My story about Eureka is up at [link] if any are interested.

Did someone say that Bush was acting weird? [link]

A photo of Bush with the Japanese PM. Bush's fly is open. Worksafe (thank God!!!).

eta: The picture is worksafe. The rest of the page - perhaps NSM. (The link loads the entire blog, but the link has a # thingie that leaves your browser scrolled to the actually entry. You know what I mean. I think.)

my alarm clock didn't go off, which was bad for shooting up the cat (but not bad enough to worry about)

I swear my diabetic cat now wakes me up to give him his shot. He is totally an insulin addict!

It was so hot in my supposedly air-conditioned office yesterday (85+) that I'm working at home in my unairconditioned but much cooler home today. Hooray for open doors and shady trees and ceiling fans.

My story about Eureka is up at [link] if any are interested.

Heh. Funny aricle.

A photo of Bush with the Japanese PM. Bush's fly is open.

Heh, but as Jon Stewart has shown, in many of the photos of Bush & the Japanese PM it's Bush who comes off as more dignified, amazing as that may seem.

My story about Eureka is up at [link] if any are interested.

I had to send it to my mom, because over the weekend, I was trying to tell her about Archimedes and the bathtub!

At least when Bush is next to Koizumi, he seems like the respectable one.

I swear my diabetic cat now wakes me up to give him his shot. He is totally an insulin addict!

Mine sleeps in the other room, but boy, did I get bitched out when I came out.

Mine sleeps in the other room, but boy, did I get bitched out when I came out

Mine also tries to wake the dog up to give him his shot. He's either not very bright or too smart (because he knows if the dog wakes up I'll get up to walk him as dog is elderly and I can't just ignore him if he thinks it's time to go out). They are all tyrants.

ION Diane Rehm drives me nuts but am too lazy to get up to turn off radio right now.

Revenge of the Language Nerds

Beleaguered linguists find witty champions in Far From the Madding Gerund.

David Foster Wallace once invented an organization called the "Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts" whose members boycott stores with signs reading "10 items or less." It was a joke (from the novel Infinite Jest), but it's not too far-fetched. Eats, Shoots & Leaves, a book that took as its primary subject the misuse of various punctuation marks, became an international best seller a few years ago, and on bookstore shelves today it has plenty of company: Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English; The Grouchy Grammarian; The Dictionary of Disagreeable English; Lapsing Into a Comma, and so forth.

These books tend to be written by prescriptivists—people who would dictate how language should be used. Descriptivists—those who would describe how language is actually used—have rarely had such eloquent (or prolific) spokesmen. As a result, they're often ridiculed. Wallace, who himself is a somewhat militant grammarian, has argued that descriptivism is hopeless as a scientific endeavor: Using what people actually say and write to determine appropriate English usage is, he says, like writing an ethics textbook based on what people actually do. But descriptive linguists have finally found persuasive champions in Mark Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum, who have collected a series of essays from their blog Language Log into a new book, Far From the Madding Gerund.

My story about Eureka is up at [link] if any are interested.

You capitalised my name!