If you haven't been to mentalfloss.com, you are missing a fabulous opportunity to waste time.
My favorite part is the quizzes:
name all the US presidents in eight minutes
http://www.mentalfloss.com/quiz/quiz.php?q=217
I missed eight.
Name all the rooms in Clue
http://www.mentalfloss.com/quiz/quiz.php?q=518
got them all!
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Monday, February 9, 2009
Sisters
Most of the time, Kezie really likes her sisiter Ivy. Of course, right after these pictures were taken, she dumped Ivy off her lap onto the couch in her hurry to see them.
Ivy is now just over eight pounds. She has started smiling and definitely has big cute dimples like her sister and her dad. She sleeps wonderfully; in fact, she wakes up crying less than her big sister.Kezie has begun throwing terrible, loud, long, destructive tantrums. There used to be a show on TV, during TGIF, called Dinosaurs. There was this baby dinosaur that would say annoying things like, "I'm the baby. Gotta love me!" and, "Not the Mama!" In one episode, the baby turned two years old and, in what I now recognize as a parody of The Exorcist, started throwing terrible fits, throwing things around the room, screaming uncontrollably, and finally throwing someone out a window.
That annoying dinosaur bears a striking resemblance to my daughter right now. I don't think anyone is going to be flying out the window, but I might jump out of one to run away. She is currenltly sobbing because I gave her what she asked for for lunch. She changed her mind and I refuse to give her what she wants now until she eats the applesauce with honey she asked for in the first place.
I just heard a crash. Kezie knocked a kitchen chair to the floor and earned a trip to her room. This tantrum is going on twenty minutes now.
In between fits, she is learning and growing so fast. She gained more than a pound in six weeks, and I've gotten out the 3T clothes because she got taller in the last month. She can count to thirteen, she likes to help me cook, and she is memorizing some of her favorite books. She likes to sit and pretend to read them. She has decided that anything animated is a "Kezie show," and anything not animated is not worth watching. This means that Imagination Movers, previously a favorite, is no longer on her list. It also means that she doesn't understand why she can't watch Futurama when we flip past it.
She found sunglasses the other day and wanted to wear them.
Little Songbird
Kezie loves to sing the songs that she knows. She can sing a few songs all by herself, but when I turn on the camera she gets shy.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Quotation marks
I promise to post more pictures of the kidlets soon, but I found this and it made me laugh. Superfluous quotation marks are a pet peeve of mine (though I am guilty of making finger quotes). They are on the list right after superfluous apostrophes. I'm definitely going to check out the Gallery of "Misused" Quotation Marks.
Martha Brockenbrough
Do You Abuse Quotation Marks?
By Martha Brockenbrough
There's a fine line between funny and annoying -- and it's exactly the width of a quotation mark. But it's not the quotation mark that deserves our wrath. It's our bad habits:
• We use them when they're not needed. My favorite taco stand claims to recycle "cans." I also have a hair dryer that says, "Always 'unplug it' immediately after using." I find this vaguely embarrassing. I'm most forgiving of this, because it comes from swiftly cured ignorance.
• We make quote fingers. Please, for the love of your knuckles, stop it. If you can't, at least know that you're supposed to say "quote, unquote," not "quote, end quote." (And if you must do this overseas, be aware of the local customs. In Germany, one hand goes up and the other goes down, mimicking the direction of the printed quotation marks they use. In France, they make sideways v's to look like the guillemets they use to open and close quotations.)
• We use them as a shortcut to funny. When we use them to show we're being euphemistic, ironic or sarcastic, it's like having to explain our jokes. If this is necessary, the jokes aren't funny. Believe me, I know (which is funny because I make jokes that aren't funny all the time -- get it?).
I'm not the only one fed up with quotation-mark abuse. Dedicated bloggers have catalogued them faithfully (see the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks and The Gallery of "Misused" Quotation Marks). The late David Foster Wallace even invented the term "finger flexion" to describe the air quotes used by one of his characters that appeared in "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men," a collection of short stories.
