Sunday linkfest

After a slow week, I figured I'd throw together some links.

1. The media mocked Bush, and an pro-Sadr Iraqi journalist threw shoes at him, but the troops he sent to Iraq gave him a tremendous welcome. It's got to be heard to be believed. (via HotAir)

2. Ronald Radosh on Bush and the Jews.

3. From November, but still timely: Don Feder on the Jewish vote.

4. Almost as old but not quite: Mark Steyn on the murders at Chabad in Mumbai.

5. Coming soon to the Mets' bullpen: J.J. Putz. Next headline: "Some Putz blows the lead." Bonus: New York Times uses the P-word, the clinical term, in its article.

6. Gallows humor.

7. Mocking Time magazine may be easy, but it's still enjoyable.

8. This semi-earnest discussion of the grammar to be used when mixing a certain bad word with Gov. Blagojevich's name is quite amusing.

9. Invest in skateboards?

10. Well, at least Obama will receive excellent advice from his new science advisor. Just tell the Messiah not to invest with him. (via HotAir)

Click here to read more . . .

Oops!

Not news: A distinguished scientific institution issues its journal with a Chinese poem on the cover.

News: The institution fails to get a translation of the poem before publication.

Pillage Idiot: The "poem" turns out to be a sexually suggestive annoucement of a burlesque show.

Click here to read more . . .

Surplusage

Artscroll is the Microsoft of Orthodox Jewish publishing. People use it because it's everywhere, not because it's particularly good.

When I say it's not particularly good, I mean that it doesn't really translate the text as much as it spoon-feeds the reader its preferred interpretation. Sometimes I'll be reading it -- even modern Orthodox shuls have succumbed to the monopoly -- and I'll say to myself, "That can't possibly be what the Hebrew means," and I'll turn to the Hebrew and think, "How in the world did they get that from it?"

The most extreme example is with shir ha-shirim, the Song of Songs. This book is a love poem, and the rabbis decided eons ago that it was really meant as the expression of love not between a man and a woman but between God and the Jewish people. Fine, I guess it has to be that way, or else it would not have been made part of the tanakh. But Artscroll goes a step further. Not only does it inform its readers that this is the true meaning of the book but it refuses to translate the text. In place of a translation, it provides what it calls an "allegorical" reading attributed to Rashi, the great commentator who lived in France in the 11th century and early 12th. The allegorical reading is based on the same idea that the text refers to God's love for the Jewish people. But it drifts into bizarroworld in a few places, like when it "interprets" the line "your breasts are like twin fawns" to be referring to Moses and Aaron. Michael Wex, in his book "Born to Kvetch," has a little aside about young yeshiva boys using "Moses and Aaron" as a euphemism for breasts. Artscroll's insistence on perpetuating this as the only English version it provides is pretty silly.

But that's not what led me to write this piece about Artscroll.

Yesterday, at the end of the Torah reading, God tells Abraham to have all his men circumcised and to circumcise newborn males at eight days. The Hebrew text says "b'sar orlato," which means "the flesh of his foreskin." After initially translating it that way, Artscroll switches abruptly and begins to translate it as "the flesh of his surplusage."

His surplusage? I thought only lawyers used that word. ("We must construe the statute to avoid surplusage.")

So when an uncircumcised man goes to the doctor, does the doctor ever tell him, "You need to keep your surplusage clean"?

And more seriously, when Moses deflects God's order that he speak to Pharaoh by saying, "va-ani aral s'fatayim" (I have uncircumcised lips), is he really saying, "I have extra lips"? No, he's saying "uncircumcised lips." This forces us to confront what the Torah's text could possibly mean by "uncircumcised lips." There are roughly a gazillion pages written on the subject, with all the great commentators weighing in. So why can't Artscroll -- which translates it as "sealed lips" -- simply give us the actual meaning of the text and refer us to the commentary in the notes below? Why does Artscroll think it has to spoon-feed us so that we can't possibly get the "wrong" idea by taking the text literally? And is Artscroll really so prudish that it runs from the f-word "foreskin" as soon as it possibly can? I've been to a lot of brises in my life, and I have never once heard the mohel speak of the boy's "surplusage."

The Artscroll siddur (prayerbook) is another story entirely, but I can't end this screed without citing to the most famous Artscroll publication of them all: the Artscroll Shakespeare. (Warning: it's probably funny only if you've used the Artscroll siddur, but then it's hilarious.)

