It’s time for a few quick observations about the 2008 Olympics.

Michael Phelps is of course the story of these games, setting 7 world records as he won 8 gold medals, the most golds ever for any athlete in a single Olympics.

He brings his lifetime haul to 16 medals (14 gold and 2 bronze). The only person to ever have more medals is Soviet gymnast Larissa Latynina, who earned 18 total medals (9 gold, 5 silver, 4 bronze) over the course of three Olympics (’56, ’60, ’64). Expect Phelps to eclipse her mark in 2012, as he is only 23 years old. If you’d care to see his astonishing 12,000 calorie-per-day diet, you can find it here.

[Read more →]

Tags: sports by Jason Sterlace
No Comments »

I have, on occasion, impetuous bowels. Sometimes when I’m minding my own business, nature calls. Urgently. Nature doesn’t care if I’m stuck in traffic on I-95 or in IHOP. [Read more →]

Tags: reflections & recollections by Scott Stein by Scott Stein
No Comments »

These cell phone companies are going to be in for some trouble one day when someone doesn’t receive a voice mail message on time. Can you imagine waking up one day to receive some big, potentially life changing news, only to realize that the news is a few days old?  Depending on the circumstances, things could get messy.

Here’s a harmless example of that. I had off this past Thursday, so I called my mother to see if she would let me hang out at her place for a bit. A few hours passed and I didn’t hear from her, so I decided to just drive home anyway to beat traffic and hope things would be ok. As I was driving by my apartment building searching for a place to park, I saw my mother walking in, so I knew all was well. When I got upstairs, mom told me that she had just left me a voice mail saying that it was, indeed, ok for me to visit. She left me that message around 4 PM on Thursday… I received it around 11 PM on Saturday.

To my knowledge, my mother doesn’t have any special powers that would allow her to manipulate the AT&T network, so I’m chalking it up to the company’s error. Think about it though — down the road, someone could miss out on important, time sensitive information like an illness in their family or a potential job interview. It sounds like a recipe for a lawsuit to me.

Tags: technology by Glenn Giangrande
No Comments »

In a transient, mobile, pseudo-egalitarian society such as modern America, it makes sense that the population would self-segregate by interest and familiarity to some degree. It’s not wrong. It’s human nature.

[Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, politics & government by Jason Sterlace
No Comments »

The growing misuse of the apostrophe is reaching catastrophic proportions. Sometimes they’re common errors — it’s for its. Although the distinction between the meaning and use of these words is clear enough, they’re both real words, so we’d expect some people to not know which is which, just as some people apparently don’t know the difference between there and their and lose and loose. 

Some apostrophe errors are wild and bewildering, and we’re seeing them more and more. For some reason, people are putting apostrophes before the ‘s’ in plural words: “Just wait till the boy’s come home.” I don’t know why anyone would think an apostrophe is needed when a word is made plural. One time, at a pizza place, on a scrolling electronic sign, I was informed that french fries’ were on the menu. Although most of us would never make that particular error, we all make mistakes when typing quick e-mails. However, many of these errors are showing up on printed material and painted signs. Look around for a couple of days and you’re bound to find some egregious examples of catpostrophe, on the sides of trucks, newspaper ads, and brochures. Aren’t there proofreaders looking for work somewhere?

Anyway, you’d have to search far and wide to find a catpostrophe as bad as this one, painted on the side of a building on the boardwalk at Ocean City, Maryland, the letters two feet high:

Photo credit: Jared Boshnack

Tags: language & grammar by Scott Stein
2 Comments »

I haven’t seen the movie Tropic Thunder, so can’t say whether it’s any good. I also can’t say whether or not the jokes involving the ‘Simple Jack’ subplot, about which I know nothing, degrade ’intellectually disabled’ people, as Tim Shriver claims, or whether they actually parody Hollywood and actors, who exploit retarded people in order to have a chance at winning awards, as Neil Miller claims. What I think about the term ‘intellectually disabled’ and the prospects of ‘retarded’ disappearing as an insult can be gleaned here.

