A little grisly accident via The Atlantic:
Now you know the last thing a whole bunch of salmon ever saw.
The BBC has a list of 10 euphamisms that bring back memories of political scandals past:
2. "Discussing Uganda" In 1973, the satirical magazine Private Eye reported that journalist Mary Kenny had been disturbed in the arms of a former cabinet minister of President Obote of Uganda during a party. Variations of "Ugandan discussions" or "discussing Uganda" - the term is believed to have been coined by the poet James Fenton - were subsequently used by the Eye to describe any illicit encounter, and the phrase soon became part of common usage.
I am still trying to work out how badgers fit into it...
It's sobering that babies born the day I graduated college can take their first legal drinks today.
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield transferred command of the International Space Station to Cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin yesterday afternoon. As a parting gift, with a little help from his friends (including David Bowie), he made this:
I've followed Hadfield's Facebook page for a while, enjoying his photos, observations, and occasional scoops (he did, after all, know about Saturday's space walk before anyone in the press). I hope Commander Misurkin continues Hadfield's habit of posting stuff. Here, as just one example, is London in February:
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Sadly, Canadian budget cuts make it unlikely Hadfield or any other Canadian will return to the ISS for a while.
Welcome home, Col. Hadfield!
I don't usually make specific book recommendations on the blog. That said: read Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell.
Russell's collection of eight short stories has kept me away from productive work all day. They're funny, horrifying, surprising, entertaining. I'm going to have to read her novel Swamplandia! next.
Allie Brosh has returned after an 18-month absence with a new post:
[T]hat's the most frustrating thing about depression. It isn't always something you can fight back against with hope. It isn't even something — it's nothing. And you can't combat nothing. You can't fill it up. You can't cover it. It's just there, pulling the meaning out of everything. That being the case, all the hopeful, proactive solutions start to sound completely insane in contrast to the scope of the problem.
It would be like having a bunch of dead fish, but no one around you will acknowledge that the fish are dead. Instead, they offer to help you look for the fish or try to help you figure out why they disappeared.
It's scary stuff. It's also a view of depression that more people need to understand.
I've missed Brosh ALOT a lot. Wow, what a sucky year she's had. I'm glad she's writing again, and I sincerely hope she's turned the corner on her illness.
The Tribune reports this morning that some groundskeeping duties at O'Hare will soon get turned over to a herd of goats:
The city's Department of Aviation is expected to announce Wednesday that it has awarded a contract to Central Commissary Holdings LLC — operator of Lincoln Park restaurant Butcher & The Burger — to bring about 25 goats onto airport property, helping the airport launch its pilot vegetation-management program.
Joseph Arnold, partner at Butcher & The Burger, said the goats now live on a farm in Barrington Hills and will make "the perfect lawn mowers" for the city's largest airport.
In about a month, Arnold said, the goats will be delivered to O'Hare and begin their task of munching away at overgrown greenery. According to the city's request for bids last fall, the animals will be expected to clear about 23 square meters of vegetation per day.
Apparently the goats can go up and down embankments a lot easier than the lawnmowers they currently use.
Time to drop by Butcher & the Burger.
Unfortunately, as Paul Lukas points out, people have forgotten the difference:
Here's the deal: Virtually any software that includes a typography function (whether for word processing, desktop publishing, graphic design, or whatever) now employs something called "smart quotes." The idea behind smart quotes is that the software recognizes when there's a blank space immediately before or after a quotation mark and adds the appropriate curvature to the mark, creating open-quotes and close-quotes. That way you end up with nicely curved quotation marks instead of straight or "neutered" marks (like the ones you see on most of this page).
This all works fine unless you have a word or term that begins with an apostrophe, like ’til or ’em (as in "Bring ’em on"). Since the keystroke for an apostrophe is the same as the one for a single quote mark, the software improperly interprets the space and the keystroke as the start of a quotation and imparts the wrong curvature to the mark. There's a way to override the smart quotes and impose a proper apostrophe in these situations (on a Mac, you type option-shift-close-bracket), but an increasing number of writers, editors, and designers either aren't bothering to do so, don't feel it's necessary, or don't even realize it's necessary. The result is a cascade of improperly oriented apostrophes on signs, on billboards, in TV commercials, in the names of businesses, and even on mainstream media web sites. Call it the apostrophe catastrophe.
To the extent I have pet peeves, it's a big one of mine. For example, there's a coffee shop at the corner of Webster and Sheffield called Jam 'n Honey—or, rather, Jam ‘n Honey—with a half-meter-high open quote where an apostrophe should be.
Actually, they're a two-fer. They're also missing a second apostrophe, as ’n’ drops off both the a and d from "and." What the typography-challenged proprietors have there is "jam an honey," which is just stupid.
This is how civilization crashes: simple acts of negligence.
I just listened to a This American Life segment by Andrew Forsthoefel, a 23-year-old from southeastern Pennsylvania who walked across the U.S. for a year. Fascinating.
He wound up, after walking 6,000 km, in Half Moon Bay, Calif., about 800 m from my family's house. I have to say, if I were to walk across the U.S., I'd want to wind up in Half Moon Bay, too.
What a start to this kid's life. I'm looking forward to hearing more from him.
...or, how I took advantage of the Middle Class Housing Subsidy but skipped an important step.
In December 2011, I reduced my home mortgage interest rate from 6.25% to 3.125%, which thanks to the commutative property of multiplication, reduced my home mortgage interest by 50% year-over-year. What I forgot to do, however, was reduce my tax withholding allowances for 2012, which increased the taxes I owe for 2012 by an amount equal to 1/3 of the amount I saved on mortgage interest.
Well, I just filed my 2012 taxes online, and later today I will write a check to the U.S. Treasury for a lot more money than I expected. (I fixed my allowances in January, when I discovered this horrible oversight.)
Go ahead and call me stupid. You're allowed.