Hint: It's 100%

This from today’s edition of the local rag. I’m no doctor, but...

Perhaps a Very Distant Relative

This is not the first time I’ve noticed that Salon’’s “related stories” link is almost always entirely unrelated to the article I’’ve just read; it’s just the most recent.

The article in question (this time) is Scientists release most precise date of dinosaur extinction. And it’’s an interesting read. Interesting enough that one might, in fact, be inclined to read more on the subject--which, presumably, is what a “related stories” link would be for.

But not in Salon’’s world, where, apparently “related stories” really means “other, completely unrelated stories.” Behold the three items it initially displays:

• Brooklyn muralist immortalizes Internet martyrs;
• When Facebook broke the Web;
• The car that cost $1.4 million to repair.

Not a dinosaur among ’’em.

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The Fine Print

NOTICE: This email message is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message.

Ah, yes. What balderdash. I observe that an increasing number of e-mail messages—including those that come from individuals, not institutions—carry some variant of the above twaddle.  I rather suspect that such disclaimers carry no weight whatsoever, in a legal sense. If they do, then shame on us, since the little paragraph above has no meaning whatsoever. Consider:

The message is “…for the sole use of the intended recipient(s)”….  And how, pray, is one to know who the Intended Recipient(s) is or are? The above sample is one that I copied from a message received this past week (with the exciting subject line “CONFIDENTIAL”). It was sent from an individual to a short list of individuals that, obviously, included me. My name, my Mac address. May I not safely conclude from that that I am an Intended Recipient? I mean, my address and everything!

“Have I reached the party to whom I am speaking?”

But soft! “Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited.” Clearly this means that if I am not an Intended Recipient I may not “review” (i.e., read) the message, yes? How, then, am I to determine that I am not an Intended Recipient? The fact that it’s addressed to me would seem to indicate so. But how can I be certain without a “review” of the item in question?

So, throwing all caution to the wind, I plunge into the body of the message. Which begins with the salutation “Brethren.”

Ugh.

I have encountered this before. Somewhere in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, my e-mail address has become attached to an Elder who shares a name with me. In bygone times I would respond to such misaddressed missives (I imagine I’ve written about that in the past, but I’ve no time to go through the archives at the moment), but I discovered that people not only could not be bothered to acknowledge their error, they could not be bothered to correct it. I know I have written about the woman who habitually gives people my address instead of hers (she seems to have left out a letter), and how I one replied to all of the misdirected messages from her friends, encouraging them to update their address books—only to receive no reply…except for more misaddressed notes!  (Oddly the only exception to this rudeness/stupidity has come from businesses to which the woman in question has sloppily given the wrong address.)

Along those lines, I responded, in the early days, to e-mail from various LDS persons, politely encouraging them to correct their address books. No reply, ever. So I quit replying. Not my fault if their message fails to reach one of their Intended Recipient(s).

And speaking of: So now I am into the “Brethren” message (which contains, following a brief greeting, the peculiar line, “I think that I have spoken live with each of you.” Spoken live. Still deciphering that one), and must conclude that I am not one of the Intended Recipient(s). For one thing, the sender has not Spoken Live to me, nor Spoken Unlive to me, nor Spoken Any Other Way to me. For another, he says, “I continue to look to raise a lot of money,” which immediately tells me he isn’t talking to me—although he goes on to say that this lot of money must not come from “members of the Church,” which is intriguing and suspicious enough that I was momentarily inclined to reply. (“You know, I speak live to a lot of people, so refresh my memory about what we spoke live about before…”)

So now I am in clear violation of the disclaimer, for I would seem not to be an Intended Recipient, and yet I have “reviewed” the message, unauthorizedly, which the disclaimer says I can’t do. Or maybe that was on the mattress tag. I’m losing track.

