John Petrie’s LifeBlag

My brother told me about the web page Symphony of Science, where its proprietor, John Boswell, mixes the voices of famous scientists (e.g., Carl Sagan, Michio Kaku, Richard Feynman) with an autotuner and puts them over R & B–style music. You should check it out.

I have seasons 1–5 of South Park on DVD, and I don’t ever plan on buying any more because every episode is available for free 24/7 at its official website, southparkstudios.com. I know there is abundant evidence that giving something away for free actually increases its sales, but I at least understand the basis of where the RIAA is coming from. I won’t pay a penny for South Park as long as it is available on demand for free.

One of the worst things Amazon.com has ever done is lump the reviews and ratings of the DVD version and the Blu-ray version of every single movie together, so that you can’t tell whether someone’s review and star-rating refers to the DVD version or the Blu-ray version, unless they state they’re reviewing the Blu-ray version specifically. What idiot thought of that? I can’t imagine the level of stupidity required to approve of that idea at multiple levels of management in the Amazon company hierarchy. It is inconvenient, counterintuitive, and simply inaccurate because the two different products are, um, different products!

So, it turns out my TV is a hell of a lot sweeter than I had ever thought. It is a Samsung SlimFit high-definition television. It is capable of displaying 720p and 1080i video. It’s only 30 inches diagonally, and it’s a cathode ray tube TV, so it isn’t as awesome as the larger TV I’m going to buy next summer, but, hey, that means it has a higher pixel density. I found this out because Kathy got me a Blu-ray player for Christmas, and I hooked it up to an HDMI port in the back of my TV (hmm, that should have made it obvious to me that it was an HDTV, but it never occurred to me), and it plays Blu-ray movies in very nice quality. I tried out my new Blu-rays of Star Trek: First Contact and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and I’m pretty sure they looked as awesome as they could on a 30″ TV. Maybe a new LCD (or plasma, if they existed at 30 inches) would show an improvement over my 3-year-old TV, but the Wikipedia articles on plasma displays and LCD screens indicate that, other things being equal, CRT produces the best picture in terms of color accuracy, sharpness, and blur. (The problem is, other things aren’t ever equal, not anymore.) However, CRT picture quality fades a lot sooner than the flat-panel displays, so I’m sure mine doesn’t look as good as it used to in high-definition. Those two movies looked really awesome, though; you could tell the source and the display were both high-definition.

I began to suspect that my TV was capable of playing video at some level of high definition (either 720 or 1080 vertical resolution) the night before I discovered it for sure, as I was reading my TV’s manual for probably the second time. I don’t remember reading a lot of it when I got it in August 2006. I think I was reading it to determine if it might be possible for me to use my TV’s remote control for both the TV and the Blu-ray player (both Samsung). I know it’s possible to use the Blu-ray player’s remote to control the TV, but I don’t think it’s possible to change the picture’s aspect ratio/zoom with the Blu-ray remote, and I’ll need this for watching regular TV content that is widescreen because I don’t have high-definition cable, so most things are 4:3, so I have to zoom in on a widescreen program to avoid having black bars on the sides and top and bottom. It might be possible, but first I’ll need to figure out how to navigate my TV’s menus with the Blu-ray controller; all it can do so far is power-off, power-on, and change the volume, channel, and input source.

Well, fuck you, you fucking Redditors! I submitted this article from the Daily Mash (Britain’s Onion), about how Santa hates ginger kids, to Reddit, thinking at least a few of them would get a kick out of it, especially since it is reminiscent of a glorious South Park episode. But, no, I went to check on it a day or two later and saw that it had a score of 0, meaning one more person down-voted it than up-voted it (it starts with a score of 1 upvote—yours—so its vote-score at a given time is the number of other upvotes minus the number of downvotes, plus 1). Probably one loser down-voted it and no one else liked it enough to vote. That person was probably a red-headed abomination himself, goddamned ginger motherfucker, I’d like to bash his face in…

Ahh, I don’t know why, but I found these pretty funny: rejected Mortal Kombat fatalities. Here’s the first one:

Also, see the 2nd one and the 3rd one.

John’s new favorite video of the month (possibly of the year, after some more contemplation) is this mashup of clips from dozens of TV shows and movies edited into a catchy electro-pop music video.