If you're guilty of crimes against the inverted comma, as the Brits call it, it's perhaps time to mend your ways.
Consider, if you will, this alarming fact: The abuse of punctuation marks -- including square quotes -- is associated with real-life crime.
I'm not saying that breaking punctuation rules actually causes crime, even if it sometimes makes me want to commit illegal acts of my own. But if you do it regularly in your writing, it might lead to your getting caught should you walk on the wrong side of the law.
Consider, for example, the New Jersey woman who killed her husband and packed his body inside a trio of matching suitcases. She wrote taunting notes to the police in which she abused quotation marks. Police compared her notes with her real-life correspondence and zing! She was busted.
Remember the Washington, D.C., snipers? They terrorized Maryland and Virginia in 2002, killing 10 people. Back when authorities only had the shooters' notes to go by, quotation-mark abuse was one of their clues. The man who wrote the notes wrapped words and phrases in unnecessary quotes, including my own favorites, "FBI" and "female." (See the evidence yourself.)
The author's grammar and punctuation were so bad that police originally speculated he might have been born in a different country. While we salute the police's optimism about our citizens' ability to punctuate properly, the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar has ample proof that native speakers can punctuate just as badly as people who did not grow up speaking English. (Exhibit A is this sign, which urges people to "speak English" when ordering sandwiches.)
With improving the state of the nation's punctuation in mind, here are five ways to use quotation marks correctly, along with one way you shouldn't use them:
Want More Martha?
Read more columns by Martha Brockenbrough.
• Use them to indicate direct quotes. He said, "I put my entire foot in my mouth." Note: indirect quotes are different. "He said he put his entire foot in his mouth" doesn't need the quotation marks. And for the love of all that is pure, please do not put them around "foot," or people will talk.
• Use them to set off titles of movies, books, essays and songs. Yes, titles are sometimes italicized, as in books. But newspapers and publications that can't easily support italics use quotation marks for this. Publication names, on the other hand, are not set off in quotation marks. Thus, it's People magazine, not "People" magazine (even if some of the celebrities on the cover are at least 50-percent implants).
• Use them to set off nicknames: Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle was acquitted on murder charges, but he never worked in Hollywood again. Quotation marks are only necessary when the nickname is sandwiched within the real name. Fatty Arbuckle, for example, doesn't need them.
• Use them to show that you're coining a new word or using a specific term that needs definition: I'm sitting in my "cloffice" -- in other words, the closet I use as my office.
• Use them to make your meaning clearer when you're referring to a word as a word. The "that" in the sentence was unnecessary. (If you're saying this out loud, though, you really don't need to use the finger quotes.)
• Do not use them to be cute, funny or ironic. Chances are, you will be none of the above -- and you actually might make people think you're saying the opposite of what you intend.
The bottom line? Good writers stand behind words, not punctuation tricks. And you can quote me on that.
Martha Brockenbrough
Do You Abuse Quotation Marks?
By Martha Brockenbrough
There's a fine line between funny and annoying -- and it's exactly the width of a quotation mark. But it's not the quotation mark that deserves our wrath. It's our bad habits:
• We use them when they're not needed. My favorite taco stand claims to recycle "cans." I also have a hair dryer that says, "Always 'unplug it' immediately after using." I find this vaguely embarrassing. I'm most forgiving of this, because it comes from swiftly cured ignorance.
• We make quote fingers. Please, for the love of your knuckles, stop it. If you can't, at least know that you're supposed to say "quote, unquote," not "quote, end quote." (And if you must do this overseas, be aware of the local customs. In Germany, one hand goes up and the other goes down, mimicking the direction of the printed quotation marks they use. In France, they make sideways v's to look like the guillemets they use to open and close quotations.)
