words are images

Last weekend, my friend Greg and I went to see the movie 300, based on the Frank Miller graphic novel. Depending on how you look at it, the movie is about a) the valiant stand of the Spartans against the Persians at Thermopylae, b) the glorious victory of the Persians over the Greeks at Thermopylae, c) America vs. Iraq, d) America vs. Iran, e) scantily clad Aryan gym bunnies fighting dark-skinned blowhards in pointy helmets and the remnants of Michael Jackson’s menagerie, or f) Xerxes’ makeup and accessorizing tips.

The movie has a definite style (more…)

One of my favorite regions of France is Brittany, which is more or less the Maine of France (not to be confused, of course with the Maine, which is a a tributary of the Loire and actually is in France).

Brittany has a beautiful, rugged coastline which explodes with flowers in the spring, with a helping hand from the French, of course. There are numerous picturesque islands including the unutterably beautiful Ile de Breihat, and in the north on the border with Normandy, the spectacular Mont St. Michel.

One of the other notable things (more…)

Ok, it’s been so long since I posted anything that I forgot my username and password. Of course, I wrote them down, but it didn’t help that I had written the wrong username. Oh well.

Anyhow, on to spellcheck. I love spellcheck, but not for the reason that you might think. I’m pretty good at spelling and spellchecking is generally more useful to me for catching typos. But a lot (notice that ‘alot’ is not a word) of words that I use in technical documents are not in MS Word’s dictionary, so it will make suggestions. Sometimes these are hilarious.

Today I was updating my resume and I wanted to include my experience with WordPress, the blogging software I use to write this stuff. Well, my edition of Word was born before blogging, because spellcheck didn’t recognize the word. Here is what Word suggested for ‘blogging’:

bogging
logging
slogging
clogging
flogging

Hmmm. Maybe spellcheck is smarter than I thought…

It seems that African Americans have made great strides since the civil rights marches of the 1960s. Successful music and sports figures are everywhere in the media. Just the other day, an article in the New York Times reported on the hip-hopification of Bergen County, New Jersey, one of the wealthiest counties in the state. Deval Patrick is the newest governor of Massachusetts, Barak Obama has the press and many in the electorate all a-quiver. And then there’s Oprah - one of the wealthiest people in the world, humanitarian, one of the short list of celebrities who can be identified by a single name.

Sure, there are occasional upwellings of attention on residual racism - Joe Biden’s comment that Barak Obama was ‘clean’ and ‘articulate’ created something of a stir, didn’t it? But that must be just some residual inadequacy of language, right? The real effects of racism have pretty much faded away, right?

Go here and watch the video. It doesn’t take long, and it will open your eyes. Wide.