What’s amazing about children (especially mine 🙂 is the joy they extract from our trivialities. C went for groceries last night of course the boys enjoyed helping put them away. B picked up a package of napkins and out he came with a big grin and “Oooh! Naa-kins! Oooh! Naa-kins!”
Month: November 2004
Your word for today is…
FunYour word for today is “vituperate”. It means “To rebuke or criticize harshly or abusively; berate.”
E.g, “If I ever meet the man who designed the PeopleSoft Enterprise One Software (formerly known as JDEdwards OneWorld), I shall bury him in a snow of vituperation.”
On a related note, I’m sure Enterprise One is an outstanding value, especially to manufacturing organisations. But programming it is painful. Hence, I’ve come up with a new nickname for the software, “Number One” (as in, “do you have to go number one or number two?”)
Due to popular demand, we…
SiteDue to popular demand, we have made a full length mp3 cut of Cubicle available on the web site.
Here’s something interesting. I…
ObservationsHere’s something interesting. I visited a website (to remain nameless) that offers movie reviews with a Christian world view in mind and from a parent’s perspective. The reviews do their job in that they shed some light on subject matter that interests me. If I was writing these reviews, I’d write them differently, but it’s not my web site is it? Anyway, we were going to talk about something interesting weren’t we…
Well, in these reviews, you’ll often find a comment on profanity. In one review, the author recapped a few uses of “d— and h—“. It occured to me that Christians often will strike out those words in print or say “the d word”, even though damn and Hell have very specific meanings to the Christian that are important to remember.
The point (in my humbly submitted opinion) is that by deprecating these words — instead of deprecating the misuse of them — we paint them simply as “bad words” rather than as words that have meanings and are good words when used properly. Then, we lose the real meaning of those words. We surrender more of our beautiful language. In the end, we execute a rote search for right and wrong that cannot detect real insidiousnesses.
I may illustrate it this way:
1. Regardless of context, if I say “execrated” or “confounded” you will not take notice. If I say “damned” you will be shocked and tell me to “clean it up”.
2. “Jackass” and “ass” are disagreeable insults in 2004, but “donkey” is not.
Words mean things. We should be aware of those meanings and use the right words. My advice to the movie review web site — spell out damn and Hell and perhaps explain why it’s wrong to use them flippantly.
Went to see The Incredibles…
OpusesWent to see The Incredibles on Saturday. Go see it. Don’t take your children.
And this statement is worthy of repetition: Pixar have proven again that they can do no wrong. The Incredibles is yet another blow from the Pixar wrecking ball to the tired, grey monolith of story-telling mediocrities.
Meanwhile….in a bathroom stall, somewhere…
AnomalismsMeanwhile….in a bathroom stall, somewhere in Wisconsin…
The northern lights were out…
AdventuresThe northern lights were out last night. Haven’t seen them this far south in a while and I don’t now that we would have seen them had we still lived in the city.
I’m back on the cubicle farm. The place is newly remodeled so I have white carpet fibers all over my black pants.
There’s this place where I…
ObservationsThere’s this place where I go to get a cup of coffee sometimes. It’s a coffee shop. Naturally, it’s named after the fashion of the day — “From the Ground Up”. Inside this coffee shop we find a superfluity of odd signage, aged magazine advertisements, and random jetsam.
The jetsam includes a couple of A-Team stickers on the cash register. Both stickers include BA Baracus but the second is the interesting one. In this photo, BA is wearing bibbed overalls and one of the straps has come unsnapped. However, the bib has not slouched over to the snapped side, on account of the gold mass around BA’s neck that extends down to his chest and holds the bib in place!
Voting: Whoah! I stood in…
AdventuresVoting: Whoah! I stood in line last night for 3 hours, 45 minutes. Some people in our town who waited until closing time probably waited 4 and 1/2 hours. Who calculated that 1 registration checker could process 4000 voters in 13 hours?
All in all, it wasn’t a bad time. The night was crisp and still and everyone was in good spirits. The folks in line behind me were voting as a family and they rung up Domino’s Pizza for supper. Furthermore, I’m encouraged that that many people were not going to allow a 4 hour wait to stop them voting.