My furry critter needs a name.

Now I will tell you about the process by which I chose a name for my foster kitty. Since this was early Spring of 2007, it was a few months before the last Harry Potter book came out, so that was on my mind.

There is insanity (and more kitten pictures) after the jump.

I reject as false the distinction between prescriptivist and descriptivist approaches to grammar.

How is that I never heard of The Oatmeal before? They come up with the most amazing example sentences!

First we have How to Use An Apostrophe. Their ultimate rule is, “When in doubt, DON’T use an apostrophe.” I appreciate this. Apostrophe abuse is so rampant nowadays, I’d rather see one missing than used inappropriately. We have this discussion here to show us that writers are not immune to the scourge of apostrophe abuse, either.

Then we have 10 Words You Need to Stop Misspelling, in which they remind us that “If you put an A in ‘definitely,’ then you’re definitely an A-hole.”

I’ll make a confession: I tend to abuse commas. My last revisions on Charlinder’s Walk involved a lot of hunting down and excising unnecessary punctuation. Also, I genuinely love adverbs. It is, admittedly, a sickness.

Incorrectly spelled idioms

Man, I just stopped reading in the middle of what was probably a very decent blog post on the recent anti-immigration law in Alabama when the author used the phrase “by in large.”

I’m sure it’s a mark of irrational bigotry on my part that I react so badly to spelling/grammar errors, but, fuck it, I’m letting my freak flag fly. Especially since the blog post in question was posted on a social network for writers. We should know better.

The phrase is “by and large.”

“By in large” makes no sense.

And don’t even get me started on using “of” in place of have. Perpetrators of would of/could of/should of, I am glaring unpleasantly in your direction.

I made it happen!

The tickets all disappeared in, like, two days, but the UMD Society for Inquiry set up an overflow room in a nearby building with a live video feed, and I SAW RICHARD DAWKINS GIVE AN INTERVIEW TONIGHT. I was hoping to get my copy of The Greatest Show On Earth signed, and that didn’t happen because crowd control sucked and THE LINE WAS NOT MOVING, so I got the heck out of there before my bladder took its vengeance. But, I got to see Richard Dawkins tonight! (I made it there with plenty of time, managed to grab a snack beforehand so I wouldn’t suffer a panic attack halfway through the talk, and didn’t even have to pay for visitor parking!) There should be video online tomorrow. It was almost entirely about biology and evolution; very little to do with religion and atheism, which is fine. We get a bit more material on skepticism, cosmology and social changes in the Q&A session afterwards.

Surely I’m not alone in this?

Greetings, everyone! Butterfly here. My cousin continues to be elbow-deep in job-hunting and novel-taming, so I’m poking my head in here to offer my own profound Thought for the Day.

What’s up with the Westboro Baptist Church?

Honestly, folks, surely I’m not the only person around here who looks at that freak show and thinks to herself: They cannot possibly be sincere. I have seen the American Right Wing do some quite despicable things in pursuit of treating sexual minorities like sub-humans and defending their right to do so, but—picketing soldiers’ funerals? Really? Who does that? It’s one thing to criticize American military conquests, though that seems to be mainly a left-wing pursuit. It’s quite another thing to go around carrying signs that say the young men who enlisted in the armed forces deserve to die in those military pursuits because America is not a moral country. Who honestly does that?

The more I watch those freaks on parade, the more I think to myself: they do not really buy into their bullshit. They’re doing this as a parody in order to make the Christianist right wing look like assholes, not that they don’t do it to themselves quite handily, but the Westboro nuts are so ridiculous even the homophobic Moral Majority types have the sense to be embarrassed.

So, most recently, the Westboro freak parade visited the Comic-Con in San Diego, and I’m still not clear on what exactly they were supposedly trying to accomplish by showing their faces there. Did they think it would be fun to out-freak-show the bunch that attends events such as Comic-Con? Because if so, they failed miserably. Comic-Con attendees are old pros at putting on a freak show, which they demonstrated to fine effect this year. Were the WBC nuts really trying to accomplish anything except giving the SDCC crowd a chance to come out in force with their cardboard signs? I sincerely doubt it.

