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Happy Halloween!

 

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Saving Daylight?

It is time once again to “spring forward” – sounds like a bouncy, playful contrivance, now doesn’t it?  Until you think about it.  I say the entire practice is absurd.  You lose an hour of sleep, for one thing.  For another, I have to go around the house tomorrow and change every single clock (in theory, that is… in practice, our living room clock has been on daylight saving time since March 2008).  It is an outdated hassle that serves no purpose.  And can someone explain to me why we still call standard time “standard time” if it is only in effect for 4 months out of the year? 

I found this insolent nugget of wisdom at a DST informational site:

A writer in 1947 noted, "I don’t really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves." (Robertson Davies, The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks, 1947, XIX, Sunday.)

Amen, Mr. Marchbanks.  Amen. 

There are more people out there who think as I do.  Oh, yes.  Like the good-intentioned folks at standardtime.com.

And then, there are the freaks. 

I do not want to carry this rant too far.  There are certainly more important matters to attend to right now.  Exhibit A:

(disturbing, don’t you think?)

My Addictive Personality (part I)

crackberry I say “part I” because at the moment I am addicted to setting up all kinds of different apps on the new blackberry – an impulse buy from yesterday afternoon.  I am still figuring everything out, but I can already ask the crawfish2question “how did I ever function without this device?”.  Today I twittered, checked e-mail, and updated my facebook page – all while driving back to the office from lunch!  Safe?  No.  Insanely cool?  Most definitely.

My other new addiction from Sunday is crawfish.  Crawfish heads, to be specific.  I am ashamed to say I have never sucked the head of a boiled crawdad before yesterday’s meal up in Trussville.  Oh my God!  By the end of our lunch, my wife was taking all the tail meat and I was just sucking head.  Spicy!

Back to the blackberry.  I should probably dedicate a real blog entry to my various addictions.  Stay tuned for part II!

Reminiscence

fw1

 HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY, EVERYONE!

Cummings & Goings

Note to fellow WordPress users:  when you choose to make a post “private” and click the OK button, you have not yet made the post private.  You must also select “update post.”  I made that error at 6:30 this morning when, after lying in bed thinking about the abstract ditty I posted last night (deconstructed from an extremely vehement, wordy rant I posted on a political site), I decided I would rather not have an admittedly thrown together and less than perfect work pasted across my social web for all to see.  Alas, that derivative product of sleepiness and Dutch Henry wine remained in the public arena for anyone to drop in and peruse.  My apologies.

I was initially excited at the result of my prior post (photolosophvisagonism.), which evolved from a mundane “I am not inspired” whiney-prose paragraph into an abstract, Cummings-esque bit of disjointed poetry.  Not great, but it was the first real creative piece I have created in a long, long time.  The juices flowing – I resolved to come home yesterday afternoon and try to replicate the experience. 

Unfortunately, when I sat down and fired up the browser, I was hit with the recent headline regarding congress’s extension of the digital television conversion to later this summer.  After hearing about all the horrible stuff going on in the world, I was blown away that this was a “top story” anywhere.  I let it upset me – not personally (I could really care less and, frankly, I am already compliant so who cares), but in a kind of insulted-intelligence sort of way.  So, that in mind and wine in hand, I proceeded to bang out an angry diatribe.  After visiting a public political forum and posting it there, the hour had grown late (nearing 1:00 am, actually).  So – operating under the self-imposed directive that I must attempt another poem before going to bed, I just subjected my current-events rant to the cut/paste/add/subtract technique. 

I think what I ended up with was interesting, but not nearly as organic as that first one.  Lesson learned – just because you feel you must force yourself to create, that doesn’t mean you have to publish every piece of swill.  It was not up to my standards, let’s say.  So, I promise to, in the future, not throw up unedited poems at ungodly hours and under a teensy bit of influence. 

Stay tuned, though.  I’m still enjoying a Cummings phase and a deconstruction could occur at any time. 

I might add that, while there were some commenters who disagreed with my (admittedly) self-righteous, indignant blow-up regarding the television bill, 60% of those who participated in the poll agreed with my view that there are much more important issues at hand. 

Slappin’ Skin In DC

I have watched this many, many times. It is still funny. Must share.