They always land on cars

On tonight’s episode of Heroes (which you should be watching because it’s still a great show no matter what the self-consciously jaded masses say), a character commits suicide by jumping off a tall building. (Nathan Petrelli. And this time, he’s really dead.) (Oh! Spoiler warning!) (Oops! Too late!)

He falls in rather overdone slow motion and lands … on a car. Even though the alley below is almost deserted and there seem to be only two cars parked anywhere nearby, he manages nonetheless to hit one of them squarely and smash its roof in.

Why don’t onscreen deaths-by-falling-from-high-buildings never, nowadays, end with the character landing on the concrete with a splatsplash? It’s almost always a car. More dramatic, I suppose, but still it’s one of those silly clichés that very much interfere with my willing suspension of disbelief.

On the positive side, the car landing in this TV episode wasn’t followed by the car alarm going off.

Black Friday Boycott

I hope this proposed boycott has failed miserably. No doubt it’s nice to have the luxury to wax high minded about crass commercialism, but those of us who are out of work need an orgy of buying by those who have jobs so that hiring will pick up in January.

Zombie dreams

I've been dreaming of zombies, probably because I recently sent a zombie story out. I wake up in the middle of the night and pick holes in the dream's plot, but that doesn't help me go back to sleep.

The story was a bit unsettling, but the dreams are more so. There’s something about being in the action, in full color in the most recent case, that makes it much more disturbing than any prose can be.

I hope tonight’s better. So long as it’s not vampires …

David’s Definitions for January 2010

Peregrination

A journey, especially a journey on foot to a foreign country. The root is a Latin word that means foreigner. The word pilgrim comes from the same root. Peregrination is not a word you run into normally in modern English, but we do still speak of a peregrine falcon, which is called that because at one time it was standard practice to capture those birds on their first flight, or pilgrimage, from their nest.

(Will be published in the January 2010 issue of Denver's Community News.)

I'm collecting all of these at:
http://www.dvorkin.com/davidsdefs.html

The system of male and female reverse!

I posted a while ago about Japanese advertisements for porno and/or dating sites showing up frequently in the comments section of an earlier blog post.

For a change, I decided to enter the latest comment into the Google translation site and see what English resulted. Here it is:

dating back to topic now! Do you have experience already? This site has a choice about adopting the system of male and female reverse Supporters hope. More financially successful woman is hungry for love that is rich. Now from the page of interest

Oh, those hopeful supporters!

David’s Definitions for December 2009

Moot

To bring something up for discussion. At one time, moot could also refer to the discussion itself. This usage no longer survives in ordinary English, but it's still used in law school, where a moot court is a simulated court proceeding, part of the training of law students. Originally, a moot question was one that could be debated or was subject to argument. At some point in the 19th century, it came to mean a question that was no longer worth discussing, or one that had no practical application outside the realm of debate. The word traces back to 12th century England, when it referred to a meeting of the freemen of a shire to discuss local issues. In turn, it came from the even older word gemot, which was a meeting of freemen assembled to discuss issues or impose justice.

(Will be published in the December 2009 issue of Denver's Community News.)

I'm collecting all of these at: http://www.dvorkin.com/davidsdefs.html

Hate mail

In response to this essay on our Web site:

I read your mindless 'manifesto'  (sounds SO euro-for the people!)

You liberals are such wandering and aimless idiots. Your ultimate goal is nothing short of eradication of all the moral values of TRUE Americans, those who pattern themselves after the original revolutionaries who established this great country.  

Your only hope is in sheer numbers, since you fail miserably in moral fiber, original ideas and true partisanship.  You fools have no idea what it takes to build UP a country, only what it takes to tear one down.  And an that you're minions are doing a hell of a job!

Credit where due: This one was actually written in English.

Basal on my shoulder

Makes me unhappy.
Basal on my shoulder
Makes me frown.

The song John Denver never sang.

I have a basal carcinoma on my shoulder, which will be cut out on November 3. This might affect my weightlifting regimen. Such as it is.

It’s supposed to be the least dangerous kind of skin cancer, fortunately.

Once again, I wish I could go back in time and lecture my boy self about the sun and sunburn. Of course he wouldn’t have listened to some weird, old guy. Kids those days!

A Public Fine and Private Place

The story is now visible to the world at:

http://theferalpages.com/issue1/?page_id=30

A Fine and Private Place

Title of a ghost story of mine, taken from the marvelous poem “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell (a poem which, I once read, has provided more titles than any other, and no wonder).

