Brain Melt
It's three in the morning and it's rainy and 31 degrees. Celsius. That's, like, 88 Fahrenheit. Or maybe it's 200. I can't sleep because it's too hot and humid and my brain isn't functioning all that well. I'm sitting with two fans* trained on me and they're not helping because it's too damp for anything to evaporate off my skin. Cold drinks don't help. It's disgusting. And I have to be to work at 7 a.m.--on a Sunday!--and despite the air conditioning there I don't think I'll be functioning at peak capacity. I just want to get some sleep. Doesn't the universe care?
Apparently not. It's been like this (only not as bad at night) for well over a week now, which is one reason I haven't been posting. I have three half-finished posts and I just can't make my brain finish them, because they need more research that just eludes me.
But at least I have it together enough to use correct grammar and a spellchecker, which is more than I can say for these guys.
Kevin Kelly labels a recent posting Harry Plotters and the Prophesies of the Hive Mind. "Prophesies" is a verb. "Prophecies" is the noun that was intended. Like "advice", which is a noun, and "advise", which is a verb, the two words come from the same source but diverged in their spelling a long time ago; the "-c-" in the noun versus the "-s-" in the verb is well established by custom.
James Howard Kunstler in his blog Clusterfuck Nation writes:
This would seem natural for people living in an age when a simple cassette SONY Walkman is superceded by an 80-gigabyte iPod in one generation.
"Superceded" isn't even a word. It's "superseded", the only word in English that ends in "-sede". A spellchecker will catch this. There's no excuse not to use one, not even if you have an editor, which few of us do nowadays. I don't care how old-school you are: you have to check your spelling. It's only common courtesy, doing right by your readers. Otherwise you drive sleepless nit-pickers like me to frenzies of distraction, muttering darkly about your intelligence at three in the morning.
*We have an oscillating upright fan from a company, or a product line, called Windmere--here's the instruction manual--and you can guess what we've called the fan itself since the day we brought it home, can't you? That's right: it's Lady Windermere.
Apparently not. It's been like this (only not as bad at night) for well over a week now, which is one reason I haven't been posting. I have three half-finished posts and I just can't make my brain finish them, because they need more research that just eludes me.
But at least I have it together enough to use correct grammar and a spellchecker, which is more than I can say for these guys.
Kevin Kelly labels a recent posting Harry Plotters and the Prophesies of the Hive Mind. "Prophesies" is a verb. "Prophecies" is the noun that was intended. Like "advice", which is a noun, and "advise", which is a verb, the two words come from the same source but diverged in their spelling a long time ago; the "-c-" in the noun versus the "-s-" in the verb is well established by custom.
James Howard Kunstler in his blog Clusterfuck Nation writes:
This would seem natural for people living in an age when a simple cassette SONY Walkman is superceded by an 80-gigabyte iPod in one generation.
"Superceded" isn't even a word. It's "superseded", the only word in English that ends in "-sede". A spellchecker will catch this. There's no excuse not to use one, not even if you have an editor, which few of us do nowadays. I don't care how old-school you are: you have to check your spelling. It's only common courtesy, doing right by your readers. Otherwise you drive sleepless nit-pickers like me to frenzies of distraction, muttering darkly about your intelligence at three in the morning.
*We have an oscillating upright fan from a company, or a product line, called Windmere--here's the instruction manual--and you can guess what we've called the fan itself since the day we brought it home, can't you? That's right: it's Lady Windermere.
posted by pyramus | 3:09 AM
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