Ough

Ough should probably be a word on its on, but at least it is a cool ingredient.

Slough (ew!)
Trough (cough)
Dough (oh!)
Rough (no guff)
Bough (wow!)

Others?

Do they bark, too?

Headline from BBC News: Mumbai attack hotels greet guests

Trust me, I get it: Writing headlines can be a challenge. Or should I say: Headlines spell word challenge

Photo page from the balloon flight

Here are a few of the better shots I got during my ride in a balloon earlier this month. Mine is a pretty tough job sometimes.And here's an online slideshow (edited by my friend and colleague, Carlos Virgen, who makes me sound smarter than I thought I would :)

Great line...

Christopher Chester, reporting for The Associated Press from Baghdad, filed a story on the unusual snowfall. At the end, and maybe let through by a friendly editor:

For a couple of hours anyway, a city where mortar shells routinely zoom across the Tigris River to the Green Zone became united as one big White Zone. There were no reports of bloodshed during the snowstorm. The snow showed no favoritism as it dusted neighborhoods Shiite and Sunni alike, faintly falling (with apologies to James Joyce) upon all the living and the dead.

Nice :)

Talk like an Egyptian

An interesting tidbit showed up in a wire story about a former police officer suspected of killing his wife. A previous wife, who died under possibly suspicious circumstances, has been exhumed, to which the ex-officer said (to NBC):

"It's a shame her rest in peace has to be disturbed for something like this."

Uh, what?

So, she's just taking a nap in that coffin? Does that mean that if the Cubs win the World Series, she'll be exhumed and he'll be happy?

Weird with a capital W.

Word police

OK, here's another word that needs to be dumped. It is three words, really: improvised explosive device.

No. 1, give me a break. It has way more letters than what it means: roadside bomb.

No. 2, it gives unimaginative bozos an annoying way to talk about any policy they disagree with: "It's improvised, explosive and divisive!"

No. 3, it has that familiar ring of words that hide something, especially when the name is nicked to IED. "The IED went off" just doesn't quite put the same message across as "the bomb went off."

I'm sure there are other reasons, but I think I've found enough.

Quotable

Over the weekend, the butterfly lady and I took in some flicks ("Death of a President" - total snoozer; "Notes on a Scandal" - well, OK, I suppose) and a couple of TV shows, including "Traveler," which we usually watch online. (I'd rather watch all the TV shows I like online and just ditch cable.)

We watched "Traveler" on ABC's dipshit media player, which as Mariposa points out forces the viewer to browse through all the shows to find the one she seeks:

"They show you the whole candy store and figure if you came in for a Snickers, you might want to leave with a Baby Ruth too."

She was in good form while surfing through homes for sale in a city we might be interested in. Our price range is, let us say, not the top tier, but maybe we wouldn't want it to be:

"People who have fuckloads of money apparently don't have fuckloads of taste."

Not that I wouldn't want to be a test case, though.

In rout

I finally caved the other day to two purchases: Book the last for Harry Potter, and an Airport Extreme base station for my growing home network.

The book had to happen at some point. Twenty-odd bucks seems a bit steep, but as Jason Bourne once said, fuck it.

I said the same thing myself, but possibly more than once, about the base station. We have pretty straightforward networking needs at home: Three users, two of whom are wireless. This should be pretty god-damned simple, but of course it is not.

We bought a Belkin (that's an Old English word for completely the fuck useless) router, which sometimes is really satisfactory, but sometimes requires me to perform all sorts of confusing rituals to get a stable signal.

I have a high tolerance for technological hassles, so when I start cursing about computers, the situation is well on its way to totally out of hand.

The upshot, after much more ado than necessary, is that a new router is en route to my location.

That reminds me: If you spend any time at all listening to police scanners, you are familiar with the re-pronunciation of en route as In Rout. As far as I can tell, this re-pronunciation is universal.

When I hear those words, as I just did here in my office in sunny Walla Walla, they conjure an image of a couple of patrol cars fleeing ahead of an advancing column of Visigoths.

Alas, this never comes to pass.

Tecumseh Valley blog

After reading a post of Lulu's a while back, I found myself surfing in places I do not typically go, or at least places I would not typically acknowledge going. Naturally, I found something interesting.

a nit to pick

One of our state legislators, hoping to make a dent in gang violence in the state, has introduced a bill that would ratchet up the penalties (aka time in the clink) for gang-affiliated people who get convicted of crimes in the state.

Our state's practice is to offer a standard range for sentencing (for example, vehicular homicide has a standard range of 15-20 months in prison) that a judge may use to determine a miscreant's bid. The standard range can get longer - or shorter - for a variety of reasons, so this bill wouldn't be a shocking change from how things are done now.

Whatever. But here's the real crime, in a quote from the bill's sponsor, Washington state Sen. Jim Clements, R-Selah.

“Gang violence is a caustic acid that eats away at our communities,” said he.

A caustic acid??? Yegods, what has the world come to. What a basic mistake.