…to my Wonder Woman on Fathers Day. Couldn’t have done it without her.
One Thing to Like About Kindle for PC
while I generally don’t much care for the formatting, pagination, text sizing options, etc., in the Kindle for PC app, I do like that fact that I can go from one device to another and simply resume reading where I left off on the previous device. I understand it works pretty much that way between the Kindle and other devices as well.
That’s a Good Thing since I tend to have several books “in process” at once, and with eBooks I generally read on more than one PC–my preferred reading device for eBooks, largely because of screen size, greater flexibility in the way the screen displays text, and old eyes.
Having the app keep a thumb in the text, as it were, and open where I last was is nice.
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.
Lesson in Particle Physics
tachyon: what you get when rednecks play with particle physics.
In Context
The Zero did say if his administration (well, himself, in his own words) couldn’t turn “this thing” (referring to the economy) around in 3 years then he’d be a one-term president. It’s been about 2.4 years, now…
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
But then, American sheeple are almost too stupid for words, and the Dhimmicraps have grand masters at vote fraud, so maybe he really doesn’t have to worry about being turned out of office by the voters.
Do we really have to wait until his term ends? Couldn’t the House just impeach his ass? I mean, take their pick of his illegal actions and just go to town on him?
Found an Interesting eBook
…but I’ve lost the link to it. Oh, there is is (Thanks, Sweetheart):
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*
Little Things–Good Music
One of the weaknesses of “indie” music is sometimes a lack of good editing or perhaps a too narrow creative view. Of course, that can also be a strength if the artist can look at their own work both with a passion that allows for some creative fire and a dispassion that can allow serious criticism. As an example I’d like to offer perhaps my fav from Heather Alexander, March of Cambreath. It has really stirring lyrics, a great driving beat and… a weak melody and a wee weakness in prosody, which Alexander almost overcomes with a very, very strong performance:
[audio:March_of_Cambreadth.mp3]By the last verse, she very nearly repairs the prosody problem by anticipating the beat with “How” in “How many of them can we make die,” but never quite makes it into a stronger line by placing the “how” directly on a pickup to “many”. And the melody itself is still very nearly boring, and would be absolutely boring without her strong performance of it (which is as I asserted above, very, very strong).
Still, as I said, it’s my fav of her work, and it is very good, even though I don’t view it as among her best musically. And it has a worthy place in the martial repertoire of modern soldier/warriors, IMO, especially since the boring melody probably wouldn’t get in the way at all, at all of any “hell runs” in PT. *heh*
Disgust Redux
I’ve said it before, but I’m giving into the temptation to reiterate what runs through my mind every time I hear or read the phrase, “It’s only semantics”.
Semantics is the single most important thing about language. Without it, spoken language becomes nothing but (tautology alert!) meaningless whistles and clicks and moans and grunts and written language becomes nothing but weird squiggles, signifying nothing.
Now there abide these three:
Phonemes (sounds and their and written phoneme analogs)
Syntax (structure) and
Semantics (MEANING), and the greatest of these is semantics.
“It’s only (or just) semantics” is an utterance by an idiot, full of sound (and whimpering), signifying nothing* (at least nothing useful, save for confirming that the one saying it has no argument or defensible position).
Insincere apologies to The Bard and all that…
* Aside: For something with much,much more sense than the “nothing (useful) conveyed by the idiotic “It’s just semantics” try this disquisition on Nothing. Not all that edifying, but it did keep me in stitches for days after I first read it. Imagine breaking out in laughter in the middle of a Greek class. The prof was understanding once I had explained and shared the article with him. Nice guy.
Somewhere On My Top Ten List…
…of things I hate. Depending on the day, it might even rank ahead of politicians *gag-spew* and Mass MEdia Podpeople:
Grass lawns and the “care” thereof.
Think about it a second. On the one end of the spectrum we see maniacs who weed and feed and spray and water and “manicure” and roll and trim and vacuum and comb and all other kinds of weird and stupid shiite. And for what? A boring, monochrome green that would be OK on a billiard table but hardly belongs anywhere in nature.
On the other, more rational, end of “lawns” we might see a well-design rock “lawn” that can be “cared” for with a once-a-season herbicide or a lawn with some other no-mow ground cover that
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1. Is suitable to the climate and so needs little to no added water
2. Is not some boring monochromatic green.
I vote for the “more rational” approach. Something to control erosion that I’d not need to water or mow… not that I’ve ever watered a lawn in any home we’ve had. (If a lawn can’t survive on what God gives it, then it doesn’t deserve to live, IMO. *heh*)
And mowing! Was there ever such a useless task invented? Grow a (grass) lawn. Mow it once a week (or be shunned by neighbors *heh*). Figure out something to do with the *@^#$* clippings–grateful that at least mulching blades finally arrived for that–and do it all over again, for eternity! Talk about hellish torture… Tantalus was a piker.
No, I can see that a Thymus serpyllum (“Elfin mint”) lawn is in my future… Having a groundcover that naturally limits itself to 1″-2″ and is drought tolerant and edible seems far, far more rational than continuing to torture myself with mowing (though NOT weeding or feeding or watering!) a grass lawn (which I’m also allergic to… in more ways than one *heh*). Maybe the “Elfin” mint will be as aggressive as the regular mint I grow and choke out the grass on its own… Well, a guy can dream, can’t he?
Beating a Dead Horse
From the WaPo a few years ago (a 2006 repeat of a 2005 report), based on the 2003 Adult Literacy Survey by the DoE:
Experts Stunned – Literacy of US College Grads Declining
“The declining impact of education on our adult population was the biggest surprise for us, and we just don’t have a good explanation,” said Mark S. Schneider, commissioner of education statistics. “It may be that institutions have not yet figured out how to teach a whole generation of students who learned to read on the computer and who watch more TV. It’s a different kind of literacy.”
“What’s disturbing is that the assessment is not designed to test your understanding of Proust, but to test your ability to read labels,” he added.
Yep, reading and understanding “labels” was about what the “proficient” level denoted. Sad. That’s “proficient”? Hardly.
*sigh*
Of course, this article from the Georgia State University student newspaper notes a couple of things most of the educrats (they’re all very naturally baffled, the idiots) who’ve commented on the situation have missed. First, more and more illiterate sluggards are getting into colleges, having graduated high school with the reading skills of gerbils. And then this:
“…perhaps the failure lies in the lack of support for library services in schools in the United states, where the first place for funding and staff cuts is the school library.”
Well, there is a wide and deep constellation of other contributing causes, but what the student writer noted here is a fact of pubschool life.