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- 5/14/08 Word of the Week:
- antiasynithisphobia - The fear of not being unusual.
Inspired by my 15 year old niece who is deathly afraid that she is running out of things to rebel against.
- 5/14/08 Travel:
- Just got back from a long weekend visit with the family back east. Actually had a great time with many funny stories to tell. I'll
have the full report next week.
- 5/1/08 Another dog gone:
- Maggie's kidneys gave out and we had to put her down. The pain she was in was unbearable to watch. We're down to a single dog now, and Rex
is feeling very lonely.
- 4/28/08 Word of the Week:
- remarkable - something that can be marked up more than once
As in; That chalkboard is remarkable. I came up with this example to prove a point to a co-worker about a miscommunication on multiple meanings for every day words.
- 4/21/08 Word of the Week:
- disunderstanding - verb: Actively not understanding something
Pretty much describes the activity of every on-air personality on the Fox News Channel.
- 4/18/08 Family Stuff:
- Bad week this week
My daughter got this nasty infection on her foot and leg. Her foot swelled to nearly three times its normal size and her skin was bright red. We took her to the emergency room and they put us in the "fast track" room. After six hours they shipped us off to another hospital. She was there for five days. My wife and I took turns staying overnight with her. She didn't really need us, but many of the hospital workers were freaked by her and we had to help them deal with her.
So now she's home and doing much better. The foot is back to its normal size and the redness is fading in clumps. Now I need to sleep for a couple days.
- 4/6/08 Writing:
- THE NOVEL IS DONE!!!
I finally finished the second draft of my novel. For several months I've been trying to wrap this thing up. The problem was I didn't like how the first draft ended, so I've been trying to come up with a new finish. I rewrote chapter 18 twenty three times trying to steer the story one way or the other. Nothing worked. Finally it dawned on me to give up trying to change the ending and just try to make the best of what I had. I rewrote chapter 18 again and in the process I was able to make the ending work. So now I like the way it ends.
Now that I'm happy with the ending all I have to do is one more draft to clean up continuity. Minor details like how one character changes names half way through the book, and one scene that starts in the evening and ends the same afternoon. OOPS! Then it's off to the literary agents to see if any of them see any commercial potential. Just like I'm a real writer or something.
- 4/1/08 Word of the Week:
- narcoinsomnia - Dreaming that you can't sleep
I know it sounds odd but this actually happens to me from time to time.
- 3/25/08 Word of the Week:
- egoplasty - surgically altering someone's ego
As in; I had to perform egoplasty on the arrogant bastard.
- 3/22/08 Racelog
- Fun stuff at the go kart track. Though at times it was more like the bumper cars.
- 3/20/08 Weird Coincidence(?)
- So I just finished reading STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE by Tennessee Williams. Great book/play/movie/etc., but I had a problem with it. I didn't
know what Tennessee Williams looked like, so my sub-brain kept substituting in an image of Tennessee Ernie Ford. So I went on the web and did
an image search for Tennessee Williams and was shocked by what I say. He was almost exactly as I pictured him. So then I had to look up Tennessee
Ernie Ford to see if maybe my image of him was wrong. It wasn't. Here is what I found:
That's just a little weird.A weird fact: Williams was born 8 years before Ford AND Williams died 8 years before Ford.
- 3/19/08 The Sax Healer
- I have a copy of my book for sale on eBay. The auction is for a signed copy with whatever inscription you want. A way unique gift idea, nicht whar?
- 3/17/08 Word of the Week:
- sporify - to make something into a spore
As in; Because of the incomplete manufacturing process Bill had to manually sporify the raw material.
Why is it the word of the week? Because it sounds cool. Say it slowly and menacingly. "Sporify" That's cool.
- 3/10/08 Word of the Week:
- hyponormal - A lower than normal level of normality
Yes, I know that the definition is logically invalid. Anyway, the motive behind this word was some Fox News reactionary complaining about Barak Obama making up words. The funny part is that the word Obama used was a perfectly constructed word, in fact is was a rather clever use of prefixes and suffixes, but since it didn't appear in the news geek's dictionary he assumed that Obama made a gramatical error. What a maroon.
So I built my own simple word which appears in no dictionary I could find, but is still a perfectly cromulent word.
- 3/1/08 Racelog Entry
- Read about my latest attempt at racing super-stardom on GoKartRacer's Yokohama track.
- 2/25/08 Word of the Week:
- Divulgophobia(1) - The fear of giving out information
I don't mean the normal everyday fear that someone is going to try to steal your identity and/or money, because they are. I mean the bizarre, excessive, irrational fear of exposing little bits of company-related information, which are already available company-wide on a dozen internal web pages, being presented together on a single internal web page. Apparently privacy is contextual.
I must admit however that I am so paranoid about online snooping and invasions that I no longer have any delusions of privacy. So I don't see the harm in letting my co-workers see what cost center I work for. Maybe it's just me.
(1) The word itself is incorrect. The correct term would be apokalyptophobia. However, due to the modern interpretation of the Greek work apokalypto, it just sounds way too scary. So then I tried substituting the Latin phrase for giving out information, which yeilded invulgophobia. This was also unsatisfactory because my test audience, the people in the cubicles around me at work, didn't know what invulgo meant and weren't interested enough to look it up. So I took the relatively modern, well 15th century, variation of the word, divulgar, which in modern English become divulge.
- 2/21/08 The big adventure:
The book is now available on Amazon.com. It's like I was a real wrter or something.
- 2/12/08 The big adventure:
-
Now available, my first book, The Sax Healer and Other Stories, a collection of short stories examining the "What Ifs" of life.
It's currently available at CreateSpace for only $9.95 and will soon be available at Amazon.
- 1/27/08 The big adventure:
Wow this is fun. Much work. Busy busy busy. I never thought this would be possible. Full details later this week.
- 1/13/08 The big adventure:
Details will follow, but tonight I completed the first step on the first leg of what will hopefully become my life's big adventue. Stay tuned.
- 1/12/08 Fog City Wrestling:
Tonight I went to the inaugural event for Fog City Wrestling. It was much better, and much more popular than I expected. The wrestling was very good and the venue, Cellspace, was packed well beyond its posted capacity. I hope they can keep it going.
- 1/5/08 Freaks of Dakar:
Sorry, folks. Race was canceled due to some morons with guns killing French tourists.