MeMo

June 25, 2010

Friday roundup: a book, a brush, a brain, a song

1. Book you should read: Pandora's Seed by Spencer Wells.

Or read the version Wordsworth wrote.

2. Genius idea du jour: A toothbrush that stands up by itself. (from robot wisdom)

3. Completely demented mapping of the interconnectedness of other TV shows to St. Elsewhere. In other words, every show you ever saw, pretty much, took place in Tommy Westphall's little brain. (found on themorningnews.org)

4. The one thing the world didn't have until now: a song celbrating the vuvuzela!

Posted by Kyrie at 02:45 PM in bits and pieces | Comments (4)
Share:

June 24, 2010

Words that make writers look lazy

Oh, this is great: overused words and terms that journalists and decent people should avoid in writing, from Delia Cabe. are listed here.

This list includes some of my all-time favorite non-faves, such as "bespectacled" and "leafy suburb". Lord, these give me hives.

It does not, however, include some of my other most-hated, always-edit-out words and phrases.

Herewith:

• The verb "battle" in connection with cancer. Even worse: Joe Itch "lost his battle with cancer." Seriously, does this reaching for the cliche on the nearest shelf do honor to a life? Nope.

• Downright. It's filler.

• Share a laugh. React. These appear in photo captions. Why can't people just laugh? And if they're reacting, how are they reacting?

• Fake folksiness. This is, I admit, more a category than one phrase. But if you are, in anything but a casual note to a friend, going to use "wanna" or "gotta" or "gonna" ... don't. Oh, and even then, "gotta" is a version of "got to", not "got a".

A subcategory of this is fake contractions. "Can't" and "isn't" are in common usage. But years ago I used to edit a writer who kept trying to sneak the contraction "who're" -- for "who are" -- into her copy. That's a prostitution of the language!


Posted by Kyrie at 08:23 AM in language | Comments (21)
Share:

June 23, 2010

Where's MeMo this time? Part One.

Not the usual, and that's all I'll say. Except: As usual, a prize for the first best.

i/

Posted by Kyrie at 06:23 PM in Where's MeMo? | Comments (8)
Share:

June 22, 2010

Should you, a man, offer your seat to a woman? In 2010?

Matty B challenged me to have an opinion on this topic: Should a grown man offer a seat to a woman?

Here is what the writer of the post says, in part:

When you're sitting anywhere and a woman enters your space with the obvious intent to sit, look around the area and see if there's a free seat. If there is, don't do anything (something you're already a pro at). If there isn't an obvious chair for her to sit in, GET UP and politely offer her your seat.

While the post should end here and you should just trust me and do it, I feel as though I must take a moment to explain why. However, I don't really know why.

Of course this gent goes on to offer some reasons, but they kind of boil down to: It's what real men do.

I can elaborate, but with special prior emphasis on what this writer says about women not being helpless. It's true: We're not feebs and we can indeed stand.

Some is common sense. Man or woman, you offer a seat to anybody who is in worse shape than you: the pregnant woman, the guy carrying a heavy load, the elderly. In Paris, the Metro for many years designated preferred seating to the war-wounded.

But given equal health and no 50-lb. sacks of potatoes, why offer a seat to a woman?

Years ago, I would have said, well, don't, as a rule. But then I lived in a part of the country where some categories of manners are not enforced. That's fine, if those are the rules.

Here, it's different, and I have to say I like it -- liked it instantly, in fact. I liked having doors opened, elevators held, walking down the sidewalk with a guy who -- even though nobody is tossing offal out an upstairs window -- insists on walking on the outside.

I can't intellectually justify this, except that it reinforces respect, real ingrained respect, for those (women) who are not inferior in any way except upper-body strength and the ability to rotate three-dimensional objects in their minds, and who are superior in certain ways, such as verbal acuity and ability to multitask. It's a reminder that might doesn't make right and that some woman blew the better part of a year bringing you into the world.

It's just nicer all around, and that's not a reason, but it is a result.

Posted by Kyrie at 09:27 AM in men and women | Comments (105)
Share:

June 21, 2010

In which I long for the Apocalypse

I got into one of my apocalyptic moods this weekend (again) and decided I really wanted to hole up out in the country with six months' worth of tuna and rice, a bunch of seeds, a few chickens and a shotgun (no shot, however -- that would scare me).

