The gunsel pumped metal with his gat at a bird on the gooseberry lay

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.

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What's on my wall

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.

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A great fish story

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.

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Donut burger?

My goodness. I'm kind of speechless on this one. Read about it on Spork Boy's blog.

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Too... many... spaces...

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.

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Watch your cows!

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.

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My favorite grossly inappropriate headline of the week

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

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The Drak Pack

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!

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Recommended reading

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.

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Does anyone remember...

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.

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Yes, I want fries with that. But not those fries. I want the fries of yesteryear.

I wish they'd have two types of fries on the menu at McDonald's.

The first could be whatever the hell they want or need to make to appease the whining masses who complain about the health values of the fries, as though fast food french fries will ever be anything but bad for you.

And the second--my fries--would go back to the old recipe, before they started using vegetable oil and started worrying about health reports over flavor. Ah, for the McDonald's fries of my youth. Today's version are just a poor imitation.

You know, some people say that the reason Americans eat so much junk is that our food tends to be so bland. You eat more, hoping with each bite to get more of that full flavor that whatever you're chewing on just hints at. Who knows? The fries of my youth might actually prove to be healthier because you'd eat fewer of them, sated earlier with all the goodness that McDonald's fries used to be.

The fact that I've fantasized about having a time machine to go back in time and eat real McDonald's fries is a little sad.

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Happy National Gorilla Suit Day!

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A quip

The other night:

Dina: "How are you, honey?"
Me: "I've been worn down, yelled at, bit, and bonked on the forehead with a yo-yo. How are you?"

Of course, if I'd been writing it as a line of dialogue and had a little more time to think about it, I might have added some specific detail:

Me: "I've been worn down by Wal-Mart, yelled at, bit, and bonked on the forehead with a Finding Nemo yo-yo. How are you?"

I'm not sure that either of these is great art, in fact I'm sure that neither is, but I've found that a little bit of specific detail can add color to writing, as long as you don't overdo it.

Anyway, I've been dismal about posting here, and thought I'd at least jot down a few random thoughts to get the wheels greased again.

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Brokeback Top Ten

I found this article about a Top Ten reader contest for Late Show with David Letterman to be pretty funny, with its list of top ten rejected titles for Brokeback Mountain. I actually think #10, "Not-That-There's-Anything-Wrong-With-That Mountain," was my favorite.

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Still Surviving

Well, I've been away for awhile. Busy at work, busy at home, just plain tired, etc. I'm going to try to do a better job of posting again.

And what better way to get back on board, talking about the survival of my blog, than to comment about Survivor? If you haven't watched the finale yet, and intend to, then read no more.

Okay. Dina and I were glad to see, for a change, that the final three candidates on the show actually deserved to be there. We had turned to each other several times in the last week and asked what Lydia was still doing on the show and threatening to quit watching if she won. She is a perfectly nice lady, I'm sure, but she didn't do much to earn a place on the show--she went with the flow, she failed miserably at most challenges, and she didn't bring a lot of fun to the camera. So we were very pleased when she was ousted last night, not making it to the final three.

Once our favorite, Gary Hogeboom, had been voted off a few weeks back (damn it!), we both centered on Rafe as our personal favorite. And he did pretty well for himself, overall, winning lots of challenges, playing a tough, but mostly fair game, and not doing anything grossly annoying or frustrating.

Last night, we rooted for him in particular when he refused to eat the chicken offered up as a Mayan sacrifice. At the same time, we razzed Stephenie for her insistence on eating the damn chicken, for the lack of class that she showed in doing so. (Respect traditions!)

But what was Rafe thinking when he let Danni off the hook on her agreement? It was a noble thing to do, I suppose, but it also showed that maybe he didn't think that he deserved to win. It's kind of like telling a loved one "you can break up with me if you really want to." What are you really saying there? Are you being noble? Or are you saying that you don't have faith in yourself and the commitment that was made between you?

Oh, well. I was glad enough to see Danni win the whole thing; she's been a trooper and a fun player to watch overall, and I really didn't want Steph to win. Especially after the chicken thing.

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