- Dear, I wanted to talk to you about the strange child we have adopted; perhaps we've made a mistake, and she's actually a demon or, or, or some sort of demented being from another period; a murderous bloodsucker, if you will.

- Oh stop stop, dear. We've been through all this. Take your medication, or it'll get much worse.

- But dear. Strange things keep happening--

- All easily explained by some logic, or by a general feeling of what is “reasonable”. We've been through this before, dear, remember? I don't want to remind you of the last time when you were inexplicably crazy and drugged out, because we've agreed never to talk about that, except in a strangely allusive manner as need arises.

- Yes, I wish you would kind of stop that. It wasn't a big deal, and it's kind of boring when people--

- Dear--let's not talk about your, ah, ah, ah, ah, “crisis” again.

- Fine by me. You make it sound like it was like Nasser closing the Suez Canal or something.

- I'd better set up an appointment with Dr Simulacrum, I see...

- Yes, whatever. The thing is, this adopted kid (albeit an outwardly normal, dwarf-life creature) appears to have been sacrificing small animals and so on and apparently the other kids in the neighbourhood all shit their pants when she looks at them cross-eyed, so, I don't know. Don't you think it might be worth keeping a weather eye open?

- I am concerned about your slow descent into alcoholism and madness. Yes.

- Er, meantime, one of our non-possessed kids has gone missing, and there was a bit of muffled screaming and whimpering a little earlier. I've no idea if those two things are related, obviously. But...

- Oh, he's sure to be in his room, where our children always are, ensconced with teddy bears.

- I looked for him, but he's not there.

- H'mm, this is difficult...I've got an idea: let's for look for him somewhere else!

- Okay! That might work!

- Although I've a feeling the police will eventually pull up in several squad cars to arrest whoever.

- Here's hoping we all survive the final tussle!

- We always do!

Labels: Cinéma

Yes, I've always thought that too: that whole collective noun thing is inexplicably dull. Go to spEak You're bRanes (Need to scroll down a bit):

...collective nouns are a long, pointless list of words you’ll never actually use in a sentence and the most smug, tedious and unfunny substitute for wit and eloquence the English language has to offer. By the way, did you know that the collective noun for people who comment on news sites is a “shitting bumwank” as in “Have you seen the massive shitting bumwank of racists on the Telegraph site today?”.

I have to say I've never heard of “shitting bumwank” though. It sounds serviceable, but perhaps there's also a U.S. English equivalent?

Labels: Commenters

“These Famous Music Books enjoy an enormous sale in all parts of the British Empire--they are Marvelous Value.”

Honestly, how could you not buy something advertised in this way?

I'm not really interested in politics, just in word use. This thing I found on Yahoo News contains a curious example of poor wordsmanship. In describing responses to the possibility that US president Obama make a short speech to schoolchildren as the year begins, they write:

Some conservative critics feared that the aim of the speech was to recruit US kids to the liberal cause and brainwash them with socialism.

I don't think “critics” is really correct here. They mean something like “loonies” or “bugfuck insane rightwing freaks”.

Labels: Language Issues

This is one of the things that's kind of funny and kind of sad, from Media Matters, via Eschaton: Fox News graphics department has shaky grasp of Mideast geography. They show a capture of a map used by Fox News to make some wankery point about the Middle East, with Iraq labelled “Egypt”.

That might seem like a small matter ... well, no, not really. I was thinking that I could easily imagine Fox News labelling Australia as “Africa”, or something, because who cares? But basic geography is important.

The truly striking thing here, though, is that Iraq is the country that Fox and many of its consumers have enjoyed seeing bombed and tormented for many years. They sold the war, they got a lot of entertainment out of it. And now they can't find the place on a map.

I don't know. It just seems truly insane, but on an organizational level. The whole network must be as nuts as it nuttiest blowhard.

I suppose soon they'll have “Mordor” on their maps. It won't make any difference.

Labels: Corporate Insanity

From a free book that you can read online in .pdf, The Authoritarians, by Bob Altemeyer.

But I also discovered that if you ask subjects to rank the importance of various values in life, authoritarian followers place “being normal” substantially higher than most people do.

It's quite interesting and I do think well worth the twenty or thirty bones that you might pay for it in paperback, but with this curious wrinkle: you can read it for free.

A bit more about Dr Altemeyer at Wikipedia.

Labels: Books

I saw a thing the other day that said that Harry Potter had outgrossed Spiderman. Don't you think it's a bit odd, that adults are lining up to watch movies about magical creatures?

Of course, there can't be anything wrong with it, personal taste and all that. But the culture has changed.

I can remember reading a comic of some kind as a kid—“Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos” or something—and being startled to discover that some of the people writing in to the editor were apparently adults, stationed at Parris Island or wherever. I found it impossible to imagine my parents, for example, being able to read a comic book, let alone comment on one. The whole world of comics was completely closed to them. In a way, I took it to be one of the odd and sad things about being an adult. One of the less-appealing things about growing up. I guess lots of other people agreed.

Labels: Motion Pictures

“Money and sex I think we've already dealt with in chapter one as being unattainable by any known means. Now...”

And so began one of my favourite prof's most well-attended lectures on “The History of Trial and Error”.

Labels: Fate, Money

Il n'existe pas de relation directe entre “l'homme” et “l'oeuvre”, mais une série de liens complexes et enchevêtrés, un vrai noeud qui les unit d'une étrange façon. Car l'oeuvre invente son auteur au moins autant que l'auteur crée son oeuvre, ce pourquoi j'ai pu parler d'Hergé commme du “fils de Tintin”.

—Benoît Peeters, Ecrire l'image, p. 137.

Labels: Tintin Biography