"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." —Mark Twain
In the news
For a change, this installment’s bag photo is as literal as it gets: it’s me wearing my bag o’ Cefazolin (click on the image to see it full-size on Flickr). My bug-eyed stare indicates my continuing state of shock. Before anyone else asks, I don’t yet know the specific bacterial organism I’m fighting off. Should […]
Looking back at some of my older stuff, I found a gloomy post from September 2007 predicting we’d never leave Iraq, that it’d turn out to be another Korea with American troops on the ground forever and ever. I really believed this at the time. Actually I believed it right up until last week. A […]
What am I being a big old pussy about today? Trapping. A young nephew in Missouri is a hunter. He also traps coyotes and bobcats and posts photos on Facebook. Photos of living animals in pain. I unfriended him yesterday in order to block those photos. That sounds pathetic and weak, but I don’t know […]
After the Newton school shooting I posted a couple of tweets using the hashtag #FuckTheNRA. When I originally set up my Twitter account I foolishly checked the box that allowed other users to contact me by email. I’ve now fixed that, but not before the gun nuts found me. The pro-mass murder emails I’ve been […]
No need to explain, I think:
I should write about our Christmas with the kids in Las Vegas, but when I think of it I’m happy, and as with most things happy, words are slow to come and inadequate when they do. When I see right-wingers getting up to their old shenanigans, on the other hand, I see red and words […]
Sorry for the incoherence, but I just don’t know what can be done about gun violence in America. If some new disease was killing tens of thousands of people each year we’d be doing something about it, just as we do with existing diseases. Traffic accidents kill a horrific number of people but we’ve been […]
Yesterday, Congress voted to eliminate the word “lunatic” from federal laws and regulations dealing with mental health. The lone dissenter was this guy here, Representative Louie Gohmert (R-Imbecile). Personally I don’t have a problem with the word. I probably wouldn’t use it around an actual lunatic, but hell, we all know what it means and […]