What am I to do? Clearly I can’t unread what I have already read. I know this bloke is eager to raise “a lot of money” from “those who share the passion and who are NOT members of the Church”; I am unlikely to forget that any time soon. The disclaimer says I am to report my transgression to the sender. But I’m pretty sure that violates my Fifth Amendment rights, so I’m not going there. Also, I’m tired of trying to do the right thing by people who are too fucking rude to acknowledge the effort or change their behavior, so that’s out.

The instructions go on to say that I must now “destroy all copies of the original message.” Exactly how I am supposed to do that? For one thing, the “original message” by definition resides with the sender. Am I to break into his house and destroy his computer? Maybe the “original” isn’t even on his computer—maybe it’s on a server somewhere. Am I to hack into the system and determine the location of the host, then travel to wherever it may be and destroy its server farm? And even then I am left with the quandary inherent in the command to “destroy all copies of the original message.” In my world, there can be only one “original”—everything else, by definition, is a copy, not an original. So which am I to destroy? The original? Or copies of the original? If the latter, we have a big problem, since there are apt to be dozens, if not more, floating around in cyberspace. Maybe they’re hanging around various servers that handled the message en route to its Intended Recipient(s).  Finding and destroying all traces could take decades.

And what of those Intended Recipient(s)? They have copies! I presume I must break into their homes and offices and destroy their machines as well! And their ISPs’ servers!

And what about “disclosure,” which the disclaimer also prohibits? How am I to know whether they disclosed the e-mail’s contents? How am I to know whether any such disclosure was “authorized”? And if they did disclose, what is the penalty? And who is to undertake it? The disclaimer implies that it is my responsibility…but I’m not supposed to have read the message in the first place!

Which obviously means…I shouldn’t have read the disclaimer either.

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What's This Doing in My Spam Folder?

Why in the world does Yahoo Mail think that great stuff like this is spam?

Who knows how many other important opportunities I’ve been missing out on?

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Gratitude

This past Tuesday was my turn to provide devotions—and, perhaps more important, food—for the weekly staff meeting at the church where I’ve worked these past couple of years. Naturally, with the holiday mere days away, my thoughts turned to the subject of giving thanks, of feeling—and expressing—gratitude for what is and, quite often, what is not.


Such expression does not always come easily for me. Too often, I see the glass’s half-emptiness. It takes a deliberate, conscious effort to pull out of I-want mode and enter the I-have state of mind. As I have put it to my colleagues, I am much better at making to-do lists for the Ground of All Being than I am in simply expressing my appreciation for what is.

Usually, when my turn for devotions rolls around, I turn to a couple of trusted sources for inspiration. Henri Nouwen in particular never disappoints, and his words have an eerie way of fitting precisely what I wish to express. Here’s what I shared with my colleagues the other day.  It’s from Nouwen’s book The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming (1992).

In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realise that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.

Gratitude as a discipline involves a conscious choice. I can choose to be grateful even when my emotions and feelings are still steeped in hurt and resentment. It is amazing how many occasions present themselves in which I can choose gratitude instead of a complaint. I can choose to be grateful when I am criticised, even when my heart still responds in bitterness. I can choose to speak about goodness and beauty, even when my inner eye still looks for someone to accuse or something to call ugly. I can choose to listen to the voices that forgive and to look at the faces that smile, even while I still hear words of revenge and see grimaces of hatred.

There is always the choice between resentment and gratitude because God has appeared in my darkness, urged me to come home, and declared in a voice filled with affection: “You are with Me always, and all I have is yours.” Indeed, I can choose to dwell in the darkness in which I stand, point to those who are seemingly better off than I, lament about the many misfortunes that have plagued me in the past, and thereby wrap myself up in my resentment. But I don’t have to do this. There is the option to look into the eyes of the One who came out to search for me and see therein that all I am and all I have is pure gift calling for gratitude.

The choice for gratitude rarely comes without some real effort. But each time I make it, the next choice is a little easier, a little freer, a little less self-conscious. Because every gift I acknowledge reveals another and another until finally, even the most normal, obvious, and seemingly mundane event or encounter proves to be filled with grace. There is an Estonian proverb that says: “Who does not thank for little will not thank for much.” Acts of gratitude make one grateful because, step by step, they reveal that all is grace.