Click here to read more . . .

Wednesday linkfest

After I do a long photo comic, like the one I posted on Monday (Bill Clinton agrees to campaign for Obama), it's hard to get back to normal posts. Unlike most of the garbage I post here, photo comics take a long time, and the hardest part is working out the text, not doing the voice bubbles, which can be done in an hour or two.

So I'm going to coast a little longer by giving you some links I've been accumulating for the past several weeks.

1. This is actually not a link, but I'm including it, anyway. The son of our friends, a good friend of my son, is in Taiwan, where he applied for a scooter license. Among the questions on the exam were these:

1. When a motorcyclist is not happy, usually he/she: (1) is emotionless (2) is not compassionate (3) is angry.

2. Time for honking, each time is: (1) within 2 seconds (2) within 1 second (3) within half a second.

3. Motorcyclist's clothing: (1) is free (2) slippers are ok (3) must be clean.

Then, there were a bunch of signs with Chinese on them, and he had to guess what they meant.

2. No linkfest would be complete without a link to a post about an incinerating toilet. Be sure to watch the video at the company's website. No butt hair was singed in the preparation of the video. Bonus: Also at InventorSpot: Russian scientist solves problem of smelly feet.

3. We all hate grammar ignoramuses, and some of us are annoyed by typos, but few of us engage in vandalism over them. (via How Appealing)

4. A reader at Instapundit creates a political ad about the meltdown at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

5. We'll have to take Obama's criticism of a McCain ad on comprehensive sex education for kindergarteners with a grain of salt.

6. Is Obama too tight with his teleprompter? (hat tip: fee simple)

7. A follow-up by Steven Plaut related to Soccer Dad's post below on Michelle Obama's "rabbi" relative.

8. A columnist at Haaretz is scared to death of Sarah Palin. But the Republican Jewish Coalition flips Congressman Robert Wexler's idiotic linking of Palin with Pat Buchanan and shows that Buchanan's views on Israel are like Obama's.

9. "Tryst turns into $50K robbery for RNC delegate." Plus, quotation of the day: "'As a single man, I was flattered by the attention of a beautiful woman who introduced herself to me. I used poor judgment. If there is any good that can come from this humiliation, it is to caution others that date rape happens to men, too,' he said."

Click here to read more . . .

More anagrams

Last week, I gave you anagrams for Obama-Biden. Now, I'm compelled to give you anagrams for McCain-Palin.

Right off the top, we have:

CALM IN PANIC

For John McCain / Sarah Palin, we get:

MACHO CHAPLAIN JARS INN

If you cheat a little and use McCain's first name, you can get these:

JOHN'S A RACIAL MAN, PINCH
IS JOHN ANARCHIC NAPALM?
CARNAL MANIAC? JOHN'S HIP
JOHN'S ANIMAL CRAP CHAIN

As before, if you come up with better ones, leave them in the comments.

Click here to read more . . .

Anagram time once again

The names OBAMA and BIDEN seem to work well with Boggle, but I wanted to try to get some anagrams out of them, too.

BAD NAME, BIO (Obama himself)
BAD BIO, MEAN (Obama and Biden)
BOMB AN IDEA
I BOMB A DEAN (the semi-official Bill Ayers anagram)
ON A DIM BABE
DEAN, A BIMBO
NO MAID, BABE
NAB MOB AIDE (the inevitable Chicago anagram)

If you add first names, as in BARACK OBAMA / JOE BIDEN, you can come up with a few doozies.

RABBI MADE A BACON JOKE
A BAREBACK MAID, JOB ONE
MAC JOB: A BARE NAKED BIO
I JAB A CROOKED MAN, BABE
A BAD MAN, O CABBIE JOKER

Well, that's all I had time for this morning. Feel free to add yours in the comments.

Previous: Anagrams. More anagrams here and here. And "Columbia Journalism Review mocks Pillage Idiot."

Click here to read more . . .

One from Column 404 Error

When you're trying to give an English name to your Chinese restaurant, you have to be careful in using online translation tools. (via Fark)




That reminds me of a photo I received from a former colleague who spent time in China.

Click here to read more . . .

