Because I am seeing this all over the place: the usage of “taught,” which is the past tense of the verb “to teach,” when the writer meant to use the adjective “taut.” For God’s sakes, don’t make me come over there and hit you with a dictionary. They are two totally different words despite being pronounced the same. I’m not even going to bother putting links to definitions — look it up yourselves.
Man, disaster follows me.* Oh, okay, nothing happened to me, but earlier this evening I heard this ruckus outside my apartment building: sirens sirens sirens! I stepped outside and smelled smoke, and knew something was up. And now there are four or five fire trucks and an ambulance parked on the street in front of the complex, which my sliding glass door happens to face. There are three more fire trucks parked down by the duck pond on the other side of the complex from me — and a building which still had smoke coming from it. (Yes, I walked over there — I was bored.) It isn’t near me, but I’m sure glad I bought that renter’s insurance policy. I’ll bet you some college kid dropped his bong.
*Last year one of the buildings in the apartment complex I used to live in was gutted by fire. And the year before that the condos across from the apartment I lived in in Winter Park was discovered to be harboring a meth lab, which brought out the hazmat trucks. I swear, it has nothing to do with the pact I made with Satan…
Or, How To Ruin An Entertaining TV Show… Desperately grasping at any straw to fill their increasingly echoing and irrelevant churches, C of E vicars are now raiding the television sci-fi cupboard in an effort to “reach” young people. I say this as a fan of Doctor Who: if I was a member of this or any church that decided to use said series as a “teaching aid” I would have been totally turned off from not only the church lessons but probably the show to boot. It would ruin the enjoyment of the show for me, the way dissecting novels has ruined the ability of generations of English majors to be able to simply read a book. Of course, I was an odd child, who was always repulsed rather than flattered by the attempts of my elders to patronizingly talk down to what they supposed was my level in order to “reach” me. The sight of an over-thirty trying to be “hip” and “cool” and speak contemporary teenage slang struck me then as now as clumsy and farcical, not to mention insulting. It’s as if they were saying “you youngsters are too dumb to understand grown-up subjects, and also we can’t be bothered to actually help you overcome your youthful ignorance, so we’ll treat you the way the cliché missionary treats the simple Stone Age cannibals and speak to you in Pidgin.” Then the cannibals boil them and eat their heads — or in the case of contemporary Western society, the adults cannibalize their own culture until everyone is the equivalent of a person with no head, or at least no brain.
And on a side note, the so-called “Christian symbolism” that all too often leaks into, or in many cases has been clumsily dropped into, science fiction series, films, and novels is one thing that has always tempered my enjoyment of the genre. Since most science fiction writers, at least in television and film, are liberal and secular in outlook the result almost invariably comes off as a cynical attempt to hijack Christian beliefs to something I call the idea of Cooler Jesus. For instance, how much cooler a Jesus is a cute time-traveling alien guy in tight pants than that boring old bearded guy in the robes on your grandma’s kitchen wall? Or worse, that bleeding guy stuck by nails to a piece of wood, what a downer! And Cooler Jesus is also tolerant of gays and disapproves of guns, and he’ll take you for a spin in his time machine if you’re a reasonably good-looking humanoid girl, so take that, Christians! You know, I think David Tennant is hot, but he’s not the Messiah.
(Via the Flea.)
If it was good enough for Winston Churchill, it’s good enough for me.
Update: and more. Heh.
Much to avoid doing today, writing included, so to fill in the gaps here’s some vintage cheesy 80’s rock by Night Ranger. (Seriously, is this not an awesome song? Try not to look at the white pants and the mullets…)