Fun with English

My, but there seems to be such a plethora of comically bad English available to the public these days. I was just browsing over a few of my favorite websites of yesteryear, and, happening upon the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest, noticed to my delight that the long-awaited results of the 2004 competition have been posted. In case you are not familiar with it, Bulwer-Lytton is an annual contest to which enterprising prosaists send in the worst opening lines to a work of fiction which they can devise. If you want to check it out for yourself, the webpage is http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/

On a related but side note, I was reading through my old e-mails when I found a beautifully terrible piece of real-world writing, which I thought was worth sharing:

(From Great Britain's 1989 National minimum wage regulations)
"The hours of non-hours work worked by a worker in a pay reference period shall be the total of the number of hours spent by him during the pay reference period in carrying out the duties required of him under his contract to do non-hours work."

Finally, here's what my mom got in her fortune cookie a few days ago:
"With consistency and integrity your credits are piling up."

Which, combined with our previous favorite ("You should be able to make money and hold on to it."), Does not bode excellent well.

Song o' the moment: None. I'm writing this from my mom's office computer which, while much faster than the one at home, is woefully lacking in the audio department.

A snail mail tale

I recently received in the mail an official looking envelope from the Washington Secretary of State. "Dear Robert Majors" it read, "now that you're eighteen years old, you can vote, etc., so please register and here is a form and mail it in and so on." Of course, I paraphrase, but that was the gist. Quite nice of them, I thought, to give me the heads up.

Then I thought to myself, hey, wait a minute. throwing my memory way back to within a week of my actual eighteenth birthday, I remember receiving a 'birthday gift' from the Gillette company. A box with a little bit of shaving gel, and a Mach 3 (It's got three blades! Wow!) From talking to my friends, I get the impression that it's the same kit that Gillette sends to every male in the Western Hemisphere on or very near to his own eighteenth birthday. Very useful for those who never had a wisp of facial hair before they turned eighteen, but who upon rising on the first day of their eighteenth year find that overnight their faces have somehow become a rugged jungle of manly scruff. Very useful indeed, if that is the case. On the other hand, in that scenario one would probably be rather loathe to scratch the stuff off. Kind of a treasure, you know?

This led me to the inevitable conclusion that the Gillette company knows more about me than my own government. That's rather spooky. It became even spookier after I talked to Brian Russell, a friend of mine who is a registered voter and has been for quite some time (since about the time he received his razor kit, I think,) and it turns out that he got the same letter which I had received. So, not only does the government not know how old I am, but they don't know who is registered and who isn't (or at least they take less care in the business than does Gillette for a silly - and if you ask me, pretty creepy - promotion.) Personally, I think that one's age and one's voting status would be two things that the government would be sure to keep tabs on. Or at least find somewhat important. Perhaps they should hand the whole operation over to Gillette:

"Dear Robert Majors,

We here at Gillette would like to congratulate you on reaching your eighteenth birthday as a fine blue eyed, six foot two, one hundred and sixty pound, singing, conga drum playing Stanford Student-to-be who doesn't know what he wants to major in but is pretty sure that it has very little to do with psychology, French, or paint. Having underhandedly got ahold of your personal information, our Department of Spooky Marketing would like to present you with this little gift - inside you'll find your own complementary Mach 3 razor (Did you know it's got three blades? Count
em. Three! We're quite proud of that), a bottle of our new shaving gel, and a Gillette brand voter registration form. Please fill it out at your earliest convenience and mail it to our headquarters. Thank you, and good luck with your new legal and facial hair status.

Sincerely,
Your friends at Gillette"


Music of the moment - "Hanani" by the O.C. Supertones, off of their "Chase The Sun" album. Three stars for the song - though this is one of my less favorite songs on the CD the album itself is one of the best that I own.

Some practical, shmactical advice

[Note: I wrote this pretty late and haven't proofread it yet. So it might be a little shaky, a little scattered. If so, just call it impressionistic and wait for me to update.]

I.
I have now been doing what might be considered 'real' work sort of full time for almost a month. Obviously, I am hugely qualified to disseminate advise concerning life in this hard world across the whole internet, for all to read and be enlightened. So, here's what I've learned:

1) Eight hours is a really long time. Better take a long lunch break, or, in my case, an hour long class smack in the middle of each day.
2) Surprisingly, the time goes faster if you don't concentrate too hard on what you're doing and instead you let your mind wander.
3) The same rule goes for effort. If you're doing something really taxing, like carrying loads of bricks up the side of a tower using only a pair of bathroom plungers and a backpack, or, even worse, pulling ivy out of your neighbor's woods, then five minutes will seem like forever. These tasks will pass more quickly if you don't try so hard.

In conclusion, to achieve one's highest quality of workday time, one must pursue the path most likely to get one fired for incompetence. Though I realize that this is a far from universal recipe for success, it may yet work for some.

II.
Noticing, as above, that work is oodles more pleasant when done mindlessly, and combining this with observations I have made in the area of workday mind-wandering, I have devised a simple task for the betterment of whomever wishes to take it up. The task is this:

Find someone you know who needs something mindless and time consuming done. Painting a house, weeding a garden, sandwichboarding for a mattress store, anything that will take at least a full day to complete. Just not pulling ivy from your neighbor's woods. Hoo boy. Next, schedule a day for you and you alone to do this task. Don't schedule anything else during this day, and don't spread the task over more than one day. When that day comes, go out and do whatever good deed it is that you've gotten yourself into. Simple, huh? But here's the fun part - let your mind wander aimlessly while you're doing your work, and check in with yourself about once every hour to chronicle these wanderings. You might be surprised at what your mind will do if you leave it alone for a while.

For my part, I have found that I can quite comfortably think about a single song for about half of an hour, even if I only heard it on the radio once and I only remember one line and that line is actually kind of obnoxious. In fact, I've pretty much concluded that there's ablsolutely no correlation between how much I like a song and how interesting my mind finds it to mull over. Other than songs, I have often found myself repeating conversations that I have had recently over and over to myself. That may be unique to me, though. Rob talks to himself.

Finally, I have decided that there is absolutely no better mechanism for absorbing one's thoughts than watching a movie the night before one will be working. For example, I have spent nearly an entire day pondering the plot of the latter half of "Mission: Impossible", and nearly as long on far less perplexing movies. I don't know why, but movies are very absorbing after one's watched them.

So go forth and do some work and tell me what you think you think.

Music of the moment: "The Boy Who Stopped The World" by Aaron Sprinkle (You can download this one and many other excellent songs for free from grassrootsmusic.com; I highly reccommend it.)