"That's not writing - that's typing." --Truman Capote
Hey there – just a quick fundraising note (yes, I know I promised to entertain you all of your days, but honestly? Â I have a paper due tonight at midnight. Â Check back later for entertaining).
The Komen Race for the Cure is less than a month away (June 6) – if you have a couple of bucks to throw to a worthy cause (breast cancer research), please consider supporting me.
Thanks.
I do want to do a follow-up to the hateful phrases post. In the meantime, I would like to say something about nonspecific hateful phrases. Call it a PSA:
Hey! Do you dislike some Thing? Has someone else expressed an appreciation for that Thing? Well, by all means – the most appropriate thing is to crap all over that Thing! Otherwise, how else would anyone know you’re too cool for that Thing! Now go – be scathing! Extra points for using a really limited data set to express how little you know about that Thing!
Sorry all, for the earworm. And no, there are no jolly elves in red suits for this particular non-holiday. It’s just the first full weekend in May, which means Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival.
The weather looks like it’s going to be …not so great. Not like last year, anyway. But that’s okay. We’re not really going for yarn, just for shearling slippers (mine have given up the ghost after about three or four years of constant use and John, poor man doesn’t have any at all). There may be a yarn purchase or two. Maybe. I’m not ruling it out, but I do have something of a yarn shop in my office/studio/cave of exploded projects, and I really don’t need any more.
Stop snickering, you in the back. Do I have to turn this car around?
Anyway, time to go jump on John in a very annoying kid-on-Christmas-morning kind of way.
What follows is a small catalog of annoyance. I am sure I have uttered these words. I am sure those I love have uttered and will utter these words. Those of us who live on the planet are bound to irritate someone at some point. But henceforth, anyone who hears these words uttered around me is going to know what’s going through my head, even if I am sporting a socially correct veneer of facial politeness.
“Doesn’t [person] have anything better to do?”
Blogging, Twitter, Facebook, knitting, reality TV, insert your guilty pleasure here. We all have them, but some killjoy is just dying to make you feel like a fool for your choices. This cute little number is intended to make the target feel like a frivolous, time-wasting moron. On the other hand, I suppose one is to infer that the speaker is a virtuous ascetic who only expends effort to create great beauty or value. Right. Get back to me when you’ve won the Nobel Prize.
It also makes me wonder, “Why do you care so much? What about this activity gets up your nose so much that you feel the irresistible need to sneer?”
I would also venture to guess that the subset of people who are superciliously passing judgment and who have also tried that thing approaches zero in nearly every circumstance (which would tend to account for the fact that speakers of this phrase seem to think that typing out 140 characters a couple of times a day takes So Much Time). Therefore, I shall now respond to all such questions by saying, “No, actually — and don’t you have anything better to do than to make fatuous judgments about stuff you don’t understand?”
“I am the kind of person who…”
This one reminds me of the quote often attributed to Margaret Thatcher, “Power is like being a lady; if you have to tell someone you are, you aren’t.” (I can’t find an authoritative source for this — at least not swiftly). The point is, all too often the quality that follows this statement would rarely be attributed to the speaker by anyone who knows them. It’s almost a guarantee of willful blindness to one’s own personality.
A close cousin to this statement is a manager’s boast that he has an “open door policy.” Generally, this person only has the door open the better to swing it firmly shut on your ass and your ideas.
“I have to be honest with you.”
After hearing this, I always think to myself, “Okay… how many lies did you tell me prior to this statement?”
“Get a life.”
You first.
Got any choice hateful phrases you would like to see banned from polite conversation?
First there was the text-to-speech debacle. I pretty much agree with John Scalzi on the silliness of it all, and yet Amazon both caved to the Author’s Guild on this one and also demonstrated that they maintain a pretty fine level of control over what you’ve already purchased on the device. I am exactly crazy about this idea.
And now this.
Heck with it.
What was Milo doing last night:
1. Experiencing Kundalini shakti
2. Taking an odd sort of nap
3. Hiding his face so he didn’t have to watch “Snakes on a Plane”
You tell me.
So I found out today that one of my photos was used on a Wired Blog post (don’t worry – it’s creative-commons licensed. Happy for them to have it, just wish I had been able to take it with a better camera – I didn’t have the SLR then).
So now I’m posting about a posting that used a photo I posted.
Funny old world.
Do I need to apologize for light posting? I suppose I do. A combination of work-crisis and middle of semester has my thoughts otherwhere these days. So, very sorry if you are expecting great — or even not-so-great, but just regular, thankyouverymuch — thoughts from this space.
So, what to do when one is rather stretched for time? Add another commitment, that’s what! In this case, it’s the Komen 5K Race for the Cure, which I will be doing on June 6. If you care to sponsor me, the link is here — no dance o’ Paypal needed this time, since they use a service to help their runners and walkers collect funds (though the service could use some help on the back end – is it so hard to make the runner or walkers’ links easy to find for said runner or walker? Apparently, yes. Or someone just needs some help with their UI).
ANYway, I need to go off and get in a run while today is sunny so I’m actually in training for this!
And a very big “Happy Easter” for all of my readers who celebrate the holiday.
Today on the Metro, there were a bunch of people all carrying boxed sets of the works of Edward Tufte with handles on top.
It was like a Magritte painting — dozens of people all carrying identical little white briefcases.
Me: Are you using Henry* to drain the cooler?
John: Yeah.
Me: Poor Henry.
John: He volunteered.
Me: He’s a giver, Henry is.
John: Yes, he is.
*All fake turtles in our house are named Henry.