When I heard that Pedro Martinez would start game 2 of the World Series for the Phillies at Yankee Stadium, I was excited to watch it, preferably with my other baseball-following friends. You can read a nice summary of Pedro’s relationship with the Yankees here and see the famous September 2004 press conference sound bite where he called the Yankees his daddies here:

After that press conference, the Red Sox ended up facing the Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series. That series is one of the most famous postseason baseball series because the Red Sox came back from a deficit of 3 games to none to win the series, 4-3. That’s the only time in MLB history that a team has won a series after being down 3-0. I never thought I’d see it happen. (It happened twice in the NHL and still hasn’t happened in the NBA). It was also famous for the two appearances Pedro made in Yankee Stadium, in which the Yankees’ organ player and 50,000 fans combined to rouse Pedro with their famous “Who’s Your Daddy?” chant. It started in game 2 when Pedro started and lost, and it continued in game 7, also at Yankee Stadium, when Pedro came in for two innings of relief with his Red Sox up 8-1. He didn’t pitch very well in that outing, either, giving up two runs before settling down and keeping his team up by a comfortable margin.

I tried as hard as I could to find a video of one of those two outings so you could hear the chant resonating through Yankee Stadium, but thanks to the idiots at Fox, it is surely unavailable to the human race forever. But if you’re not familiar with it, imagine what a chant of “Let’s go, Yankees!” would sound like, with the organ going, “Dun dun da-da-dun,” in between the chants, going up an octave each time, but the fans were shouting, “Who’s your daddy!” instead. It sounds just like the “OVER-RATED” chant.

I did manage to find a fan’s video of the “Who’s your daddy!” chant at Yankee Stadium this past Thursday when Pedro pitched for the Phillies in game 2 of the 2009 World Series. I’m sure this video doesn’t do it justice. It must have been louder than that, coming from every corner of the stadium. I couldn’t hear an organ, either, which gave it a nice, old-fashioned baseball touch in 2004.

I didn’t hear the chant on TV myself because I went downtown to watch the game at Bar Louie with five of my friends. It was a lot of fun watching it with them and all of us cheering for the Phillies. Pedro pitched well in Yankee Stadium for the first time since at least 2004, but he still lost because A.J. Burnett pitched better.

I wore my new red Detroit Red Wings hat because I wanted to wear a reddish hat that was close to the dark red of the Phillies to show my support for them that night. That sounds kind of lame because they aren’t even close to the same team, and Philadelphia fans, in fact, hate the Red Wings, but it’s the gesture that counts. (My red Georgia hat feels too tall and awkward on me, so I don’t wear it anymore, and it’s a brighter red than the flimsy, pre-faded, worn-out-looking Red Wings hat that I bought anyway.) However, my Red Wings hat came in handy in a very unexpected way. Near the end of our night there, after we had finished our meals and most people had finished their drinks, the waitress came over and said the bartender wanted to give us a free round of shots because I was wearing a Red Wings hat! Ha! We obviously laughed in disbelief about that. But not in front of the waitress. I’m not even a good Red Wings fan. I’ve never been to a game, I only watch them occasionally, and I only know their famous players. I jumped on their bandwagon and bought a hat so I could wear it to softball next year and because I couldn’t find a new copy of my flimsy, worn-out-looking Braves hat (which is smelly and dirty from wearing during softball). The shots were the bartender’s own creation, the first time he’d ever made it. I forgot what he called it, but I think it had triple sec and some kind of blueberry syrup in the bottom. We all agreed it was good.

These are some of my favorite examples of technological impairment from the Parents Just Don’t Understand articles at CollegeHumor.com. The best ones are the ones you could never, ever make up.

My mom asked to see my pictures on Facebook. I thought about all the drinking pictures that are on it and then I thought about my mom’s computer skills. So I said, if you can find them by yourself, sure. I came back 5 minutes later and she had an empty Microsoft word document up. I think I’m safe.

Instead of using the kitchen timer option on the microwave to time whatever she’s baking, my Mom turns on the microwave and lets it run for the hour or so she’s baking something.

My girlfriend’s dad typed a huge letter out on the computer. After he was done, he printed it and decided the font was too small, so he erased the whole thing, changed the font size, and retyped it.

My mother claimed she could not read my latest email because her printer was broken.

My dad uses the word “video” every time he searches for something on Youtube.

My dad works from home, and often needs to receive updated blueprints. His office has now given him 2 different computers which I set up, and he refuses to turn on. Instead of including him on emails, they have to print their emails and fax them to him. In an odd twist the younger interns in the office had to spend 8 hours on a training day to learn to use a fax machine.

