Archive for the 'Trash Can' Category
In the photo above, Nazis exult over a pile of burning books on May 10, 1933, which this Web article explains more fully.
Now, with the advent of the CPSIA (Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act), which takes effect this Feb. 10, many are worried that there will be massive book burnings in America.
Reason?
The CPSIA bans lead from all articles intended–or perceived as being intended–for children under 13. Books can and do contain lead, so this ban could lead to massive book burnings, critics fear. It also renders any books you have in your collection, even rare ones, unsellable unless you test them and prove they’re lead-free.
Problem is that "perceived to be intended" since many books look like children’s books when in fact their audience is adults.
I don’t know how serious this threat is (and most laws passed by our government screw up more things than they solve and hurt more people than they help, which is why we should stick to the Constitution and dissolve most government initiatives)but I’ve also read where many children’s clothing retailers fear that they’ll go out of business after the law takes effect.
Good going, doofae in Congress. You’ve done it again.
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A local rag out where I live (I guess I shouldn’t call it a rag since the paper does try to be somewhat fair) ran an interesting editorial today about best-selling author Neil David Walsch, who just got caught plagiarizing–unintentionally, of course. (The same edition also carried a note about how "an unspecified number" of employees had just been let go the day before in a cost-saving measure.)
Read "Not writing, but stealing." It’s quite revealing.
The author, by the way, is famed for his Conversations With God series. I wonder which god he’s referring to.
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"Great Caesar’s Ghost" Daily Planet editor Perry White was heard to exclaim from the grave. Journalism as we know it ceased to exist as of Monday, Jan. 5, 2009.
The end came as the New York Times, that bastion of all things journalistic (and they would say of all things just and politically correct), ran a four-color advertisement from CBS on its front page. The culprits in charge explained that it was okay because the ad appeared at the bottom of the page, and thus "below the fold."
I see.
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English is mostly a Germanic language with some French thrown in owing to the Norman (French) Conquest of England, so it’s a great time to revive and revel in a German word not used that often but particularly a propos this year–schadenfreude.
Roughly translated, schadenfreude means "joy over other people’s suffering and losses."
With the circle of fat-cat millionaires and billionaires now being brought down singlehandedly by Bernie Madoff and his $50-billion Wall Street Ponzi scheme, we can all take some delight in seeing others get what’s due them. If we ourselves have suffered losses this year (raise your hand to join mine if you have), l’affaire Madoff is just what the doctor ordered.
Economist and columnist Thomas Sowell tells a great fable that cuts to the heart of schadenfreude–and human nature.
Two Russian peasants, one named Ivan and one Boris, live a rough-and-tumble existence in the forest, but Boris (or Ivan, I can’t recall who) has a goal and Ivan has nothing.
One day Ivan stumbles upon a genie in the forest who offers to grant him one wish but one wish only. So what does Ivan ask for?
"Make Boris’s goat die."
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I remember back in high school being excoriated by an English teacher who said, in effect, "You can’t say a myriad of. Myriad is an adjective."
So, blindly, I believed that for the next several decades until…today.
I finally looked it up. Turns out myriad started out as a noun meaning "innumerable" or literally "10,000" (once considered an "innumerable" sum).
Then in the 19th century, Samuel Taylor Coleridge helped convert it into an adjective when he wrote the phrase, "Myriad of myriad lives."
Not sure what that meant or referred to, but as a result, we now have myriad as both noun and adjective to abuse.
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