Tuesday evening linkfest

Here are a few links I've been collecting:

1. You know you're having a bad day at the gym when the exercise machine shoots you out like a slingshot.

2. I had a visitor looking for information about flatulence in Beethoven's Second Symphony. (It's not as strange as it sounds; listen to the fourth movement.) So I followed his search link and discovered that it's really the choral movement of the Ninth that's flatulent. So says an op-ed in the NY Times from last December. I'm serious. Check it out.

3. In light of that, scientists have strapped plastic bags to Beethoven's back to measure the effect of his flatulence on global warming. Sorry, it's Argentinian cows who have to suffer this indignity. Photo at link. (Hat tip: fee simple)

4. The headline says it all: "Gummy Bears That Fight Plaque" (via HotAir)

5. The Snickers ad: How to be retro and edgy at the same time.

6. As a follow-up to my post from last September on the same subject and the same "scientist," I'm giving you this article on "breast biomechanics." (via Ace)

7. The Maryland Death Penalty Abolition Dog And Pony Show (MDPADAPS) is now underway. I'm on the edge of my seat wondering what the commission's conclusion will be.

8. Soccer Dad deals with Obamoid stupidity so you don't have to. Or is "stupidity" the new "uppity"?

9. If the carnivores can do it, so can the vegetarians. A veggie "hot dog" eating contest, I mean. Except for the fact that Tofurky sucks major eggs. And don't neglect to click to read the waiver required of participants. (On The Red Line)

10. Mark Newgent takes on more left-wing economic idiocy. (See here for my own post from last week.)

11. Mightily pissed off (and more dubious language) because an editor removed the indefinite article formerly the penultimate word in his column. (via Three Sources)

Click here to read more . . .

Jew eat, again

You've seen the video of the cell phones appearing to make popcorn pop?

There's an amusing video, which you can find at HotAir, in which Obama figures cause the popcorn to pop. But I could swear that the woman in the video says, "Israel? Oh, my God!"

If you follow the link to HotAir, you'll see that I raised that in the comments. Another commenter responded that it was "It's real! Oh, my God!" That would make some sense, but if she were saying that, she would accent it this way: "It's REAL!" She actually says "IT'S real" or "ISrael." Who knows? Maybe she's just irrationally invoking the Israelis.

Jew eat?

Click here to read more . . .

Talking with your body

When I was in college, I was always desperate for summer employment. I saw a sign advertising jobs earning over $250 a week, which was a small fortune in those days.

My friend and I went to the meeting where the jobs were discussed. To our chagrin, they turned out to be in sales, which neither of us had the slightest aptitude for, and not just sales but sales of encyclopedias. Door to door.

Yeah, I know, the same nonsense you've read about. Hire a gazillion college students and run 'em through the mill. A few will succeed, and that's all you need for your business. The other ones drop by the wayside.

Unfortunately, my friend and I were pretty naive. We figured we were already there, so why not go through the interviews? Astonishingly, or so I thought, they offered me a position. I spent a couple of hours ruminating about it before I turned them down.

My friend had a better story. When they offered him the job, he asked them how they could possibly have offered it to him before comparing notes with all the other interviewers. The response? "We could tell by your body language."

The two of us, both kind of dorky, later had a bunch of laughs over that answer.

But it turns out that body language is actually a science. And one of the scientists, a former FBI counter-intelligence agent, has written a piece in the Health section of the Post.

I'll give you the short version: Boy meets girl. Boy reads girl's body language. Girl slaps boy's face.

Well, maybe I should phrase it this way: The agent figured out from his friend's wife's body language that things were about to fall apart in his friend's marriage. They did. He (the agent) went on a cruise and watched people in various stages of relationships or attempted relationships show their body language. He wrote about it for the Post.

But there's also a series of drawings to illustrate the common forms of body language. I'll give you an example:




Here's the set, in case you can read it:





What I want to know is what the following body language indicates:

Click here to read more . . .

Sunday evening linkfest

Passover has (finally) ended, and now, once again, it's time for a linkfest of links that have been forming plaque on the walls of my intertubes for the past two weeks or so. Some of them are seriously OLD, but I want you to have them, anyway. Please stay with me till the end, because way at the bottom of this post, I have a couple of future classics from the Sunday New York Times that are almost worth the price of the paper.