I sent my father a long Google link to a photo, and he proceeded to print out the actual web address. He thought the printer would “decode the link” and turn it into a photo.

I work in a small computer shop in my town. One day a woman walks in, and tells me she has a problem with her computer, that it has broken. I then ask her the problem and she shows it to me and describes her situation. She told me that she had been online, ordering something off the net, when she had put her card in and it hadn’t done anything, just got stuck. Naturally assuming it was something to do with the machine i start booting it up and examine things, this is when she asks me “can you get the card out first please,” curious i asked what she meant. It had turned out that with her limited computer knowledge that she had managed to go online, start ordering items, get to the checkout and wanting to pay with a credit card, she had push her card into the floppy drive. She never came back to the store, but did have to order a new floppy drive.

My cousin, who is my age, recently found a bunch of pictures of us when we were really little and she told my mom. My mom then called me and said “Leanne found some pictures of you two from a long time ago and is going to tag you on facebook, whatever that means. I guess you’re it.”

I bought my mom a new laptop for her birthday. As I’m showing it to her I explained that she needed a power outlet converter because the cord has the ground plug while none of her outlets have the ground inlet. At this point she stops and looks really confused. When I asked what was wrong she said, “Why do I have to plug it in. I thought it was wireless.” I explained that the wireless part is for the internet, but she needs to plug it in for power and to charge her battery. Her response: “So, what’s the difference between the internet and power?”

While my grandpa went online to manage his bank account, there was a box that read “sign here.” He either scrolled down the screen a few times or there was more than one box…his name and initials were written about three different times on the monitor. In ink.

My mom thought that an iPod worked like a cassette player. When I heard her complain that she had to listen to songs she really didn’t like on her playlist to get to the ones she wanted to hear, I suggested she just take those songs off her playlist. She replied with, “Well then I’ll just have to listen to 3 minutes of silence until the next song comes on.”

You know the little image with the wavy letters that sites use to make sure you’re not a robot? It can also be used to make sure you’re not my mom. I have to fill them out for her.

My dad doesn’t know how to send me e-mails. Instead, he just uses the customization feature on stuff like e-cards. I recently got an e-card of a cute kitten with the message “I transferred $100 into your account”.

Our printer ran out of ink, so my Mom bought a new printer.

My grandma kept complaining about how she couldn’t get her new alarm clock to stop displaying 12:00. I went up to her room and took the sticker off of the display screen.

My high school Spanish teacher, on multiple occasions, has been known to photocopy blank pieces of paper in order to get more blank pieces of paper. She’s completely oblivious to the fact that you can open the copier to take out the paper.

My mom thinks Google’s “Suggestions” are the only options available. If she’s trying to find something and it doesn’t come up in the suggestions, she’ll say, “Sorry, it’s not on the internet.”

My dad called me to ask about removing a virus from his computer. Somewhere in the middle of the instructions, he interrupted me to ask, “Are computer viruses man-made, or are they like real viruses?”

My mom was once using my desktop to check her email while I was away at school. I got a frantic phone call that afternoon because the mouse was at the edge of the mousepad but the “thingy” wasn’t at the edge of the screen.

I had fairly bad eyesight for most of my life, so I ended up getting Lasik eye surgery as soon as I was old enough and had enough money. My mom apparently never heard of this procedure, so she was amazed when I told her about it, and is now always asking me how many fingers she is holding up while she is right in front of me, and if I can see the license plate of cars that are up to a mile away. She also tells all of her friends about my amazing “super laser vision”.

I was watching “Jurassic Park” with my grandmother a few months ago. During one particularly scary moment she leans over to me and, with a very worried tone in her voice, asks, “The Dinosaurs…they’re only for the movie, right, they didn’t breed any extras?”

I was in a very dimly lit restaurant with my parents and I asked my mom what time it was. She took out her brand new iPhone (which has the time displayed in huge digits on the screen) and used it like a flashlight to read the time on her watch.

When my parents got the internet, I spent hours explaining how to type in a web address, but my dad still doesn’t understand that it has to be a real website to work. When I look at the previous addresses they read, “www.golfcoursesnearmyrtlebeach.com” or “www.insurancepoliciesforseniors.com”.

My dad got a cell phone a few months ago, but he never turns it on. He thinks that you get charged for every minute the phone is on.

I told my parents I wanted the new MacBook for school. Two weeks later I received “Macs for Dummies” in the mail.

