to promote real literacy, so the only definition such will accept is “can decode those funny lil squiggles, whether they can really understand the content or not.”
#gagamaggot
Uncrunching Time
I have a bit more time in my day now that I have pared my internet comic reading down to ten, urm, eleven, OK, twelve regular reads…