1. In the past couple of weeks, the biggest issue in politics, in case you're a Japanese World War II fighter who's been holed up in the Pacific until yesterday, has been whether Obama flipped the bird at Hillary while speaking to his supporters following the final debate in Pennsylvania. The Hillarosphere demands to know. And Baseball Crank has another photo that may provide circumstantial evidence.

2. The Democrats' Nightmare Scenario (via Instapundit)

3. More popcorn, please!

4. McCain goes to NOLA, and an African-American participant at a town-hall meeting says this: "I want to inform you that everybody in the camp here is not a Republican." Does he mean (a) literally no one is a Republican, or (b) colloquially, not everyone is a Republican? Who cares, anyway, besides anal-retentive grammar wackos like me?

5. As Warner Wolf might have said, if you studied math in school since about 1961 . . . YOU LOST! On a related topic, Hillary Clinton does some math trolling for delegates and votes from Michigan.

6. Gov. O'Malley calls a special session of the legislature to pass a law declaring the official state dessert of Maryland. (Only kidding about the special session. Beats the hell out of raising our taxes, though.)

7. The man-cave: "Like most stories that end up with a man mowing his friend's lawn in a dress, it started out innocently enough." (via Fark, of course)

8. Sometimes it pays to test your personal machinery before reporting its theft by voodoo to police. As the police chief himself put it: "'I'm tempted to say it's one huge joke,' Oleko said.
'But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, "How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it",' he said."

9. Public Service Announcement: Be careful when eating in Canadian restaurants.

10. "Le Petit Singly is a farm that specializes in making cheese from women's breast milk." (via Ace)

11. This one's so old, it's already been overtaken by events. You remember the McLean school that banned tag in the schoolyard? Well, tag's back, but not before a week of "reorientation lessons on playground safety." I swear I'm not making that term up.

12. Patch (for women) aims to make you (not you, you) feel sexy. (via Ace)

13. Rick Monday saves the flag. In 1976. But now, there's a video.

14. American expat in Paris whines about the falling dollar. My heart bleeds.

15. False advertising from Moron Pundit: a very non-moronic defense of the tax deduction for child dependents.

16. Doubleplusundead on more misery with McCain. For me, if you want to know why McCain hasn't sealed the deal with conservatives -- I'm going to vote for him, anyway -- read George Will's column this morning. Two words: campaign finance.

17. The Children of Israel were enslaved in Egypt by a Pharaoh who took great pleasure in persecuting gays, who were brutally forced to arrange flowers for the Egyptians. Hence, the orange on the seder plate. Funny, I had always heard that it was supposed to represent Pharaoh's fear of the vagina.

18. And finally, the moment you've been waiting for -- the two classics from today's New York Times: (a) In the travel section: "In 2007, nude recreation represented a $440 million industry — up from $400 million in 2001 and $200 million in 1992." (b) In Sunday Styles: A family adjusts to the father's sex change -- "Through Sickness, Health and Sex Change."

Click here to read more . . .

Cutting it

When you get a bunch of doctors together, the talk inevitably turns to bagel injuries. Those of you who don't eat bagels may not realize this true fact: that so many people arrive in the emergency room having sliced their hands in a foolish attempt to slice a bagel that the ER personnel can tell immediately what the cause of the injury is.

So this weekend, during one such discussion, I explained the proper way to cut a bagel, which involves holding the bagel on its edge from above and running the knife through the arch formed by your thumb and forefinger so that it won't slip and cut your hand.

Someone jokiningly suggested that I write a book about the zen of cutting bagels. But I think if I wrote about cutting bagels, I would also want to write about cutting other things, too.

Here's the chapter outline of my book, called "Cutting It."

1. Cutting a bagel.
2. Cutting classes.
3. Cutting up.
4. Cutting corners.
5. Cutting the cheese.
6. Cutting the crap.
7. Cutting bait.
8. Cutting loose.
9. Cutting in line.
10. Cutting the mustard.
11. Cutting to the chase.
12. Cutting taxes.
13. Cutting wit.

I've found that most of these are far safer than cutting a bagel.

Click here to read more . . .

Stupidity squared

As my regular readers know, I'm something of an expert in stupidity, mostly my own. But that's not what I'm referring to right now.

I write for a living, and I'm also anal-retentive enough to be careful about grammar, usage, and spelling. Not that I never make a mistake, but you're not going to find totally illiterate writing here, the way you might in some sectors of internet-land.

