“The executive’s current claim of absolute immunity from compelled Congressional process for senior presidential aides is without any support in the case law,” the judge, John D. Bates, ruled in United States District Court here.
Here's a screenshot from Zap2It.com, which I checked to see when Doctor Who is on tonight (7:30, in case you're interested):
For the record: The lackluster Flash Gordon reincarnation, which was on SciFi last season but now has moved to Ion, is on at 7/6 C on Fridays. Not Friday's. Fridays. I know it's difficult, Ion marketing/advertising people, but with practice you too can learn to put the letter s at the end of a word without an apostrophe.
I put it to my students thusly: The apostrophe-s indicates either possession or contraction:
It is a beautiful day in the neighborhood = It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood = Correct!
The ball belongs to Spot = It is Spot's ball = Correct!
Members of the Nelson family are coming for dinner = The Nelson's are coming for dinner = Incorrect!
The lackluster Flash Gordon is on every Friday at 7 = The lackluster Flash Gordon is on Friday's at 7:00 = Incorrect! (Except for the lackluster part.)
So as I told the class, if you can't rephrase the sentence to indicate a contraction or possessive (and still have the sentence make sense!), then you need to ditch the apostrophe.
We will save for another day the matter of forming possessives when the word ends in s already!
Addendum A: I do wonder, however, about the mailbox mentioned above. It is, I suppose, possible that the labelers of said box intended to indicate that it belongs to Anderson, in which case Anderson's would be correct. But I rather suspect it's meant to indicate that the box receives mail for members of the Anderson household, in which case Andersons is what you need. Of course, you can save time, confusion, and a sticky metal letter if you go with Anderson and hope the letter carrier can figure it out from there.
Addendum B: Some years ago I worked for a company called The Webb Company in St. Paul, Minnesota. It no longer exists. The company, I mean. Anyhow, some time after I left there I communicated to a former co-worker that I would be meeting a friend of his who also had worked at Webb but had left shortly before I joined. My friend told me not to be alarmed when the other fellow referred to the place as Webbs, as my friend rendered it in his letter to me. And sure enough, when I introduced myself to the other fellow, mentioning our mutual friend, he in turn introduced me to his wife and said that I too had worked at Webbs...except that, as I later expressed to my friend, I think it was in fact more properly rendered Webb's. I have often noticed a local tendency to incorrectly render various business names as
possessives. One of the most common around here is the John Morrell meatpacking plant, which is universally referred to ('round here) as Morrell's...even though none of their signage or labeling has ever, to my knowledge, said anything except John Morrell or Morrell. I don't know why this should be, unless it goes back to a time when many if not businesses carried the proprietor's name: Bob's Grocery, Foley's Garage, etc. (Sure, names like that are still around, but my guess is there are fewer than in bygone times.)
Eugene Robinson in this morning's Washington Post ("So Much for St. John") got me thinking, which is about par for the course with him:
Not that anyone cares, but I'm extremely disappointed in John McCain. I was one of those naive souls who, eight years ago, thought he would be okay on Pennsylvania Avenue should he arrive there...which at the time seemed a disctinct possibility. He struck me than as someone who, as my father would have said, had his head on straight. He was, after all, a moderate. A maverick. A straight-talker. Even an unrepentant leftist like me found him the least-worrisome of the field of GOP contenders that summer.
(The GOP, of course, went and nominated the most worrisome of the contenders, but we all know that story.)
I'll be the first to admit I'm naive...but I'm not completely naive. I don't think that Straight-Talk McCain was a complete
fabrication. If so, he was pretty damn good at it. But the McCain we see today, Mud-Sling McCain, quick to disparage, quick to cast aspersions, quick to imply, quick to lie, seems so completely formed that I have to wonder about the man's personality. I mean, he didn't seem phony eight years ago when he was Straight-Talk McCain, and he doesn't seem phony now that he's Mud-Sling McCain.
So which one is real and which one the mask?
Or are they both real?
Or are they both masks?
Or is it simply that, having missed the brass ring the last time around, McCain this time decided to follow that time-honored tradition of doing anything--any...damn...thing--in order to win?
We wouldn't have dirty politics if it never worked.As Robinson rightly points out:
Meanwhile, over at the New York Times, Paul Krugman has this to offer:
A McCain campaign ad says that gas prices are high right now because “some in Washington are still saying no to drilling in America.” That’s just plain dishonest: the U.S. government’s own Energy Information Administration
says that removing restrictions on offshore drilling wouldn’t lead to any additional domestic oil production until 2017, and that even at its peak the extra production would have an “insignificant” impact on oil prices.
