This has been making the rounds today, and I don’t usually post something just to link to it (anymore), so you will understand that this is for future reference. Semicolons; So Tricky by Mary Norris at the New Yorker, quotes from a book called “Punctuation..?”:
Its main role is to indicate a separation between two
parts of a sentence that is stronger than a comma but
less strong than dividing the sentence in two with a full
stop…. She looked at me; I was lost for words.
Stronger than a comma, weaker than a period. So, the semicolon has both a comma and a period in it.
Two days ago, we saw a live puppet theater in the backyard of a Prospect Park neighbor on Franklin Avenue.
The title of the production was “The Adventures of Juan Bobo”, and the second half of it, which we caught, was really fun. The live accordion player made it really… lovely, too.
I do wish I could have seen the production of “The Amazing Cow Boat”, which can be summarized thusly:
The Amazing Cow Boat tells the story of a boy named
Charlie who is playing pretend in the bath tub. He dives
into his imagination where he becomes the captain of a
boat that is part cow, part boat, part amazing.
There are more shows in other places, perhaps I will catch the Cow Boat show.
One day ago, it was our third year wedding anniversary. Somehow, with all the changes we’ve been going through (buying our first car together, considering living somewhere by choice rather than by necessity, figuring out our careers and family plans), we both knew that a lot needed to be written in the cards we exchanged. And we wrote a lot, a lot about how we felt now and about our future. And you know what? That brought us closer together. It’s probably a good sign that one of us didn’t write a novella while the other just put “Love you lots!” Nice to be on the same page.
So we went to a lazy river at the new Como Park Pool. We lazy rivered for about 20 minutes, which is exactly the right amount of time to lazy river on a small lazy river on a beautiful late summer’s evening on your third wedding anniversary. I suggested we make this a tradition. No matter where we are or what we are doing on our anniversary, we find a lazy river and then lazy river on it. (This paragraph brought to you by verbing).
These days, we’re starting to do more things. Saw a movie on a weeknight with Nils. Had dinner with old and new friends (Emily Fulton and her boyfriend Nick). Did stuff that felt more like living life than surviving. We’re both trying to figure out what type of structure we want for our days, weeks, years… and it is hard because right now we have fewer restrictions on our lives than ever before. Mykala is beginning to consider her transition out of school, I’m in the middle of mine.
I love her more than anything, and that fact is my North Star.
Just ate at Wok in the Park in St. Louis Park. Wow! Not only was just about everything on the menu vegan-friendly by request, but they had two flavors of vegan cheesecake. One of them we actually thought they’d made a mistake and told us it was vegan. Nope: the head chef stopped by and explained to us how he made it without any dairy or animal products. Yum.
Mykala converted my idiosyncratic and decidedly gentle ill-will towards some selfish strangers to something called “Unlikely Retribution”, and here’s how it works. First, a stranger must do something bad, wrong, or otherwise morally repugnant to you. They might cut you off in traffic, spend 5 minutes ordering coffee, or take your parking spot. The offense usually occurs in an incidental way where you don’t directly interact with this person, though that isn’t a requirement.
The stage has been set, then: someone slighted you. To participate in the game, you describe the most unlikely misfortune that you hope your subject faces:
“I hope that they develop a slow leak in their tire, which forces them to drive slightly slower than normal for the rest of the day.”
“I hope their microwave malfunctions, so that it makes noise for 2 minutes, but their food still comes out cold.”
“I hope their remote control batteries die and the replacement batteries are hard to find.”
“I hope they patch the scratches in their car’s paint, and someone dings their door right after they’re done.”
“I hope they ask for extra ketchup packets, and only receive the normal amount of ketchup packets.”
“I hope the handle on their briefcase loosens so that it has only one questionable attachment point and they have to hug it for the rest of the day.”
“I hope they think there is one more stair, but they’re really on the floor and they awkwardly push their foot into nothing.”
Brainstorming such mishaps makes the whole event feel silly, trivializing the slight against you. The game pulls your thoughts out of anger and into humor.
I wish somebody would figure out how to disrupt the car buying process. It’s unimaginable how bad things must have been before you could easily find the models of a certain type in your area — you would’ve been completely at the mercy of the dealer at which you ended up. In this day and age, we can narrow our search from home with CarSoup, reference safety and reliability using hard data rather than here-say, and can make decisions outside the pressures of car price negotiation. But, it’s still bad out there.