It will be published in the new online magazine The Feral Pages, in the October/November issue. Thanks to Chris Holm for alerting me to the magazine, which has also acquired a story of his.

The editor wrote the following to me. (If I had a smaller ego I’d be embarrassed. If I had any shame, I wouldn’t reproduce his words here.)

This is a marvelously complex piece with which I am still peeling back the layers. I discover something new every time I read it. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to publish it.

Screwed by the state

When I was laid off by Quark in mid-May, I applied immediately for Colorado unemployment benefits. Everything sailed through smoothly. Oodles of paperwork arrived in the mail – notification of approval, how much I’d get, when it would start, what I had to do every week, and a thick book telling me the rules and Dos and Don’ts and procedures.

Included in the book was a brief sentence saying that I was required to notify the state if I withdrew money from a 401(K) to which my employer had contributed.

As it happened, my 401K had been doing surprisingly well, despite the financial meltdown. I made what seemed to be a very prudent decision. Since I had to move the money out of my now ex-employer’s 401(K) plan, I decided to roll half of it over into an IRS and use the other half to get us (finally!) completely out of debt, eliminating what had been a burdensome monthly payment. (The result of youthful indiscretions combined with some unavoidable emergencies. We’d been painstakingly paying down that result for years.) What a relief that was! And how much easier it would make it to survive on unemployment benefits while I searched for a new job.

Of course I notified the state about it. I figured that they would delay the beginning of my unemployment checks by a few more weeks because they would treat one-half of the employer’s contribution to my 401K as part of my severance package. That would have been fair and reasonable.

Then I received a letter from the state saying that under Sections 8-73-110 (3) (A) & (C) of the Colorado Employment Security Act, since I did not reinvest every penny of the 401(K) in an IRA or Keogh plan, the entire amount of the 401(K) was being treated as a lump-sum retirement payment. This delayed the start of my unemployment benefits until March of 2010.

I appealed, noting that I had reinvested half of the 401(K) in an IRA, and moreover that of the half I had withdrawn for my use, only a small portion was my employer’s money, as opposed to my own. Would I have been penalized the same way if the money had come from a regular savings account? No. Would it have hurt the state to mention this bizarre law in the thick booklet it sent to me? No.

I was given a hearing date. I went on schedule. I repeated all of the above objections to a hearing officer named Benedict, a tired man despite my being his first appointment of the day, a distracted man, an uninvolved man. He’d heard it all before. (To be fair, perhaps he was sympathetic but had been trained not to show it.) As I expected, the appeal was denied.

So there’s a law on the books that affects your unemployment benefits, but the booklet from the state that tells you what you need to know when you apply for unemployment doesn’t tell you about that law. It tells you that you must notify the state about a 401(K) withdrawal, but it doesn’t tell you what the consequences of such a withdrawal are.

I’m not living in Colorado. I’m living in Kafkarado.

Pull on your pant and flex your bicep

I was shopping at Costco today and saw a sign, above a pile of clothing, that read MEN’S PANT. They also sell WOMEN’S PANT.

This misuse has been around for a long time (more than a century, according to this site), but I’ll never get used to seeing it. It bugs me every time.

Some people can’t understand that some words are only plural.

Another such common mistake is bicep. People seem to think that you have one bicep on each arm and hence two biceps in total. No, you have one biceps on each arm; the name is plural because of the double attachment to the bone. At the back of each arm, you have one triceps, which has three attachments. On each thigh you have one quadriceps. So many attachments! So many opportunities for detachment! I tore one of those attachments mostly off in my right biceps years ago, but assume that muscle is still my biceps, not my unicep.

I haven’t yet heard anyone refer to cutting paper with a scissor, but I’m expecting it to happen.

Addendum:

This is another common and somewhat related error. I just ran into it on Facebook: An individual being referred to as a homo sapien. I suppose people think that sapiens is a plural form, whereas it’s simply a Latin ending, and singular.

David’s Definitions for November 2009

Nonplussed

At a loss for words. Also used in a more general way to mean bewildered. From the Latin non plus, no more, no further. That's simple enough. The word has been in use since the late 1500s. What's really odd is that, starting about ten years ago, it acquired the meaning "unimpressed" or "unmoved." No one knows how this happened. Perhaps people thought that it meant that someone was "not plussed." But there is no word "plussed" in English. This strange, new trend leaves me bemused - perplexed, lost in thought. "Bemused" has been around for 300 years. What strange, new meaning will it suddenly acquire?

