buzzwords 2007

From Sunday's Times.  e-mail bancruptcy:What you’re declaring when you choose to delete or ignore a very large number of e-mail messages after falling behind in reading and responding to them. This often includes sending a boilerplate message explaining that old messages will never receive a personal, specific response. Although the Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessing is often credited with coining this term, at best he can be said to have popularized it. Its first use was in 2002, two years before Mr. Lessig publicly declared his own e-mail bankruptcy.

mr. fish

carbon tax

At least one candidate is addressing the environment.  "You cannot be serious about acting on the urgent threat of global warming, about making us less captive to Middle East oil, or investing in renewable energy, unless you have a corporate carbon tax that eliminates the last incentive there is to pollute -- that it's cheaper." --Chris Dodd (thanks to Beth in Roanoke) Here's Dodd again saving the day--where' are Hillary and Barak and Beiden?  Dodd: “I’ve been asked, what’s the first thing I’d do as president in the year 2009, and January 20th. And I’m going to give you back your Constitution, because this administration has gone out of it’s way to do just the opposite and the Constitution does not belong to a political party or a candidate and they’ve been trampling all over it.”

absinthe makes the heart grow

Absinthe is now legal in the U.S.  Have yourselves a green Christmas! (thanks to Bruce  in Hollywood)  

carol bly

Author Carol Bly dies at 77 of ovarian cancer. 

found poem

Reply Me, Very Urgent

Sir i am trusting this

transaction to you buy

faith and hope

you will handle this business

without betrayed me

at the end when

the fund enter your

personal bank account?

to stand and claim this money

is for both benefit

this transaction is

100% hitch free

mutilation's okay, but no hoods, please

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has rejected Taxi's poster, displayed to the left, as being "not suitable for all audiences." The poster for the film simply shows two soldiers walking away from the camera, holding a hooded detainee between them. Variety notes that the military has also tried to censor the photo on the poster.

mondegreens

And if you listen to pop music much, you’ve no doubt confused the lyrics.  These mishearings are called mondegreens from the Scottish ballad “The Bonny Earl of Murray,” whose line “And laid him on the green” was misheard by some as “And Lady Mondegreen.”  The poet Henry Taylor wrote a delightful poem called “The Parrot Bath” on mishearing the word “paragraph.”  On a book tour a few years ago, I sat with my driver Frank at a sidewalk café in Berkeley waiting to do an NPR radio show around the corner.  Frank told me that he was into media rights, and I wasn’t sure what he meant.  He said he collects them, buys them on the Internet.  I smiled.   He’s got twelve of them on his bookcase gathering dust.  I realized then that he meant meteorites.  He’s investing in meteorites.  I had a whole other story going on in my head.  There are actually a few words, perhaps many, that came into the language as mishearings.  Asparagus is a mishearing of “sparrow-grass.”  “Buttonhole” was first “buttonhold.” 

the executioners' song

A couple of long time state executioners in South Carolina are suing government officials.  "The two are suing for loss of quality of life, shock, humiliation and embarrassment, and loss of earning capacity, the lawsuits say."  Yes, that's right, "shock."  (Thanks to Beth in Roanoke)

i heart huckabee

If the Democrats self-destruct and nominate Hillary because they think she's the only one who can win, when she's the only one who can't, we have to hope the GOP nominates Mike.   With two conservatives running, Hillary has a chance.  Here's Ron Paul, quoting Sinclair Lewis, on Mike: "When fascism comes to this country it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross." 

why Time magazine is irrelevant

Their Man of the Year is Vladimir Putin!  They've also chosen Hitler, Stalin (twice), Kissinger, Nixon (twice), Ronald Reagan, John Sirica, and George W. Bush (twice) and Newt Gingrich.  Well, it's not the thinking man's magazine.

from toothpaste for dinner:

from the Freezer Jesus Files

"Terrance Cotton said he wished on what he thought was falling star outside his Abilene home while playing with his dogs. The object headed toward him at lighting speed, he said." (thanks to Neil in Miami)

what I'd like to do to my iPod

today's short story waiting to be written:

"A murder suspect dubbed 'the cannibal' was found dead in his prison cell of an apparent suicide today, two months after police found cooked and seasoned bits of his girlfriend's corpse on a fork and plate in his apartment." (thanks to Joe in Cheese)

is the world any more prepared?

"'Matilda Briggs was not the name of a young woman, Watson,' said Holmes in a reminiscent voice. 'It was a ship which is associated with the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared.'"

little huckabee

"Two boy scout counselors, 17 year old Clayton Frady and 18 year old David litickabee [sic], the son of Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, have admitted to catching a stray dog during their summer session at Camp Pioneer in Hatfield, AR, and hanging the dog by his neck, slitting his throat and stoning him to death."

sports builds character

Twenty-five scholar-athletes at FSU may miss the bowl game.   As an indication of how bad the Seminole season has gone, this year's players got caught cheating. 

same as the old blog . . .

Cindy's got me up and running again, but this after a hectic couple of days--a computer crash and an iPod crash.  So I have a new computer and I can't use Word Perfect anymore, so I bought a book explaining Word, and I lost 4000 songs on the iPod, but Bruce is coming by this week to download his music onto my computer, and I'll be off and running pretty soon.  It'll be slow going.  Lost all the archives to the old blog.  While this chaos was going on, I was grading my classes and copyediting the new novel, Requiem, Mass.  Finished it all today and even did some online shopping for Christmas.