Wasn’t Trowenna Sea supposed to be recalled? They must have missed Whitcoulls in Westfield. $40.99. Someone tell Witi so he can buy them. Oh, I see: Witi only bought the copies not yet shipped to every bookstore in New Zealand. Penguin’s not recalling them, for some reason. Bookstores can send them back for a refund, but seem to prefer selling them for a hefty profit. So, all parties behaving honourably then.
Grandycaps (n): The inadvertent SHOUTING of the well-meaning grandparent new to e-mail. “Chill out, Sis: it’s just grandycaps.”
Wikipedia articles in Māori: 6522. Yiddish 7191, Burmese 2944, Tongan 1492, Samoan 397, Klingon 169, Esperanto 124,640. Fijian? Just 58. Curiously, while most of that group are growing fast (30–120% in the last year), Māori has stagnated: it’s up only 2%.
Spare me from meetings where people “touch base”, “report back”, and decide not to discuss papers everyone’s been emailed but nobody’s read.
“The button on our web page doesn’t work. Why didn’t you just copy and paste it from the Word document I sent you? It works in Word.”
LaTeX fanboys claim it’s hot stuff at typesetting. So why do all LaTeX documents look like instruction manuals from 1923? LaTeX looks like: Das Kapital, 1960 Albanian edition · Bilingual guidebook translated from Chinese · A History of Timaru (1936). LaTeX is for people who wish writing were more like programming. And haven’t tried Word since 1997. And type two spaces after full stops.
When there’s a mattress lashed to your car roof with clothesline, people stare with an expression I choose to interpret as admiration.
53% of Republicans think Sarah Palin more qualified to be Prez than Obama. 73% would ban gay schoolteachers. 31% would ban contraception.
Trying to negotiate a classroom booking with two admins named (and I’m not making this up) Ms Register and Mr Allott.
A 1926 edition of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders with a few uncut pages; sitting unread on the UC shelves, waiting for me, for 83 years. Trivia: Roosevelt was good friends with Seth Bullock (cf. Deadwood); Bullock even joined the Rough Riders, but never got to go to Cuba.
If academics taught their classes as badly as they deliver conference papers, they’d lose their jobs. No, the problem is they wouldn’t.
The second-oldest surviving email I have on my computer is a quadruple-forwarded Dave Barry column about an exploding whale. Ah, 1994.
Chocolate features so prominently in It’s Complicated, they should have just come clean and called it Chocolate: It’s Complicated. Although menopause romcoms scarcely need the audience boost a chocified title might supply. Sports movies, on the other hand…
Oh my: chocolate turns every movie into a date movie. Just try it. · Chocolate Invictus · Chocolate Saw · Inglourious Choclate Basterds · Hostel du Chocolat · 300 Chocolates · Dark Chocolate City · The Seven Chocolate Samurai
@adzebill