Summer Holidays
(a poem by Gabrielle Koetsier, age 10)
Children sitting, solemn, silent.
Bell rings! Screaming, yelling, violent!
Running, rushing, up the stairs.
“Children, wait!” nobody cares.
School’s out! It’s summer! Time to play!
No more teachers! Run away!
We are going to the pool.
Perfect way to keep us cool.
Let’s go buy some lemonade!
We will drink it in the shade.
Our skin is brown, our feet are bare.
And we are free without a care.
Playing, laughing, summer days,
We’re on summer holidays!
(I typed it all out by myself too!)
delicious and nutritious
I love well-constructed and vivid language. Here’s a snippet I ran across today that inspired some memories:
A few years back, I was struggling to liberate a new Barbie doll from the almost invincible packaging that imprisoned her …
(Seen in an email newsletter from Character Counts … written by Michael Josephson.)
Tags: language, john koetsier, character counts, michael josephson
Lots of people say “snaining”
OK, maybe not lots. But some - Google proves it. (Yes, this is about a recent post.)
Google has 509 results for “snaining.” And the urban dictionary, bless it’s electronic little heart, has an entry for snaining.
That horrible combination of rain that is not quite snow…but soon will be.
Basically, it’s airborne precipitation that fluctuates mid-drop, and can’t seem to make up its mind whether it’s rain … or snow …
Only problem? Apparently the word was invented by a Stephanie Tyler of Eaton Township, Ohio. And here I thought I had had the privilege!
Tags: snaining, john koetsier
I love the internet
… and I hate the English language!
For every question, there is an answer. Just don’t think that you’ll necessarily like that answer. For example, I wanted to know if bi-monthly meant twice a month or every two months.
Unfortunately, it means both. As AskOxford says:
I’m afraid it means both! But in the publishing industry, it is used fairly consistently to mean ‘every two months’. The same ambiguity affects biweekly and biyearly. If you want to be absolutely clear, use a phrase such as ‘twice a week’ or ‘every two years’.
Hrm …
More kidspeak: Crabsters
Doing groceries as a family, approaching the sea food area with live lobsters, crabs, oysters, and more …
Aidan pipes up: “Want to see the crabsters!”
Me, silently to myself: can I freeze this moment in time?
Kidspeak
From Ethan’s mouth, today, to Teresa:
Mommy, if you split the word bumpy in two, you’d have two bad words.
Tonight we’re in Woodland, California - just outside of Sacramento. Two more nights and we’ll be home and sleeping in our own beds.
Tommy Nothing Fancy: Nasdijj Nothing Truthful
I recently picked up a book from the library that completely blew my mind. I was going to start a review of it like this:
Some books are from the literary catch-and-release program: you read ‘em, return ‘em, and remember them no more.
Others are like great bloody axes crashing through your brain like some cosmic sword of Damocles.
The book is The Blood Runs Like A River Through My Dreams by “Nasdijj,” who purported to be a half-blood Navajo with a mild form of Foetal Alcohol Syndrom (FAS) … for whom it was torture to read and even more painful to write.
It’s about the life and death (mostly the death) of his adopted son, Tommy Nothing Fancy - who had a more pronounced form of FAS - and it is seriously mind-blowing. Just a little too mind-blowing, in the aftermath of the James Frey story Million Little Lies episode. There seemed to be just a little too much pain in the book for any one man’s life, and the details were oddly gapped. For instance, his excruciating recountings of the 6 years of Tommy’s life included nothing - not even the name - of his wife at the time.
So I did some searching, and guess what: it’s another Frey all over again. LA Weekly broke the story just a couple days ago - The Blood Runs Like A River Through My Dreams was published in 1999.
Just a few days after that, “Nasdijj,” who is really a sordid little man named Timothy Patrick Barrus, admitted fabricating the story. If you look at his archived blog posts, Barrus appears to be a misogynistic pedophilic anti-Semite.
He was actually born in 1950, as the book states, but is not Navajo, never adopted a child named Timothy Nothing Fancy, and actually gets multiple details about contempory Navajo life and customs completely, idiotically wrong.
This is just now hitting the blogosphere, with bloggers like Bill Doskoch helping to publicize the “Najahoax.”
“Nasdijj” kept a blog, appropriately enough titled “Deserving Death For Evil Deeds,” but most of the archives have been deleted or unpublished. However, he has some new content up, and if you look at it today, you will get a sense of what an odd, twisted, paranoid mind is behind the farce.
Here’s the saddest part of the whole thing:
The book is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. The fact that it is a lie cannot alter the concurrent fact that it is an absolutely mind-blowing heart-shredding story.
Why, why do these talented writers throw away the truth they have in stupid little lies?
Top 10 Winston Churchill Quotes
What we often forget about good old Winnie is that he wasn’t just a politician, statesman, and leading figure of the 20th Century. He was also a prolific writer with more than 43 books in 72 volumes.
In those books - as well as in his speeches - Churchill has dozens, hundreds, even thousands of pithy, memorable quotes. I ran across them the other day when researching a speech.
Here’s my top 10 favorite Winston Churchill quotes:
10) “All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.”
9) To a woman who said: “If I was your wife Sir, I’d poison you!” “Madam, if you were my wife, I’d let you!”
“Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash.”
7) “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
6) “The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”
5) “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
4) “I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.”
3) “We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”
2) “We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”
1) “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”
And, because I can’t help myself, a bonus quotation:
“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
And one more which I hope is not true of this post:
“The length of this document defends it well against the risk of its being read.”
And that’s the end.
. . .
. . .
Thanks to BrainyQuote for the quotes.
Clicks and cliques
I am so tired of Americans talking about how horrible “clicks” are.
A click is a small noise, often caused by something hard tapping on, hitting, or sliding past something else that is also hard. A clique, on the other hand, is a small, inward-focused, exclusionary group of people.
The two words do not rhyme … the second one being of French derivation and being pronounced ‘cleek.’
That’s my rant of the day.
Jargon watch
I recently participated in a training session led by some fairly top-notch consultants. Besides the actual training that you get, it’s always interesting to hear the new jargon.
Consultants, of course, are always up on all the latest jargon. And even if it isn’t new, it may be new to you.
Here’s two I enjoyed:
BBQ: Big Burning Question
T.H.U.D. manual: This is a manual full of all your company’s policies and procedures. You drop it on a co-workers desk, and it goes thud, and that’s all the use you get out of it.
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Sparkplug 9 is John Koetsier's blog on life, the universe, and everything,
but mostly the stuff you see big in the tags to the left.
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