(Will be published in the November 2009 issue of Denver's Community News.)

I'm collecting all of these at: http://www.dvorkin.com/davidsdefs.html

Cups outlasting comments

In July, I put up a short post titled Cups outlasting companies.

For some reason, the comments for that post keep filling up with what appear to be ads for Japanese dating and porn sites. Why those sites and why that post? I am mystified.

I’ve been deleting them. If any of them are actual comments, not ads, and I’ve misinterpreted something, I hope the commenters will let me know in English. If I have not misinterpreted, I wish they’d stop.

Dvorkin Global Enterprises, Inc., Ltd., PLC, GmbH

Some time ago, as a joke, I created this page on our Web site to tell visitors about the Intergalactic Headquarters of Dvorkin Global Enterprises, Inc., Ltd., PLC, GmbH.

Yesterday, I got a letter from Google, telling me about the value of Google Adwords for my business, and addressed to Dvorkin Global Enterprises, Inc.

Giggle.

Classical Muzak

I love classical music*. Listen to it via streaming radio all the time. However, the local classical station, KVOD, spends hours every day playing shallow, derivative, tedious crap from the late 18th Century that I’m sure was background music in its day. I can just imagine someone from that time, brought forward via a time machine, listening to KVOD and shaking his head in wonder. “Dude,” he would say, in the 18th-Century equivalent, “you actually sit in concert halls listening to that crap? Man, in my day, that was playing in the background while we drank and played cards and tried to get girls to go to bed with us. You people are twisted.”

 

* Oh, come on. You know what I mean by that phrase. Don’t give me that music-history shit.

Explanation of Benefits

I'm cleaning up my desk, which means processing old paperwork that I should have processed long ago. In the stack is a bunch of messages from so-called health insurance companies titled "Explanation of Benefits". But these are really shallow excuses for denial of benefits. They ought at least to be honest and label those letters "Benefits Denied and Suck on It".

Evil government medical programs

Leonore and I went to Walgreens today to get (seasonal) flu shots. United Health Care, the insurance plan for which we pay an absurd amount each month, soon to become almost three times as absurd, didn’t cover Leonore’s shot. Our cost: $25. Medicare covered my shot. Our cost: $0.

In an earlier post, I told Barack that he coulda been a contendah. One way would have been to propose expanding Medicare to everyone, with some major upgrades to the system itself and to Medicare taxes. Too late now, of course.

Lemonade Stand Award

Which you can see displayed off to the right. It came from here, and now it’s my turn to do my part.

I hereby bestow the Lemonade Stand Award on (may I have the envelope, please) the following (cue the trumpets) blog(ger)s:

Chris Holm

Travis Erwin

Kristen Tsetsi

Mitch Wagner

Stephen Blackmoore

There are other writer blogs I read and enjoy, and it’s hard to choose from among them those that I think deserve a special award. What makes these stand out, for me, is that these bloggers share both their writing and their lives with us and that each does so with a unique voice. When Google Reader says that one of them has a new post up, I’m delighted and look forward to reading it.

The Jews. All they care about is money.

I don’t know what reminded me of this. Perhaps it was the recent commemorations of the 70th anniversary of the start of World War Two. (How many Americans were surprised to learn that WWII began in September of 1939 and not December of 1941?)

Some years ago, descendants of Jews whose artworks and other valuables had been stolen by the Nazis were in court trying to get the goods back. Back from a government that claimed it owned those items because they had been willed to it by the Nazis who had stolen it or because the items had been signed over to the state by the Jewish owners. Any civilized person would surely agree that thieves have no right to will their stolen booty to anyone and that if the original owners had signed their goods over to the Nazi state, it was under duress and those agreements are invalid.

Consider, too, that the thieves involved were the same people who, in their insane lust for Jewish gold, cut the fingers off concentration camp victims to get their rings, tore earrings from the ears of living prisoners and gold fillings from their teeth.

While the court case brought by descendants of those Jews was in the news, I heard a man-in-the-street interview on the radio with people in Germany. What did they think of this lawsuit? Should those descendants be awarded possession of the goods stolen from their forebears by evil, amoral, blood-and-gold-lusting barbarians? (Obviously, that wasn’t quite the question the interviewer asked.)

I can’t forget the answer of one young German woman, possibly the granddaughter of one of those beasts who cut off fingers to get gold rings, who tore earlobes and yanked out teeth to get Jewish gold. “The Jews,” she said, with a sneer you could hear. “All they care about is money.”