I’m reading Origins of the Specious and remembering the grammar wars (well, skirmishes, really) that I used to have with (son) b!X back in the old days. I was as adamant about the rules as he was about accepting common usage.

When I taught 8th grade English in the late ’60s, our grammar text book was my bible, and I carried it with me all through graduate school and beyond so make sure that my writing and editing were grammatically “correct.” Now I find out that b!X’s points were the ones I should have been paying attention to.

Like ending a sentence with a preposition (see previous sentence). Or beginning a sentence with a conjunction (note current sentence). And then there’s the split infinitive, as in “to boldly go where no one has gone before.”

I rarely read non-fiction, but this book is as entertaining as any Stephanie Plum adventure, chock full of ear-opening anecdotes that explain where those old grammar rules came from and who were responsible.

Here’s a little sample of Patricia O’Connor’s clever chapter headings and her catchy writing style:

Isn’t it Pedantic?

Quick, what’s the plural of “octopus”? If you think “octopi” is classier than “octopuses,” go stand in the corner…..

We live in a postmodern world, but the Latinists are still among us, especially in academia. They insist on using plurals like “gymnasia,” “syllabi,” and symposia,” even though dictionaries now recognize a preference for Anglicized plurals (”gymnasiums,” “syllabuses,” “symposiums”). There’s pedantry off campus too, of course,. I’ve seen real-estate ads offering “condominia” for sale — to ignormani, no doubt.

As Garrison Keillor notes on the book’s back cover:

It’s right there on page 54: ‘It’s better to be understood than to be correct’ — pull that out the next time somene corrects your grandma. This tour de force of our beautifully corrupted language is both. And dull it ain’t….

And yes, as the title of this posts indicates, sometimes double negatives are what make the point. Never say never.

“So you think you can dance” is what I’m watching on tv tonight. I miss the ballroom dancing I used to do so much that I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch any of the dance shows. I just feel too envious. Until now.

There is no point in my feeling envious, since there is no way I would have been ever able to do that amazing choreography. So I can objectively enjoy the dancing.

And starting in a week or so, I will finally have a chance to do some dancing of my own. I going to begin taking a “Zumba” dance exercise class once a week. I’m sure, given my tight muscles and back pains, I will be one of the slowest movers, but it’s a start.

So, we’ll see if I can still dance.

These are two welcoming places in our back yard, thanks to the hard work of my daughter and son-in-law. The rest of the yard is requisite open space and jungle gym for the family’s youngest, as well as a vegetable garden strip.

But these are my favorite spots.

Now, if only I could convince the mosquitoes to move somewhere else.

Latest craft projects to keep my hands out of the potato chip bag:

Recyclable plastic grocery bag crocheted with strips of recycled plastic bags.

Two crocheted cotton grocery bags.

Take a grandchild to the movies and go and see Up.

It was supposed to thunderstorm this afternoon, so we figured we’d all go see a movie that we all might enjoy. And we did.

A Walter Mathau look-alike (voiced by Ed Asner) literally animated Carl Fredricksen is my new hero, and if you wear dentures, creak when you get out of bed, and wish for adventures you never had, you’ll love him too. He brings a refreshing understanding and appreciation of elderly people (with those continually growing noses and ears and those increasingly sagging jawlines and shoulders) who struggle not to be overwhelmed by a world that often seems to be leaving them behind.

In some ways, my almost-seven-year-old grandson saw a little different movie than I did, but that’s OK. I mean, when I laughed at Carl’s dentures flying out when he spit at the villain, it was for a reason much more personal than my grandson’s giggle.

But we both did see a movie about a feisty (and sometimes crotchety) old guy and a fumbling, eager kid who, together, grapple with many of their obstacles to making ordinary life an adventure. And they succeed.

“Up.” Definitely and “up” movie.

It was the 40s. Comic books were 10 cents, and Mr. Wellman, who owned the news stand down the block from my house had a wall full of constantly updated comic books, which he let me read for free while I sat on the bench and munched on penny candy.

On the way back from visiting my mother yesterday, I listened to a piece on NPR about Harvey Kurtzman the creator and driving force behind Mad Comics and later, Mad Magazine.

By the time the 50s arrived, my interests were moving away from comic books and more toward True Confessions and Mad Magazine.

From Wikipedia:

Comics historian Tom Spurgeon picked Mad as the medium’s top series of all time, writing, “At the height of its influence, Mad was The Simpsons, The Daily Show and The Onion combined.”[1] Graydon Carter chose it as the sixth best magazine of any sort ever, describing Mad’s mission as being “ever ready to pounce on the illogical, hypocritical, self-serious and ludicrous” before concluding, “Nowadays, it’s part of the oxygen we breathe.”[2] Joyce Carol Oates called it “wonderfully inventive, irresistibly irreverent and intermittently ingenious American.”[3] Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam wrote, “Mad became the Bible for me and my whole generation.”[4

Irreverence and ingenuity. They sort of go together.

There is something endearingly irreverent about Alfred E. Neuman, the poster boy for Mad Magazine, and his philosophy of “What, me worry?”

It was the 50s, and I didn’t worry about much.

Nothing good lasts forever.

Except maybe irreverence.

Here’s a great comparison of the sayings of Alfred E. Neuman and George Bush, asking “Who would you trust?”

Irreverence.

One of the many great things about Obama is his ability to be irreverent about himself.

Yesterday, when I walked in the door of my now home after visiting my mother, I was greeted with a scene that was a far cry from the 50s. My son in law was ironing his shirts for the work week and my grandson was imitating him, using his toy iron on one of his own shirts laid out on a tray table.

There are lots of good things about it not being the 50s, even though we all do worry a lot.,

It’s the solstice and mom had a really bad morning. I will never get used to the fear in her eyes. Dementia is a personal hell.