My parents don’t have a debit card. Anytime they need cash, they make out a check to cash and go into the bank.

My mother has never sent, nor attempted to send me a text message ever before. Earlier today, I inexplicably found this waiting for me on my phone: “We r on ca nif eigh six mail gmom”. Anyone want to take a crack at what she meant to say?

My friend just got a text message from her mom that said: “What day do you come home question mark”

A friend of mine found a cell phone. She called the owner of the phone’s parents to see if they could get the phone back to their daughter. Five minutes after she got off the phone, a text message came through from the girls dad saying “Lizzy, some girl found your phone…call her at ***-***-**** to get your phone back”

I’ve worked at an internet company for about a year. One day, a lady called and told me her computer wouldn’t turn on no matter what she did. I said “Ok, can you look at the back of the computer and make sure the power cable is plugged in.” She responded, “Just give me a second, I have to find a flashlight because the power is out here at my house.”

My 75-year-old grandfather just bought a laptop so he could learn to use the Internet. I got an empty email from him yesterday, and the subject heading was, “Andrew what does it mean when it asks ‘are you sure you want to send an empty message’ when i click on the send button??? —-love grandad”

Every time my dad wants to check his email, he goes to Google, types in www.hotmail.com, hits search, and clicks on Hotmail. He recently told me he discovered a shortcut—he can just hit “I’m Feeling Lucky.”

My grandma always reminds me to turn my GPS off a few blocks before I get home “so that the man giving me directions doesn’t know where I live.”

Whenever my mom doesn’t feel like answering the phone and lets the machine get it, she makes everyone be really really quiet because she thinks that the person calling can hear us while they’re leaving a message.

My boss thinks that Google is slang for find. Just this week, I’ve heard him tell our interns to google old documents in our file cabinets, google meeting minutes saved on our server, and google some sugar packets for the coffee bar.

Mom’s Text Message: “Can u go 2 niketown to buy a Pacquia shirt 4 dad size lrg? B careful swine flu.”

My mother got my father a GPS for Christmas. He told me the reason why it wasn’t working in the house was because it couldn’t see the stars.

My dad thinks that he can only check an e-mail account on the computer he made it on. Therefore, he checks his work e-mail in his office and his personal e-mail on our house computer. It wouldn’t be that bad, but he works at home and those two computers are about 20 feet apart….

My mom has a contact in her cellphone named “?.akj.e0″

I showed my dad the BustedTee with Mao Tse Tung on it that reads, “LMAO” and he didn’t get it because he doesn’t know what LMAO means. I showed it to my mom, and she didn’t get it because she doesn’t know who Mao Tse Tung is. Which is worse?

My mom just got a Facebook account a few weeks ago and on Valentine’s Day she posted on my wall:”I HOPE YOU ENJOY YOUR VD!!!”

My grandma cannot grasp the functional purpose of a thermostat. She cranks it up when its cold, then proceeds to regulate the heat by opening and closing the windows.

I made the mistake of trying to explain Wikipedia to my grandmother. She’s now convinced that anybody can modify any website at will, and she won’t use Weather.com anymore because she’s worried that vandals will change the temperature on her.

I caught my father on google the other day typing in “show me snow machines”. I later found out that he starts any and all searches with the words “show me”, or “I want to see”.

My mom needed to transfer pictures from her digital camera onto her computer. After a few minutes, she was hopeless and asked me for help. I took out the memory card and put it in the computer. Nothing was on it. I hooked up the camera to the computer, but still, there were no pictures. Finally, I had to ask my mom what she had tried before she asked me for help. She put the camera’s batteries in the mouse.

My professor has tried to show different DVD’s in class for the past 4 weeks. She couldn’t get any of them to work so tonight she decided she was just going to show a VHS tape because “it’s simple and I know how to work it.” It took her 20 minutes to get it to show on the projector. Now she’s trying to turn the volume on. Class ends in 10 minutes.

While my mother was looking over my shoulder at an AIM conversation:
Mom: “What does LMAO mean?”
Me: “It’s an abbreviation”
Mom: “Let’s Make An Omelette”?

A few years ago my mom tried to call my brother and reached his voice mail. She left a 2-minute message calling out for him to pick up the phone, as if it was being played through his speaker phone.

The other day I was at work and an older lady came in and wanted to buy Firefox. I explained to her that Firefox was a free download. I then told her to find it by going to Google and searching for it. She told me, “I don’t have Google; I only have Yahoo.”

