Category: general

I had a dream last night that I got four letters–there were really just two, but for some reason I received two copies of each–in regards to job applications I’d made for positions in Japan. The first one I opened was apparently for a job at Disney. I remembered that the application had involved a discussion of the character Gadget from Chip-n-Dale Rescue Rangers.

The first paragraph was just a couple of sentences long, and it went something like “No, no, the answer is no!” The following paragraph stated, “Do not hate me for this decision, for it must be made! The true brilliance of Tokyo Disney [it was something like that, can’t remember exactly] can only be seen in person. I invite you to visit!” Enclosed was a photo of the staff room. There, on the wall, was a picture of Gadget (and as I recall, she was in a very weird position, like she was trying to limbo or something).

I read the letter aloud to Sean, then cried, “There’s a picture of Gadget here! I was supposed to mention it on my application! It was a test! Dammit!”

The other letter was another rejection that I don’t really remember.

There was a subplot in my dream about a character who was Brooke, except she was shorter and had brown hair and she was taking care of a small girl. She wasn’t being careful about the things she touched, and someone had ended up giving her some sort of disease. “Did you wash your hands after talking with the taxi driver?” a lawyer asked. “No,” Brooke said, as if it was silly to do so, and insulting to the taxi driver. The lawyer and I looked at each other and nodded grimly; this was obviously the cause.

Later, I wandered around in some sort of store that was filled with Valentine’s Day pillows.

This post really has nothing to do with the malapropism I quoted in the title (you’ll see it again in the quoted text below), but I couldn’t think of a more interesting headline, so there you have it.

Today I wanted to highlight what Zach Braff said yesterday about writing:

So many of you ask me about writing, just skim through the comments and you’ll see thousands of stories to write about. All I did was sit down and write about what I was feeling in my own life. What bothers you, what makes you laugh, what do you obsess about, what makes your stomach turn, what do you lust over? – just sit down and write about those things. That’s what’s universally interesting; those are the kinds of movies I like to go see: regular people in real life situations, dealing with emotions and worries I can relate to. Also, think about starting very simply; don’t overwhelm yourself trying to think about the whole movie; write a scene between two people, then write what happens after that, then what happens after that. Don’t get boggled down worrying about outlines and rules, just tell a bunch of stories that happen to the same group of people. And try (for lack of a better expression) keeping it real. There’s a saying I really like to think about when I’m writing: “Don’t do that, they do that in movies.” Anytime I find myself writing something that feels nowhere close to reality, I try to stop and reign it back to what’s true for me. Blah, blah, blah. I just wanted to offer up a couple of thoughts since so many have you have asked about it.

But take it for what it’s worth. This is coming from a guy who got rejected from USC, UCLA and got C’s in screenwriting at Northwestern.

Even though I was obsessed with getting good grades in college, I have an enormous amount of respect for people who didn’t (like, you know, Einstein). Somehow I feel like they know something I don’t. I mean, I’m talented, and teachers generally liked me, but I was also very lazy. That people who weren’t lazy couldn’t manage to get the grades I did says something to me, like “Grades are absolutely meaningless”.

But I digress yet again…the point was, Zach Braff has some good tips for writers. :>

Wear your seatbelts, assholes.

This article in the Lexington Herald-Leader really brought home to me how far Nicholasville has come in the past several years. Driving up US 27/Nicholasville Road to Lexington every day for classes, I became very familiar with the spotty storefronts and rolling hills along the way. Now when I visit, it’s almost unrecognizable due to all the new development.

Extending the city limits to the county line seems to be a reasonable notion, especially given that Nicholasville will get some money out of it.

I can see some parallels growing between the north side of Nicholasville and where I live here on the Richmond County line (almost in Martinez). From here I can get to all the good stores in about five minutes, and downtown in about half an hour. Half an hour in the other direction, and I’m out in the boonies. It’s very similar; people near the county line in what will be Nicholasville are right near Fayette Mall and Lexington Green, plus that huge Wal-Mart complex…there is so much commerce right on the south side of Lexington on Nicholasville Road. With the possibility of a 14-screen movie theater, Nicholasville is shaping up a lot like Martinez.

I hope the developers keep trees in mind while they’re changing the landscape. Here in Augusta, we’ve still got trees everywhere. They’re tall, too, so they block sound and visual pollution. The trees in Kentucky don’t grow quite the same way, so I hope they are able to find some way to integrate all the new construction into the environment in an appealing way.

Recently, I pointed out a grammatical error, but missed another. Oops. It so happens that the guys at Language Log have been discussing a similar kind of “error” recently, and Mark Liberman has a new post up that is very interesting. In this post, Liberman presents a possible “rule” suggested by a reader, and then picks holes in it.