So I had to ask myself: How difficult is it really to distinguish between coherent writing and stupid, illiterate writing? Not at all difficult is my answer. But apparently some people think it's necessary to have a computer analyze the writing to determine whether it's stupid. (And this is not some April Fool's joke, like that pathetic joke Google put up on Blogger Buzz.)

Here's the deal. Go to stupidfilter.org and you find this: "Too long have we suffered in silence under the tyranny of idiocy. In the beginning, the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people. Then, Eternal September hit and we were lost in the noise. The advent of user-driven web content has compounded the matter yet further, straining our tolerance to the breaking point. It's time to fight back."

Sound annoying enough yet? Well, just wait.

The solution we're creating is simple: an open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in written English. This will be accomplished with weighted Bayesian or similar analysis and some rules-based processing, similar to spam detection engines. The primary challenge inherent in our task is that stupidity is not a binary distinction, but rather a matter of degree. To this end, we're collecting a ranked corpus of stupid text, gleaned from user comments on public websites and ranked on a five-point scale.

And just how useful do you think this project is? Consider this: "u r dum !!11! lol" is stupid to the extreme. But do we need a computer applet to tell us that? Not really, but that's what we find at stupidfilter. From the FAQs:

The idea is that the most egregiously stupid comments will also be the easiest to detect while remaining ignorant of context; comments with too much or too little capitalization, too many text-message abbreviations, excessive use of "LOL," exclamation points, and so on.

And how hard is it to rate comments like the one I made up above? Not very, but that's what we find at the same FAQs:

Keep in mind we grade stupidity on a scale of 1 to 5. Someone might get a 1 or 2 for a comment that used no punctuation, whereas a comment consisting of nothing but text message abbreviations with a dash of LOLLLLL thrown in for good measure would probably rate a solid 4 or 5.

Oy, vey. Well, just to show I'm a stand-up guy, I decided to give the program a chance.

Test 1. I took two phrases from a relatively recent post of mine about some stupid parent in Montgomery County who was arrested at his kid's elementary school when he got over-aggressive about his desires for his kid's curriculum.

First, here's a baseline test: "Is it just me or is it somewhat odd for a parent to be arrested (second item) when discussing his kid's elementary school work with school officials? I don't know. I've lived for over 20 years in Montgomery County, where helicopter parenting takes on a whole new meaning, and yet this still seems a little out of line." Fairly non-stupid, at least for Pillage Idiot, right?

Here's the result at stupidfilter:

Text is not likely to be stupid.

CLASSIFY succeeds; success probability: 0.5066 pR: 0.0114
Best match to file #0 (/home/sfp/code/nonstupid_cor.css) prob: 0.5066 pR: 0.0114
Total features in input file: 11472919
#0 (/home/sfp/code/nonstupid_cor.css): features: 11472919, L1: 240419182 L2: 340256281 L3: 553124907, l4: 1327203205 prob: 5.07e-01, pR: 0.01
#1 (/home/sfp/code/stupid_cor.css): features: 1510682, L1: 29910336 L2: 41683685 L3: 67105951, l4: 160824653 prob: 4.93e-01, pR: -0.01

I have no idea what most of that means, but perhaps that's because I'm, er, stupid.

Next, I checked the statement of the man who was arrested, who said this: "According to an arrest document, the 6-foot-4 Rogers 'stood up, cupped his hands around his mouth and screamed very loudly, "'I am Rosa Parks. I will not ride on the back of the bus."'" That's about as stupid as a person can be, but here's what the stupidfilter computer showed:

Text is not likely to be stupid.

CLASSIFY succeeds; success probability: 0.6175 pR: 0.2080
Best match to file #0 (/home/sfp/code/nonstupid_cor.css) prob: 0.6175 pR: 0.2080
Total features in input file: 11472919
#0 (/home/sfp/code/nonstupid_cor.css): features: 11472919, L1: 130118990 L2: 202077007 L3: 390256047, l4: 1207598011 prob: 6.17e-01, pR: 0.21
#1 (/home/sfp/code/stupid_cor.css): features: 1510682, L1: 16486110 L2: 23417883 L3: 38819315, l4: 94786575 prob: 3.83e-01, pR: -0.21

It's "not likely to be stupid," eh? Well, I guess the "not likely" gives them an out. Yeah, yeah, I know the filter isn't directed to substantive stupidity. That's my point.