Also, until those end times arrive, I would very much like to eat out a lot and have DirecTV.

Then I noticed, but could not bring myself to watch, an infomercial for something called the Dogpedic Sleep System and I decided the end times are going to arrive sooner rather than later. Dogpedic Sleep System? I've never encountered an insomniac dog.

But rather than just rant -- although that's my inclination -- I looked up the Dogpedic Sleep System online. Here it is.

I'm terribly disappointed to report that it's not especially expensive (about what a plain old pet-emporium dog bed costs) or stupid. It's also not much of a system, consisting of a piece of suede-covered memory foam. But if I had an arthritic or elderly dog, it might seem like a compassionate purchase. How disappointing.

Happily, I also, in my researches, came upon this imaginary-post-apolcalyptic blog. The first word in the latest post is "Its" when it should be "It's", in and of itself a sign of the last times.

So, yeah, I'm back to wanting Costco quantities of tuna, toilet paper and canned corn. If after the end comes you drop by for a visit, bring charcoal. Ignore the shotgun.

Posted by Kyrie at 12:21 PM in | Comments (7)
Share:

June 18, 2010

Three animals and a human

1. C'mon. It's Friday. Enjoy a hip-hop hamster ad!

2. Excellent piece on the differences between wolf populations that are heavily hunted and those that aren't. Big non-surprise: The packs that are allowed to live unmolested are larger, healthier, better adjusted and less damaging. Read it here.

3. Oh, it's been a long, cold day since I read anything that was as happily pleasing as this essay from Slate. It's by Rosecrans Baldwin, reader of many novels and writer of one, who started to notice that some varation of the sentence "Somewhere, a dog barked" appeared -- rather lazily -- in an astonishing number of novels. Genius!

4. Humans are separate from -- you might say better than -- hamsters, wolves and dogs because they are rational. Right? Not according to Dan Ariely, author of Upside of Irrationality.

A snippet of the review:

For example, the sections on online dating (the return on your investment in an online dating service is so poor that you might as well not bother) and charitable giving (it's nearly impossible to feel the visceral sympathy for a million sufferers in some terrible genocide that you feel for a man choking to death at the next table) are both engrossing and well-written, but the advice that Ariely gives on both amounts to, "Be aware that you're apt to make a bad decision in these situations."

Posted by Kyrie at 01:33 PM in bits and pieces | Comments (13)
Share:

June 17, 2010

An idea lost, maybe forever

Today I had a Bunch Mucherasi, M.D. moment.

Let me explain.

Last night, right before I fell asleep -- just as I was drifting off -- I had the most wonderful, amazing idea. It was a fantastic idea, the best I'd had in ages. But not good enough to drag me out of bed.

I decided, Sarah Palin-like, to write the idea on my hand so I'd have it in the morning. Unfortunately, there was no pen on the bedside table, only some coral-colored nail polish. Close enough! I wrote the couple of key words of my idea on my hand in the nail polish.

Of course, in the morning I couldn't read it. There appeared to be a lower-case i someplace in the orange blotches, but that was the best I could do.

The brilliant idea is gone, maybe forever.

Oddly enough, I had just a couple of days earlier read the Bunch Muncherasi piece in the N.Y. Times, in which the author, Chris Colin, finds a scrap of paper with those words in his handwriting, and he can't remember the genius idea associated with them 10 years earlier:

I put the scrap of paper into my back pocket that night and kept it there, or migrated it to other back pockets, for years, with my credit cards and old receipts. As I sat on the bed that afternoon, a wave of memories came back -- life as a 20-something, without a baby, jotting things exuberantly in bars. There was only one thing I couldn't remember: Who or what the hell was Bunch Muncherasi MD?

For every lightbulb idea, how many die on cocktail napkins or in smudges on hands? What song lyrics, hit TV shows, lawn-sprinkler systems, cat box cleaning devices have died a-borning because the idea simply flew away?

Colin is more sanguine about this than I am, maybe because his idea is 10 years old and my idea died after eight hours. Here is his conclusion:

Was it possible we'd foreseen how things go in life -- that you file something meaningful away, cling to it intently and then wake up one day to find it has simply vaporized, been replaced by other things? Could it be we unconsciously left a riddle for our future selves, all those years back, just to shake things up a bit?

Me, I'd rather have my idea back.

Posted by Kyrie at 11:59 AM in | Comments (7)
Share: