Here And Now

Hello World, We find ourselves sinking ever deeper and deeper into that disorienting time of year when all of the seasons seem to pile up on top of each other in a mad jumble that just about makes your head spin. Fans of America's Pastime are about to succumb to pennant fever, while football and even hockey are knocking on the door. The back-to-school sales are in full swing, which means it's time for the Christmas card catalogs to start arriving at work, which they did this week. The constant drone of locusts tells you it's certainly August, while Bill just spotted a store that was entirely decorated with pumpkins, and can the Pilgrims be far behind, I ask you that. You don't know which way to turn on television, where old shows are wrapping up and new shows are being unveiled, and the programming landscape of familiar series can't help but remind you now of the post-apocalyptic wasteland from some Japanese horror movie of days gone by. And when it comes to Japanese horror stories, the hapless Mets have certainly had their share, often with Godzilla-like consequences that leave their traumatized fans numb with shock. Never one to learn from their mistakes, the front office is at it again, reeling in media darling Dice-K to help bolster their depleted pitching staff as the season winds down. After signing a sensational $51 million contract with the Red Sox in 2007, his so-so record of 50-37 with an ERA of 4.52 and 609 strike outs was certainly not what Boston envisioned from their star acquisition, and they finally released him in 2012. Now that the erratic hot shot has landed in Queens, we can only hope that he hasn't brought any giant lizards with him - let's face it, our local newspaper doesn't have room for that story and also Alex Rodriguez at the same time, after all. Meanwhile, in the "timing is everything" department, 6 months ago, this would have meant nothing at all to us, but suddenly it's a big deal - yes, I'm referring to Black Cat Appreciation Day on August 17, when we get a chance to celebrate all things ebony in the wonderful world of felines. Bill happened across this fortuitous occasion in his travels, and we were glad to jump on board with the idea, in honor of our enormous Nubian princess, Inky, and also Truffle, who is mostly black with a bit of white underpinnings. But, as they say on late night TV: "That's not all!" Our neighbors have a large black cat that we sometimes see in our yard, and we've also been feeding a tiny black stray at our front door, so our cup runneth over with black cats on every side, and just in time, a special day comes along to give them their due. So for every Blackie, Midnight, Smoke, Inky, Salem, Licorice, Spooky, Onyx, Magic or Darth Vader out there, let your silky obsidian hair down, and party like it's black as the ace of spades, Zorro. We also have Bill to thank for pointing us in the direction of http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/g.html where we turn for our laugh of the day: ============================================== Grammar Checkers. I have no problem with spelling checkers; while they sometimes miss typos, they rarely give advice that's downright wrong. Computerized grammar checkers, on the other hand, are a mess. They not only miss most of the serious problems, they actually give wretched advice, often telling you to fix something that's not broken. And of course they have no sense of grace, which means they can only apply rules pedantically with no sense of context. I've played with many of them, and have never seen one worth the CD-ROM it's printed on. A fun experiment is to take some great work of literature and feed it to a grammar checker, and then to see what mincemeat it makes of it. Here are some mindless tips on the first sentence of Milton's Paradise Lost: Consider revising. Very long sentences can be difficult to understand. Avoid contractions like “flow'd” in formal writing (consider “flow had”). Avoid the use of “Man” (try “he or she”). “One greater Man restore” has subject-verb agreement problems. “In the Beginning” should be “at first.” “Or if Sion” should be “also if Sion.” Milton's style is judged appropriate for a 98th-grade reading level. (Well, okay, that seems about right. But the rest is silly.) Maybe someday I'll be pleasantly surprised, but for now, rely on your own knowledge when you revise and proofread. See also Spelling Checkers and Microsoft Word. [Revised 5 April 2001.] =============================================== Well, talk about Paradise Lost, indeed! I don't know if Milton famously suffered the slings and arrows of detractors and critics during his lifetime, but at least he died well before he had to endure digital brickbats being thrown at him by computerized experts, springing from software that can't tell a hawk from a handsaw, as Shakespeare's melancholy Dane would say. Of course, if this was Shakespeare, the grammar checker would probably insist that it was Francis Bacon instead, I shouldn't wonder. And speaking of the poor overworked spell-checkers of the world, it's not going to help you in a situation like this miscue under a picture from the Living Here section of our local newspaper: ===================================== The Westchester Cosentino Center in Mount Kisco, which boats a 25,300 square foot warehouse and distribution space ===================================== Frankly, I doubt their warehouse, however estimable, "boats" anything at all, in fact, I would go so far as to dare it to use the phrase "which boats a" in any kind of a sentence at all, that could be considered grammatically correct anywhere in this universe. One can only assume the caption writer meant "boasts" rather than "boats," but ran aground on the rocky shoals of this Holiday For Spell Checkers - since "boats" is a perfectly good word, and even the right word in other contexts, and the spell-checker was never going to catch that one, Captain. We can only wonder what the persnickety grammar checker would have made of that, the mind reels. And while we're on the topic of caption writers, let the linguists and purists rejoice (and don't think the dinosaurs and I don't know who you are) because they were on top of their game in this tidbit from the TV listings Best Bets - ====================== Dwayne Johnson challenges the contestants to rappel down the tallest building in Central America on TNT's "The Hero" ====================== Unfortunately, the same can't be said for their colleagues writing the show synopsis for the very same episode - ======================= "The Hero" TNT Contestants are tasked with having to repel down the tallest building in Central America ======================= Once again, this is no fault of the poor over-burdened spell-checker, where the problem is using a perfectly good word in the wrong context. It continues to amaze me how the newspaper staff, with all the modern technology of the world at their fingertips, can continue to make such bald-faced blunders as spelling the same word or name two different ways, once in the caption and again in the body of the story, and often side-by-side, as if there isn't anybody there who actually reads the paper when it's finished. Of course, it's always possible that the newspaper workers don't actually subscribe to the paper themselves, or perhaps they take it home to wrap up coffee grounds and fish bones, for all I know. What we do with the paper at our house is use it in the bottom of the litter boxes, where the cats poop on it - and I guess we can all agree that this is exactly the kind of editorial comment that we can live with, Horace Greeley. But now it's time to kick back with a classic epic poem, tuck into some back-to-school pumpkin pie, and maybe catch up with some local baseball action on the tube. Say, who let Godzilla in here? Elle