Deviant Dispatches

Hey look! Another mish-mash of recent happenings. I'll be expanding upon a few of these later in the week. I made eggplant parmesan for the first time last night. It was much easier and more fun than I thought it would be (both good signs, as I haven't been very into cooking lately). It was a simple matter of baking the breaded eggplant and making some sauce. Spousal Unit and I found a three-tier cat tree near a dumpster. It had been rained on, but we let it dry in the sun and gave it a thorough cleaning. The cats seem to like it so far, though Oberon is still more of a ground-based kitty. Last week at work, someone used "thru." In a professional report. I headdesked so bad. Another item in my work week: someone emailed saying that if the government shuts down, she'll have to send her report on Monday instead of Tuesday. That should not be a serious sentence. I feel like "If the government shuts down" should be the start of a joke, not a qualifi...

I'm a fan of all things weird. We all know this and agree that it makes me quirky and eccentric rather than strange and weird myself. (Here's where you nod your head in placating agreement.) One of the weird things I've always had a special place for are weird safety instructions. You know, the little things people never read about their new devices, which leads to strange accidents and the instructions getting even more bizarre in the next iteration. The best source for these, I've found, is usually a device whose instructions are written by someone who does not speak English, whose words of wisdom are then translated by someone else who doesn't know English. I've run across several like that myself, though the fount of all such wisdom is usually Engrish.com . This is not the case today, as I found this little gem in the box for our Blu Ray player. "The second rule of Fight Club is..."

At work yesterday, I had to deal with lots of future perfect tense. For those of you who are unaware, the future perfect tense goes something like this: At this time tomorrow, I will have been  attacked by velociraptors. Future perfect tense is used when talking about the future, but in a historical sense. I know - it makes my head hurt, too. Which is why, when I ran across a sentence with an extra verb in it, my head almost exploded. I couldn't figure out what to do with it for quite a while, and then I subverted the issue entirely by just removing the second verb. I was so pleased with myself for it that I came up with an excellent slogan. Copy Editors Will have been subverting future perfect since tomorrow Awesome, right? ...Okay, fine. It's excellent to linguists and writers. Everyone else is taking a step back to avoid having geek spilled on them.

I really have no idea what "indoor chicken flavor" cat treats taste like, and I don't want to know. I'm also curious about Titania's seating choice. But I'm not one to hate on a person (or cat) for their lifestyle choices. Sit wherever you want, cat.

I'm not used to working a full week, but I'm in the midst of one right now. I don't usually complain about working a "whopping" 40 hours, and I know lots of people who work more than that in a week. But my leg and back pain, combined with moving and organizing an entire bookstore, results in a sore body and sore mind. I'm so done with thinking for the week, and it's only my Wednesday. What this means is I'm not planning to think too much the rest of the week, so here, instead of witty commentaries, dry banter, and sharp analyses, you're going to get mass ridiculosity. I hope you can tolerate that for a week - I sure as hell won't have a problem with it. For example... - Here's a thneed someone knitted. A thneed, as you know, is a thing that everyone needs . - A Silly Song, featuring Larry and some pirates - A few terrible tattoos and some wonderful ones A cat picture A knitted angler fish - And a totally hilariou...

I've at last completed number 13 on my list of 25 things to do before my birthday in October: finish a crossword puzzle. The proof is in the... picture... My original goal was to complete one entirely alone, without outside help from any persons or internets. But I realized most people get at least a little help from someone while completing these, so I gave myself some slack and accepted Spousal Unit's help when I needed it. He may tell you that he completed up to half of the crossword for me. This is what we call lying,  kids, and it's a very bad thing to do. I finished half the crossword before I even asked for his help, and even then, I didn't really need it. As we all know, I don't really  need help. I just like the strangulatory hug a strait jacket gives me. Anyway. Most of the reason I was able to finish this was because of the theme: Beatles songs turned into horrible insect puns, such as Ant Buy Me Love, I Bee Mine, and Cricket to Ride. Us...

