Greengrocer's Apostrophe

I hate it with a flaming passion. Just wanted to tell y'all that.

Which brings me to a brief rant I have about grading undergrads' essays. I'll leave off the diatribe about having to grade so many of them so often (though some of you have heard this in person or on email several times already), and concentrate on some of the errors that all but a few students commit from time to time:

1. Fucking Greengrocer's Apostrophe and its apprentice, its/it's. Hate, hate, hate, hate. Apostrophes are for marking possession, not plural! No more sentences like this (made up) one: "The successful samba's in carnival...." MAKE IT STOP.

2. Gratuitous punctuation. Kids, you don't look smart or cool if you throw in semicolons randomly, you look like a typist with a spastic pinky finger.

3. Misused big words. Ditto.

4. "This is due to the fact that...." Shoot me now.

I could go on, but I actually have to go deal with a couple of kids' papers (which, fortunately, aren't the worst of the batch)--but *why* don't college students have more writing skills? Ok, don't answer that....

Er, "Off to Columbus" Indeed!

Delta sucks. Somehow, the weather seemed to selectively affect both flights we tried to get on--but very few of the others leaving JFK & LaGuardia, and few of the planes arriving in Columbus. Weather, my ass. Not to mention that we wound up having to go to LaGuardia for the failed second flight. So here I sit, in our living room in Brooklyn, and we'll miss a couple of great paper sessions tomorrow morning--that is, assuming Delta gets us to Columbus at all!

The good part of this wasted day at the airport is that there were six of us from the music department all in the same boat...or rather, not in a plane at all! So we had fun hanging out and finding strength (and bitchiness) in numbers. So tomorrow we get to do it all over again. The car service is supposed to pick J & me up at 5:45am, then stop at Allen's for himself, Nicol, and Brett (who had arrived from South Africa this morning!), and then finally for Jessica. If we're cranky when we arrive at the conference, you all, at least, will know why!

GK Tries Again

(Apologies once again for reposting a link from Rob's blog!)

This from Salon.com...more attempts to explain himself at the bottom of what I find another questionable piece of work, though I believe he didn't mean to say he's "indifferent to militance." Must be nice, to be in so safe a position not to have to worry about white supremists, paramilitaries, drug traffickers, gay bashers, or any of the myriad other kinds of violence and/or hate that much of the world's population has to deal with on an everyday basis....

But he should worry about his cartoonist.



In the immortal (misquoted) words of Hee Haw: "You made [sic] another, and PBBBB! you was gone."

Lake Woebegone Dumbass

Apologies to those of you who check Rob' blog, too, but for those of you who haven't already seen Garrison Keillor's bullshit in Salon and Dan Savage's rightfully irate reply, check 'em out. As Rob would say, Keillor is dead to me--except that he was never alive to me in the first place. I almost always found Prairie Home Companion tedious, dull, and too self-absorbed.

What I wonder is--what does he think about lesbian parents? Certainly the flamboyant dresser stereotype doesn't exist...but I'm sure he'd have something to say about kids and softball injuries, or something. Geez. What a dumbass.

GK made an apology, and I just read it. How totally lame. The comments are pretty depressing, too--if I didn't know better, I'd run off to write a column on the cluelessness of straight people. But I do know better, and so should have Garrison Keillor. If he was trying for satire, it sure didn't work, and (as someone in one of the comments wrote) dredging up old stereotypes does more harm than good.

Ok--enough soapbox. Now back to transcribing the conversation Jenny & I had last night about getting Maddie stoned on catnip for my linguistic anthropology assignment....

I Want to Go Hide Under a Rock.

Oh, bitter Fate! Oh, cruel Irony! Oh, goddamn Small Print!

After all that work on the grant proposal, getting next to nothing else done this weekend, and going through a painful existential crisis about it--and ultimately coming out on the other side of misery with the whole damn thing--

I found out that I needed to request an undergraduate transcript from William & Mary. I THOUGHT I had read the small print carefully to find out whether I needed one. So all that work--and asking my two very fabulous and fabulously busy advisors for letters of recommendation, which they took the time to write--all for nothing.

I guess the only thing to do right now is what I'm doing: listening to http://www.deathmetal.com/nile/, ranting about it, petting Kitty, and soon I'll watch an episode of Moonlighting. And tomorrow, wake up and start reading for linguistic anthropology. Again.

The Book I'm Not (Re)Reading: J. L. Austin's How To Do Things with Words.