3570 Being evil

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Some people are energized by conflict.  If you aren’t, you will always lose if you play by their rules.

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Search hits:

I've got four posts (out of several thousand) that get repeated search hits.  In the fall and winter, the one on  how to pronounce Ashokan gets several hits per week, sometimes several a day.  Why fall and winter?  I don't know.  In the spring and early summer it's the one about tiny ants, again multiple hits per week, lately several per day.  Why spring and summer is obvious.  Year-round it's the one about the odd error message, maybe two hits a week.

The only other one that shows noticeable activity is the brain cancer timeline.

No one ever leaves a comment on any of them.  "Gee, thanks for the info" would be nice. 

Now I'm chuckling evilly to myself, because future searches for those terms will land them here, where I say nothing about those topics. Notice I didn't include links.  Snork.

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A "game" I never understood:

Telephone.  Where someone starts a sentence or two and it's whispered from person to person around the circle, and at the end it's very different.  The times I've participated it was presented as "an illustration of how gossip gets distorted in the telling".

Bull poopy.  The times I was in the circle it did not illustrate how gossip was honestly distorted.  It was an illustration of how people will perversely TRY to distort information.  They cheat.  Always, in every case, the person who whispered it to me purposely mumbled, spoke super quickly, and ran words together at an unnecessarily low and breathless volume.  It pissed me off because it was obvious that they were trying to make sure I didn't hear it. 

It would be more illustrative of the purpose if everyone in the circle could honestly say they'd tried to pass it clearly.  Then it would be a surprise that it still got distorted.

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Word confusions:

Along with loose/lose, sight/site, and all those others, add wander/wonder and in tact/intact.

At least four times in the past few days I've come across "professional" writers describing people as "wondering around" when they are walking aimlessly.  Hey, they aren't even pronounced the same.

I'm getting tired of people describing something which is unbroken as being in tact.  I should be grateful it's not "in tacked" I guess.

The telephone game is nothing.  Soon people won't understand each other at all.  Or worse, THINK they do when they don't.

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How childhood misunderstandings get stuck:

I was washing dishes and stacking the rinsed dishes in the drainer to air dry.  I was less than 8 years old - not sure how old, really.  My mother noticed I was rinsing them with cold water.  She got angry at me and said, "Cold water!  They'll NEVER dry!" and grabbed a dishtowel and started to dry them, slamming things around angrily.

That stuck.

It's stuck in my head now that if things get wet with cold water, they'll never dry.  Of course I know better now, but logic doesn't count. I think of it every time I wash dishes, rinse clothes, step in a puddle, get splashed by the garden hose, take a bathing suit off.  I'm still afraid they'll never dry, and there's a faint residual fear of mold.
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