This guy may be able to produce a chart, but he’ll never map the shoals of the female heart.
Archive | April, 2011
The Minister of Silly Walks
Cleese still rules:
Alltop could make its walk much sillier if it just had the funding.
How Not to Seem Like a Maniac Online
I’m always astonished to see some people have not learned this basic etiquette. It’s now more common on message boards and in comments than in email nowadays, but still ….
ALLTOP NEVER USES CAPS! Check out more fun cartoons at The Oatmeal
Laser beans & other high-tech, high-fiber foods
This sounds like an exciting product, but I am somewhat afraid of what happens after you’ve enjoyed a plate of laser beans, fiber-wise.
Other high-tech, high-fiber products to consider inventing:
- Irradiated oat-bran muffins
- Plutonium protein bars
- Chili con Chemo
- Multi-dimensional Lentil Loaf.
Please leave other new product ideas in the comments.
Alltop just drinks lots of coffee.
You post to your blog, not blog to your blog!
Do you blog? Yes? Then when you sit down to write something for that blog, do you “write a blog” or do you “write a post”?
If you answered “write a blog”, then you are one of the doofus digerati that makes the Phrase Freak cry.
It’s a common error (especially on MySpace) and one that is understandable. The blog is still a relatively new phenomenon (not in web years, but in the writing world), so the conventions are still shaking out. That said, this is an error in usage that we should all try to stamp out now, while there’s still time. (I’m still upset that phrase freaks and grammarians everywhere were unable to prevent the odious “proactive” or even worse, “moving forward.“)
If you were writing an article or story for a newspaper, would you say, I’m writing a newspaper? Of course not, that would sound ridiculous. (Unless you’re a one-person operation, in which case it may be accurate, but still sound absurd.)
If you were writing a sit-com would you say, I’m writing a TV? Only if you were the Vice-President of TV.
Acceptable:
- writing a (blog) post
- writing a blog entry
- posting to a blog
- writing
- posting
- blogging.
This gets 4 gobsmacks out of 10:
Alltop is all about the humor usage.
The Magic Box Syndrome
I call this the “magic box” syndrome, based on Arthur C. Clarke’s famous maxim: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”