Someone ordered this at a coffee shop a couple of days ago. Hmm. Nothing like mixing skim milk and cream. I suppose this tastes better then a hot chocolate made with whole milk and no whipped cream?
If airlines were free to provide their own security, I wonder if they’d choose to train their pilots to use guns, and have them carry on the planes. John Lott wrote a good article about this. Lott concludes:
About 70 percent of the pilots at major American airlines have military backgrounds, and military pilots flying outside the United States are required to carry handguns with them whenever they fly military airplanes. There are no records that any of these pilots carrying guns has ever caused any significant problems. Protecting people should be as important as protecting the mail once was.
I’m quite worried about airline safety, especially in light of the recent threats, and the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) incompetance and authoritarianism.
According to the New York Times Style Guide, the times chooses to use an apostrophe when making the plural of an acronym (see my Nov 30 entry) because not doing to would make their all-capital letter headlines confusing. So to avoid this, which rarely occurs compared to how often it does in the text of their stories, they choose to use the apostrophe (DVD’s, 1960′s, CEO’s) when no possessive exists. Why not just place a lower-case s in the headline? Instead, the NYT editors are probably responsible for the proliferation of misplaced apostrophes in written American English.
People are killing each other over black-market cigarette sales. Surely some will respond to this by advocating stricter laws and taxes on cigarettes. Idiots.
The Salvation Army volunteers outside of supermarkets would do better, I suspect, if they did not constantly ring their bell. Instead, they should pause once in a while. People’s brains get accustomed to constant noises quite easily.
It’s (=It is) about time I address a very serious issue: The use of the apostrophe in making a plural. The New York Times does this with acronyms and years, e.g., “DVD’s” and “1980′s,” instead of what I consider correct, “DVDs” and “1980s.” (I suppose the punctuation does go before the closing quotation mark, and parenthesis, for that matter.) Chicago Manual of Style agrees with me on this, as does the Modern Language Association (MLA) and Fowler’s Modern English Usage, 2nd Ed. (entry on “M.P.”, plural is “M.P.s”.) OK…I agree with them. As discussed in a Mediantics article, the apostrophe is tricky.
From FoxNews: Most Democrats have objected to the tax cut ever since Bush proposed the idea early this year. “It gives away billions to those who need it least and does very little for those who need it most,” said Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (search), D-S.D. Gives away. Gives away?!. What the HELL is this guy thinking? That the government employees are “giving away” money to people, as if it belongs to the government employees? Is this guy deliberately phrasing it this way in some sort of Orwellian Newspeak so people don’t realize that the tax dollars belong to the people who earn it?
Josef Stalin died 50 years ago, and, accoridng to this AP article, people still like him. “He was the best – as a chief, as a leader. He lifted the country out of the ruins,…We need a leader like him now.” Um, for what, murdering millions of people? Last night Campus Libertarians showed a movie about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Great heroism, courage, and an illustration of the importance of firearms. But, what is with evil? Are people still predominantly apes? Don’t people fundamentally want to be left alone to pursue their vision of the good life through voluntary associations with others? Apparently not. Perhaps in another 5000 years “we” will outgrow this savagry.
Last Friday a friend and I were looking for a place to shoot hoops. We walk in the freezing rain from the rec center to the field house. We get in, and these two retired-looking guys are sitting at the entrance. One asks what we want, and before I can complete my answer, he says the place is closed. I ask if we can cut through the gym on our way back to the rec center (to avoid the freezing rain). Guy says “no, this place is closed.” Now I don’t know what possesed me here, but I ask him: “So you mean that you won’t let us just walk across the gym here…” Yeah, that’s right, he says. These guys had no ID, uniform, golf shirt, etc, that would show them to be “official”. I ask him who he works for. He claims he works for the college. He asks me why I care. I think about this, and say: Well, when someone tells what I can and cannot do, I want to make sure he has the authority to do so. So the guy says: What, you think we’re just two guys sitting here doing this for kicks? Why don’t you and your friend go out where you came from…At that point, I gave up (why??), and said, well, people do do strange things, and we left.
Dang, I should have asked him for his name, or University ID. Or at least ran for the door. What were they going to do? Perhaps this is a good lesson. They might be cops next time. Flex Your Rights..
Apparently I was not taking any shit, as soon I took on a more formidable tarket: I’m at the grocery store using the auto-check out. Doing everyting right. Scan, put in bag. No extra bag jostling to confuse the scale. And the screen says “Please wait for cashier assistance.” And I say (to whom?) “If I *needed* cashier assistance, I’d go in a line with a cashier!”
It happened again: I”m in the bathroom in the Engineering Center, and this guy sitting in the stall next to me is talking on his cell phone! As George Costanza has said: “We live in a society!” So I’m thinking “Is it rude to flush?”. How silly.
The Pete Townsend with kiddie-porn thing. So it’s not a crime to look at it, I think, but to purchase it may be. If so, the reason is that it promotes the crime, in a similar manner that buying “hot” DVD players off the back of truck does. So, what about watching a show like COPS? Assuming it’s real. (I should check that.) I mean, if someone has a financial incentive for criminals to exist, i.e., the producers of COPS, or police officers themselves, then might they be prone to create more laws? This reminds me of an Ayn Rand quote found on DUIGulag.com
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren�t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor objectively interpreted-and you can create a nation of law-breakers–and then you cash in on guilt.
I’ve found this Dire Straits lyric in my thoughts recently: “When you point your finger ’cause your plan fell through, you’ve got three long fingers pointing back at you.” Hmm.
It happened again. I walk into the bathroom in the Engineering Center, and in the first stall: an unflushed toilet with its golden glow. Lovely. Another grad student, electrical engineering, was there, washing has hands. So I ask him, in a non-accusatory tone, whether that was his, er, doing. He said “no,” and explained that he was just here washing his hands, as he had “just been in the clean room.” And then he leaves. Of course.
I will find that non-flusher. During my junior year in college, our dorm hall had one, so I left a note above the urinal: “Hey, if you’re not going to flush, why don’t you piss in a cup, and leave it uncovered in your room for a while so you can have the smell all to yourself.” Quite effective.
This evening I was reading a book about stuttering. See, I’ve been doing it for at least twenty years, and I’m getting a bit tired of it. In the section about reducing “avoidances” there’s a story about a man confronting his fears. After ordering breakfast at a cafe that he feared stuttering over, and did [on purpose -- now that's a neat trick], he was pumped up and ready for another challenge. Now, I can admire that. Take life by the horns, face the fear. Yeah. Here’s how he tells it:
“After breakfast I was feeling so good about myself that I decided to tackle the phone[,] which has always been my most feared situation. I wanted to find out when the buses left for Trenton, and ordinarily I might have gone to the bus station rather than the phone. [Perhaps if he had the Internet, he'd not have confronted his fear...] That phone fear is terrible and I hung up twice when they answered before saying a word. I was in such a panic I hardly knew what I wanted to say even if I could have started.”So I sat down, smoked a cigarette, and wrote out the words “When do the buses leave…”
Woah. Wait a second. The guy is trying to overcome his fear, so to relax, he smokes a cigarette? I can see him now: “Yeah, I’m an alcoholic with a failing liver and I have lung cancer. But let me tell ya, I don’t stutter a bit!”
