Category: Uncategorized

Considering this, I would like to point out that I am an HR information systems manager for a hospital. So, I’m #1 and #7 and work with lots of people in #2. Sweet.

Quick wordplay post for you.

Looks as if the Mountain Goats will not be returning to Buffalo this year, despite their “see you next year” promises. I think… I think we may have scared them. The image of four of us standing far behind the crowd, arms crossed and heads moving just slightly in time to the strumming, while in truth a reverent meditation, may have appeared as disdain or even derision from the stage. The dude just fled off stage after his encore, as if about to chase the bottom of a bottle, break hotel furniture, and make incoherent threats towards abstractions.

You must go to SHPAAAAAAH!!!

Need some new geek duds? Swing on over to the cafepress shop and see just what it is I’ve been doing with my evenings.

Finally! At last I learn what these damn stickers mean.

Throughout my bookish life, I have tried and failed several times to read various non-fiction books. It turns out I just don’t have the stamina for it.

Here’s the issue: they just don’t need to be book length. For example, I am currently sweating through Guns, Germs, and Steel, which claims to explain differences in the technological development in various societies throughout history. I just read a whole damn chapter on wild almonds. Sorry, but the sentence “some wild plants lent themselves to cultivation better than others” would have suited me just fine. I have a feeling that when I reach the final page I will wonder why the author didn’t just write a five paragraph essay.

I move we bring back the pamphlet. Go ahead and spend your adult life proving something — just boil it down to the essentials for me. Thirty pages tops. And I know you think you have already, that you’ve tearfully stripped untold pages of vastly important details on the mating habits of horseshoe crabs which your editor told you the unwashed plebs just wouldn’t be able to handle. Your editor is right. Trim that puppy down, no matter how a good thick book looks on a library shelf.

Since B A Start appears to have become an etymology blog, can anyone tell me if the idiom “bite the dust” existed anytime between The Iliad and Queen?

As I plowed through a writing project this weekend, I caught myself typing the stale phrase “that rarest of species”. I know, I really am that stuffy. Maybe it’s The Dante Club, maybe the Pride and Prejudice, but my English has become substantially more Queen’s recently, probably to the same degree as Johnny‘s has become Queens.

Either way, I struck the phrase, assuming I was unconsciously quoting something. Damned if I can figure out what though. I mere googling returns a litany of articles using the phrase, but no source. I tried Shakespeare and the KJV. Even a thorough bartleby session turned up nought. (See? Who uses ‘nought’?)

Anybody got anything on this? I mean, it must have come from somewhere. Three cheers to you if you find it. I’ll toast your name with a sherry in the parlor and draw up an epigram praising your alacrity.

My 25 favorite TV chatacters (unranked):

1. Niles Crane
2. Jayne Cobb
3. Lucius Vorenus
4. Ironhide
5. Capt. Lewis Nixon
6. Shipwreck
7. Statler / Waldorf
8. Uncle Iroh
9. Riker
10. The Riddler (Animated, not Gorshin)
11. Tigra
12. Mandora the Evil Chaser
13. Lionel Luthor
14. Orko
15. Those spaghetti aliens from Sesame Street (yep, yep, yep, uh-huh)
16. Malcolm Reynolds
17. Skinner
18. Lt. Felix Gaida
19. Dr. Cox
20. Kaboobie the Flying Camel
21. Samurai Jack
22. Stormshadow
23. Bugs Bunny
24. Leonardo
25. Tom Servo