"Your one-stop source for improper ideology and freedom seeds."
If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought – George Orwell
Earlier today, as Schatzi and I emerged from the house for our morning constitutional, a raven lifted off from a palo verde tree across the street. It’s a windy day here in Tucson, so the raven was able to turn into the wind and hover, holding position a few feet away and slightly above us. […]
Which is exactly what I did. And here it is: I was recently tagged with a Facebook survey. The instructions were to go through a list of 50 books, indicating which ones I’d read. The list was a mess: classics mixed with airport trash; books every schoolchild should have read mixed with Oprah-esque book club […]
Certain words and phrases indicate a person’s inability or unwillingness to engage in honest conversion. I call them eye-rollers. When you hear them, you know you’ve hit a brick wall: whether it’s stupidity or willful close-mindedness, the person who utters them is not listening. Roll your eyes and find someone else to talk to. Ground […]
What’s in Paul’s grab bag? Unconnected thoughts and short observations which don’t rate separate blog posts, but when aggregated together might amount to something: Some of My Best Friends Are Negroes NASCAR Fans You may have seen my earlier NASCAR post. I swear, they must put something in those $10 beers. Here’s an ESPN reporter […]
I found a Q&A book meme at Electronic Cerebrectomy. It’s composed of headings one is supposed to respond to (I say “headings” rather than “questions” because the questions are formatted in title case . . . incorrectly so, in many cases). The meme hasn’t been stupidified by Facebook, as far as I can tell . […]
“Larsson left about three quarters of a fourth novel on a notebook computer in Gabrielsson’s possession; synopses or manuscripts of the fifth and sixth in the series, which was intended to contain an eventual total of ten books, may also exist.” — Wikipedia Given the phenomenal worldwide popularity of the first three Larsson novels — […]
Land o’ Goshen, the Associated Press Stylebook is officially ditching “Web site” for “website.” Maybe now the copy editors at The New Yorker will consider uncapping the “i” in “internet.” For years now, I’ve been tripping over The New Yorker’s insistence on capitalizing the “i” in internet. It offends me. Who decided “internet” is a […]
Ever hear someone say he has a beak, or that such-and-such a thing gives him the beak? We said it all the time in the USAF; “I have a beak” means I’m pissed off; “you give me the beak” means you make me angry. The beak must be secret military jargon, because when I Google […]