Well put, and well worth remembering, on this day especially—although, as Ebeneezer Scrooge discovered in regard to the Christmas spirit, it is good to keep Thanksgiving in our hearts all year ’round.

My late mother was possessed of what I came to dub the Habit of Complaint. That glass I mentioned earlier? Always half-empty. Always. As I look back, I can see that habit developing in her even when she was a young woman; as the habit became more established in her later years, complaint simply became part of the fabric of her life. Conversation, small talk, was little more than a string of petty complaints—about the weather, about people at church, about the news, about the infrequency with which she saw her children and grandchildren, about this neighbor’s tree or that neighbor’s dog. It was all inconsequential and probably unconscious on her part—it was, after all, a habit, and a habit, I find, that is all too easy to slip into. As mentioned above, I find I must make an almost constant effort to avoid sliding into that vein myself.

And so one works to be grateful for what is and what isn’t. This may take on a spiritual aspect, if one is—as Father Nouwen—so inclined. But I would argue that it needn’t necessarily hinge on any particular belief system. Regular readers of these irregularly produced pages know that I tilt toward what I think of as healthy agnosticism on most days of the week, but that in no way interferes with my fitful attempts to be grateful for what I have (and for what I have not had to deal with). Thank God, thank the Fates, thank good luck, thank the universe—but thank.

That said, if I hear the expression “An Attitude of Gratitude” one more time, I will not be responsible for my actions.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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A Slow Day for News?

Here’s a screen grab of this morning’s Daily Briefing from USATODAY.com. Yes, all four of those “Polls: Obama, Romney in tight race” headlines link to the same article. Guess they wanted to make sure I didn’t miss it.

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And Good Luck with That!

A couple of recent items that gave me pause, then gave me a laugh.

First up, a little bit of a challenge signing up for a newsletter. I dislike these Captcha things anyhow, because it always seems I need to try three of them before I correctly guess at the distorted letters and numbers. But this time I know it wasn't my fault!

And, yeah, it took three attempts before I finally got a screen that displayed letters that actually could be read. Hope the bots had better luck. Meanwhile, here was a fun offer from Lone Star Steakhouse, good for One Week Only. A "week," in this case, apparently being only five days. Beginning on Wednesday.

It could always be worse, of course. More than once I have come in from the (physical) mailbox holding ad fliers that have already expired. And I am reminded of a certain fulfillment house, many years ago now, whose aim in life seemed to be to make sure not to fulfill whatever rebate, "free gift," or other come-on accompanied one's purchase of a given product. Invariably, one would receive a form letter indicating that one had someone not quite met all of the requirements--even when one clearly had done so--but encouraging one to try again. Even though the expiration date had just passed, darn it anyway. After awhile, one simply gave up if one saw that the proof-of-purchase was to be sent to that particular address. Which, I strongly suspect, was the point. But then it's been years since I've seen that outfit's address on any kind of mail-in form, so it's possible that they--and the companies that hired them--outsmarted themselves.

It's a pleasant thought.

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A Tattoo on the Tongue

And here we have another bunch of quotations, which I semi-compulsively collect from here and there across the vast wasteland of the internet. Several are from the wonderful newsletter A Word a Day; many are not.

The title of this post, as you will discern momentarily, comes from the first quotation in the current batch, which struck my fancy.

“A quote is just a tattoo on the tongue.” —Attributed to William F. DeVault

“Writing is torture. Not writing is torture. The only thing that feels good is having written.” —C. B. Mosher

“Not far from the invention of fire must rank the invention of doubt.” —Thomas Henry Huxley, biologist (1825-1895)

“The hardest part is starting to write.” —Michael Crichton (1942–2008)

“To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.” —Mark Twain (1835-1910)

“No writer is really part of a group sensibility. When you’re writing, you’re on your own.” —A. S. Byatt

“It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.” —Confucius

“Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.” —William Zinsser

“The real index of civilization is when people are kinder than they need to be.” —Louis de Berniere, novelist (b. 1954)

