English

Nice.

accountability

A lot of excitement today about Andy Pettitte "coming clean" and admitting to the use of human growth hormone. From the Sunday New York Post:

"In 2002 I was injured,'' the statement said. "I had heard that human growth hormone could promote faster healing for my elbow. I felt an obligation to get back to my team as soon as possible. For this reason, and only this reason, for two days I tried human growth hormone.

"Though it was not against baseball rules, I was not comfortable with what I was doing, so I stopped. This is it - two days out of my life; two days out of my entire career, when I was injured and on the disabled list. If what I did was an error in judgment on my part, I apologize. I accept responsibility for those two days."

So for 48 hours, his desire to be a good teammate overrode his personal comfort level. If that was wrong, he's sorry. What more do you people want?

"of course" and "obviously"

They are the most overused words by conservatives:

"Of course we want to get out of Iraq."

"Obviously no one cares more about the suffering in New Orleans than I do."

"Obviously no one wants war."

"Of course we want to find out how the information was leaked."

Once you've tuned in to those words, you can't listen to a Dick Cheney interview or Rush Limbaugh monologue without hearing them every other sentence. And of course it doesn't tend to be when things are actually obvious.

The most overused word by progressives? Kabuki. They're tired of the kabuki dance between Bush and Congress! They're sick of it!

A Meta-post

Three things that bug me about blogger, our blog editor/host:

Forced Astrological signs. Take a look at this guys profile. See how it lists his sign(s)? This isn't because the guy believes in astrology, it's because if you want to list your age on your profile, Blogger forces the star sign on you too. So if you see an age in a profile, you'll see the astrological sign too.

What do all the hardcore skeptics do? I haven't searched for a skeptic tag yet, but I'd bet you don't find a single person listing themself as a skeptic who also displays their age. The forced Zodiac sign is why.

No automatic email notification when comments are added to a post. Blogger, if I ask you to, you will automatically send me email when someone else makes a comment to a post after I've made a comment to the same post. Why can't you extend the same privilege to me when I'm the poster? After all, I'm hosting that party. I'm a big boy, Blogger. What is it you're trying to protect me from?

(This isn't about blogger specifically, but still...) The word blog. It's a little better than tofurkey jerkey but way worse than even chunnel, which is saying something. Every time I use it I think it's more suited to a context like I got so drunk last night that I blogged all over Nancy's floor. I hated this word from the start; for a long time I insisted on using the longer, and way more pleasing weblog instead. But I lost that war. Now I use the word, of course, but it still grates.

Feel my red-hot fury.

Previously Unuttered Sentences

I was at a friend's for Thanksgiving. Georgie, a ten year old girl, had some problem with her nose that she didn't seem to want to talk about. Her brother Patrick started to tell us what was wrong with her nose and Georgie told him "Patrick, it's not your nose to explain."

I love that because a) it's funny, and b) that sentence has probably never been said before.