4.21.2006

Diversionary Tactics

Diversionary Tactics

I don't want to talk about the detoxification anymore. So boring. Day seven, it's a good time. Feel awesome. Want ribs. Done. The problem is that no much is going on at the moment, so here is some stuff of no particular importance and hopefully at least debatable interest:

  • All of a sudden yesterday I felt that I should be annoyed by the fact that I use phrases like "I seem to remember" or "I tend to think." It's a stupid hedge and if I were still in the biz of linguistic anthropology I would analyze such the hell out of it: "This linguistic convention functions to weaken a given statement for one or another purpose. Depending on the culture and context, this might be used to indicate a speaker's lower status vis à vis the listener or it may serve to distance the speaker from being responsible for, or associated with, the truth value of the statement. (Think of someone wracked with liberal guilt who feels the need to spout things like, 'I have this friend, who happens to be black.') Additionally, it may be used in an argument to make an attack on an interlocutor more indirect while simultaneously highlighting the statement with sarcasm or irony (e.g., in a marital dispute, 'I seem to remember you not caring when that stripper was showing off her booty by shaking it in your lap.')." Anyway, I should hedge my statements less.
  • Yesterday evening I saw a hot Jehovah's Witness. Actually, no, hot isn't what I want to call her. She was graceful. Tall, pretty and graceful. And it was very weird, standing in front of the Western Brown Line with this woman trying to save CTA riders' souls. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the Lord figured out that sex sells. No, I didn't take a copy of The Watchtower.
  • Standardized measurement is one of the foundations of modern society. Rational and widely accepted measures of size and duration allow scientists to build upon the findings of one another and provides a basis for exchange and commerce. We've known that since the days of the cubit. Not that the cubit was all that handy (no pun intended). So why the fuck can't the Chicago Tribune's Red Eye come up with a standard for rating the difficulty of their Sudoku puzzles? I know that the world probably has bigger problems waiting to be solved, but I'm an addict. I'm a junkie who gets his fix from a 9x9 grid of numbers. It's a compulsion and a rush to organize, but like any compulsion it's about control. How am I supposed to exercise that control and derive the proper satisfaction from it if the six-star bonus Sudoku on Friday is easier than Wednesday's three-star? The American economy is doomed because we don't produce any engineers and our newspapers still don't know three should be easier than six. Fucking idiots.

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