08:44 – Barbara was gone all day and into the evening on Tuesday, on a trip to an outlet mall with her sister and parents. Yesterday, she went out to dinner with two of her friends from the library and didn’t get home until mid-evening. She then asked if it was okay if she went to the gym after work today. Yeah, right. Like I’ve ever tried to tell Barbara what to do, or like she ever asks my permission. But this was a rare opportunity that couldn’t be missed, so I shouted, “No!” Colin did his bit by agreeing with me. Of course, we were only kidding. Barbara is in fact going to the gym after work.
As of today, I now have three months left to finish the re-write on the forensics book, along with everything else I need to get done between now and then. Today I need to get purchase orders issued for the chemicals to make up more chemistry kits.
Still freezing my butt off but at least the rain has stopped and the ground is drying out.
Ending a sentence with a preposition??!! The penalty is forty days and forty nights of rain!
Well, at least I avoid split infinitives, unlike a certain 800 pound gorilla…
Yes, but I never split infinitives when I’m writing in Latin.
You weigh 800 pounds, RBT? Huh. You must be, like, 8 1/2 feet tall. Or else 6 feet tall and your bones are made of iridium. Which would be really cool. It’s like Wolverine has a blog.
I saw what you did there.
I don’t acknowledge split infinitives as a problem in English. The ancient brainiacs who attempted to jam English into Latin grammer were too dim to recognize the round-peg-square-hole difficulty and yet still managed to get their view accepted. Strange.
Yeah, I was just rattling his cage. I try to avoid split infinitives in English unless it makes the sentence look clumsy but I don’t seriously object to them or ending sentences with prepositions.
Winston Churchill is supposed to have said once “There are some things up with which I will not put”. The consensus is that he was taking the piss out of the purists, but one source on the Internet seemed to think he was serious and showing how it should be done.
Of course, the solution to avoiding split infinitives in English is to ditch it and go back to Latin.
Nah. I used to be 6’4″ and about 240 pounds, but I’m getting smaller. I think I’m probably 6’3″ and around 220 pounds now.
Incidentally, Aussie gorillas are apparently smaller than US gorillas, which are 900 pounds.
They [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/800_lb_gorilla]are[/url]?
Okay, just lost my first post. Typed it out, attached an URL and hit post comment and *poof*
I shall try again!
They are?
Are those Englisch pound or metric pouns? Mayne it’a loke the pint or the gallon, where the definition depends on which part of the former empire you happen to be in…
Darned fat fingers on a cell phone…
Um, after teaching English for nearly 10 years, I can tell you that the keepers of English, Oxford University, now insist that prepositions at the end of sentences and split infinitives are the CORRECT way to write and speak English. Their books teach it, and their tests demand it for the answer to be valid.
That seems a strange rule up. What if a sentence doesn’t have a preposition out? We just insert one in?
Or two over out.
Pay no attention to the crackpot “modernists” who say anything bloody goes; it most assuredly does not just bloody go. See Mssrs. Fowler and Graves from a million years ago.
OK, howzabout bears. And coyotes. Here in northern Nova Anglia and upstate Noo Yawk we are seeing huge-ass bears, twice their former average size, male black bears closing on 500 pounds. And be-bopping around the woods in PAIRS. My .41 Mag ain’t the ticket no more for them.
And the coyotes have evidently been breeding over many years now with timber wolves and are also huge. .41 might still do the trick on them but I’d want a backup. They are some slick, clever mofos, too. After the rest of the planet is toast, it will be them, the corvids, and cockroaches. Also rats, probably.
There is no need for coyotes to cross-breed with wolves any more than for black bears to cross with grizzlies. Remove the largest predator (wolf) from the system when there is large prey (deer) and there is an empty niche available to be filled. It should be no surprise that other predators start selecting (naturally) for size when it correlates with successfully exploiting a plentiful and otherwise untapped food supply. In the case of the coyote at least the absence of the wolf also allowed major range expansion.
Which reminded me of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly%E2%80%93polar_bear_hybrid
Before we got our Golden in Berlin, we regularly had a fox who several times came up to the landing of the back door, and it was big! Every bit as big as the Golden finally became. Never saw it again after getting the dogs, but the property backed up to a forest preserve where wild boars were a big problem (they are a big problem all over Berlin). There are only so many people licensed to kill the boars, which are recognized as dangerous, and if they get 1 a week, that is a lot. Not nearly enough to quell the problem.