This just in. Scientists have discovered new red and blue rings around Uranus. Any guesses on how many late night talk show hosts will make cracks about this in their monologues tonight?
Memory's a funny thing. I have vague memories from my childhood of going to an amusement park called Old Chicago. I remembered that the entire theme park was indoors, something that seemed off-kilter to me whenever I thought about it afterward. Would someone really build an amusement park indoors? Would it be functional? Wouldn't it be expensive to power the whole thing and keep it warm or cool, as appropriate?
Whenever I thought about it, I figured that I was remembering wrong somehow, that either it was a very small park that seemed bigger in my memory, or it wasn't really all indoors.
My impressions of the park were positive ones, if not very concrete: fun, with a classic theme reminiscent of old World Fairs. I remember wrenching my neck on a roller coaster. I remember my mom and dad there, and I think Dad might have carried me on his shoulders.
I'm not sure why I've never just asked my parents about it when it's come to mind, but I guess I've just never thought about it when they were directly at hand.
So today, it popped into my head for the thousandth time and I decided to look it up. I found a site that goes into a good amount of detail and brought back some memories. You can also read more about it in the Wikipedia.
As it turns out, I should have trusted my memory more. It was indeed an outdoor amusement park, although, unfortunately, it didn't last for very long. Kind of makes me wish I could step into a time machine and visit it sometime.
Oh, and on a slightly related note, I recently read a really good thriller about an enclosed amusement park. The book is called Utopia
I have brown hair. Dina has brown hair. Our younger son, Zack, has brown hair. Our older son, Alex, has blond hair. Ever since Alex was born, we have occasionally had people make comments along the lines of "where did he get his blond hair?"
Some of these are perfectly innocent--they generally segue immediately into questions about our parents' hair, etc. They're genuinely curious.
But others, most often complete strangers, seem to find this an opportunity for comedy. "Where did he get his blond hair?" they ask in teasing tones. Wink wink. Nudge nudge. Often, they suggest that the mailman is responsible. This evening, we attended an orientation function for kids signing up for kindergarten in the fall at our local elementary school. A lady (who had seemed perfectly nice earlier) asked us, rather loudly, about Alex's hair, then followed it up with an amused glance at me. "I bet you'd like to know," she said. Ha ha. Mind you, this was in front of Alex.
How many possible ways could this joke go wrong for someone? I mean, in our case, there's no question that Alex is my child, and Dina's. But what if that weren't the case?
Let's take fictional family A. They've adopted a child with blond hair. Or fictional family B. The dad has died and the mother has remarried. Or fictional family C. The mom had a wild fling at one point and the child isn't her husband's, but they've reconciled and he treats the child as his own. I'm sure you could come up with more possibilities on your own. Is it a good idea, in any of these situations, to make a potentially awkward situation (for the parents) even worse? Is it ever a good idea to suggest to a child that his parents might not really be his parents?
For the record, our parents also have dark hair, but Dina's brother's hair was blond when he was young. My grandfather had blond hair, and my aunt is blonde. So Alex's hair is a little unusual, maybe, but nothing far from the family tree. I have absolutely no doubt that Alex is mine, nor should anyone who really pays attention for more than a few seconds--we've got too many traits in common (including, of course, dashing good looks, keen intellect, and charming personalities). But you know, if he hears a half dozen strangers asking how he can have blond hair when his parents don't, he might eventually start to wonder, every once in a while. He might start to doubt us. And making a child doubt his parents isn't worth the price of a joke. Particularly a stupid one.
I'm moderately gratified to see that I've passed 1,000 hits on this blog since I started tracking traffic shortly after launching the site. I hope that's not just Mom hitting refresh a lot to make me feel better. Hi, Mom!
Click here to read the full post with comments.Ever wanted to read my blog in Italian? Well, me, either. But it's kind of cool to see the translated version. Someone recently ran my site through a translator to read it in French. Oui, French! And that got me kind of curious as to how the site looked in other languages. As I'm not fluent in anything but English, I can't tell how good of a job the translators are doing, but it's kind of neat.
FYI: I tried to get Google to translate the French version back into English for me, but it told me "non!" I played around further and had Alta Vista's Babel Fish translate the French version back, and it kind of worked, but everything was pretty garbled. Not sure whether to blame Google or Alta Vista or myself for that one.
FYI, part two: Translating my site into redneck (the site's term, not mine) was kind of interesting, too.
I love mysteries and often enjoy reading hard-boiled books from the 20s, 30s, and 40s, with their particular brand of slang. Somewhere along the way, I found a web site that includes a very interesting glossary of some of those terms. It's a fun read, and makes me think that we might need to add a "talk like a gangster" day to the world's repertoir, a kind of companion to talk like a pirate day.
The same site with the glossary has a fun article about Dashiell Hammett's use of the term gooseberry lay and how he turned the term "gunsel," which originally meant something along the lines of "catamite," on its ear.
I particularly love that fact that the article involves two pillars of the mystery community: Hammett (who, of course, wrote The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, and other classics) and the article's writer, Erle Stanley Gardner, best known as the writer of the Perry Mason mysteries.
I know nothing about the cartoon Brewster Rockit, but it's run by the Dallas Morning News in its free Quick paper (and quite probably in the regular paper itself). One of the strips caught my eye and made me laugh, and I finally got around to clipping it out and sticking it on my wall. So I'll share it with you and point you over to the site where you can read more like it.
I don't generally keep up with the fishing circuit in detail, but I was very excited to hear that Chris McCall, my cousin-in-law, won a recent competition, the Stren Series Central event on Sam Rayburn. Way to go, Chris. And it sounds like you pulled in a great catch, too.
You can read the whole story here.
My goodness. I'm kind of speechless on this one. Read about it on Spork Boy's blog.
In school, I was always taught to leave two spaces after the end of every sentence. The reason for this was that the original typewriters had only monospaced fonts; people needed the extra space for a visual cue that a sentence had ended.
Well, hardly anyone uses typewriters anymore. Computers use proportionally spaced fonts and, as a result, writers now only need to use a single space after a mark of punctuation.
A fellow copyeditor retrained me in this, explaining the reasoning to me and convincing me to stop hitting the spacebar that extra time. It was a bit jarring at first; it wasn't what I'd been taught. But after about a day, I got used to it.
For some reason, though, many people have never been taught to stop adding those extra spaces. Almost always, when I'm asked to edit a document, one of my first steps is run a search and replace, converting all double spaces into single ones. It's not a huge deal, but it's a pain. Someone needs to get out there and communicate to people that that extra space has gone the way of the dodo, disco, and "Dingoes Ate My Baby."
So there.
I have no idea what this site is all about, but it is pretty clever and amusing. Probably some of that there viral marketing I done read about, yup.
This one cracked me up, although it's clearly in poor taste and I'm wondering how it managed to get past the editors at Reuters:
Prosthetic legs returned; police stumped
Thanks to Spork Boy (I can't type that with a straight face, Michael) for using his IMDb fu to track down the show I was looking for, which it turns out was called The Drak Pack! You can also read more about those crazy guys here. I only vaguely remember this show, but the vague memories are fond ones. Thanks, man!
Tape: Bush, Chertoff Warned Before Katrina
"In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans' Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage."
Read the whole article.
Click here to read the full post with comments.
A cartoon (probably from the 70s) that featured a teenage wolf man, Frankenstein's monster, and Dracula? I think that maybe they fought crime.
So far my Google fu is not working its usual magic.
This is bugging me.
Posts
All Comments