What I can say is that the following Shriver statement is batshit insane: 

Mockery in any form, or for any purpose or directed at anyone, especially those least able to defend themselves, is neither funny nor acceptable. We must work together to bring it to an end.

Got that, folks? Remove the “especially those least able to defend themselves,” as that is merely the worst kind of mockery (hence the ‘especially’), not the meaning of the sentence. Tim Shriver wrote this column for cnn.com — this is not an off-the-cuff remark or an out-of-context quote. He had time to consider it and phrase it as he desired. He knew that many thousands would be reading it. So we can take it as Shriver’s considered opinion that “mockery in any form, or for any purpose or directed at anyone, is neither funny nor acceptable.”  

Tags: language & grammar, movies by Scott Stein
5 Comments »

August 6, 2006
I dream I am in a truck that transforms into a gurney, and I find myself in a combination Home Depot and Jewish Community Center. I am slowly ascending staircases and heading towards a door. When my gurney hits the door I don’t make it through. A nearby gurney suddenly flies straight up into the air and I fear that my gurney is going next. Fortunately, my gurney tries the door again. On the other side of the door I am high above a huge indoor warehouse space filled with corded wood, water heaters, and boxes of large appliances. While there are no tracks, I fly up and down through this environment as if it were a roller coaster. I find I have limited steering ability.

[Read more →]

Tags: Fred's dreams by Fred Siegel
No Comments »

For some casual sports fans, the Beijing Olympics can be hard to get into. Sure, we’re down with the mainstream sports like basketball and softball, but swimming, rowing and the like? Yes, it’s easy for some people to get up for them every four years, but not all. In those cases, it takes a little extra to pique the interest of the masses … like the good ol’ patriotism that can only be engineered by some foreigner talking smack about Americans. Leave it to a French swimmer to shoot his mouth off.

“The Americans? We’re going to smash them,” said Alain Bernard before being fed a steaming pile of crow by the United States 4×100 relay team, specifically comeback kid Jason Lezak, who earned every bit of that nickname on the last leg of the race despite being 32 years old. Bernard and his teammates can act like losing by a “fingertip” wasn’t a big deal, and really, a silver medal isn’t anything to sneeze at. But when you’re thisclose to victory … that kind of pain translates into any language.

The loss wasn’t for naught though — it motivated at least one bar full of karaoke singing, beer drinking patrons to stop their activities to cheer for the U.S. in unison. I never thought I’d say this, but thank goodness for the French.

Tags: sports by Glenn Giangrande
No Comments »

Robert: I’ve been thinking about the amazing number of online sites and magazines out there. Do you think people who write for these sites actually read the work of others on those sites? I’m sensing we’re in the “I write for it but don’t read it” era of writing and publishing. Perhaps it has always been thus. I don’t know if most contributors to academic publications read most of the work in the publications they write for … am I wrong? Yet now the proliferation of sites makes the imbalance between writing and reading more pronounced. And of course there is the question of whether there is anything wrong with this emphasis on production and writing as opposed to reading? As a teacher, I too am emphasizing writing more than reading, trying to get my students to write their way into engaging a subject. Any thoughts on this?

  Paula: You raise a point that does have application to myself. I write for lots of journals, both print and online, and I certainly don’t read everything in those journals. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, conversations with Paula and Robert by Robert Anthony Watts
No Comments »

May 25, 2008
I dream I am sleeping in my old bed in Northeast Philadelphia and I wake up to see a man I don’t know in the house. I am not angry or scared, but I want to know who the man is. He answers politely, though evasively. This basic situation happens three times with different people in different versions of my old house. Eventually, I run wildly looking for secret entrances to discover where these people are coming in. Later in the day I meet one of them in a deli line, and beat him with a lighting fixture that I wield like a mace. I can see on the television that Conan O’Brien is preparing to play the male lead in a post-modern production of Gypsy.

[Read more →]

Tags: Fred's dreams by Fred Siegel
No Comments »