“The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.” —Mark Twain

“Faith is the unflagging determination to remain ignorant in the face of any and all evidence that you’re ignorant.” —Shaun Mason

“Habit with him was all the test of truth / It must be right: I’ve done it from my youth.” —George Crabbe, poet and naturalist (1754-1832)

“They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security.” —Benjamin Franklin

“An army of sheep led by a lion would defeat an army of lions led by a sheep.” —Arab Proverb

“An interesting thing about writing is that you might write quite a lot before you realize what you’re doing.” —Alexander McCall-Smith

“God shouldn’t be put in charge of everything until we get to know Him a little better.” —Kurt Vonnegut

“Patriot: The person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.” —Mark Twain

“The term ‘family reunion’ kind of implies you normally don’t have to keep in touch with these people, right?” —Jim Gaffigan

“To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.” —Oscar Wilde

“And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence.” —Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)

“Man: A creature made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired.” —Mark Twain

Apostrophe Catastrophe

But of course! When “its” actually needs the apostrophe, that’s the one time it gets written without one! Shee-it.

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It Makes a Difference

From time to time I will encounter the bizarre attitude that, somehow, spelling, punctuation, usage, word choice—you know, all that technical, grammar-Nazi stuff—“doesn’t matter.” Translation: “I don’t understand such things, so the armor I put on is to say it doesn’t matter.” 

In fact, it does. 

As I have expressed to more than one client—and, once, to an alleged editor!—such supposed trivia may well go unnoticed by 98.6% of readers, but the flip side is that it will be noticed by 1.4% of readers. And simple mathematics tells us that the bigger the total number of readers, the greater that 1.4% will be in actual numbers of readers. That 1.4% could be 100,000 readers. (We should be so lucky.) 

More disturbing: You have no way of knowing who those 1.4% are. Nobody does. You have no way of knowing their personalities, their threshold of tolerance of sloppy (or nonexistent) editing. For every one who might just shake his or her head and plunge on ahead, you could have one or two who give up, close the book (real or virtual) or web page, and never come back. 

Simply because, as the meme has it, you don’t know the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you’re shit. And you don’t like “grammar Nazis,” so you shut down the person who could help you. 

I pause to reflect on these things because a few minutes ago I started to read an article that I had bookmarked earlier. The topic sounded interesting—writing a sales page for book promotion—and maybe the article contained some useful information; I’ll never know, because when I came to the second error in as many paragraphs, I stopped reading. Sure, I could simply have tut-tutted and kept going. Heaven knows I’ve done that more often than I’d care to count. But today I didn’t feel like it. The obvious sloppiness of the article caused me to doubt that its author really had anything worth saying. If she had, she would have taken a few minutes to proof the article, see that here she had used it’s when she wanted its, there she wanted the word’s noun and not the verb form, and so on. 

I would have been more forgiving had the article been a blog post about, I dunno, politics, or food, or movies, or any number of other things. But when your article purports to be educating about the finer points of writing and publishing, you had bloody well better proofread the damn thing before you publish it. 

Or find a grammar Nazi to do it for you. 

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Peter Palmer, the Amazing Spiderman

So yesterday I posted my little gripe about The Professional Media’s laxness when it comes to correctly rendering such things as proper nouns—using as an example the frequent references to Spiderman one sees in print and online, rather than the correct trademark, Spider-Man—and what that may say about the media’s inattention to other details they place before us.

Today’s e-mail, coincidentally, brings an offer to read—for free, even—a digital copy of the inaugural issue of Spider-Man, from March 1963. I’ve got it somewhere in the archives, on paper, as a reprint in a later Spider-Man “annual” (as mentioned yesterday, I didn’t come on board till Spider-Man number 16, which I mark as the genesis of my comic-book meekness), but having not looked at it in many years I thought it’d be worth a nostalgic peek. Did I mention it was free?

