Friday, October 13, 2006
“When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters. …
Scholars who study original documents say the demise of handwriting will diminish the power and accuracy of future historical research.”
– from The Handwriting Is on the Wall
I’ve been complaining about the decline in my own penmanship for years now. I used to take pride in how beautiful, in particular, my lowercase e and t looked. And don’t get me started on my q. It was lovely. Truly a sight to behold. Now I am ashamed to see my own handwriting. Unless I’m sending a check — and that’s rare these days, too — I just don’t ever need to use a pen or pencil. Blast this damn keyboard!
Friday, May 6, 2005
Are you as surprised as me that this is not on ESPN right after the poker and billiards championships? Apparently there is a new “sport” sweeping the country by storm: Cup Stacking, in which teams attempt to stack — and unstack (maybe that’s the “sport” part?) — specially designed plastic cups.
File under: Decline of Western Civilization
Friday, December 21, 2001
“Grammatical English is now the near-exclusive province of the middle-aged and elderly because it hasn’t been formally taught in most schools … for about thirty years. Knowledge of the mechanics of how words, clauses, and phrases are hooked up to form sentences and paragraphs has been withheld from most children for such a long time that clear grammatical precision is now a rarity.”
link via the always delightful Follow Me Here
Tuesday, July 24, 2001
Some comments on something I read @ deadman:
Fans pretending to be fans of a band pretending to be a band?
I don’t know how much I want to get into this one … But I will chip in $.02 for the halibut. I was (am) a great big ol’ fan of Pearl Jam. I’m one of those guys that even likes all the new CDs. There is really some great music there. And of course there’s the whole Eddie-angst-rebelling-against-corporate-America blah blah blah K.C. why’d you leave us so soon? blah blah blah and all that. But if you listen … and I mean *really* listen … the Foo Fighters are a much better band.
[click to continue...]
Wednesday, August 9, 2000
I am going to quote just one line from this article on how to have sex with dolphins and just let you read the rest:
“If you are in the water, they may press their genitals up against yours, nibble your fingers, nuzzle your crotch, or do pelvic thrusts against you.”