When I first ran across this cover, I thought it was a fake title. But no. The Very Virile Viking by Sandra Hill The Very Virile Viking is a real book. By a real romance author, who apparently doesn't care about pretending to be historically accurate anymore; she just wants to get to the good stuff. The first line of this book? "In the days of old when men were... whatever... " I think this review sums it up much better than I could. I especially like the euphemism the reviewer points out: "It was not yet spring, but his sap was running high." Oh myyyyy. Our next awful book title features... Pregnesia by Carla Cassidy ...Okay. No.  I give up on this one. It's too easy. (Just let me say that either this is a condition where you forget how you got pregnant in the first place, or the lady's birthing a planet. Now I'm moving on.) We all know Harlequins are absolute crap. Here are some more wonderful baby-related tal...

Remember how I mentioned Spousal Unit and I were going to wait and slowly add to our teapot savings as people came to visit us? Remember that good plan we had in place, where every time we saved money on something (such as with coupons) we would put that money toward our new cast iron? Some plans aren't meant to be followed. This is our awesome new teapot, from Teavana . As you can see, one side has a tiger growling and prowling through the grass; the other side has a tiger sleeping under bamboo with a sun overhead. (Yes, I have a favorite side: it's the sleeping tiger.) On top of the cover is a little tiger statuette. We ended up choosing one that we hadn't considered before, and I'm glad we chose the tiger. The two sides together make it feel fierce, but peaceful. According to the little booklet of symbolism , it represents courage, determination, and bravery. I guess no one told their copy editor that courage and bravery are the same thing. But...

Everywhere I look online, I'm seeing the word "occupy" appear. At first, it was just "Occupy Wall Street." We Are the 99 Percent's website features posts from people who are in the enormous bottom segment of income in the United States: people who aren't making enough to live on and are involuntarily in hopeless situations. And with almost every post came that phrase. I had no clue what it meant. That was two days ago. Yesterday, I saw it again, in links on Facebook. Occupy Wall Street is a social/political movement (somewhat connected to the group Adbusters ) that some are comparing to the recent Middle Eastern revolts. The purpose is more or less to stand up, as the lower-class majority, and stand against a country run by the top one percent of money holders. According to the website , they have "an interest in returning the US back into the hands of it's individual citizens." (Guys, I love the idea, but you need a copy editor. I volunte...

Dear Management/Owners, Your attempts at making retail classy are not working. You seem to be under the extremely mistaken impression that changing the language we, the workers, use will change everything about the place in which we work. Carefully chosen words, to you, can make or break the business as a whole. While I agree that language is powerful, you're overlooking something very important: language cannot change facts, only disguise them. And sometimes, not even that. For example. At the tux shop, I've not been allowed to say the common retail phrase, "Can I help you?" The supposed reasons for this are that it's a yes or no question, and that it's very "low-end" retail. Instead, employees are supposed to say, "What brings you in today?" News flash: eliminating the phrase "can I help you" does not change the fact that even if it's expensive, it's still retail. We are still selling useless crap to people who could eas...

Back in the day, I was a newspaper copy editor. Grand times were had (minus the times it sucked my creativity dry). There was a plethora of reporter mistakes for me to put in order. One of the more important parts of that job was my need to think like a 12-year-old boy. Accidental double entendres ran rampant in every story imaginable. I pretty much saw it all. When my coworker and I were reading quietly and one of us suddenly burst out laughing, we always knew an awesome error had been found. I kept a running list of the worst mistakes. For example: "Finished brooms hung from a display wrack." "Mr. Jones has been grazing near Bone Lake since 1993." [His cows have been grazing, not Mr. Jones] "Wild forest berries were available to the ancient Romans in the Middle Ages." Those are some of the simpler ones, with one mistake that was easily corrected. Not every sentence was so easy as that. For example: "The raw vegetable virgin oil processing will proba...