Worth the download it was indeed…but I was amused to discover that, in those early—and, I suspect, hurried—days, not even Stan Lee himself seemed to have a firm grasp on the character’s name. Here’s the cover:

Plainly, the intent seems to be to call the character Spider-Man, hyphenated. The name appears three times on the cover, each time punctuated the same. Very good.

Oh, but look:

There on page one, the name appears another three times…twice as Spider-Man, but then as Spiderman. This is getting slippery. 

Skipping on to page nine, we have Spidey’s name presented yet another three times (coincidence? I think not), and I’m going to say it’s given as Spiderman each time. (Bit of a coin-toss there in the second panel, but I’m guessing the hyphen is there to break Spiderman at the end of the line, not to indicate the letterer—or whoever ultimately made the decision—meant to have it Spider-Man.) 

 

By page two of the second Great Feature-Length Spider-Man Thriller, “Spider-Man vs. The Chameleon,” which includes a completely pointless fight with the Fantastic Four, whose presence here, I imagine, was to boost sales and nothing more, things seem to have settled down a bit: Peter Parker’s alter ego is being consistently rendered as Spider-Man. Alas, young Peter Parker himself is not faring so well, in that twice on the same page his creators seem to think his name is Peter Palmer. 

 

Alas. Even 50 years ago Spider-Man was being victimized by sloppy, hurried editing. And so was Spiderman. 

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If You Don’t Have a Phone, Call This Number

I occasionally lend my name to petitions on subjects that are of interest to me, and much of the time those that are directed to my congressional trio produce this result: 

I can think of no legitimate reason for my state’s junior senator to “require” me to supply a phone number “in order to communicate via email” (emphasis mine). To communicate via telephone, yes, that would make sense, but via e-mail? What do you need besides my, you know, e-mail address…which, along with my name and street address, have already been provided. 

The other two members of my congressional team seem to be able to function without asking me for my phone number. Maybe they realize that e-mail communication goes by, you know, e-mail. 

Because of the way things are in this country, and in this state, I can’t help but wonder if there’s an intimidation angle at work here. I express my opinion, but before Sen. Thune will accept it, I have to give him my telephone number. Geez, my telephone number! What the hell is he gonna do with my telephone number?? Better click cancel… 

I suppose I could call one of the numbers he provides in case I have “difficulty providing this information,” and ask why he needs me to provide said information. 

But what if he has Caller ID? 

Can I borrow your phone?

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Well, "Forever" Is a Pretty Long Time

Rule of thumb: If they put quotation marks around it, it’s the same as putting “not” in front of it.

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This Should Not Be Difficult

Full disclosure: I was a comic-book geek in my youth, and, I suppose, once a comic-book geek always a comic book geek. (I am a child of the so-called Silver Age, and trace my “active” years from 1964—The Amazing Spider-Man #16, “Duel With Daredevil!”—to 1975, when I hied off to college.) But I don’t think it’s simple geekery—nor the fact that I have spent my entire working career as an editor, a writer, a creative director, etc.—to be continually torqued off when The Media can’t be bothered to spell things correctly. 

Like this, from today’s HuffPost Daily Brief: 

Let us pause for a moment an consider the irony inherent in the fact that James Franco, who co-starred in the original three Spider-Man films, seems not to know how to correctly render the proper noun (and trademark). Or that his editor seems not to know how. Or that Huffington Post’s proofreaders seem not to. 

Assuming there are in fact editors and proofreaders there, which more than once I have had cause to doubt. 

I have long since become inured to such monstrosities as mailboxes bearing the legend The Anderson’s, or copy handed to me replete with “quotation” marks to “highlight” words the “author” considers “important” (though possibly the “author” is being “facetious,” as possibly I am here), or “infer” instead of “imply,” “whom” instead of “who,” and so on. These generally are the product of nonprofessionals, which entitles them to a significant amount of slack.

