This headline from a week ago inspired a round of limerick-writing on the WELL:
This was my contribution:
An athlete whose skills were prodigious
Lifted weights with her pubococcygeus.
When she went on a date,
Sex started out great
But it usually wound up litigious.
It’s hard to resist a legitimate opportunity to rhyme pubococcygeus. I’m not likely to have another.
Okay, I acknowledge that I am peculiarly neurotic about not wanting to stand in the flow of any foot traffic. (I was regularly bullied and picked on as a child, and once I was deliberately knocked down and trampled on by about 15 or 20 other children going the other way down a school hallway; it was one of the scariest things that has ever happened to me, and to this day, seeing that I’m in the way of a flow of people can bring on flashbacks to the terror I felt.)
But even allowing for the fact that I know I am hypersensitive about this and do not expect others to participate in my phobia, still, what on earth are you people thinking when you decide that smack in front of the bottom step of that stairway is a fine place to stop and have a conversation with your companion or check your Blackberry or make a call on your cell phone??? Seems like I have been having to say excuse me please to you folks two or three times a month for just about ever. Often, when that stairway is in fact a crowded down escalator and you have stopped at the bottom just a foot or so in front of me, I have been inexorably propelled into you from behind. And yet you keep stopping there. Why have you not figured out by now that when you reach the bottom of the stairs you need to walk forward a few more feet before you stop???
Given the very limited space available on the Internet, I figure that every blog I find boring is taking up space and preventing some blog that I am interested in from existing. And there just isn’t enough interesting material to read on the Internet every day to fill my time.
At least, those seem to be the implicit assumptions behind this otherwise incomprehensible rant.
From Jon Carroll’s column today:
I think there are about seven lessons that life has to teach us, and we just learn them over and over again. Wisdom consists of remembering at least three of them at any given time.
Despite being already in the middle of both Little, Big and Thoughts without a Thinker, I came across a copy of Garry Wills’s What Paul Meant at a used book store on Monday and started it on the BART trip home. I’ve read and enjoyed his two companion books, What Jesus Meant and What the Gospels Meant, so I was eager to complete the set. Good book, too.
So now I’m in the middle of three books. It’s a bad habit of mine and I can’t even guess how many books over the years that I’ve laid down somewhere and forgotten I was in the middle till I came across them again months later.
But What Paul Meant is a fairly short book, a little under 200 pages and about the size of a trade paperback, and I’m not far from the end, so I’ll be back to the others soon.
Dave and I spent part of Sunday at the California Academy of Sciences. On our previous visits we’d never gotten there early enough to get planetarium passes, but the Academy is open an hour early on Sundays for members, so this time we made an effort to get there early and got passes for the first show. I thought the show was fun but rambling, like it couldn’t quite settle on what it was going to be about.
Afterward we spent time on the Living Roof, in the Africa Hall (great fun to watch kids and penguins interacting with each other through the glass wall of the tank), and other stuff, but the rain forest and the aquarium were very busy and we skipped those this time.
From an AP news analysis by Philip Elliott:
Despite the misstep, Palin enjoys an ability to connect with voters that cannot be taught.
From the New York Times breaking news alert in my email inbox a few minutes ago:
Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, announced she would step down before the end of the month, citing a desire to affect change outside of government.
Yeah, I guess it’ll be easier for her to pretend she’s changed if she’s not in government.
Received email at work the other day warning us that there’ve been a number of plural-singular mismatch errors slipping through lately, along the lines of (and I’m making this example up)
The inclusion of updated widget tables and expanded reticulation equations make this new edition especially valuable.
I found myself grinding my teeth a bit, partly because my ego doesn’t like people thinking I’m capable of such an elementary editing error (even though I know perfectly well that we all are when we’re working at a fast clip), but mostly because the mismatch of the singular subject “inclusion” and the verb “make” seems to me to be least of this sentence’s problems. Good grammar doesn’t redeem weak writing.
Two rules of thumb:
If you have to actually stop reading a sentence in order to work out whether the verb should be “make” or “makes”, then your sentence structure is just too damn complicated.
If your subject is an abstract noun like “inclusion”, then there’s a pretty good chance you’ve got the wrong word as your subject.
The real fix:
This new edition is especially valuable because it includes updated widget tables and expanded reticulation equations.
Dave and I and our friend Doug spent the day hiking at Point Reyes. We had originally planned to hike somewhere else more inland, but when we saw this morning how hot it was going to be, how hot it already was by 8:30 a.m. or so, we changed our plans and decided to go someplace along the coast instead. So we took Sir Francis Drake Boulevard out to Point Reyes — a quick stop in Inverness for some provisions — and when we got to the information center in Point Reyes and looked over the maps, we decided on the eight-mile hike to Sunset Beach and back.
It was still hot, but nowhere near as hot as it got inland (it was over 100°F where we had been planning to go) and we had a breeze nearly the whole time. Most of the trail has a view of the estuary, and on our walk out it was low tide. We saw a lot of egrets and white pelicans flying low over the shallow areas looking for food. We didn’t see a whole lot of other wildlife, but there’s a remarkable variety of plant life along the way. The whole hike took us a little under four hours. I think I got a little sunburn on the back of my neck and the little toe on my right foot got sore, but otherwise I came back in better shape and better spirits than I set out.
Stopped for dinner on the way back at Sol Food in San Rafael, a terrific if noisy Puerto Rican restaurant. My ensalada con bistec (a salad with thinly sliced steak and grilled onions) was good sized even though I ordered the small, and tasty.
For the last sixteen or seventeen years (and even much longer in Dave’s case) Dave and I have spent all of Pride Weekend, both Saturday and Sunday, working our butts off as volunteers. This year we didn’t, and we didn’t go anywhere near the parade. Nice change of pace.
Now it’s time for a hot soak in the bathtub with a glass of wine, and to bed.
Scratchings 