Fogy

el cheapo iv

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:21:48 +0900

Advertising is legalized lying. -H.G. Wells

$5.53 for 10 tablets
caved-in and tried lemon-lime Airborne

curious ii

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:36:50 +0900

http://abc.go.com/shows/v

about: the pilot

ho-hum existence viii

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:28:13 +0900

ON BEING FIRED AGAIN
by Erin Belieu

I’ve known the pleasures of being
fired at least eleven times—

most notably by Larry who found my snood
unsuitable, another time by Jack,
whom I was sleeping with. Poor attitude,
tardiness, a contagious lack
of team spirit; I have been unmotivated

squirting perfume ont　 o little cards,
while stocking salad bars, when stripping
covers from romance novels, their heroines
slaving on the chain gang of obsessive love—

and always the same hard candy
of shame dissolving in my throat;

handing in my apron, returning the cash-
register key. And yet, how fine it feels,
the perversity of freedom which never signs
a rent check or explains anything to one　 ’s family.

I’ve arrived again, taking one　 more last
walk through another door, thinking “I am
what is wrong with America,” while outside
in the emptied, post-rushhour street,

the sun slouches in a tulip tree and the sound
of a neighborhood pool floats up on the heat.

Tom
Dick
Harry

average ii

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:12:45 +0900

Averages play two tricks: first, they put life’s lumps and bumps through the blender. It might be bedlam out there but, onc　e averaged, the world turns smooth. The average wage, average house prices, average life expectancy, the average crime rate, as well as less obvious averages like the rate of inflation . . . there are ups and downs mixed into them all. Averages take the whole mess of human experience, some up, some down, some here, some there, some almost off the graph, and grind the data into a single number. They flatten hills and raise hollows to tell you the height of the land—as if it were flat.

But it is not flat. Forget the variety behind every average and you risk trouble, like the man who drowned in a river that rose, he heard, on average onl　y to his knees. So trick one　 brings a problem: it stifles imagination about an awkward truth—that the world is a hodgepodge of uneven variety.

Trick two is that averages pass for typical when they may be odd. They stand for what’s ordinary, but can be warped by what’s exceptional. They look like everyman but can easily be no one　. They sound like they’re in the middle, but may be nowhere near.

The way to see through an average is to picture the variety it blends together. An image might help make the thought vivid: “White, on average,” is what we would see by mixing the light from a rainbow, then sharing it equally. But it is a wretched summary of the view. It bleeds from the original all that matters—the magical assortment of colors. Whenever you see an average, think: “white rainbow,” and imagine the vibrancy it conceals. -Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot, The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News, in Politics, and in Life

arrive 10 to 25 minutes before to crank out

windfall iii

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 05:32:21 +0900

The subject of personal finance has become almost entirely removed from the study of economics, both in theory and in application. We’ve come to think that economics is a topic reserved for college professors and experts, even though the origin of the word itself speaks more of personal finance than it speaks of things like gross national product and supply and demand charts.

The word “economics” comes from the Greek words oikos (pronounced ee kos) meaning “home” or “house,” and nomos, meaning “name,” “organization,” or “management.” To the Greeks, an “oikonomos” is a manager of a home. Economics isn’t about charts, graphs, interest rates, and indexes. It’s about what you do on a daily basis to create a profitable, thriving, and sustainable home life. The science of economics, then, is much closer to home than many of us think. Not onl　y is it highly relevant to your personal finance, but it’s also actually based on personal finance. A national economy is nothing but the reflection of individual and family economics. -Garrett B. Gunderson with Stephen Palmer, Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths That Are Destroying Your Prosperity

shares

mindless vi

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:24:46 +0900

You’re not getting an inferiority complex, are you?
What you’re doing is wonderful!
I’ll put it down in writing if you want.
Drop the complex; you don’t need it.
He’s like a baby elephant: He doesn’t know how strong he is.
Really, most people are like that.

You’re not suffering from complexes, that much I know.
You’re doing excellently, so carry on. –directed by Robert Dornhelm, Karajan

drive
direction

retail therapy iv

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 12:07:59 +0900

Give a girl the right shoes and she can conquer the world. -Bette Midler

multiple pairs

Grawlix, Interrobang, Schwa, Tittle, Tmesis, and Umlaut

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 02:23:26 +0900

A GRAWLIX is a sequence of typographical symbols used by cartoonists to represent a swear word. *%!@$! might be an example.

