eclecticism

Corrective: Paris Hilton Story:

In a Nov. 13 story, The Associated Press incorrectly reported that Paris Hilton was praised by conservationists for highlighting the problem of binge-drinking elephants in northeastern India. Lori Berk, a publicist for Hilton, said she never made any comments about helping drunken elephants in India.

(via Swirlee)

There are no precise rules about punctuation (Fowler lays out some general advice (as best he can under the complex circumstances of English prose (he points out, for example, that we possess only four stops (the comma, the semicolon, the colon and the period (the question mark and exclamation point are not, strictly speaking, stops; they are indicators of tone (oddly enough, the Greeks employed the semicolon for their question mark (it produces a strange sensation to read a Greek sentence which is a straightforward question: Why weepest thou; (instead of Why weepest thou? (and, of course, there are parentheses (which are surely a kind of punctuation making this whole matter much more complicated by having to count up the left-handed parentheses in order to be sure of closing with the right number (but if the parentheses were left out, with nothing to work with by the stops, we would have considerably more flexibility in the deploying of layers of meaning than if we tried to separate all the clauses by physical barriers (and in the latter case, while we might have more precision and exactitude for our meaning, we would lose the essential flavor of language, which is its wonderful ambiguity)))))))))))).

— Lewis Thomas, Notes on Punctuation

Last week sometime, Prairie and I were flopped in bed, watching some silly sitcom before we faded out for the night. During one of the commercial breaks, we heard the following:

Of course milk comes from cows, but we know that cheese comes from people…

Prairie and I looked at each other with identical horrified and amused expressions, and then spent the next few minutes laughing until our sides ached and our eyes were tearing up. Cheese comes from people? We just couldn’t get past it, and every time we started to calm down, one or the other of us would say, “cheese comes from people!” and we’d start laughing all over again.

The worst part was, we were laughing so hard that we had no idea what the rest of the commercial was about, or who it was for, so since then, we’ve just been hoping to run across the “cheese comes from people” commercial again so that we’d have some idea what they were talking about. Prairie found it last night, and apparently it’s an ad for Kraft cheese…unfortunately, a horribly written ad. This one just slipped right past the editors before it went on the air!

Thankfully, we’re not the only ones amused by this.

Not overheard by me, unfortunately, just too bizarre and funny not to share. This is ganked directly from overheardsea on LiveJournal:

Select lines from a guy having a very long conversation with what I believe was his significant other on his cell phone sitting directly behind me [on the #26 bus]:

“I’m on my way to my brother’s to pick up weed, and them I’m going to get a cat at the Humane Shelter.”

“So last night I went to meet up with that couple I told you about. They’re a gay guy and a tranny girl. The interview went real well. They called me back later that same night and said I was their favorite, so things are looking good there.”

“I’m making dinner tonight with my housemates. No, honey! Honey! I told you I was doing this tonight! Well, we’ll have to play really quickly in the bathroom tonight because I have to be there for the dinner. I love you, too.”

A beautiful opening paragraph from a review of one of my favorite movies, Brazil:

In Brazil, Terry Gilliam asks the audience to imagine a world where the government wages a never-ending war with shadowy terrorists, a world where civil liberties are being destroyed in the name of security, a world where torture becomes official state policy in order to conduct more efficient interrogations of suspected terrorists. What’s more, in Gilliam’s fictional world, the central government is not just secretive but incompetent. Mistakes are made, leading to the imprisonment and torture of innocents. Most offensive of all, Gilliam implies that such a government could exist without its citizens staging an armed revolt. I’m usually willing to suspend disbelief, but this goes too entirely too far.

There’s a long standing theory that Hollywood action movies deliberately play up US urban gang violence…a part of a propaganda effort to persuade foreigners that America is not to be [messed] with. The British equivalent is Faulty Towers and Monty Python, which simply makes people want to stay the hell away in case it’s contagious.

— originally somewhere in this forum thread, via learethak

One of the most common constructs of political speech is what’s technically known as the ‘passive tense,’ which conveys what happened without directly assigning any specific responsibility. For example:

The passive is used when the subject of the verb action is not as important as what happened. Note the difference between

1. He burned down the house. (Active verb)

2. The house was burned down. (Passive verb — who, or what, caused the house to burn down is not known, or is not as important as the fact that it burned down.)

Politicians use this form a lot, as it’s a convenient way to weasel out of why something happened.

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales fell back on a classic Washington linguistic construct on Tuesday when he acknowledged that “mistakes were made” in the dismissals of eight federal prosecutors last year.