There are so many different causes of dementia, and I often wonder if my mother is afflicted with several of them, since we have yet to find a medication that relieves any of the symptoms.

Sometimes her behavior is like that of an autistic child, with repetitive hand movements and sounds and outbursts of anger. That was the way it was this morning.

I keep thinking that she might have some pain in her mouth, since tapping her mouth became one of those movements. However she has no other indications of such.

What she seems to be is a bundle of fears and anxieties. Music and rocking her sometimes helps, but not often.

She has lost weight because she just doesn’t want to eat much.

She is 93. There must be some magic potion that will relax her without knocking her out or having the opposite effect of making her even more anxious. So far, no prescription drugs have been able to do that.

Medical marijuana is not available here. I’m looking into some legal herbal possibilities.

I take a Passion Flower tincture to help me sleep, but it tastes awful, so she won’t take it. A maple-flavored Kava glycerite is a possibility.

Even though most of the medical profession still looks down on herbal remedies, they and their pharma buddies are not offering anything that works anyway.

It is so unfair that someone her age should have to bear the mental and physical anguish of dementia.

But then, it’s not fair that people are still being maimed and murdered in the Middle East.

As reported in the latest Harper’s Weekly Review:

A woman in Tel Aviv was searching through the city dump after she bought her mother a new mattress as a gift and threw out the old one, which was stuffed with $1 million in cash.

The parents of young “trustafarians” who live in fashionable Williamsburg, New York, could no longer afford to pay rent for their adult children.

A bakery in the Spanish city of Valencia was sued when the arm of an undocumented Bolivian worker was severed by a kneading machine and put out with the garbage, and French prosecutors commenced the trial of a woman accused of killing her babies and storing their bodies in the freezer.

Johanna Ganthaler, a woman who missed the May 31 Air France flight that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean and killed all aboard, died in a car accident.

Farmers in the Netherlands were using pig excrement to generate electricity, and U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu suggested that painting roofs white might reflect sufficient sunlight to stave off global warming.

A Nebraska doctor said that he would offer third-term abortions.

Nurses in the Czech Republic were receiving free breast implants and liposuction as signing bonuses. “It helps to improve the morale,” explained a clinic manager, “of both our employees and our patients.”

Young girls in Zimbabwe were trading sex for food, three boys in Dorset, England, stomped a baby deer to death, a 16-year-old boy in California was running for city council, and a 14-year-old boy in Germany was hit by a meteorite.

California scientists studying guppies found that evolution can take place in as little as eight years, and scientists conducting research in Africa announced the discovery of a penis-shaped mushroom that they christened Phallus drewesii, after herpetologist Robert Drewes. “I’m utterly delighted,” said Drewes of the new species of stinkhorn fungus, which is two inches long. “The funny thing is that it is the second-smallest known mushroom in this genus and it grows sideways, almost limp.”

Citations for these and other equally disturbing news tidbits can be found on the Harper’s Weekly Review page.

Five years ago,

….on July 6, 2004, Technorati tracked its 3 millionth weblog. …..seeing anywhere from 8,000-17,000 new weblogs created every single day.

At the beginning of 2003, according to a graph in the table in the article referenced above, there were less than 150,000.

I began blogging in 2001. I can’t do the math, but seems to me that when I started blogging, I was a small fish in a small pond, and that’s about where I like to be.

From a 2008 piece in the Blog Herald

Technorati currently states it is tracking over 112.8 million blogs, a number which obviously does not include all the 72.82 million Chinese blogs as counted by The China Internet Network Information Center. Blog statistics often concern the English language blogosphere but we should not forget about the millions of other blogs that are not always included in estimations.

My personal history shows that I like participating in the start of things - projects, businesses, relationships…. I liked blogging when the blogosphere was a newly evolving neighborhood. Now it’s a widespread nation, and I feel lost in its vastness.

When I attended the first BloggerCon held at Harvard in 2003, I was enamored of all the interesting people I met online. I met some of them in person at the conference, and that was even more fascinating.

A lot has changed in the past half-dozen years. Social media networks like Facebook and Twitter have become the new online connectors, adding another territory to what once was a manageable blogosphere.

I bought at GPS a while ago because I have such a bad sense of direction in the real world. I get a visual overload when I travel and lose my sense of direction.

That’s kind of the case with me and the blogsophere these days.

I’m just a little fish. And my little pond has merged with the overwhelming ocean.

I feel a little lost. And I don’t have a GPS (although the closest thing to it for me these days is the blogroll at Time Goes By.)

Maybe I just don’t have anything more to rant about in the face of all of those other blogs doing the ranting that I might want to do.

It’s a dilemma.

It’s not that the York, Maine library doesn’t have wireless. It does. But I have Ubuntu OS on my HP mini notebook and I couldn’t figure out how to connect. I couldn’t get on their help page because I couldn’t get on the Internet.

I can’t believe that I actually figured it out by myself. I guess there’s hope for me yet. Although I’m not sure how much more frustration I can put up with re Ubuntu. I can’t get any sound out of the machine. Bleh.

Since I am in Maine, I got in touch with Ronni Bennett to see if we might have a chance to grab a cup of tea before I leave tomorrow, but she’s just getting back from NYC, so it’s a no go this time. But I’ll be in York again at some point, and I’ll try again.

I can’t believe how frustrating it was not to be able to connect through my laptop. While there are terminals at the library that are for public use, it just isn’t the same thing. (And I don’t know my WordPress login info by heart; it’s stored on my laptop.)

Tomorrow, we leave for home, after a week of Boggle marathons, too much wine and Sea Breezes (the alcoholic kind),. and just about enough belly-laughing.

Not enough sun, but that’s Maine for you

Now I’m off to have lobster roll for lunch and poke around York Beach.