The cartoonist Mort Walker, creator of Beetle Bailey, the long-running U.S. cartoon strip, invented a whole vocabulary to describe the devices cartoonists use in dialogue balloons to represent emotions, obscenities, and physical exertions. For example, agitrons are wiggly lines indicating that something is shaking. Briffits are clouds of dust that hang in the spot where swiftly departing character or object was previously standing. Emanata are straight lines rising from around a character’s head, indicating surprise. Squeans are asterisks with an empty center, indicating drunkenness or dizziness. Plewds are flying sweat droplets that appear around the head of a character who is working hard or stressed, and waftaroms are wavy lines rising from something to indicate a strong smell.

The INTERROBANG is one　 of the most eloquent punctuation marks in the English language, combining an interrogative point, or question mark, and a bang, which is printer’s parlance for the exclamation mark.

There are some sentences that require, nay, demand an interrobang:
“She said what?!”
“He ate how many slices of cake?!”
“You’re going to have a baby?!”
There have been various attempts to incorporate the two marks into one　 symbol by graphic designers, but this has never caught on . . .

The SCHWA (pronounced shwaar) is that curious inverted “e” you will have seen written in italics in your dictionary’s guide to pronunciation.

It represents an unstressed vowel, such as the second syllable in pencil or the first in about, though such vowels are often found in the middle of a word.

Both the first and last a’s of the word America are unstressed and would be marked with a schwa.

If you’ve ever dotted an i, you have titled, because the little dot above the i—and the j (the very last letter to be included in our twenty-six-letter alphabet)—is called a TITTLE.

Ever since the alphabet was invented, the dot above the i has been regarded as a measure of something very small. Indeed, in the Bible, Jesus is reported as saying (Matthew 5:18): “For verily, I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass away, one　 jot or one　 tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” In the Greek original of this gospel, the word rendered jot is iota, the Greek name for the letter i—from which indeed jot derives.

TMESIS is the separation of parts of a compound word by the intervention of one　 or more words. Abso-bloody-lutely, for example. Or, un-freaking-believable.

One of the more famous regular users of tmesis is Homer Simpson’s good Christian neighbor, Ned Flanders, in The Simpsons. His catchy greeting—“Well-diddily-elcome”—is a classic example of tmesis, though whether Ned is aware of this is not clear.

The UMLAUT is the name for those two little dots you see floating over the letters of certain words, most of them German. It marks a change in the normal pronunciation of the letter.

In German, ä, ö, and ü (alternatively spelled ae, oe, ue) describe different vowel sounds from a, o, and u, which have no direct equivalent in English.

In English and French, the same mark is used to indicate that two adjacent vowels should be pronounced as distinct sounds, as in Zoë, pronounced Zo-ee, not Zoh, and naïve. The two dots in this case are called a diaeresis.

SOURCE:
Danny Danziger and Mark McCrum
The Whatchamacallit: Those Everyday Objects You Just Can’t Name
Hyperion 2009

self-absorption ii

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 12:16:18 +0900

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging prejudices. -William James

box
oXo
xob

ruthless when necessary x

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 12:17:27 +0900

It made Olaf smile again, and for just a moment I had the very clear thought that someday I would kill him. Maybe not this day, or even this time, but eventually he’d cross a line and I would kill him. The thought helped steady me. Helped me feel more myself. It helped me smile back at him, but it wasn’t the same smile. His was damn near sexual; mine was the smile, most unpleasant, that has frightened bad guys across the country.

Olaf frowned at me. Which made me smile wider.

“If you fear nothing,” Olaf said, “then you are not brave; you are merely too foolish to be afraid.”

Bernardo and I looked at the big man. Even Edward took enough time to glance back at him. “What scares you, big guy?” Bernardo asked.

Olaf shook his head. “Fears are not meant to be shared; they are meant to be conquered.”

Part of me wanted to know what could scare one　 of the scariest men I’d ever met. Part of me didn’t want to know at all. I was afraid it would either be another nightmare for me, too, or make me feel sorry for Olaf. I couldn’t afford to feel sorry for him. Pity will make you hesitate, and one　 day I would need to not hesitate with him. A lot of serial killers have pitiful childhoods, hideous stories where they were the victims—most of them are even true. But none of it matters. It does not matter how horrible their childhoods were, or whether they were victims themselves. It does not matter when you are at their mercy, because one　 thing that all the serials have in common is that for their victims, there is no mercy.

When you forget that, they kill you. –Laurell K. Hamilton, Skin Trade

It’s anything but business, sweetheart.