Mr. Jane knows that if I call him any shmoopy name that's not sweetheart, there's trouble.

There were always attempts at my libraries to set things up - but they kept trying to use hospital codes- which sounded so fake. and the only reason you'd use a code is that you were trying to keep the crazy person from knowing you were calling for help. So we never had them.

David, bookseller #2 thought cover was "hilarious." She thinks it works for that album. Also recognized your name.

At the bookstore, where I work on Saturdays, we are always on the IM. So if a crzy person or somebody shifty is worrying me I can just explain on the IM what is happening to one of the owners and the person doesn't know any better....I still think we should come up with some emergency codes! Like, calling down to the office "Do we have any copies of Crazy Person in the Stacks! in stock?"

Remember that "Left Behind" videogame, where your object is to kill or convert heathens? Remember that the game didn't do so well in the marketplace?

Following massive losses, Left Behind Games has embarked on an executive purge:

Officials from controversial Christian game developer Left Behind Games (Left Behind: Eternal Forces) have announced that senior management at the company have accepted the resignation of senior vice president Jeffrey S. Frichner, with CEO Troy Lyndon also demanding the resignation of the company's other three board members.

The new appointments follow months of controversy over the game, both at Talk to Action and elsewhere. Critics have charged that Eternal Forces is violent, that it promotes a paranoid and hateful worldview, and that even on a technical level the game is a failure: unentertaining and allegedly liable to install spyware.

These attacks have alarmed the Left Behind novels' authors, who have already been so disappointed by the books' movie spin-offs that they had their names removed from Peter Lalonde's flock of low-budget turkeys. In a bid to improve sales of the game among Christians, Jerry Jenkins reassured potential Christian purchasers that the game is "not more violent than the Old Testament"....

"not more violent than the Old Testament" isn't saying much....

[link]

We have codes here. As noted, I'm disappointed that the intended reaction to "person with weapon" is flee. But the reaction to "person causing trouble" is to flock to them. I can see how I could totally get confused. My memory's not that good.

Oh--about the 90 apostrophe s thing--what is the rational for it? It's not replacing any letters, nor indicating a possessive--what else is the apostrophe for, beyond Go'a'uld?

In the column I read in the NYTimes and now can't find, it was about clarifying all-caps headlines, I think. 90S was somehow deemed less clear at a glance than 90'S.

Speaking as an atheist, I think that the whole furor over the Left Behind games is way overblown. I know at least one serious gaming site that gave it a decent review: [link]

I'm not sure why I'm supposed to take the game content more seriously than I would GTA.

Why do I insist on trying to use sites' internal search engine, when Google will find me what I'm looking for? In other words:

As to the question above (and frequently submitted) of why we put apostrophes in decades (the 1960's) and in the plural of some all-capitalized initialisms (DVD’s), the answer is we don't anymore. Phil Corbett, the deputy news editor who is in charge of the stylebook, eliminated those anachronisms last October, with this comment:

Our main reason for using the apostrophe had been to avoid confusion in all-cap heds, but with those heds long since eliminated everywhere but Page One, that rationale is no longer compelling. And the apostrophe annoyed many readers, who thought we were mistakenly using a possessive form instead of a plural.

We hear you, and obey.

[link]

I'm not sure why I'm supposed to take the game content more seriously than I would GTA.

Because they believe it. Okay, that's harsh. But it's being presented as a point of view of the organisation, or at least cannot but be perceived as such by the majority of onlookers.

I don't think the GTA people are all about stealing cars for real.

Somewhat tangentially, if a game came out about shooting random black people, I'd be disturbed. Okay, maybe it's already out--I don't pay much attention to this stuff. Now, if that game came not so much from a gaming house who are all about profit, but from a religious organisation (all about prophets?) or anyone else with an agenda that's not primarily commercial, I'd be wondering how long the decision-makers behind that gem were going to still have their jobs.

we were mistakenly using a possessive form instead of a plural

But they were! Okay, kinda. They picked a typographical symbol with a meaning and didn't expect people to flash on it?