Thoughts, ideas, tips, musings, and pontifications. . .not necessarily in that order.
By now I’m sure you have heard of the passing of Randy Pausch. I saw his lecture on youtube last October and passed the link on to as many people as I knew. I also told them to have tissues or a hankie nearby. If you have not seen the lecture, please do. If you have not read the book, please do.
Your life will change.
I received this as a spam email today. If anyone knows the author, please let me know. Yes I grew up with english, but I wonder what foreigners think when they undertake learning the language?
“We’ll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes, One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese, You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice, If the plural of man is always called men, If I speak of my foot and show you my feet, If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth, Beware of heard, a dreadful word If teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught? Reasons to be grateful if you grew up speaking English:
1) I did not object to the object. You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language And that is just the beginning
But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes.
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.
Why shouldn’t the plural of pan be called pen?
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
Why shouldn’t the plural of booth be called beeth?
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And how can a slim chance and a fat chance be the
same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?
2) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
3) He could lead if he would get the lead out.
4) Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.
5) The farmer could produce produce.
in which your house can burn up as it burns down,
in which you fill in a form by filling it out,
and in which an alarm goes off by going on.
even though this is the end.”
Think you’ve found or created a new word? Well if you can define it, you can add it to the Merriam-Webster’s Open Dictionary.
poopshmere (noun) : 1. When an organism shmeres its or others poop 2. A mammal that searches for poop for living. 3. A person who gets amused real fast or easily
1) That person’s dog poopshmered its poop all over the ground 2) The poopshmere had worked hard searching everyday and night. 3) My friend Shantay gets really poopshmered sometimes.
Go to the site, add your word and share your discovery.
ClassicReader.com offers a large collection of free classic books by authors such as Dickens, Twain, Shakespeare and many more…320 authors and over 3,000 works of literature. Now I find it uncomfortable reading a book off of a computer screen. A page or two I can handle. More than that and my eyes start giving out and the old noggin’ starts hurting.
But, I use a program called TextAloud which verbalizes the written page. I can listen to a book as I work on other things, or I can save it to an MP3 file and listen to it later in the car. Check it out….and yes, I’m a nerd.
I’ve caught myself looking for information, but not quite sure what I’m looking for. Searching the Internet is an art more than a science. The info eludes me, but I keep searching for word permutations and ideas show up. And when I get lost on the web, I go to my librarian. Remember her? (or him as the case may be, but I always remember the “lady” librarian.) The librarian doesn’t know everything, but she does know how to find just about everything.
Most of you would say, “Google it.” I actually use Yahoo as I find the results more relevant for me. Yagoohoo!gle actually does both for me, but they must of run into lawyers since the name has been changed to Twingine. Dogpile does the same and adds AskJeeves to the mix, but the results are listed in one list rather than side-by-side. And I like Teoma because it provides suggestions on how to narrow my search to get to precisely what I’m looking for. That works only when I know what it is I’m looking for!
As you can see, there is a myriad of search engines, databases and indices available to us. Knowing where to look and how to search, can mean the difference between finding that essential bit of knowledge and getting lost in a bottomless pit of irrelevant information.
I wonder why no one has come up with a “Dewey Decimal System” for the Internet?
Everyone I know has read The Da Vinci Code, the bestseller by Dan Brown. It was released two years ago and has been on the best seller list ever since. I enjoyed the book, but I don’t understand all the hype. I mean there’s the Special Illustrated Edition, the same novel with drawings. It spawned its own cottage industry with add-on books and videos such as The Da Vinci Code Decoded, The Da Vinci Code: Fact or Fiction, The Truth Behind The Da Vinci Code, Breaking The Da Vinci Code, Inside The Da Vinci Code, Secrets of the Code, and many, many more. It’s been featured on prime-time TV news programs, and the Catholic Church denounces it.
This is a novel right? A work of fiction. So what drives people to explain the meaning of the code or to point out factual errors? How does a work of fiction have factual errors? I enjoyed this murder-mystery, but all this spurious talk about church, Jesus, artwork and Leonardo Da Vinci seems to diminish the book for me.
Anyway, happy birthday Da Vinci Code and may you milk it another two years. Oh, and don’t forget to pick up Da Vinci For Dummies.
National Novel Editing Month – one week down, three to go – and I’ve given up! You remember that novel I wrote a couple of months ago during NaNoWriMo? I have not looked at it since then and started to read it in preparation for editing. Wow, what a piece of crap. I quickly began redlining words and sentences, moved on to paragraphs, and finally began butchering entire pages. The last 20,000 words didn’t even make sense.
I’ll keep chipping away, but I think my 50,000 word novel will soon evolve into a 3,000 word essay.
Writer’s Digest has published the Personal Writing magazine. Now that’s not earth-shaking news, they put out special editions all year long. But in this issue there is a short blurb about this blog. Cool! It’s a sidebar called Blog Spot in an article titled Blogged In. So go ahead and stop by your favorite newsstand and take a peek. Let me know if you’d like me to autograph your copy. 
Merriam-Webster Online announced their top ten words of the year based on dictionary searches, and with no surprise, blog is the number one word of the year in dictionary searches. The others:
incumbent
electoral
insurgent
hurricane
cicada
peloton
partisan
sovereignty
defenestration
Well I guess I need to add peloton and defenestration to my vocabulary!
I’ve been voraciously reading all my piled-up books and magazines, making room for all the soon-to-be-here Christmas presents. And of course all that reading makes for a good excuse not to keep up with my writing. I even treat my Christmas shopping as I do writing. . . .putting it off until deadline! What a procrastinator I am. Now I’m snowed in, my 4-wheel Explorer is in the shop getting winterized and brakes checked out, and only one-and-a-half shopping days left. I feel an embarrassing situation arising. Well, at least my reading queue is empty.