Amusingly, my sister has gotten the idea to gung-ho clean the shit out of our carpet, wipe down her computer and the TV with some product to make the screen clean. This is her idea of cleaning. And it would be a good one, if not for all the crap that is still in the house. It is a fucking mess, and no one really seems to want to fix it the right way -- which is fundamentally, or getting rid of stuff. Because my house is really saturated with, just...stuff, accumulated over the years, that no one ever wanted to throw out, donate, etc, it cannot be tidy. There are boatloads of bric-a-brac, boxes of books, cartons of clothes, a paper party in every room. Ok, so wow, now the TV shines and the family room carpet is kind of whiter. It's still a fucking mess in here, and it smells, and it feels like I've spent the night huffing. If I wanted to alter my conscious reality, I would have just gone to the Phish show.

Wizlah wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:

Wizlah wrote:used to be academics couldn't write in a horrible, garbled, $#@!-you-up-with-50-subclauses way whilst making up new words in german that even german philosophers have never heard of before. And I could live with that, really.

Now though, it is apparent that they just can't write.

what ARE they teaching them in school these days?

Hey. I can say with confidence I've never made up a German word.

thats cos oul' Tom wasne speakin' in Hun. I bet you love the subclauses though, all littered with semicolons. You dirty slag. You laaave it, dontcha?

I work hard to avoid subclauses. Strunk and White, that's where it's at.

I do probably over use parenthetical em dashes.

my roommate is watching "fight club" with one of her friends who has never seen it.

i always forget what a great movie it is.

Oooh, I love the parenthetical em dash. Not sure how I'd write without it -- or more likely, I've just never thought about doing without it.

TenuredVulture wrote:I do probably over use parenthetical em dashes.

Guilty.

em dash overuse is one of my major pet peeves. If you're gonna hit me with an em dash, it should be a gut-punch moment in whatever you're writing. Like when black people say something and their friends all go "OHHHHH SHIT"

So I'm reading this story about Spanish police arresting a doctor who is suspected of running a doping ring. He used to work for the cycling team Kelme, a team that also employed the infamous Dr. Fuentes. Anyway, there's this part:

The homes of several cyclists were also raided, according to various Spanish media sources, as was that of a prominent Spanish race walker.

I mean, it must be something to be able to walk faster than most can run, but it just seems goofy tagged on there at the end.

i'd been meaning to borrow The Wire DVDs from my friend but he just moved to New Hampshire so i guess it'll be another three years before i see an episode of that show

CrashburnAlley wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:I do probably over use parenthetical em dashes.

Guilty.

em dashes are for lazy people

Trent Steele wrote:

CrashburnAlley wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:I do probably over use parenthetical em dashes.

Guilty.

em dashes are for lazy people

Semi-colons, however, are for industrious go-getter types!

Overuse of em-dashes is perhaps my greatest stylistic sin.

I indiscriminately overuse parentheses, em dashes and semicolons.

i probably use parentheses more than i should. i use semicolons in every case possible, which still doesn't seem like enough.

phatj wrote:I indiscriminately overuse parentheses, em dashes and semicolons.

I use-or overuse-them a lot here where I'm going for a more conversational style, and in order to reflect my actual thinking process (which rarely knows where it's going to end up when it starts a sentence). I try to avoid them when writing for business; the amount of editing I have to do shows that I don't do a very good job.

Someone threw a pen into my laundry. Kinda hard to believe.

you sure it wasnt yours?

Yeah.

It was wrapped in a plastic bag and snapped in half.

I have no idea why someone would do that to my clothes.

what the hell? that makes me mad. i dont understand people who actually think through ways to be dicks to people and then carry those things out.

wow, that's ridiculous.

No big deal. This Eagles t-shirt is only from the 60s.