Category: Words

You thought Fast Food Nation was a stinging indictment of US food practice, and it was. It also had information about how to improve food safety, worker health, and general quality of life.

Against the Grain author Richard Manning is apparently opposed to agriculture. Not even agriculture as practiced in the US by giant combines with tons of pesticides and petroleum fertilizers, mind you. He’s more or less opposed to agriculture, which despite the various problems he describes with it, is still the foundation of global society.

Yes, the particular fertilizers used by US agribusiness are ruining our waterways, and yes, the US agricultural subsidy system is screwed up beyond belief. Let’s reform them. Let’s eat organic. Let’s eat low on the food chain, low on the processing scale, be aware of the petroleum in our breakfast cereal. But come on– you’re attacking agriculture and describing it as the bane of global existence? Gimme a break. You can tell he’s on thin ice when he begins romanticizing the hunter-gatherers and talks about how important it is to hunt your own elk. Yeah, I’ll be sure to do that.

So, in Vegas this weekend, will I see Elvis? How many people dressed like Elvis will I see? What’s the plural of Elvis? A lot of people use “Elvii” but according to Bookdwarf and Straight Dope that would be assuming a spelling of Elvus. That’s the same as thinking the plural of penis is penii.

The -is ending is usually for third declension nouns, which are pluralized to -ites, so if we wanted to go the Latin route, really, we’d have Elvites. Of course, Elvis isn’t actually a Latin word, so the real plural is just Elvises, same as pelvises and penises.

The next question, then, is how many people are going to find this site looking for pornography and find ridiculous grammar instead? And is it going to be (shudder) Elvis porn? Possibly featuring the aliens who abducted him? I hope not.

Bookdwarf has been fiddling with CSS and so forth as she updates her blog (Sample problem: If you have a 200 pixel wide div on the left, and a dynamic div on the right that has a width set to, say, 70%, how do you get a banner image at the top of the page to run from the leftmost edge of the page to the rightmost edge of the right-hand div? Can you set the width to be 70% + 200px?). So, I figured, it was time to update my blog. Spring cleaning if you will. Big changes.

I’ve increased the red and blue background values from 66 to 76, leaving the green value at 66, making it darker and slightly purple-ish, and then chose a lighter grey for the title and description so they’re legible in the new background color. I then narrowed the left margin area allotted to the links bar from 22 to 21 percent of the page width. I think that should do it for another year or so, eh?

Oh, and if it doesn’t look good in Internet Explorer, get a real browser, shitbird.

Straight Dope, man. What a column. And here it illustrates, as always, that English is a very weird language:

Penis is a third declension noun, not second declension. These nouns often end in -is in the singular and -es in the plural. The English style -ises is sometimes preferred. Hence, we have penises (half of us do, anyway), and mantises and pelvises, but only more rarely do you see penes, mantes, and pelves, though they are not incorrect. In many cases, only the Latin form is acceptable: We have testes (some more than others) and crises and psychoses, but never testises, crisises, or pyschosises.

I always get annoyed when people say “forums” instead of the obviously more correct “fora.” But I’ve had to give in: “fora” is, frankly, pretentious, and therefore is perfect for this site, but it doesn’t fit on something like, say, Go-Mono, which actually does have fora. Or forums. A discussion board, anyway.

I was feeling better, ate a banana, drank some tea, quit shivering. And so I started browsing Orkut and now I’m doing that thing where you look up people you used to know and wonder where it all went wrong and I feel sick to my stomach again.

I got a galley copy of Steve Almond’s new book Candyfreak earlier this week; it’s due out in May and it’s genuinely excellent. I think what I like about him is that he’s smart and self-conscious and funny without being pretentious or annoying like Dave Eggers. Anyway, when it comes out I’m buying like three copies to give to friends.

It’s quite a good piece to pair with Fat Land, which is about how this country got so… well… fat. Fat Land isn’t as good as Candyfreak or Fast Food Nation, my other relatively recent food-related read. But read it in tandem with Candyfreak and you’ll see the parallels. Add in Schlosser’s other book, Reefer Madness, and Michael The Botany of Desire, and you’ve got quite a collection of books about the way we consume, live, and grow today.

Today I got a call from someone who works in IT over at one of the tech companies in the area who said “hey, I found a lot of documentation errors in Evolution 1.4, and I printed out the manual and marked it up, can I bring it by for you?”

This means of course that I have a lot of work to do, and it’s annoying to find so many mistakes in something I’d thought was done. On the other hand, it’s deeply gratifying to know that someone out there actually cares.

Cares about me. Yes, Me.

Happy week of crappy chocolate advertising.

This introductory blurb is presented on the website as a stand-alone article. The related pieces are in the side navigation, but they aren’t an integral part of the page, and they aren’t linked from the article itself. Poor form.

And then the front page had a link to a 404 on it when I checked this morning, although they fixed it promptly. That’s a start, I guess.

You’ll never hear me talk about one day gettin out
Why put a new address on the same old loneliness?
Everybody knows where that is,
we built that house of his,
and when he’s not home someone else we know always is
If Heaven’s really coming back
I hope it has a heart attack…

Songs: Ohia

Dear PC Magazine:

In your reviews this month (Feb 2004) you gave your highest rating to Outlook 2003, despite the fact that its flaws are one of the major reasons junk mail can spread so easily and so rapidly. If you are serious about stopping junk mail, you will o more than suggest spam filtering tools: you will suggest that people stop using Outlook and start using more secure email clients.

In other words, you should suggest Ximian Evolution, especially since it’s free, secure, and includes (as of v. 1.5) jumk mail filtering in addition the address book, calendar, and to-do-list tools.