Test 2. Hillary's early response to the Tuzla exposure was this: "You know, I think that, a minor blip, you know, if I said something that, you know, I say a lot of things – millions of words a day - so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement." Totally stupid, right?

A little surprise here:

Text is likely to be stupid.

CLASSIFY fails; success probability: 0.4605 pR: -0.0688
Best match to file #1 (/home/sfp/code/stupid_cor.css) prob: 0.5395 pR: 0.0688
Total features in input file: 1510682
#0 (/home/sfp/code/nonstupid_cor.css): features: 11472919, L1: 136163155 L2: 194867166 L3: 334824012, l4: 914439786 prob: 4.60e-01, pR: -0.07
#1 (/home/sfp/code/stupid_cor.css): features: 1510682, L1: 17608926 L2: 25394698 L3: 45709338, l4: 138558262 prob: 5.40e-01, pR: 0.07

I guess it must have been all the "you know's." To verify this, I deleted them and tried it again: "I think that, a minor blip, if I said something that - I say a lot of things – millions of words a day - so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement."

The results? A surprise again.

Text is likely to be stupid.

CLASSIFY fails; success probability: 0.4804 pR: -0.0340
Best match to file #1 (/home/sfp/code/stupid_cor.css) prob: 0.5196 pR: 0.0340
Total features in input file: 1510682
#0 (/home/sfp/code/nonstupid_cor.css): features: 11472919, L1: 118999011 L2: 174065450 L3: 306798586, l4: 865356242 prob: 4.80e-01, pR: -0.03
#1 (/home/sfp/code/stupid_cor.css): features: 1510682, L1: 15294168 L2: 22135632 L3: 39684900, l4: 120275436 prob: 5.20e-01, pR: 0.03

And now, I've rewritten Hillary's stupidity so that it reads well, even though it's still substantively stupid: "It was a minor blip. I say perhaps millions of words a day, and this was just a misstatement."

This time, the result is negative:

Text is not likely to be stupid.

CLASSIFY succeeds; success probability: 0.5241 pR: 0.0420
Best match to file #0 (/home/sfp/code/nonstupid_cor.css) prob: 0.5241 pR: 0.0420
Total features in input file: 11472919
#0 (/home/sfp/code/nonstupid_cor.css): features: 11472919, L1: 71720625 L2: 104271070 L3: 181129542, l4: 487604746 prob: 5.24e-01, pR: 0.04
#1 (/home/sfp/code/stupid_cor.css): features: 1510682, L1: 9177190 L2: 12891812 L3: 21612594, l4: 56643680 prob: 4.76e-01, pR: -0.04

Well, I'm a little tired of this, and I'm sure you are, too, which is why you're not even bothering to read this post any more.

What I'm looking for is a computer that can distinguish substantively stupid writing, like my rewrite of Hillary's statement, or some of the rantings of her supporters, or the New York Times editorial page. Find it, and that's when I'll be interested.

Click here to read more . . .

The meaning of is, etc.

"Clemens denies drug use during testimony." I'm glad, because if he can't keep his hands off the stuff during his congressional appearance, he's in bigger trouble than I thought.

Sounds like when Bill Clinton parsed the meaning of the word "is" at the grand jury, and the prosecutor asked Clinton whether his position was that his testimony was accurate because he was not engaging in sexual activity at the time of the deposition.

Click here to read more . . .

Another Wednesday linkfest

Some days are good days for drive-by links. Some days are bad days. Today was a good day.

1. If you really want to become a millionaire, don't bother following these rules. You'll become a millionaire in about 40 years, which doesn't really count if you adjust for inflation. Better advice: To become a millionaire, start with $2 million.

2. Why Heidi Klum fell for Seal. (via HotAir, with lots of comments) Hmmm, I wear bike shorts when I ride, and this never happens to me. Back at my high-school reunion, some people were talking about padded bras -- you know, the usual topic of conversation at high-school reunions -- and the gay "partner" of a classmate of mine explained to me that gay men often pad the areas that others are interested in. Not that this explains the Heidi Klum situation.

3. The math of teenage sex: "If you do the math—worthy of an SAT prep course, with fractions and large numbers—you'll find that early sex plus the Pill equals sexually transmitted disease and maybe even pregnancy."