I was showing my mom how to get pictures from her camera to her computer. I told her to click on the desktop icon which she clicked once. I told her you have to double-click and she said, “Is that where you click something twice?”

My dad makes the subject for all of his emails “Hi, It’s Mitch.”

My mom sent me an email with the subject as my cell phone number. The email said “Is this a text?”

My mom deleted friends off Facebook in an attempt to free up her hard drive space.

I just saw an old guy working out with a discman inside a fanny pack.

My mom just got a new cell phone. She was setting up her voicemail on it and wanted to see if she did it correctly so she asked me to call her. I called her phone and she picked up so I told her to just let it go to voicemail. She said OK. I called back and she picked up again. This happened two more times until I took the phone away from her.

One time I opened a Firefox window, minimized it to look at something else, and then brought it back up again. My mom freaked out and yelled, “You just wasted twenty dollars!” “Huh?” I eloquently replied. “It costs twenty dollars every time you open up The Internet,” she continued. “Our plan costs twenty dollars.” I assured her that this was a monthly charge, but she remained unconvinced. She demanded that I repay her $20 for “wasting The Internet,” and then reminded me to “turn it off as soon as you’re done with it, we don’t want to use more than we absolutely need.”

I tried to teach my grandmother basic computer skills, but I wasn’t able to get anywhere with her because she kept rotating the mouse on the mouse-pad. She thought you had to steer it like a car when you wanted the pointer to go someplace.

My grandfather literally used the screen as a mousepad because he thought the cursor was controlled by the mouse being on the screen.

My dad has a Zune.

The only worthwhile thing that Fark.com has given me in a long time is this discussion thread about this completely pointless, worthless, empty news article. This thread is comedy gold. The comments posted below the article itself were hilarious until the newspaper’s mods deleted all of them. If you read the Fark thread, you can find some of the funnier comments that they copied and pasted from the article’s comments section (most of which were undoubtedly written by Farkers).

Link of the day: The Parents Just Don’t Understand series from CollegeHumor.com. Some of the items therein are truly hilarious.

I just finished reading the Ender quartet by Orson Scott Card. It is so awesome. It is kind of weird that I finished it now because I started it in my third year of college when I read Kelly’s copy of Ender’s Game. A few years later, after I moved to Michigan, I bought Speaker for the Dead but never got around to reading it, until sometime in mid-August when I started it on a whim. I had decided to start reading some of the numerous unread novels that I had accumulated over the years, and I started with Don’t Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk. I began with that one because it had a good reputation for being a funny novel, and it was an intriguing enough portrait of life in the Caribbean that Jimmy Buffett made an off-Broadway musical about it, and the senior scientist at my NIH lab highly recommended it, so I had thought about reading it for a while.

However, it turned out not to be that funny and not really fascinating, either. I suppose it was well-written and the characters were somewhat interesting, and I got a little bit of a flavor of what life was like on this fictitious Caribbean island. But all the trials and tribulations that the main character suffers through in the purchase and management of his new hotel/restaurant/bar were more frustrating and stressful than funny.

Next was an Agatha Christie novel, which was very clever, as usual. I have a lot of those still to read, and they’re short, so I felt both interested and obligated to read one of those.

After that, though, I knew I wanted a clever and thought-provoking science-fiction novel. Over the last few months, glancing at my bookshelf, some of the novels I considered reading were Bruce Sterling’s saga about the future technology and space colonization of the human race, Schismatrix; Dan Simmons’s beloved, epic, Hugo-winning novel Hyperion; Ursula K. LeGuin’s story of an anarchist utopia of sorts, The Dispossessed; and Connie Willis’s Hugo- and Nebula-winning novel about time-travel, Doomsday Book. I have also long wanted to dive into two large books I own, a collection of Harlan Ellison‘s short stories and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which also came highly recommended by the aforementioned NIH labmate.

However, somehow that afternoon I was drawn to Speaker for the Dead and grabbed it first. I am really glad I did because it is awesome in every way. It picks up a considerable time after Ender’s Game, and I had forgotten a lot of the details of Ender’s Game, apparently. I remembered a lot of stuff about Battle School, and his siblings publishing essays under the pseudonyms Locke and Demosthenes, and the little holographic instant messages the students used to send each other, and of course the most important plot points. But a lot of things Ender does after Battle School that Orson Scott Card mentions in the other novels were news to me. Maybe they weren’t actually included in Ender’s Game and we’re supposed to learn this history as we go. Like the good and bad aspects of the Hegemon, who the Hegemon even is, and Ender’s exile from planet Earth for the rest of his life (which is the subject of a new and enticing novel). Some things that must have been featured prominently in Ender’s Game that I had completely forgotten, however, were the ansible, Ender’s killing of two Battle School mates partially in self-defense, and the significance of those dreams Ender kept having about that giant.