But it’s disheartening to realize that even in the “professional” realm—and at a time when advertising for the upcoming movie series reboot, The Amazing Spider-Man, is relentless—nobody can be bothered to check it out, to look at a movie poster, a comic book, the internet, and say, “Oh, it’s not Spiderman; it’s Spider-Man. Well, that’s an easy fix!” 

Nope, no time for any of that sort of nonsense! 

Yes, you’re right: It’s just a comic-book character. And the majority of the world doesn’t know and doesn’t care one way or the other. 

However. 

It has been pointed out that God is in the details. And it seems unlikely that a media organization (and Huffington is far from alone in botching “Spider-Man”: As soon as the box-office figures start rolling in on Wednesday, we will see the name mangled in all sorts of print and electronic communiquÈs—will be sloppy only with the “little stuff.” 

If you can’t be bothered to check to make sure you’re getting the “little stuff” right, what would make me think you’re bothering to check to make sure you’re getting the “big stuff” right? 

Truth is, you’re in a business in which there’s no such thing as “little stuff” and “big stuff.” Not if you’re the least bit interested in credibility. 

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For Lovers of Irony

I know it’s not funny. And yet...Victoria’s Secret?

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Part of the Problem

Our letter carrier left this slip at our house the other day. Evidently someone had sent us a letter that required an additional 20 cents’ worth of postage.

It’s a good thing we know where the post office is, since, evidently, the post office does not. You could spend the rest of your days driving the streets of our fair city, you could comb through maps, atlases, and gazeteers, you could MapQuest, Google Map, and Google Earth until overcome by hunger, thirst, and sleeplessness, and you would never find 320 S WND AVE. Indeed, you would never find WND AVE at all. There is no such thing.

You might, however, with a certain amount of detective work, stumble upon 320 S 2ND AVE, which is where the downtown post office (Downtown Station, in current parlance) resides. And where, 20 cents later, our daughter claimed our undelivered envelope.

It’s true that 2 and W sit awfully close together on the keyboard. And it’s true that in this era of budget cuts and over-reliance on electronic backstops, proofreading by actual breathing, thinking human beings is one of the first fatalities (at the hands of breathing but not thinking human beings, usually). But it is both true and deliciously ironic that mail sent to the address provided by the post office itself would be returned as undeliverable by, yep, the post office.

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Choose One

Call it self-serving, but I do believe that even in our technological age, editors—of the human variety—still matter. Why? Well, here’s yesterday’s Daily Briefing from USA Today:

I presume that any editor worth his or her salt would have paused at those last two headlines, and determined that one of them must go. But maybe not. There’s a lot of low-salt editors out there.

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Dear Groupon: What??!

My dad was a great guy, and he did a lot for me...but he most certainly did not “give birth” to me.

Appears somebody needs a Human Reproduction refresher course.

Daily Beast's Ethnic Slur

This is from this morning’s Daily Beast Cheat Sheet, a link to an article about the most recent Vatican scandal:

The immediate and obvious question: What the hell is that mamma mia doing there? It has nothing to do with the article, nothing to do with the Vatican scandal. Clearly some doofus at The Daily Beast had an intellectual epiphany that went something like this:

“Hey, the Vatican’s in Italy, right? And those crazy Eye-talians, they’re always saying stuff like Mamma mia and pastafazool and other goofy things, right? So let’s just throw in a completely superfluous and vaguely insulting Mamma mia to lead off this serious crime story, ’cause, I dunno, it’ll be fun.”

And some perhaps-even-more-moronic Daily Beast editor—if in fact there are any, which I often have had occasion to doubt—said, “Wow, what a great idea! That’ll be loads of laughs! Too bad we don’t have any pictures of some greaseball goombah biting the inside of his own hand--that would be hilarious! Well, we’ll go with this picture of one of those beanie things cardinals wear. Not very funny, but it’s all we have.”

Incidentally, the Washington Post article to which the Cheat Sheet item points manages to avoid any such frivolity, and the implied ethnic smear.

This Makes Perfect Sense to Me

Obviously, you can never be too careful, or too precise:

But I’d really like to pay at the store when I pick up my order. How do I do that?

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