What’s even more important than Mr. McCain’s bad economics, however, is what his reversal on this
issue — he was against offshore drilling before he was for it — says about his priorities.
Back when he was cultivating a maverick image, Mr. McCain portrayed himself as more environmentally aware than the rest of his party. He even co-sponsored a bill calling for a cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse gas emissions (although his remarks on several recent occasions suggest that he doesn’t understand
his own proposal). But the lure of a bit of political gain, it turns out, was all it took to transform him back into a standard drill-and-burn Republican.
And the planet can’t afford that kind of cynicism.
Posted by: Rob Hof on July 28
Just weeks after the last highly touted Google challenger, Powerset, was snapped up by Microsoft, a new one is launching Sunday night. Cuil (pronounced “cool” and previously sporting an additional “l”), boasts a Web index three times the assumed size of Google’s (though I’m not aware of Google admitting to a particular index size lately), a management team with an impressive pedigree (several people from Google), a different set of algorithms that in part analyze the content of pages, and a radically different presentation of search results.
Read the whole article here.
Others were as underwhelmed as I by yesterday's debut of Cuil. This from Time:
"Anybody who thought [Cuil] was this Google killer can really see now that no, that's not going to happen today — and the likelihood is that's not going to happen a year from now," says Danny Sullivan, internet search guru and editor-in-chief of SearchEngineLand.
Despite its lackluster performance, Cuil (which means wisdom or knowledge in Gaelic) got so many visitors on Monday, that its servers crashed around 3 p.m. E.T. "Due to excessive load, our servers didn't return results. Please try your search again," the site read intermittently throughout the afternoon. But even when it was working, the results were fair, at best. Enter a keyword such as "mint" and the first result that comes up isn't the herb or flavor but the U.S. Mint. ...
Read the whole article here.
So I think my original conclusion was valid: Give them some time.Those hits led to some good internet contacts that helped me immeasurably when it came to filling in some gaps in the family tree. And Google became my search engine of choice, a tool so helpful that it remains today the home page on my browser of choice, Firefox.
So it was with interest this morning that I heard on NPR's Morning Edition about Cuil, the new search site founded by former Google employees, which went live this morning. Cuil supposedly indexes more of the web than other search engines ("Search 121,617,892,992 web pages"), which may very well be so...but when I had a chance to check it out, repeating the searches indicated above, I came away pretty underwhelmed. If nothing else, I was surprised that the family history pages that I have online--which include, of course, me, my grandfather, and his grandfather--didn't appear among the hits. Indeed, I and my grandfather seem barely to exist in Cuil, and old Phinny shows up in a couple of old genealogical pages that were among those that Google took me to almost a decade ago.
Is that a fair test? Well, you tell me. For my dime, I like a search engine that will help me find the obscure, and in that regard Google has always been the go-to guy.
Here's another couple of oddities:
First, if I put "Phineas Bates Reynolds" in quotation marks--the standard, I think, for searching for an exact term--Cuil shows me one hit but tells me there are 1,066 results for "phineas bates reynolds". I wouldn't mind knowing how to access those results. If Cuil provides a way, I have yet to find it. (The line that tells me 1,066 results for "phineas bates reynolds" is not clickable, though it feels like it should be.)
If I search Phineas Bates Reynolds without the punctuation marks, I of course get more results displayed...but most of them are wrong. And I can't seem to access the 17,056 results its says it found.
Second--and this is inexplicable--if I turn off Cuil's "safe search mode," the single result it previously displayed disappears, as do the alleged 1,066 results it claims to have found but isn't showing...and now it tells me that it's finding nothing! Very strange, no? I assure you, there is nothing pornographic or objectionable in "Whiteside Co IL Township Histories," so I'm at a loss to explain Cuil's apparent issues with it...and the thousand other results it claimed to have once had.
It is also disconcerting to click on "About Cuil" at the bottom of the page and be rewarded with this:
Well, it's all very new and all. I suppose, in fairness, I should pop back in after Cuil has been up and running a week or so and see if these apparent oddities have been addressed. For now, however, I think I'll stick with Google...even though it must be said that Cuil is much prettier.