4. There's something peculiarly Japanese about this: "Cell phone message warns train gropers." Huh? Well, read this: "The application flashes increasingly threatening messages in bold print on the phone's screen to show to the offender: 'Excuse me, did you just grope me?' 'Groping is a crime,' and finally, 'Shall we head to the police?'" The only thing more Japanese would be robots.

5. Does this campaign photo of the month remind you of this one -- I mean, the evil grin? (via HotAir, where Allah says, "Mitt should fire his advance team")

6. With the World Series finally underway, we have this year's best baseball injuries from Ken Levine (via Ace). Line of the day: "Somehow in June Washington reliever, Jesus Colome suffered an 'abscess on his right buttock'. The team's General Manager, Jim Bowden is quoted in the Washington Post as saying, 'We pray for his buttocks and his family.'" There's no link to the Post, but I've verified the Bowden quotation here. My own personal favorite baseball injury story was related in Lindsey Nelson's book from the mid-60s called "Backstage at the Mets." Grover Powell, a young left-handed pitcher who'd made a great splash for the abysmal Mets, injured his pitching arm while combing his hair. Casey Stengel quipped: "Greasy kid stuff."

7. If you're a kid who lives in Boston, they want to teach you how to duck to protect yourself against gunfire. (via Fark)

8. You might not want to meet this Australian barmaid in a dark alley, although rumor has it that she's very entertaining in the bar. (via about a million sites)

9. Yiddish makes a comeback in Lithuania, as demonstrated by this syntax: "I feel a very rich person by knowing this language." (via Fark)

10. I just had my 100,000th visitor at Pillage Idiot this evening. Needless to say, it was someone who had been searching for images of the Thai transvestite pageant, which I wrote about two years ago. Somehow that seems appropriate.

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Polyglot

I took my car in for an oil change at a service station, and I had to pay for it and pick up the keys at the convenience store next to the service station.

The man working at the convenience store, to judge by his thick accent, was African-born. I'd guess he was Nigerian, but that's a wild guess. Anyway, when I told him I was picking up my car, he asked for my name, which I gave him, and I added that the car was a Subaru Forester.

The man then disputed my pronunciation of Subaru. He took out a pad and wrote "SU" on it. "How do you pronounce that?" he asked me. I told him. He wrote "BA" on the pad and again asked how I pronounced it. I told him. Finally, yes, he wrote "RU" and asked how I pronounced it. I told him.

He looked up at me and said, "See? It's Su-BAH-ru. Americans say SU-b'ru."

I fought the temptation to say, "Yes, thank you for that explanation. Just give me my damn car back." Instead, I puzzled over the bizarre image of an African, speaking English with a thick accent, instructing me how to pronounce Japanese. I pointed out to him that the Japanese tend to accent words on the second syllable, as in Mit-SU-bishi, which we always pronounce Mitsu-BISH-i. And I told him that once we had paid for the cars, the Japanese probably didn't care how we pronounced the name.

So the car is a SU-baru or a SU-b'ru. As Reagan might have said, "I paid for that SUV."

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Cars only

When I was in law school, I shared an apartment with a friend who was studying linguistics. I can't tell you how many hours we spent discussing, and arguing about, whether certain sentences were ambiguous. I was basically his subject. He'd ask me questions about syntax and meaning, and when I'd respond, we'd often disagree. I once polled about 30 members of my law school class on one of the examples. (You can tell I must have been a really popular guy.)

I was driving back from New York today and noticed a sign in lights on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike near the southern end. The sign said: "CARS ONLY USE SHOULDER"

There are three possible meanings of this sign.

1. Only cars may use the shoulder.

2. Cars may use only the shoulder. (Cars, only use shoulder, not main roadway.)

3. Cars may only use the shoulder (not look at it or do anything else to it).

Sentence 3 seems pretty unlikely, and you'd have to interpret "cars" to include the drivers of the cars.

I'd say there's an ambiguity between Sentences 1 and 2, not that it was particularly relevant today, when traffic wasn't yet heavy. Sentence 1 makes more sense, but it's not obvious from the sign that this is what it means.

About a half mile later, near an exit, I saw a sign that said something like this: "Cars Only / Cars may use shoulder if traffic on ramp is heavy."