Toodle-oo, my dears!

The stupid, it burns!

Four adults who obviously have far more spare time than sense dressed up in bee suits and protested a goddamn spelling bee:

Former elementary school principal Roberta Mahoney says the current construction of our language obstructs 40% of the population from becoming fully literate. “Our alphabet has 425-plus ways of putting words together in illogical ways,” she said. Mahoney would like to see that more words are spelled exactly how they are pronounced. For example, she believes “fruit” should be spelled “froot” and “slow” should be “slo.”

Well, I see you’ve really given this a lot of thought, Former Principal Mahoney! So, if the combination oo should be used to express the u sound in fruit, then how do you propose we spell words like book and look? For example, the Albanian language uses the letter y as a vowel sound which is close though not entirely comparable to the sound in should/could/would. But since we use y for a consonant, what do you suggest should make that vowel sound? While we’re at it, how do you suggest we differentiate between homophones such as would/wood, bear/bare, and flower/flour? Or do you say we just spell all homophones the same and let the kids differentiate them from context?

While we’re discussing mechanics, how about contractions? How do you handle a word which is actually a mashup of two words? I’m sure you had lots of experience with children who couldn’t learn the difference between there/their/they’re, but how do you propose to construct they’re which is short for they are?

Geeks should work with other geeks

From IMMD:

I purchased a desk-top Zen garden (with sand, rocks and rakes). I came in the next morning and some of my co-workers had added a collection of miniatures including orcs, wizards, a Sherman tank and a Spitfire fighter plane to create the most bizarre battle diorama you could possibly imagine. IMMD

I really hope to get a job soon, and when I do, I will have to get a Zen garden for my desk. Not because I expect my co-workers to add orcs and wizards, but because I JUST MIGHT DO IT.

Or maybe I’ll just keep the Zen garden in my next apartment and occasionally take pictures of it with weird shit in the sand.

“Slightly more than half of everything I am is thanks to you!”

It is a musically talented biology nerd! Who is not afraid to show the entire Internet that he loves his mom!

(snaked from PZ Myers)

“But there are no transitional fossils!”

(Okay, the title is a cheap shot. Sue me.)

Via RD.net, we get news from Science Daily of a new prehistoric critter!

The fossil skull, found in 2004 near Pittsburgh International Airport, was recovered from rocks deposited approximately 300 million years ago during the Late Pennsylvanian Period. Named Fedexia striegeli, it is one of only a very few relatively large amphibian fossils to display evidence of a predominantly terrestrial (land-based) life history so early in geologic time.

Oh, Fedexia. You have a stupid name, but you’re a beautiful animal.

How did Fedexia thrive back then, but not now?

At the time of Fedexia‘s preservation, the earth’s climate was in a period of transition. Immense glaciers in Earth’s southern polar region produced rapidly fluctuating global climates. Western Pennsylvania, which was near the equator at that time, experienced tremendous amounts of rain. Swamps which would later develop into coal developed, and amphibians — which are dependent on moist conditions — flourished; in fact, the Pennsylvanian Period is known as the “Age of Amphibians.”

The idea of western Pennsylvania having a tropical climate and filling up with coal while near the equator makes me happy for reasons I can’t quite articulate.

Congratulations, Mr. Striegel! You have an amphibian species to your name!

Fulled laptop sleeve

Pick out an animal-fiber yarn which is shrinkable in the wash; wool, alpaca, and mohair are good for this. Make sure it isn’t superwash.

Knit a flat rectangle that covers the width of the laptop (plus room for shrinkage) and is long enough to cover both sides plus a flap. The stitch pattern should have some body, such as garter stitch or a broken rib pattern. I used garter stitch in modular rectangles, but unless you’re using a variegated yarn, the directions in the garter stitch will barely show up.

Place markers at each end of the row that meets the bottom of the case on one side, and again at each end of the row at the other side.