Tuesday, May 22, 2007
The “assisted living facility” where my grandmother lived — Indigo Manor in Daytona Beach, Florida — just sent my mom and uncle an automated form letter. It was something along the lines of, “Please tell us how satisfied you are in the care we gave your loved one.” They’re really not very bright over there.
If my mom and uncle are still too upset to do so, I’m going to be the one sending them a reply: “We were completely satisfied … right up until the day you dropped her and broke her femur, then allowed her to spend over 36 hours in agony before telling anyone what had happened. Y’know. Right before she died because of complications from the emergency surgery. Aside from that, though, you were terrific.”
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Tuesday, December 18, 2001
Bored? You can go to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice web site and peruse the Final Meal Requests of death row inmates. What would you order as your last meal? Some of them are pretty interesting.
link via Bob
Thursday, March 8, 2001
Did you always wish you could be a bounty hunter? Bounty Quest gives you the chance! Okay, so you don’t exactly get to go and track down deadly criminals, but this is still a pretty nifty site. Find the evildoers! Make them pay!
Thursday, February 22, 2001
I’m much more interested in how this particular speech pattern became known as “the female register” than I am in the legal aspects of this discussion.
“Once they have been arrested, even the toughest thugs turn to jelly. More precisely, Ainsworth says suspects lapse into a deferential mode called the female register, identified in women’s speech 25 years ago. When speaking in this way, people turn statements into questions and avoid direct commands. They use the conditional form of verbs, such as “might”, “may” and “should”, to weaken the impact of what they are saying. They also hedge everything with phrases such as “kind of” and use inflections more appropriate to questions.”
