To make Comments write directly to Jim at jimt@quixotic.ca
18
Jan
2017
You probably had drilled into you, at school, a number of rules about writing:
· Never split an infinitive.
· Never start a paragraph with “I”.
· Never end a sentence with a preposition.
· Never start a sentence with “And” or “But”.
And you’ve spent most of your adult life trying to conform to those Never-Never rules, even when doing so required a mental hernia.
Those rules never were rules. Every one of the great English writers, the ones who set a model for us, broke those rules.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: grammar, English, rules
15
Unlike most recent mass shootings, Santiago did not die in a hail of police bullets, leaving authorities to guess about his motivations. And often, I suspect, to create conspiracies where none existed. We’re told he has been cooperating with police.
Even so, most news reports have included a line such as, “Terrorism has not been ruled out.” Or perhaps, “Authorities are still investigating possible terrorist links.”
Why, why, oh why must Americans find someone else to blame?
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: Esteban Santiago, airport killings, mental illness
11
My mother had a maxim for every occasion. If I paced impatiently waiting for something to happen, she’d tell me, “A watched pot never boils.” If she had reservations about my friends, I’d get “Birds of a feather flock together.” If I got a Christmas present I didn’t particularly want, I might hear, “Never look a gift horse in the mouth.” Or perhaps, “Beggars can’t be choosers.”
It took me some time to realize that many of those maxims come in contradictory pairs.
“The squeaky wheel gets the grease” encourages me to squeak up. But “Speech is silver, silence is golden” advises me not to.
One maxim advocates caution: “Never put all your eggs in one basket.” Another expects me to take risks: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.”
Tags: Folk sayings, wisdom, extremes
8
It’s hard to call dementia an epidemic. Epidemics typically involve infectious diseases. But when one in every 11 Canadians over the age of 65 has some form of dementia, some 700,000 Canadians, it’s hard to call dementia anything but an epidemic. Every year, about 25,000 new cases are diagnosed.
Apply those figures to any other illness – measles, cancer, AIDS – and you’d have not just an epidemic, but panic.
Tags: Dementia, Ebola, denial
4
You remember those jokes, “Why did the chicken cross the road?” The jokes assumed that a chicken actually had a reason for crossing a road. California quail don’t. When a car comes, they scuttle across, then decide they preferred other side, and reverse direction just as the car reaches them.
In the muted light of dawn or dusk, they sometimes move in such numbers that it feels as if the earth itself is moving.
They land on my bird feeder the same way they travel on the ground -- en masse. They shoulder each other off the platform. They climb over each other. They can empty the feeder in a day. Last winter, I put out an estimated 300 pounds of sunflower seeds. Quail got most of it.
This year, I decided to outsmart them. I made a wire cage to cover the feeder. Its mesh had holes big enough for chickadees and finches, but too small -- I thought -- for bulkier quail.
I was wrong.
Tags: communication, imitation