just words

Eewww, gross! A comma splice!

/ Steve Hill / Leave a comment

A discussion in which several friends are taking part over on Facebook inspired me to revive and repost this seven-year-old rumination on comma splices and more. It’s from my now-mothballed “dr. shill” blog (Oct. 22, 2010).

 

The comma splice is among the most loathsome of errors. It should be wiped off the face of the earth with extreme prejudice. No, I’m not kidding.

They say post-apocalyptic cockroaches will inherit the earth. Sometimes I think comma splices will give them a run for their money.

On a beautiful fall day recently, my colleague Dr. Rhonda Sprague came to observe my teaching. From our third-floor lab, one could still see a good deal of flaming red and yellow foliage along Briggs Street as it ran to a dead end just outside our class.

As I reviewed the concepts behind identifying and avoiding comma splices, I mentioned to my students that comma splices increasingly creep into newspaper writing, especially at smaller newspapers and in quoted material.  Dr. Sprague startled me by raising her hand and asking whether they’re acceptable in novels, as she has noticed many during her own reading.

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Naked on the day it was burned

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A few hours after Trump’s travel ban for Muslims started getting serious news attention (including nonstop CNN coverage), the naked guys were standing around the locker room at the YMCA, transfixed by what they saw on television.

It was the end of a Wisconsin Badgers basketball game, however, that enraptured them. Out in the fitness area, virtually everyone was ignoring several screens with live coverage of our constitution going down in flames, complete with stranded travelers and unjust detentions.

From what I could tell, life was simply moving forward for most exercisers. I didn’t see a single animated conversation, and certainly not one that appeared to focus on the travel ban.

Around that time, a friend of mine — a technology entrepeneur from one of our staunchest Pacific allies, in the U.S. to do business — said he was busy at an airport, spending a substantial amount of time “chatting up the CBP officer to make my case that I’m no criminal”  (CBP being Customs and Border Protection),

We’re all being faced with serious personal choices right now.  Ignore what’s going on around us?  Post a few outraged comments on social media? Join a march?  Boycott a business? Something more?

I’ve seen all sorts of things.  One friend told me yesterday, with a clear tinge of shame, that he’s just trying to keep his head down and do his job,  Several friends took part in the recent women’s marches.  One new acquaintance — a Facebook friend, really — is posting an endless series of anguished comments, multiple times daily.

Fixing this is going to need more, and it’s tough to know how to proceed.  Part of what I’ll do is write more, including on this blog, where I’d committed to focusing more on parks and the outdoors and less on the political side than I have in the past.

As we have seen, however, with the rebellion of National Park Service employees amid renewed political efforts to weaken science, sell off public lands, and silence dissent, there can be no avoiding politics.

I’ve posted nothing since mid-November for multiple reasons, all of which were stressful, but none more so than the thoroughly deflating and demoralizing election in which the worst elements of our national character changed the nature of our country.

It’s time to come back. I’ll still stick mostly to the outdoors, as I’ve got some projects in the works, including the continued production of my outdoors column.  But the ugly side of life in America cannot be ignored now.

Not everything in nature can be beautiful.  It often seems that little in politics is, but there are glimmers of hope here and there through the smoke of our principles being incinerated.

Many are resisting in ways large and small.  Doing so creatively and appropriately, forcefully and effectively, is the task we must all continue.

And now for a return from blogging vacation

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[Update and disclaimer: it seems the Gazette is finally headed toward a pay wall, and it wasn’t my intent to trick people into buying a subscription; however, I’d already published the post, so rather than take it down, I’ve just added this note and will figure out what happens with my columns next, as we haven’t discussed it. But for the time being, it looks like this was a test and a few of my future columns will still be completely accessible.]

Along about April, I just got a bit worn out and stopped posting for a while.  Some of that probably had to do with the stuff I was posting.

I’ve mostly sworn off the political commentary, and I’ll be focusing a whole lot more on all the fun stuff I get to do from now on.  Some of the other will slip in here and there, as you’ll see if you’re intrepid enough to read my Sept. 8 Gazette column.  It’s about what happens when you let work get to you and how a good bike or boat ride helps cure it all.

And there are a couple of extra photos, just for fun.  Great to be out on the water with my son, Sam, and my friend, former student, and editor Nate Enwald — because he doesn’t like me to call him “boss.”

Misleading Facebook posts are misleading

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I’m trying to follow a new personal rule about Facebook responses: if mine hit two paragraphs, consider a blog post. The potential elimination of overtime pay and a Facebooker’s promiscuous use of the term “misleading” lead me to this post.

legreeHere’s the news that prompted the Facebook post that I ultimately wanted to respond to.  To the left of this paragraph is a screenshot of the original Facebook post and the comment that prompted this response, exactly as the post and comment appeared. The screenshot is a little small and I don’t intend for it to appear misleading, so please click for a more easily read view.

Full disclosure: yes, that last bit was an outright lie.  I blanked out the name of the commenter (using the unofficial colors of Labor Day) and the name of the original poster, because I don’t want to draw undue attention to anyone’s friends, even if they are posting on a public forum. And I did do the hat.

But everything else is just as it appears in real life. Especially the mustache. I swear it on the Internet.

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Darn right I had one. Wanna make something of it?

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angriest

Stevens Point Still Life: Red bun, read paper, red state?

Cheap marketing ploys don’t do much for me.  The Angriest Whopper, however, is at least a little clever because it seems to tap into our collective psyche right now.

Quick background: I went to the polls early today expecting a Bernie Sanders win, but with my mood tempered by an equal expectation that dark money would deliver the open Wisconsin Supreme Court seat to one of the most singularly unqualified candidates in the United States right now.

A few hours at work didn’t exactly turn me into Mr. Twinkles.  We’re in the midst of faculty searches to replace our departing droves.  Other constant pains in the rear — such as our so-called governance structure at the university — make me question whether I should be bolting from here myself.

I read the piece linked above and decided I could use a bad burger for lunch while reading more about the Panama Papers, which already have resulted in the resignation of Icelandic premier Segret Monibankss Monisson, or whatever his name was.

The burger wasn’t that hot. Neither was it that hot.  And it doesn’t deserve much more review than that, although I still enjoyed it enough as both food for my belly and fodder for my blog, the point of which, at least for tonight, is this:

Yeah, Sanders won, but big deal.  I’m still expecting the Democratic machinery to hand the nomination to a candidate who’s looking more and more like she could finish a comfortably distant second in the popular vote.  Additionally, no matter what happens in the Republican convention, it won’t be any prettier than the end results of the last colored whopper, if you know what I mean.

sanders FBAnd despite early indicators of a happy ending for today’s Wisconsin Supreme Court race, later reports look more bleak.  Regardless, I’m not hopeful for anything much better in the short run.  I’m not seeing any serious discussion of the Sanders candidacy in mainstream media.  Like the Black Whopper, it’s all “but … but … but …” (see screen shot at right).

Little is being done about vote suppression.  And how ’bout that U.S. Senate and its ongoing vacation from responsibility?

My only consolation seems to be the chance to write bad puns and political exhortations directed at whoever has made it this far on this post. My anger is on auto-pilot, and I hope yours is too.

Keep speaking out and making things happening.  We have a long way to go.