In a bout of bad judgment, CNN no longer puts dates on its articles, but I just stumbled across this article about Grammar Girl there. (It looks like it went up in January.) I’ve been listening to her podcast for a month or two now, and have found it invaluable.
She recently weighed in on a dispute over apostrophes that divided the U.S. Supreme Court. Grammar wasn’t the issue in the 5-4 decision, but Justice Clarence Thomas referred to “Kansas’ statute” in the majority opinion, while Justice David Souter wrote about “Kansas’s statute” in the minority.
Fogarty said both men were correct, but that she preferred leaving off the extra s.
“Justice Thomas’ name ends with an s, so you might guess that he is more familiar with the issue,” she told her audience.
The dirty secret of the Hesperia Star is that Peter and I really aren’t grammarians in the way that Mrs. Nyrop back at South Lakes High School would no doubt like me to be. Instead, we’ve internalized grammatical rules through lots of reading and lots of writing. Grammar Girl, though, makes learning the actual rules pretty painless. Her use of “Lay Down Sally” to explain lay/lie was particularly inspired and one of my favorite episodes.
She’s definitely worth a listen even for casual writers.
Like a lot of people, I’m finding buying Blizzcon tickets to be a LITTLE frustrating — mystery errors with multiple credit cards, captcha inputs that seem to be out of synch with the verification software.
I hope Blizzard gets this resolved before the tickets are all gone …
UPDATE: My Windows XP box at home didn’t work, but my Mac OS 10.4.9 box at work got through fine. Weird.
Well, it was almost too good to be true: The new Liz Phair track on the, ahem, Nancy Drew soundtrack, is only available as an album from iTunes, which will make me one of the few buyers who is not a 12-year-old girl.
On the other hand, Storm Large’s album is available now from CD Baby, meaning I can at least get my Amazonian Portlander seductress fix.
We now have four — count ’em, four — interns at the Hesperia Star this summer. Starting with this week’s issue, you’ll see bylines from the new interns, photo credits and more. Frankly, it’s depressing how good at this these high school kids are, given that it’s taken me this long to be barely better than them.
In addition to producing more stories, Peter and I are also looking forward to the addition of more points of view to the paper, which will hopefully include coverage of summer sports and stuff that’s of interest to people under 30. (Quick way to know you’re old: When one of the interns has never looked up a phone number without the Internet and has to be told what number to dial for information. I’ll be off measuring myself for a casket, thanks.)
Apple’s pretty crappy browser, Safari, is now available for Windows. Hooray?
Mac loyalists will argue it renders faster, it’s stable, yadda yadda. Well, not really. It’s not appreciably faster than Firefox, it lacks nearly all of Firefox’s improvements (many of which have now been aped by IE7) and it can’t even render quite a few standards-based pages that both Firefox and IE can render. (It’s an issue I face here at work where Freedom folks at remote locations see a totally different page than I see with Firefox or IE.)
How about a widescreen video iPod, Jobs?
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