What can I say of the house now that the house

is over—what can I sing of the bridge

now that my family is on the other side,

where the birds finally tune the shadows

with their songs, and the lights need only

brighten for a moment, for there is no darkness

in their house, only light, the causes of

light, the moment of memory when the

past pronounces the future, “so long,” the leaves

wave, the sea waits for someone and someone

else …

Burkard, Michael, 1947-: The Moment of Memory [from Fictions from the Self (1988), Norton]

Again, changing is to are after family would be at best unidiomatic, while writing “there is no darkness/in its house” would be bizarrely dehumanizing.

[Emphasis added by Liberman.]

That “bizarrely dehumanizing” bit occurred to me as I was reading, too. Somehow, there is more humanity in the pronoun they than there is in it–probably because it can be used for people in the plural (and also, arguably, for a singular, speculative person). So maybe the reason “they” sounds good to us in certain cases that seem superficially ungrammatical is because it connotates a person. (Even when we’re not talking about a person, “they” feels more familiar and comfortable. “It” is very standoffish, as if the speaker has no connection whatsoever to the subject.)

This is fabulous.

The term “booty” technically means a pirate’s treasure, but in slang also refers to a girl’s backside or sex.

I don’t know why, but proper-sounding definitions of slang words always crack me up.

This quote brought to you by Yahoo!, from a story about The Kid Who Said Too Much.

Carpenter, a housekeeper at a convalescent home and an aspiring actress, said some co-workers have told her that when her son reaches school age, classmates will make fun of his name, “but I don’t worry about it. They made fun of me because my nose is small. They make fun of you no matter what you do.”

Yes, Mrs. Carpenter, but there are levels. Kids grow out of making fun of people for their noses (at least, most of them do). I don’t think anyone will grow out of making fun of your child for being named “Jake 2.0”.

Yahoo’s got a story on the trouble the name is already causing the kid (mostly unrelated to childhood taunting, since he’s only a year old at this point).

The UPS guy is starting to know me :> Today he said, “You should move to the first floor.” :>

Anyway, the thing’s an Omron Automatic Blood Pressure Monitor with Large Cuff. I’m not sure the large cuff was actually necessary. It’s pretty damn big.

Of course, I took my blood pressure immediately. It was:

I just wanted to note that, because I do my typical logging in the morning and evening. I also want to mention that my pulse was:

Not bad, really.

This guy is amazing.

Critics of Gerard Kennedy are having a field day with the fact that the Ontario Education Minister mistakenly said there were five letters in the word “strike”. The flub has drawn comparisons to former U.S. vice president Dan Quayle.

“But then again, at least no one put Dan Quayle in charge of educating over a million schoolchildren,” said legislator John Baird, of the opposition Conservative Party.

Mr. Kennedy made his error in speech, rather than in writing. Human beings in general are bad at counting the letters of words while they are talking–at least, that’s my impression. It’s pretty obvious why that would be.

The idea of an alphabet is to have one character to represent one sound. However, languages change over time. The older your writing system is, the more differences there are going to be between what is written and how it is pronounced. I don’t know the particular etymology of the word “strike”, but I can tell you right now that the final “e” is not pronounced. In the IPA, the word “strike” would be written

/straik/

The /ai/ there is a diphthong. (I don’t know that I make the diphthong mark show up in Shift_JIS, or even in a regular font. Also, note that by /r/ I actually mean the American English r, not the normal IPA /r/.) If you consider a diphthong to be one “letter”, you could argue that “strike” actually is a five-letter word–in terms of pronunciation.

Ultimately, I’ve thought way too much about this, writing a bunch of baseless conjecture and then deleting it all :> The upshot is that I don’t think people should be judged too seriously on grammar value judgments they make out loud.

But it’s, like, hard! She just wrote a love story.

o_o

…yeah, this is a great place to live!

(From WAGT News.)

(Also, that quote is ungrammatical. The objects of the verb “are” should be in parallel; to correct the problem, simply add “on” before the word “probation”. Otherwise, it’s like they’re saying some Georgians “are on already in prison”. Yes, I am anal, but I also point these things out because of a paranoid fear that one of you will notice one that I didn’t mention, and think that I missed it. I didn’t miss it!!!)

A man injured and trapped in the Los Angeles commuter train collision scrawled a message of love to his wife and children in his own blood. The man survived and was rescued by firefighters.

“I am here today because these guys deserve the credit. All I did was just lay there,” Phipps said, choking back tears.

“I don’t know whether I did it because I thought I would not make it out alive or because I was just being a maudlin dope,” Phipps said, walking on crutches and wearing a Los Angeles Fire Department cap and shirt.

Here’s the story, at Yahoo.

Check out today’s PA–aptly titled “Linguaphiles Unite“.

Those guys really do give each other shit all the time. I love it.