The phrase sounds like a confession of error or even contrition, but in fact, it is not quite either one. The speaker is not accepting personal responsibility or pointing the finger at anyone else. It is a construction that other officials, from Richard M. Nixon’s press secretary to Ronald Reagan to John H. Sununu and Bill Clinton, have used when someone’s hand was caught in the federal cookie jar.

While listening to this week’s edition of NPR’s ‘Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!’, I heard mention of a wonderful new term for the passive tense, also mentioned at the end of the just quoted NYT article:

The nonconfessions inspired William Schneider, a political guru here, to note a few years ago that Washington had contributed a new tense to the language. “This usage,” he said, “should be referred to as the past exonerative.”

In an aside to a post about an altercation on a Seattle Metro bus, David Schmader has this to say about the phrase, “I don’t know who I’m supposed to root for….”

It’s nothing really, but the grammatically preferable version of this phrase is “for whom I’m supposed to root,” which is the most hilarious collection of words I’ve encountered since “Academy Award-winning screenwriter Ben Affleck.”

Best comment in the /. thread about JJ Abrams (creator of Lost) coming onboard to direct the next Star Trek movie:

I don’t get it: why is the latest Enterprise the NCC-4 8 15 16 23 42?

The sea squirt has a very simple brain which is used only to find a suitable spot to root itself for life. Once it’s settled into a spot, it no longer needs the brain, so it eats it. This has been compared by at least one Researcher to a professor receiving tenure at a university.

— from Weird Animals

(via eukarya)

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof; and that conviction depends upon evidence, and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. Not from men who feared to write, to associate, to speak, and to defend the causes that were, for the moment, unpopular. This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the results. We proclaim ourselves indeed as we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world. But we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his, he didn’t create this situation of fear, he merely exploited it, and rather sucessfully. Cassius was right: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Good night, and good luck.

— Edward R. Murrow, as portrayed by David Strathairn in George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck

Every time I hear this monologue, it strikes me — and I’m very sure that this was Clooney’s point — just how topical it is. How easy it would be to replace the references to Sen. McCarthy with references to President Bush and have it read just as accurately.

“So, what’cha gonna do now?” Prairie asked as I clicked through the last item in my RSS reader. “You’ve run out of Internet.”

“5D (Fifth Dimension)” by The Byrds from the album Greatest Hits (1966, 2:35).

That was seriously one of the strangest things I’ve ever had in my mouth.

— Prairie, after I convinced her to try tapioca pudding.

She wasn’t impressed. Actually, she didn’t even get through more than two tiny little bites (she says they were spoonfulls, but she barely dented the top of the pudding cup).

Admittedly, it probably didn’t help that part of why she’d never had tapioca before was because her mom detests it, and would involuntarily shudder every time it was mentioned. And, my comparing it to frogs eggs, or holding up a spoon full, looking at it, and commenting that, “It’s like it’s looking at you, with lots of tiny little eyes,” likely wasn’t much in the way of constructive encouragement.

So no more tapioca for Prairie. That’s alright — it’s all the more for me (which in itself is more than a little odd, as I’m pretty picky about what I eat, and texture is an important part of why I like or dislike something, and as Prairie pointed out, from everything she’s seen me enjoy or turn my nose up at, I should be entirely squicked out by tapioca, and yet, I’m rather fond of it…we figure it’s because I’m a boy, and it’s a good “gross out food”).

“Renegade Soundwave (Leftfield)” by Renegade Soundwave from the album In to the Mix (1994, 7:51).

On the way home from school, Prairie and I stopped off at Toys ‘R’ Us to pick out a present for my nephew Noah, who we’ll be seeing this weekend. As we were walking out we passed a coin-operated Winnie the Pooh ‘horsey’-style ride that was playing the Winnie the Pooh theme. Prairie didn’t hear it at first until I started humming along.

As we were driving home, she suddenly turned to me. “Damn you! Winnie the Pooh is stuck in my head!”

I laughed. “It’s not my fault…it was the machine!”

“I didn’t hear the machine. It’s your fault.”

“I had to share the pain,” I protested.

“Some things shouldn’t be shared,” she explained. “The Winnie the Pooh theme is one. It’s a lot like syphilis.”

“Variations on “I Got Rhythm” for Piano and Orchestra” by Orchestre National de l’Opera de Monte Carlo (Edo de Waart) from the album Panorama: George Gershwin (1971, 8:32).

Who knew the government was this in tune with today’s marketplace?

> The government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression. They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod.

— Pres. George W. Bush, during a speech at Tuskegee University

(via The Cult of Mac and Engadget)