4003 So many women remain lost....

Saturday, January 17, 2015

No man ever listened himself out of a job.

--Calvin Coolidge--

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Over the past 15 years I have been able to locate a lot of my classmates from high school and college --- the MALE classmates.  I have been able to locate only three old female classmates --- one who never married, and two that I know who they married.

Women who change their name when they marry get lost.  They get cut off from the past.

I don't understand why young women today still change their name.  Unless they want to hide from the past, it no longer makes any sense at all.  You'd think there'd be a movement among socially aware young women to maintain their own identity.

I don't understand.

There used to be a time when it didn't matter, because women had no identity of their own.  Their identity was solely based on who their father was, or who their husband was.  (Who owned them, basically.)  Their world was very small, circumscribed by men.  Men put their stamps on them.  That's the time that this name-change custom came from.  

Girls --- marry.  But keep your birth name.  If your future husband doesn't like that, maybe you should ask him why before marrying him. Better yet, if he wants that both of you have the same name, propose that HE change his name to yours (it's just as easily done), and if he reacts with horror, ask him to explain why that's such an awful idea, then maybe he'll understand.
.

4002 Not the smartest dog

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

I just had to share this.  I love it.

4001 Strange baby

January 12, 2015

"I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about

human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive.

We've created life in our own image."

 --Stephen Hawking--

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I recently read an article about a woman who went to the emergency room with back and abdominal pain, and one hour after discovering that she was pregnant, she gave birth to a full-term baby.

It happens occasionally.  Especially if you are very heavy you don't notice the belly getting bigger, and large women frequently have irregular periods because fat flattens out hormones.

It reminded me of something that happened when I was very young, probably 10 or less.  It was when we lived in a tiny Pennsylvania village, you know, four blocks by five blocks big.  We're talking mid-'50s ish.  In those days, kids my age knew literally nothing about sex (if you didn't live on a farm).  Babies appeared magically.  Couples on TV slept in twin beds.

There was a shopkeeper - I believe he was the town baker, whose one-man shop was in the first floor of a converted house on the main street.  He owned the house, and rented out the second floor apartment.  Big middle-aged man.  Married.  Lived with his wife and children outside the village.

He rented the apartment over the shop to a youngish woman.  Single.  She didn't seem to have a job.  I don't know what she lived on (although my mother had her suspicions).  Anyway, she was very large.  Had to be pushing 400 lbs, maybe.  I'm not good at weight estimates.

One day I came home from playing and my mother was hopping with excitement.  She was overloaded with juicy gossip, and just had to spill it.  It seems that the woman had been stricken with horrible stomach cramps, and an ambulance had come and taken her to the little hospital in the town 20 miles up the road.  She had been anesthetized in her hospital bed, and a few hours later awoke in the same bed with a baby in a bassinet next to her.  (Remember, this was the '50s.  Women were put to sleep through labor and birth.  No muss, no fuss.  (Also no DNA tests.))  The nurses told her it was her baby, and she refused to believe it.  Flatly.  Insisted that it was impossible.  Screamed until they took the baby to the nursery.  Her theory was that some rich bitch'd had the baby and didn't want it, so the hospital was trying to fob it off on her.  She was no fool, by damn!  Last heard, she refused to take the baby home and was going to sue the hospital.

Everybody in town was laughing.  Everyone knew exactly where that baby came from.  Everyone who bought bread, anyway, and everyone they talked to, which was everybody else.

It seemed that sometimes when you went to the bakery, it was closed.  Temporarily.  When it was supposed to be open.  This being the '50s, air conditioners were rare, so when it was hot, you had windows open.  If you stood on the stoop of the shop, you were right under the open windows of the woman's apartment.  Her bedroom must have been in the front, because as you stood on the stoop of the closed shop, you could often hear interesting and unmistakeable sounds coming from the window just 8 feet or so up.

Snork!

That's as much as my mother told me that day.  I never heard anything more, and there's no way I was going to ask.  Here it is 60 years later, and I still occasionally wonder what happened to that baby.

I hope the woman wasn't bullied into taking it.  I can't imagine her ever having been a good mother to it.  I can't imagine her ever having accepted it.
.

4000 Of

January 12, 2015

"A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he

unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand."

 --Bertrand Russell--

-------------------------------------------------------------------

I seem to be complaining at lot in this blog lately, mostly because these days the only person I talk to other than store clerks and people I do business with is my daughter, and she hates to hear anyone complain about anything.  That's not new with her.  When she was a child and went to spend some time in the summer with her grandmother in Florida, when asked on her return how it went, the only thing she ever said (with an eye roll) was, "She complains about everything, all the time!"  Yeah, old folks do that.  Daughter, however, has the attitude that if something is worth complaining about, you either fix it, or stop complaining about it, and she gets angry if you don't do one or the other.  Ah, the arrogance of youth.

So, this is my soapbox.

My new complaint:

It's becoming increasingly obvious that schools (and home) are no longer teaching proper sentence construction and verb conjugation. I'm seeing more and more lately "could of", "should of", and "would of [verb]", even from people who style themselves as professional writers, and it jerks my chain every time.  I want to scream.

I can almost understand it, because people don't say "would have".  They say "woulda", so I can see where that could become "would of" when written if you don't know any better.  Sometimes, when I'm being purposely informal, even I write it as "woulda".   But I know the "a" is for "have", which is actually part of the verb.  These people don't.

Another very common crapolla is "embarrassed of".  That one I can't figure out at all, can't come up with an excuse for it.  Does that mean you are embarrassed by, or embarrassed for?  That's two different things.  "Embarrassed of" makes no sense at all.  But I see it everywhere, over and over.  Does anyone think about what words mean any more?  

The most recent is "have a crush of [somebody]".  The first time I saw that I thought it was a typo.  I have since seen it several places, different people, different ages.   Again, I can come up with no excuse, and it makes absolutely no sense.  Granted, "crush on" is an idiom (I think), but it's old enough that it should be well known.

It seems like "of" is the go-to word when you know something should fill that space, but you don't know what.

And it infuriates me that anyone who attempts to correct the perpetrators of this kind of crap on the internet is hounded with accusations of "Grammar Nazi"**.  Like, nobody should ever learn any better.  After all, you know what they mean, right?  So who cares?

AAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

I DO!
.
.
.
** I've noticed "Grammar Nazi" is beginning to morph into "Grammer Nazi".  We are doomed.
.