Fess Up Friday

I called in "can't keep the car on the road in this wind" to work today, at Cheers working instead. So let's get Fess Up Friday out of the way first because - I've stalled. Nothing. I did some good editing last Sunday, but that's about it. I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm a bit spastic and distracted.

More pleasant things abound...

Really digging the new PolyAnna strip and there's LOTS of stuff my inbox insisted on sharing with me and therefore, with you.

NPR review of Alan Ball's Towelhead.

"In the unlikely event that Earth and humanity are destroyed, mankind can be resurrected with Stephen Colbert's DNA," Garriott said in a statement. I couldn't have said it better, so I just copy and pasted. Dying laughing here. Who would you choose to be cloned in the event that humanity is destroyed? I love that I posted a piece a while back about people wanting to vote for Jon Stewart as President and here I am posting that Stephen Colbert's DNA's going into space in order to potentially one day resurrect humanity.

NPR on The Bechdel Rule, 23 years later. I wonder if Alien is STILL the last movie Bechdel's been able to see...

Thanks be to Jenny Rappaport. This is a cool idea. Hope it doesn't get too overwhelming too quickly. Here's just her Book Block website. (Via GalleyCat)

Short shorts, micro-novels and text stories. Interesting. (Via GalleyCat again) The deadline is September 19th and here are the rules. You win free chocolate for a year and an Apple iPhone. Jamey, you have to enter this contest.

Also via GalleyCat, Guide to Literary Agents blog had a worst storyline contest, read about the winner here.

Cool article about how babies begin to recognize words.

And another about letting misspellers off the hook. I see the point, but we have to have standards and we have to correct students' mistakes so that they'll learn something. In this day and age, what with texting and instant messaging and just plain emailing already messing changing the face of our language and our spelling, punctuation and even salutatory standards, we have to continue to at least TEACH our standards, not just throw up our hands and say "oh well, your spelling is variant." Everyone misspells and wrongly punctuates on occasion, and some times it matters more than others. But we still have to TEACH the standards of our language. Yes, they'll change and mutate with our technology and culture, but we still have to TEACH them. Big breath. "In 1906, Mark Twain lobbied the Associated Press to use phonetic spelling. "The heart of our trouble is with our foolish alphabet," he once wrote. "It doesn't know how to spell, and can't be taught." I agree with changing the standards, perhaps (because they're changing and have always changed on their own, regardless) but this quote bothers me: "The senior lecturer in criminology at Bucks New University in Buckinghamshire, England, sees so many misspellings in papers submitted by first-year students that he says we'd be better off letting the perpetrators off the hook and doing away with certain spelling rules altogether." Yes, I know correcting it consumes so much of a teacher's time. That just means we need to focus on perhaps better standards and better METHODS FOR TEACHING those standards, not a throwing up of our hands and no standards. Where'd that rant come from? I don't know, but here's another related article. (Last three via WordSmith's newsletter)

A word about my bevy of Word of the Day links. I'm trying to improve my vocabulary. Not because I don't know a lot of word, but because I'm lazy like everybody is and tend to use the same ones a lot. Which isn't a great idea for a writer. So I'm overdosing on words of the day. They're not all created equal, but they're all good. I like the format of Merriam-Webster's the best, and the "did you know" about the origin of that day's word the best. I like Dictionary.com's format a lot. And I love WordSmith's perhaps best of all because it contains an audio file where you can hear the word pronounced AND a bonus thought for the day. Like this recent one:

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you CAN make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all." -Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) [Through the Looking Glass]

Do you know why libraries rock? Because both of my local ones have decided not to charge late fees after the hurricane. Here's a shot out to East Baton Rouge Parish Library and the Nola library.

For the record, speaking of libraries, Sarah Palin scares me a little. She's starting to remind me of Umbridge from the Harry Potter books. Here's one of the reasons why.

A friend sent me this video on Facebook. Take a look at it.



It might seem like I'm random, but that's because I am. My reward for finally finishing this blog (think I was feeling guilty about having nothing to fess up to for Friday) is to watch the first episodes of Bones, which I missed. So happy it's back on, though. Just have to remember to go plug in my cable...

[This amuses me endlessly - The title of this post is Fess Up Friday, but it looks like I posted it on Wednesday. Posted it on Friday, in fact, but it's from a post I started on Wednesday, saved and then deleted. I am easily amused...]