• We use them as a shortcut to funny. When we use them to show we're being euphemistic, ironic or sarcastic, it's like having to explain our jokes. If this is necessary, the jokes aren't funny. Believe me, I know (which is funny because I make jokes that aren't funny all the time -- get it?).
I'm not the only one fed up with quotation-mark abuse. Dedicated bloggers have catalogued them faithfully (see the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks and The Gallery of "Misused" Quotation Marks). The late David Foster Wallace even invented the term "finger flexion" to describe the air quotes used by one of his characters that appeared in "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men," a collection of short stories.
If you're guilty of crimes against the inverted comma, as the Brits call it, it's perhaps time to mend your ways.
Consider, if you will, this alarming fact: The abuse of punctuation marks -- including square quotes -- is associated with real-life crime.
I'm not saying that breaking punctuation rules actually causes crime, even if it sometimes makes me want to commit illegal acts of my own. But if you do it regularly in your writing, it might lead to your getting caught should you walk on the wrong side of the law.
Consider, for example, the New Jersey woman who killed her husband and packed his body inside a trio of matching suitcases. She wrote taunting notes to the police in which she abused quotation marks. Police compared her notes with her real-life correspondence and zing! She was busted.
Remember the Washington, D.C., snipers? They terrorized Maryland and Virginia in 2002, killing 10 people. Back when authorities only had the shooters' notes to go by, quotation-mark abuse was one of their clues. The man who wrote the notes wrapped words and phrases in unnecessary quotes, including my own favorites, "FBI" and "female." (See the evidence yourself.)
The author's grammar and punctuation were so bad that police originally speculated he might have been born in a different country. While we salute the police's optimism about our citizens' ability to punctuate properly, the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar has ample proof that native speakers can punctuate just as badly as people who did not grow up speaking English. (Exhibit A is this sign, which urges people to "speak English" when ordering sandwiches.)
With improving the state of the nation's punctuation in mind, here are five ways to use quotation marks correctly, along with one way you shouldn't use them:
Want More Martha?
Read more columns by Martha Brockenbrough.
• Use them to indicate direct quotes. He said, "I put my entire foot in my mouth." Note: indirect quotes are different. "He said he put his entire foot in his mouth" doesn't need the quotation marks. And for the love of all that is pure, please do not put them around "foot," or people will talk.
• Use them to set off titles of movies, books, essays and songs. Yes, titles are sometimes italicized, as in books. But newspapers and publications that can't easily support italics use quotation marks for this. Publication names, on the other hand, are not set off in quotation marks. Thus, it's People magazine, not "People" magazine (even if some of the celebrities on the cover are at least 50-percent implants).
• Use them to set off nicknames: Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle was acquitted on murder charges, but he never worked in Hollywood again. Quotation marks are only necessary when the nickname is sandwiched within the real name. Fatty Arbuckle, for example, doesn't need them.
• Use them to show that you're coining a new word or using a specific term that needs definition: I'm sitting in my "cloffice" -- in other words, the closet I use as my office.
• Use them to make your meaning clearer when you're referring to a word as a word. The "that" in the sentence was unnecessary. (If you're saying this out loud, though, you really don't need to use the finger quotes.)
• Do not use them to be cute, funny or ironic. Chances are, you will be none of the above -- and you actually might make people think you're saying the opposite of what you intend.
The bottom line? Good writers stand behind words, not punctuation tricks. And you can quote me on that.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Book website
Some people from my high school class introduced me to this website. It's Goodreads, and it's fun because you can keep track of everything you read, see what other people are reading and have read, rate books, and keep a list of books you want to read. This means that my dog-eared piece of notebook paper on which I've been jotting lists of books I want to read someday can be retired.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Tiny little Ivy, getting bigger
As requested, here are some close up pictures of Ivy.
She is getting so big. When she was less than two pounds, I couldn't imagine her looking like a fully grown, round and pudgy baby. She isn't pudgy yet, but she is getting there. I still can't believe she is a healthy six pound baby.
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