A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

I hereby nominate "Obamacon" at the Word of the Election.

I saw Andrew Sullivan use it a lot to describe self-identifying conservatives who, like himself, support Obama. But now I'm seeing a lot of people using it, and often regarding themselves, as well. Good.

I used the word "disinterested" in a blog comment last night, and despite its tiny probable readership I find myself worried that people who do read it will read it incorrectly, that I meant it to mean "uninterested" instead of "taking a neutral stance". I bet dollars to donuts that most users of the English language think it has only the former definition, when they encounter it.

Certain people like to get angry that other people are stupid and English is doomed when they encounter evidence of readers taking the wrong meaning from words like this. And they remind me of nothing so much as hardcore Unix geeks belittling everyday computer users for getting something wrong in a command-line invocation and erasing half their hard disk.

That's right: I'm saying that that "disinterested" is an example of a word with a terrible UI.

There's a cleaning lady in my house, at the invitation of my landlady. After a few moments of working around her and even helping a little with my own messes, like taking out the trash, it seemed wisest to just withdraw into my room and her do what she likes. I kind of hope she gives my room a pass; it's been a sty since I stopped using it as a workspace two years ago. It's been a little better lately but I am not proud of it yet.

The rough part is that my landlady is there with her, ordering her around. Neither are native English speakers but they're using it as a lingua franca, which I think is always kinda cool to see, but my landlady adds the extra stumbling block of being batty and cranky, so they're both getting frustrated with each other. Cleanlady is a consummate pro with her own system, and landlady is at her heels telling her that it's all out of order. Gah. I didn't want to be witness to that either.

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On the subject of housing: can any of y'all give me an idea of what I should have in the bank in order to obtain, let us say, a two-bedroom condo in the vicinity of my current location? Is doing this sort of thing as simple as paying a mortgage every month - just like I do now with rent - after dropping a single phat down payment? I don't know, I'm asking.

I passed the magic barrier not too long ago of wondering why I'd ever want to own property to wondering how one goes about this.

• Sahf
• Darf

[Poll #866806]

I have to laugh at the recent wave of of spams from exotic lands proclaiming "I want to fuck with you!" I get enough of that at work, lady, thanks anyway

CNN rushes to press with OMG THE PRESIDENT SWORED.

See, the thing is, I am actually impressed that Bush apparently professed a candid political opinion in (what he thought was) a private conversation. It goes against his grotesque caricature of pure, cynical ignorance to world affairs that I have internalized, and gives me a modicum more respect for him, if you can believe it.

Listening to a particular Tori Amos song for the first time in a while, and it strikes me that the image evoked by the lyric "Greg he writes letters and burns his CDs" managed to completely reverse sometime between its publication in 1994 and today. Our moody friend Greg was originally destroying all his music, but now he's making more copies of it instead!

FWIW, discussion of this and other bits of the song here. From now on it's really quite impossible for me to hear those words and not think of this emo kid cranking away with iTunes while writing his emo fan letters, anachronism or not.

I've actually been doing it for a while, now, but I'm going to go ahead and state it for the record:

Henceforth I will use the pronoun they (them, their) when I wish to refer to a person in the singular without specifying their gender. ← See? I just did it. That wasn't too awful, right?

Ten years ago I hated this usage. Now? It's like a warm bath.

* "hott"

* curling