Maybe since I had forgotten so much about Ender’s Game, I’m not in a position to make quality judgments about the novel, but nevertheless I would say Speaker for the Dead is an equally good novel. I just loved it. The plot was fascinating, the science-fictional aspects that Card invented like the pequeninos and the descolada were clever, and Ender’s ability to deal with people and understand and love and heal them is just perfect.

Within a day of finishing that, I went to Barnes & Noble and bought the second half of the quartet of novels, Xenocide and Children of the Mind. I loved those almost as much and agreed with the blurb on the back of the latter that described the Ender novels as “a saga of the ethical evolution of humanity”. The main point of each novel, it seems, was to use science-fiction to explore ethical dilemmas that humans and even other species might face.

When I read Ender’s Game I credited Card with inventing or at least successfully predicting the future nature of instant messaging and blags/discussion forums. I don’t know what other authors might have made similar or different predictions that influenced him, though.

I found it very coincidental that today’s xkcd comic was about Ender’s Game and its blag-like ansible forums.

So if you haven’t read any of the Ender books or you were stuck on one for a long time like I was, get out and buy Speaker for the Dead today!

Check out Michael Bach’s amazing and expansive collection of optical illusions. Some of them will undoubtedly be familiar to you from your youth, and you’ve probably also seen a couple of the more sophisticated ones on computers more recently. But they’re all fascinating and worth perusing for an hour or two. He introduces his site thusly:

“Optical illusion” sounds pejorative, as if exposing a malfunction of the visual system. Rather, I view these phenomena as bringing out particular good adaptations of our visual system to standard viewing situations. These adaptations are hard-wired in our brains, and thus under some artificial manipulations can cause inappropriate interpretations of the visual scene. As Purkinje put it: “Illusions of the senses tell us the truth about perception.”

You can click on his first one and then keep clicking “Next” to browse through all of his illusions, or you can keep returning to his list to pick and choose which ones to visit. I recommend the former method. If you’re short on time, or lazy, or impatient, I’ll tell you my three favorite: the lilac chaser, the spiral aftereffect, and my favorite optical illusion of all time, Ted Adelson’s checker-shadow illusion.

I’ve thought of myself as a pretty good writer since I was in elementary school, having been told several times throughout my life by people worth listening to that I had a talent for it. I just haven’t had any training in writing since 12th grade—writing, that is, for the general public on topics like history, culture, sociology, political science…you know, things you might write an English or History essay about—I have had plenty of training in scientific writing and, much to my pleasure, I have mostly excelled at that.

But sometimes I’ll read an essay online at a blag or a magazine that strikes me as very professional, very analytical but accessible, very thorough but easy to get through, and formal without being pretentious. The individual sentences and paragraphs are phrased well and the entire article is organized and flows well. They make their point convincingly without seeming biased or like they had to try overly hard to make it. I say, “I want to write like that. That’s professional writing by a well-trained and -practiced person who doesn’t let their love of their own writing get in the way of the content.”

The two main aspects of people’s writing that I see often on the internet that highlight their lack of writing talent are: bad grammar and punctuation (obviously), and over-use of florid language and fancy words. Being bombastic. I can spot a mediocre writer who’s trying to impress people with his/her allegedly fancy writing skillz from a mile away. Writing well rarely means using complex sentences or SAT words, and when those are involved they are few and far between. Everyone should take Louisa May Alcott’s motto to heart: Never use a large word when a small one will do just as well. No, this doesn’t mean you have to write like Hemingway, but Hemingway is better than Faulkner.

Sandra Tsing Loh is a perfect example of this type type of writing fallacy. Contrast the aforementioned professional writers who impress me and make me want to write like them to this self-absorbed, pretentious douchebagette who writes for The Atlantic. (I italicized that not only because it’s the title of the publication but also for emphasis: this pompous hack who is in no way, shape, or form a better writer, a better social critic, or a better person than you or me writes for the fucking ATLANTIC monthly. If she can do it, I sure as hell could.)

