From the Associated Press Stylebook, 2004 edition, page 49:
citizen, resident, subject, national, native A citizen is the person who has acquired the full civil rights of a nation either by birth or naturalization. Cities and states do no not confer citizenship. To avoid confusion, use resident, not citizen, in referring to inhabitants of states and cities.
Citizen is also acceptable for those in the United Kingdom, or other monarchies where the term subject is often used.
National is applied to a person residing away from the nation of which he or she is a citizen, or to a person under the protection of a specified nation.
Native is the term denoting that an individual was born in a given location.
I know that conflicts with the surprisingly sloppy dictionary definition, but it still bugs me hearing the word used loosely, especially by people who know full well that there’s no such thing as Hesperia citizenship.
Technorati is a dangerous tool, akin to the ability to pop open a million vapid Instant Messenger conversations and read them anonymously and secretly.
Amazingly, spammers have found a way to clog it, as they clog all search engines, with apparently machine-generated blogs about whatever keyword you might type in.
Well, almost any keyword.
Want to read real blogs from real people, bitching about their love life, work life, home life, whatever? (You know you do, in a train wreck sort of way, let’s not pretend otherwise.) I found the magic word. (Warning: By definition, many of the links off that page will be NSFW.)
 Well, it started out great, but it looks like Guyville, the get-fans-pumped-about-the-new-Liz Phair-album site is effectively dead. And me hundreds of points from being able to qualify for any of the free schwag.
Which is weird, since the early word on the new album is pretty decent. The Support System mailing list, which I’ve been on since … hmmm, forever … is usually of the view that anything after her debut album is crap. And they haven’t been, this time around, which about made me fall out of my chair.
In other news, I will find and kill the snipers who keep snatching away the promo disk versions of “comeandgetit” from me on eBay. With a shovel. It would be a bad idea to test me on this one.
Wow. After Tuesday night’s Rock Star: INXS, I would run, not walk, to pick up Marty Casey’s single, “Trees,” if it were released somewhere other than the crappy MSN Music. (Who, exactly, thought that trying to sell music that’s as difficult to listen to on a portable device as humanly possible was a good idea?) Marty did a great job combining his signature passion with a too-seldom-glimpsed sense of humor in the song.
Otherwise, I thought everyone did OK, but everyone also failed to cover themselves in glory. I voted for Marty and Jordis.
Astonishingly, it turns out that “Trees” was not the song chosen for the encore. America is clearly nuts. I will console myself with the knowledge that Sleater-Kinney’s “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone” is finally available from iTunes.
OK, reading Marty’s Rock Star blog, “Trees” is an older song that he apparently did with his Chicago band, the Lovehammers. (The band name makes me giggle a bit too, but if I put a band together at age 13, I doubt I would have come up with a better name.) The lyrics to “Trees” can be found here.
So, it was a weekend of one videogame (where I beat up a lot of criminals and probably have a lawsuit coming my way from various supervillains) and another (where I shot so many orcs, trolls, undead and cow-men that I was made a knight) and hot dogs and steak and barbecue sandwiches and soda and generally goofing off. So, naturally, I overslept on Tuesday.
And in other great news, the black widow population of Hesperia has finally found our home. After accidentally sticking my hand into a web this spring, I’ve been dreading this day. Somehow, poisonous snakes back east seem less threatening than teeny tiny spiders with non-fatal venom.
My baby brother Joel turned 34 this weekend. But he’s still not too big for me to kick his butt!
The New York Times calls World of Warcraft “a game that is easy for casual players to understand and feel successful in, while including enough depth to engross serious gamers, who may play a game like World of Warcraft for 30 hours a week or more.” The article discusses whether having the first mass market MMORPG is helping the market, by bringing lots of new players into the MMORPG genre, or hurting it, by snapping the necks of its weaker competitors. I have to say I think it’s a good thing — and if bad games don’t find audiences, stop making bad games. Good games will survive, and have. (BugMeNot NY Times ID and password: abracadabra605, pentape)
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