"To express one's thoughts accurately is hard work, and to be precise is sometimes dangerous."
-- Sir Ernest Gowers, author of "Plain Words: a guide to the use of English"
(Quote spotted by the lovely iamwordwiz)

"Without music, life would be a mistake."
-- Nietzsche

(Found while playing on hunch.com)

"The trouble with normal is it always gets worse."
-- Bruce Cockburn, via my Google Reader

(But it's long been one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite of his songs.)

"Talk to copyeditors. Learn their names. Embrace them as fellow writers and lovers of language. Feed them chocolate."

-- Roy Peter Clark, from "Writing Tools"

Observation 1: Sometimes "I'm too busy" is both true and a blessing in disguise.

Observation 2: At this point in the semester, students are NOT the only ones tired and often frustrated.

(The observations stem from separate events; don't try to put them together.)

I should, I suppose, be grading papers or putting together class notes for tomorrow. But I keep finding myself wanting to try to write this out, which probably means I should just do it. It is, however, one of those "trying to write it out" comments, so if you have no patience or time just now, feel free to skip it. It'll end up as bullet points after the cut because I can't get it to write itself any other way.

( Read more )

Remember the Project from Hell that I've mentioned a couple of times in this space? I think it's done. No, really. I proposed my little effort to settle the question officially tonight, and it was approved. The chief grumbler from the last two months was not there, but I'd already decided I was simply going to invite him to vote no if he thought my approach was the wrong one.

And I did say "No" quickly when someone tried to propose me for a seat on the board of directors of this group. See, I can say no...

Besides, I'm still in the mood to stall tonight (although I have projects that need to be done tonight). And so, a couple of chapters from the continuing saga last updated Oct. 6.

1. The Bills have begun to win. Yes, it's winning ugly, but the fact remains: there were more points on their side of the board yesterday and last Sunday. I know some fellow football fans who wish they could say the same about their teams.

2. I may finally be done with the Big Company snarled at in the Oct. 6 edition. They sent a letter tonight that officially finishes my business with them. (Let the celebration commence.) They did manage, however, to come up with one more patience-rattler before it was all done. Friday night, we got home to two messages. The first was from one of their employees asking me to call to finish a few details with him. Problem was, I'd talked to someone else a week earlier, and that person had assured me that the letter to finish the thing should go out no later than Friday. Immediately after that was another message from that employee: He'd just looked at the notes on the computer (imagine that) and realized all was done.

Sigh. Even if I'd been tempted to continue to deal with them...

3. I have a meeting a week from tonight that I hope will finish the Project from Hell. (If not, you're all likely to hear the explosion.) Then, I just have to come up with a way to get the two who can't play nicely together to realize that any journalist hates to hear "you got it wrong in the newsletter," and it's even worse when that translates as "I'm going to blame you for talking to this person who holds a position which SHOULD mean he knows what he's talking about."

Hmm. Wonder if I can inform them both that if they have something that needs to be in the newsletter, it has to come from someone else? It might get to that.

This is from an ad posted on my Facebook profile page just now:

"Show your support of Breast Cancer with a Photo Pillow made from your choice of Pink Ribbon Fabrics. 10% of sale benefits research!"

Somehow, I really doubt they're asking us to support breast cancer. (And if they are, I'd urge you to say no to the request.) Breast cancer research, maybe, or survivors ... but not the cancer itself.

And a question people are increasingly asking: When they say 10 percent of sale benefits research -- through what organization? I'm highly in favor (for really obvious reasons), but I have more trust in some organizations than others. Clicking through to their ad, I finally found the answer: "10% of the entire sale is donated to the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center."

Memo to them (and to my students heading toward strategic communications): That piece of information needs to be far more visible on the initial ad. Then we'll go back and deal with that "support of breast cancer" (no, I will NOT capitalize it) thing.

"You need to move away from the politics of fear.”
-- Dawn Purvis of Northern Ireland's Progressive Unionist Party, quoted by blogger Alan in Belfast

It's a lesson we could stand to borrow...