I first heard of this Sandra Tsing Loh character from Fark.com, where a recent article of hers made the main page and was commented on extensively. First, read the article and then read the comments from Farkers. At least some of them. Go on, do it.

Okay, now that you agree with me and them, I can quote a couple Farkers who hit the nail on the head in the discussion thread:

“Oh my LORD that woman is in love with herself and her vocabulary. I love big words and intelligent writing but I wanted to punch her in her martini-swilling face.”

“Ughh. I honestly tried to read that, but it was like eating five pounds of potatoes. The first paragraph or two were okay, but halfway through I felt nauseated and bloated and I couldn’t continue.”

“I got about 1/3 down the page before my brain just couldn’t parse anymore.

That essay is an abuse of language that should be punishable by waterboarding.

You torture us, we torture you. Now put down the Thesaurus and get back in your cave.

/Oh yeah, and the essay contents weren’t any better”

Yeah, the comments on the substance of Loh’s article were more insightful and important, in the grand scheme of things, than the comments about the writing style, but I’m writing about writing right now, all right? Lastly: this Fark.com thread does some good to dispel my impression of Farkers as bitter, hateful, spiteful, religion-hating, government-loving zealots who would scarcely be more pleasant in real life than they are in anonymous discussion threads. They still wouldn’t recognize a property right if it smacked them in the face, but they sure can hit the nail on the head about some relationship/sexual/social issues.

Here’s a blast from the past: I have these classic Bush–Gore debates from Saturday Night Live on my computer, and since NBC, in its infinite wisdom, calculated that it was in its best interest to limit its own presence on the internet and greatly reduce the amount of its own shows that fans can watch, they are no longer available online. So I uploaded them to my web space and you can watch them here. In case they don’t load or play right, I also provide the link to each file:

Bush–Gore 2000 first debate (.flv file)

Bush–Gore 2000 second debate (.mpeg file)

A link on MSN.com today read, “‘Star Trek’ tech isn’t light years away.” It goes to this slideshow of technological gadgets that might not be as futuristic and fantastical as we think when we see them in TV shows and movies. The introduction to the slideshow says the “gadgetry of Star Trek should appear light years ahead of today’s technology.”

When did people get so dumb? Hey, scientifically illiterate science writers and MSN homepage authors: How do you know Star Trek technology isn’t “light years away”? Maybe that technology does exist in some alien society in a far-away solar system. Are you sure that the technology doesn’t exist at some location that far away? How do you know this? If not, why do you insist that it isn’t light years away?

Idiots.

Today’s headline that needs no re-phrasing to make it into a double entendre:

Hooker named Indoor Athlete of the Year

Misspelling the word “definitely” is definitely my new pet peeve of the month. True, most of my pet peeves involve grammar or punctuation, so this is nothing special, but where did all these people get the idea all of a sudden that “definitely” has an A in it? I’m sure I had seen that spelling once or twice before in my life, but nothing to annoy me like it does now. It’s all over the place—emails, discussion forums, blags. Get with it, people! I don’t even want to type out the incorrect spelling because enough injustice has been done to the word already and I don’t want to supply any additional instances of that spelling for anyone’s brain, contributing to their subconscious impression that it’s spelled like that!

Turns out those Facebook badges are extremely lame. I thought I would like having a Facebook badge in the right column of this web page, containing my profile picture, my current status, and my network(s). Maybe you’ve seen them on other people’s blags and web pages. I got the idea from Timoguapo van Swanson at movementarian.com. I created a Facebook badge (the link for which is near the bottom of the left column of your Facebook profile page), copied the HTML code it gave me, and pasted it where I wanted it in my sidebar.php WordPress file.

There are two problems with the Facebook badge. First, your whole status can’t even fit in the damn badge unless it is particularly short. And, I mean, statuses can’t even be that long to begin with, so Facebook already knows the maximum number of characters a status can contain, so why can’t they write the damn code to allow the badge to accommodate any status in full? Second, and far more important, the badge is just a static picture that never changes on its own. It’s like a snapshot or a screen grab. It doesn’t communicate with Facebook or update itself every time you log in. It displays the picture and status that it contained when you first created it, always. If you change your profile picture, status, or any other information you chose to include in your badge, you have to create a new badge and re-paste the HTML where it belongs, if you want your badge to reflect your current Facebook information. I personally wouldn’t want a badge that didn’t do so. I can insert a JPEG and text into a PHP file on my own. So I’m not really clear on the point of Facebook badges. I removed mine. They’re just stupid.