Happy Birthday, pholph!

For your present, here's today's Forgotten English (© Jeffrey Kacirk):

hospitate

To reside under the roof of another.

--Richard Coxe's Pronouncing Dictionary, 1813

May Day/Labour Day
Feast of the Ascension

Moving Day in New York

The First of May is noted among the people of New York for bustle and change. … In every direction were carts and wagons laden with furniture. The streets were literally filled with chairs, tables, drawers, desks, carpets, &c. passing from one house to another to the great advantage of the carters, who find full employment and are on that day paid double charges. It is also not a little gratifying to New York gossips, who are allowed a peep into the lodgings of such strangers generally as have not permanent dwellings. … Many American women, we were told, occupy much of their leisure time about this period in prying into the abodes of foreigners to see if they are respectable and have their rooms well furnished. Americans could not have invented any domestic custom more inquisitorial, or which gives a readier access to the privacy of strangers.

--Rev. Isaac Fidler's Observations in the United States and Canada, 1833

Not 'til Jerry Springer, anyway.

-The Gneech

Isn't This a Lovely Day, by Irving Berlin

The weather is frightening
The thunder and lightning
seem to be having their way
But as far as I'm concerned
it's a lovely day

The turn in the weather
will keep us together
so I can honestly say
that as far as I'm concerned
it's a lovely day

...and everything's okay!

Isn't this a lovely day
to be caught in the rain?
You were going on your way
now you've got to remain

Just as you were going
leaving me all at sea
the clouds broke, they broke and Oh!
What a break for me

I can see the sun up high
'though we're caught in a storm
I can see where you and I
could be cozy and warm

Let the rain pitter-patter
but it really doesn't matter
if the skies are gray
As long as I can be with you
it's a lovely day!

Miscellaneous Miscellany

From athelind:

Watch on YouTube

From gamera_spinning:

Watch on YouTube

From Arts & Letters Daily:

The Weekly Standard: The Media Builds a Monument to Itself

Still, I prefer to think of all that the Newseum embodies--the sanctimony, the constitutional preening, the bogus intimations of danger, the religious veneration of saints and their relics--as a defense mechanism. Journalism, seen plain, is not a terribly impressive line of work. Some people do things, other people watch people do things. The news business is for people of the second sort. It's a grubby game. What do journalists do? They call people on the phone, they ask questions, they talk, they type, they read newspapers and magazines and boring government documents, they type some more, they go to one place or another to look at something or other, they jot in their notebooks, they type some more, they think a little, they pause for a minute to sip coffee before they go back to typing. The dough's not very good. The hours are erratic. Most of your colleagues are slobs. You'll never have a proper office unless you become an editor. Your fellow citizens assume you're an arrogant ass.

We should be forgiven if, in compensation, we exaggerate our own importance. We daydream: If this not-very-interesting trade can be elevated into a profession, made to seem dangerous and profound, a delicate flower of the timeless principles of self-government, blessed by patron saints like Cronkite and Murrow and even Thomas Jefferson, then maybe we're not in such a grubby business after all.

These two need to be read in order:

Los Angeles Times: Men Who Explain Things

Men explain things to me, and to other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about. Some men. Every woman knows what I mean. It's the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men's unsupported overconfidence.

This syndrome is something nearly every woman faces every day, within herself too, a belief in her superfluity, an invitation to silence, one from which a fairly nice career as a writer (with a lot of research and facts correctly deployed) has not entirely freed me. After all, there was a moment there when I was willing to believe Mr. Very Important and his overweening confidence over my more shaky certainty.

And in an "Only Nixon Could Go to China"-esque response we have:

AdviceGoddess.com: Rebecca Solnit Is A Sniveling Idiot

Of course, the difference is that women in Muslim countries are not, by law, allowed to testify. Western women like Solnit simply refrain from speaking up. Some loudmouth cut her off? Wow. While Muslim women fear lashings and death if they speak their minds, Solnit's simply too limp-willed to say, as I've said numerous times, and to men and women, "Don't interrupt!" or "My turn to talk!"

When that doesn't work, as it didn't when I was on the TV show, "Faith Under Fire," with the booming blowhard Frank Pastore, I began removing my mike, and told the host I was going to walk off if Pastore kept shouting over me. (I may not have been born with balls, but I keep a little set in my makeup bag, and bring them out on an as-needed basis.)

-The Gneech

Greetings From the Laptop, Le Sigh

My new, barely-out-of-the-box computer, GORT, had a brain hemorrhage this evening. After a bit of round-and-round with the Dell chat help, the net result is "This particular problem requires you wipe your hard drive and restore it to the factory default."

I wailed and gnashed my teeth. Only on the inside, 'cause I'm brave, but still.

So now GORT is having his brain re-installed. Fortunately, data loss will be minimal because I've got very thorough backups, having suffered catastrophic hard drive failures before. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to reinstall and re-configure (and re-update) every freakin' driver and bit-o-software.

So, there went my weekend. :P

Tomorrow's SJ will be a filler piece utilizing files I had elsewhere. I'm not sure when new strips will go up. It depends on how much time I have to spend on GORT instead of on art, I guess.

Oy vey.

-The Gneech

In Better News...

This one screams "huskyteer!!!"



-TG