The moral of the story is: Don't use telegraph-style signs when dealing with lawyers who have friends who are linguists.

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Are you an annoying person?

Every Saturday, in the Washington Post, there's a feature I read, called "Free for All." I'd describe it as a place where people whose letters are too stupid even to get into the usual stupid letters section can have them published.

Nearly every single week, there's a letter from someone or other complaining about the Post -- a minor grammatical mistake, some outrage or other, or a perceived insult. I call these the librarians' complaints. The tone is typically indignant. (No offense intended to librarians with a sense of humor.)

This week, there was a different sort of letter that struck home with me, for reasons I'll explain shortly. The letter was this (bottom letter at the link):

Regarding the Aug. 23 front-page article "Elderly Staying Sexually Active":

The article said that "the elderly would benefit from more frank and open discussions about sex with their doctors."

Call me old-fashioned, but I don't think that sex with their doctors is what they need.

-- Mark W. Garrett

Maitland, Fla.

This letter made me smile, because the writer is not indignant; he merely wants to poke fun at the poor editing of the newspaper.

Maybe you've figured this out from reading Pillage Idiot over a period of time, but I have something of a compulsion -- to misinterpret, deliberately, what people say, in order to make it into a joke. To use an example from a recent post, I quoted this: "Ingrid Hoffmann, the latest arrival on the Food Network — her show 'Simply Delicioso' is shown on Saturday mornings — seems to be quickly staking her claim as the country's pre-eminent cleavage cook." And I wrote: "I'm struggling to avoid asking how you cook cleavage -- bake it, roast it, or simply warm it gently." Or, in real life, my daughter called from college and said, "I have a question for you about classes." Naturally, I responded, "I'm in favor of classes."

This, my friends, is called being an annoying person.

And I do it compulsively. Can you imagine having lunch with someone like me? I remember one lunch in particular at our friends' house at which I was doing this non-stop for about two hours. The hostess was very polite -- she even laughed at some of my quips -- but I almost felt the need to apologize afterwards. Except for the fact that she already knew what I'm like, and it didn't seem to faze her. (She must really like my wife.)

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading an article in the Weekly Standard about Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina, which discusses the rocky relationship between Sanford and Hugh Leatherman, the Republican chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. I came across this sentence:

Fowler says Leatherman "just can't abide the governor, and I think the governor feels the same way."

Now, most people would know exactly what this sentence means. In fact, I myself know exactly what it means. But that's not the way my mind works.

If you're an annoying person like me, you look at that sentence and deliberately misinterpret it. If you can't see how, yet, that means you're not an annoying person.

Let me rewrite it first: A can't stand B, and B feels the same way.

Anyone reading that would know that would understand that it means "B feels the same way about A." But because the "about A" is only implicit, you can also interpret it as "A can't stand B, and B feels the same way about B." That is, the governor can't abide himself.

Getting back to Mr. Garrett's letter, I have to point out that he cheated. The Post article said that the elderly should be discussing sex with their doctors, and the correct misinterpretation would be that the article is saying the elderly should be discussing the details of the sex they're having with their doctors, not that they should be having sex with their doctors. And the correct objection for Mr. Garrett to make would be that if they're having sex with their doctors, they should keep it to themselves.

But don't listen to me. I'm just a very annoying person.

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"So I'm, like..."

So I'm, like, this is the stupidest language column ever to appear in the New York Times. And he's, like, yeah, hel-lo! And I'm, like, William Safire would be turning over in his grave right now if he were dead.

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Low-hanging fruit

I'm going to pick off the low-hanging fruit in a short entry, in which I criticize the Washington Post for using the same asinine expression twice on the front page yesterday in two different articles -- and above the fold.

The expression, you might have guessed, is "low-hanging fruit."

1. "The 'Six for '06' policy agenda on which Democrats campaigned last year was supposed to consist of low-hanging fruit, plucked and put in the basket to allow Congress to move on to tougher targets." (Democrats' Momentum Is Stalling)

2. "The failure to remove 'low-hanging fruit' such as fugitives 'may reflect the fact that there's a complete neglect for enforcement, or that even in egregious cases, they just can't get their act together,' said Steven A. Camarota, spokesman for the Center on Immigration Studies, a group that advocates less immigration." (U.S. Targeting Immigrant 'Absconders')

Is there an editor in the house?

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