... for reasons that will be obvious to most readers of this blog:

Some House committee members talked of cancer affecting them personally, including Rep. John Barrow, D-Ga., who said, "My mother turns 89 today. She is a 35-year cancer survivor."
-- from an ABC News story this morning

Because it's been too long a week (already) and I don't yet want to settle into what I should get done this evening, I offer some follow-ups on continuing sagas around the House of the Black Cat:

1. It's depressing to be a football fan forced to realize that the season is already over for her favorite team. But I'm having trouble coming to any other conclusion about the Buffalo Bills. The inept -- coaching, offense, special teams -- seems to be swallowing up some reasonably ept performances by the defense. (For examples of the latter, I offer the games against the New England Patriots and three-quarters of the game against the New Orleans Saints.) (The latter, btw, is costing me a lunch on a bet with a former student. Sigh.)

I'd like to say "I don't care," but no one would believe me, including me. So I'm considering a flirtation with some other team -- not to replace the Bills, but to give me a chance at rooting for a winning team as well as my long-time heartbreakers. (Note: Dallas and Miami need not apply.)

2. I had another go-round today with the Big Company featured in the Sept. 29 entry. The man on the other end assured me he was sorry for my frustration and the amount of time (40 minutes, if I was watching the clock right) I'd spent on hold at varying points. His "I'm sorry" didn't matter much; I'm no closer to a resolution of the situation. I am, however, closer to telling people I know why they might want to consider not dealing with these people ever.

3. The Project from Hell featured in several recent entries resurfaced last night. Because I had a flash of temporary insanity (how else to explain it?), I put myself back into a small piece of it. But I do this piece on my terms. What I'm hoping is that this effort will settle this thing (at least for awhile) by early November. We'll see.

4. But what do you do with two supposedly responsible adults, officers of a group, who are consistently telling you that the other doesn't know what he's talking about? I'd like to ignore them both, but I am (great surprise here) the newsletter editor. I'm fighting the temptation to print both versions of any given story and invite the rest of the membership to sort it out.

5. And one sidenote: My illustrious sibling got a letter to the editor in the current issue of Rolling Stone. It's not a huge letter, but he was pleased enough to tell me it was there. And I was pleased to pick up the issue (the one with U2 on the cover) and see him in there.

Passed along by cam_1089 via C'Mack:

"Commas: They save lives!

Let's eat Grandpa!
Let's eat, Grandpa!"

Dear Big Company,
No matter what you appear to think, not all transactions with your company can be done online. Sometimes you need to talk to a Real Human Being (tm), either because the transaction isn't totally routine or because you want to avoid three or six rounds of e-mail tag. Hiring too few people to handle such calls will not drive us to your web site. It may drive us out the door. (To be fair, that's where I'm planning to be sometime after this call. But even if I had been planning to stick around, 10 minutes on hold would make me reconsider.)

And by the way, you may not want to thank me for my patience -- I'm rapidly losing it.

Seriously grumpy,
Penshark

Try this one out:

http://www.hunch.com/banned-books/?SEMref=google&kw=banned%20books&gclid=CIvQn6-ql50CFdVL5QodsHWt2Q

I was introduced to this by one of our local librarians.

Then feel free to leave a post with your results.

Sitting on the printer at the moment is a letter resigning from the committee I mentioned in this space a week ago. I may let panther_tracks do an edit on it, but the plan is for it to go in the mail tomorrow.

... Worse that I had to just listen to a horrible "interview" between the sports media and Terrell Owens. And before you jump to a conclusion on which side I favor, no one came out of that one sounding good.

Let's see: Take a (non-school-related) project. Roll along with it for months, declining assistance from people who had some idea how the project was done the last time around and why it was done that way.

Then yank one of those people into the project at the 11th hour. I realize I'm overfond of that 11th hour for a lot of other things -- like posting to this blog. But I hate being asked to justify something into which I had absolutely no input (and about which I'd heard suggestions that my input would not have been welcomed if I'd tried). I especially hate it when I would have tried to shape the thing differently had I been involved earlier.

Then you take a needed next step and it's nit-picked -- "why did you draft the thing this way and gee, I think we agreed to also do this and that."

Really? I didn't happen to be a committee member just then.

And it won't take much encouragement for me not to be a committee member again.

Among the world's aggravating things: Being dragged into the middle of a project and asked to help fix/justify it after you had no input before the next-to-last minute.

Things to do lists are best case scenarios. Generally the best case never arrives.