New Year's Eve 2012, Armageddon?

It's an unseasonal warm afternoon in Claremont, California. The sunlight is as clear as on any summer's day. The air is still, rich, and warm. The sound of the cars passing on the freeway is indistinguishable from the sound of rustling leaves. A crow in fight caws.

The apartment is a little dusty.

Tomorrow is 2012 and I'm pretty sure that humanity will endure long enough to see January 2 without catastrophic incident. I'm not worried. If the world is poised to eat itself in 2012 then it's because the universe wills it. People are hardly in a position to bend space-time, so there's isn't much to be done about it. And that's fine.

Back to work on Tuesday.

Wet Puppy Syndrome

When chastised, to act in the manner of or to mimic (adopt the physical disposition of), a puppy that has been doused with cold water during the fall or winter months, i.e. to adopt a servile or subordinate demeanor.

Stardust for the Atheist Child

Stardust: A Bedtime Story for the Children of Atheists
A rough draft

When you die, you will be buried underground.
After you spend a little time there, all the tiny atoms in your body will start to glow, and you will eventually turn into stardust.
You will ascend beyond the clouds, beyond the vast blue Earthen sky, and into space.
As you look upon the earth, the oceans, the swirls of gray clouds, the shining caps of the northern and southern poles, you will start to catch the solar wind.
As you drift away from earth, the last thing you will see are the people of the world smiling at you and waving goodbye.
Then the solar wind will carry you throughout the universe.
You will drift past great galaxies, and clouds of cosmic dust,
belts of asteroids and the rings of great planets.
You will drift along past the new worlds being born and the old ones growing dark.
You will travel on the solar wind for thousands of years.
Then when you reach the edge of the universe and can go no further, the solar wind will carry you towards the center.
Once there, the solar wind will let you drift to a silent stop.
And once you have stopped, you will turn into a star.

Internet Blog Acronyms...so far

DAE: Does Anyone Else... (see IAE)
FTFY: Fixed That For You
GTFO: Get The Fuck Out
IAE: (1) In Any Event... (2) Is Anyone Else...
IAMA: I Am A...(policeman, student, [profession])
IL: I Learned (see TIL)
IMO: In My Opinion...
IMHO: In My Humble Opinion...
TIL: Today I Learned...

TLDR: Too Long; Didn't Read

Found a better resource: http://www.internetslang.com/

The Shining Bear

This is one of the most disturbing scenes from Kubrik's superior version of Stephen King's The Shining. I read the book over ten years ago and cannot remember the relevance of this cutaway shot¹. I recall that these two characters had a greater role in the book than on screen. According to some notes I trolled across sometime ago, it was some sort of gay Sadomasochistic relationship. The scene occurs toward the climax of the film and represents what appears a break in the character of Wendy Torrance, wife of Jack Torrance (Nicholson). This incongruous image jolts her awake. She can no longer deny what her son Danny has been hinting at all along, that the hotel is haunted.

It is a fine, terrifying accent to a movie that scared me to death when I was younger. There is something taboo about it.

References

¹ AVAILABLE: http://blog.velvetguerilla.com/?p=681 ACCESSED: 01-16-2011

Accounting: Poor conventional usage

I recently caught myself writing the following clause,

"Books have the ability to..."

Now I fancy myself a decent writer, however I now realize, to my chagrin, that I may have been using ability very, very poorly. Far as I can tell, on the surface it would seem that books don't have the ability to do anything. One reads a book, picks up a book, flips through a book. Unless someone or something interacts with the book, the book lacks any agency of its own. Right?

I guess if one were writing prose a book can be made to do just about anything. The author creates a literary frame, a magical wonderland or what not wherein a book is given the ability to do just about anything...like get up and run.

Really I am just picking at nits.

A cursory Google search produces several pages of results that have some form of "Books have the ability to..." on them. I take this to mean that the phrase is circulating and is not uncommon. I suppose Strunk and White would perceive this as nothing so terrible. But my intuition is that they would recommend that the sentence be re-crafted for the better.

Whatever the case may be, I will make effort to avoid attributing ability to books in the future. Although knowing myself, I'll likely fall back into the habit.

—gp

Below are the 11 Composition Principles from Strunk and White.

• Choose a suitable design and stick to it.
• Make the paragraph the unit of composition.
• Use the active voice.
• Put statements in positive form.
• Use definite, specific, concrete language.
• Omit needless words.
• Avoid a succession of loose sentences.
• Express coordinate ideas in similar form.
• Keep related words together.
• In summaries, keep to one tense.
• Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.

Available: http://www.writingclasses.com/InformationPages/index.php/PageID/305 Accessed: 01-16-2010