We found a Honda Element in our price range that looked like it could work, so we went to see it. “Oh, the car was really dirty! We’re cleaning it up.” We drove up the road to the other lot that the dealer owned, where the car was supposed to be. Wasn’t there. Back to the original dealer — OH — there it is, in the ‘detailing’ department of the original location.
‘Really dirty’ was now downrated to this: “The folks who sold this owned two dogs and we noticed some things in there that we wanted to clean up.” We looked at the car for a while. The front seat was still wet from… shampooing. We wondered what was so dirty. “I guess they took their dogs in the car sometimes—no stains from them or anything.” It smelled like dog and some shampoo. Why do you list a car for sale when it’s not ready to be sold? What has been covered up in the cars where we haven’t seen this process?
We said we’d stop back later. Which we won’t. Their lies mean one things, ours another. “I noticed a list of things to clean on the dash,” said Mykala. “It said ‘disgusting shit stain on seat.’” No matter how reliable, we’ll let someone else buy this just-cleaned, gnawed plastic, shit-stained Honda Element.
For my whole life, school is what has given me meaning. Now, starting my job, I realize that I have to find that meaning on my own. This has been unexpectedly terrifying; the framework in which I lived has melted away. For those accustomed to such existential freedom (to which most have unconsciously adapted), this is nothing — they just… live life, you know? Their adaptation happened gradually since their high school or college careers ended. So, I guess I’m not alone… but I do feel adrift sometimes. I shouldn’t expect too much since it has only been 4 weeks since graduation. Typing it out in black and white, i realize that, wow, it HAS only been 4 weeks since graduation. Life feels a LOT different in the rhythm of a job than it ever did in the rhythm of school. While I struggle to figure this out, I’m going to be a better husband to my wife, spend time with my family, and be better friends with my friends. I’ve been so goal-oriented, that I can’t decide if I should set more of them, or learn to focus my life without them. Probably, as is almost always the answer, a little bit of both.
Sometime in 2003, when this online space was only 4 years old, I thought: “I would love to be a dentist.” The journey is the destination and all that, but the destination is pretty great. So, it’s time to start as a dentist tomorrow. My weeks off since graduation have been wonderful, but what’s even better is that I don’t fear the years ahead the way I did the years of dental school. Somewhere, deep down, you know when what you are doing isn’t sustainable. Like 4 hour nights of sleep or back-to-back hotdog eating contests, you know that this is a pace you can’t sustain. This isn’t that. This is an opportunity to learn, to treat patients, and to grow my relationship with my wife.
“Your 1920x1080 TV takes a 1920x1080 signal, chops the edges off it and then stretches the rest to fit the screen because of decisions made in the 1930s.”
— Matthew Garrett
“120Hz and 240Hz TVs have the potential to show you each 24p frame for exactly 1/24th of a second, perfectly replicating The Way Movies Look, and that’s great. The problem is, it’s hard to make them do that, because of awful motion-smoothing settings that are On by default.”
— Stu Maschwitz
“‘Can I choose?’, Beatrix asks. She’s still confused. She thinks this is like home where one can choose from a selection of things to watch. A well organized list of suggestions and options with clear box cover shots of all of her favorites. I have to explain again that it does not work that way on television. That we have to watch whatever is on and, if there is nothing you want to watch that is on then you just have to turn it off. Which we do.”
— Patrick Rhone
“You know those [unskippable] FBI warning messages that appear at the beginning of DVDs and Blu-ray discs? They’re getting an upgrade—and they’re multiplying.
The US government yesterday rolled out not one but two copyright notices, one to “warn” and one to “educate.” Six major movie studios will begin using the new notices this week.”
— Nate Anderson
“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent [television],” he said. “[Apple is] not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
— (Inspired by) Ed Colligan
So if you take Wikipedia as a
kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every
page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in
every language that Wikipedia exists in—that represents
something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of
human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg
at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s
the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of
thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion
hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way,
now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects
a year spent watching television. Or put still another
way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every
weekend, just watching the ads.
Two years ago, Mykala and I ate a life alteringly great watermelon. The darn thing made you ask questions like “What is truth?” and “Have I known beauty until now?” Ever since, we’ve been on a watermelon quest. Today, we have matched that previously awe-inspiring watermelon: we just had a (part of a gigantic) “Little Bear” brand seedless watermelon (#4032). I didn’t ask any big life questions, but did ask where it was from. Target. Hmm.
