.
INBOX: Pelosi *and Schiff to hold a press conference tomorrow at 10:45AM ET
— Geoff Bennett (@GeoffRBennett) October 1, 2019
It's before. IG meeting is currently schedule for the afternoon. pic.twitter.com/vThcUaPw6u
— Miranda Binewski (@superlorna69) October 1, 2019
The Inspector General of the State Department does not seek a meeting with Congress during a recess because they want to say the Secretary of State is a great guy. https://t.co/7VpJApDhNF
— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) October 1, 2019
From a Watergate prosecutor:
The shift to support impeachment is happening even faster than it did during Watergate. I suspect 45's approval ratings will tank in direct correlation to rise in support for impeachment as it did for Nixon as the facts came ut. https://t.co/KWID5X3eEt
— Jill Wine-Banks (@JillWineBanks) October 1, 2019
Living Well: The Best Revenge…
"The Book of Gutsy Women" is out today. It's full of the stories of courageous and resilient women who had faith that their actions could make a difference. And they were right.@ChelseaClinton and I are so thrilled to share it with you: https://t.co/cZSyC1Ltch pic.twitter.com/jrVFG5xyZk
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 1, 2019
An appearance by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton gave CBS' 'Late Show With Stephen Colbert' (@colbertlateshow) its highest-ever overnight ratings for a Monday show https://t.co/l9EKwAkT8I
— Hollywood Reporter (@THR) October 1, 2019
Hillary Clinton’s recent appearances are causing a lot of people with guilty consciences to get super upset.
— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) October 1, 2019
Tomorrow, former Secretary of State @HillaryClinton joins Rachel @Maddow live in studio for an in-depth interview. Watch “The Rachel Maddow Show” tomorrow at 9pm ET on @MSNBC. pic.twitter.com/QiFZr2iPpC
— MSNBC Public Relations (@MSNBCPR) October 1, 2019
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone ???
Mary G
I might have to watch Hillary on Maddow. So glad she is getting the attention she deserves.
geg6
I took today off from work to help my sister close up her pool. But she has a hair appointment, so I won’t be busy until this afternoon. So, for once, I’ll be getting to see the press conference in real time. I’m very curious to see what they have to say. I hope it’s as good as I hope. Meanwhile, I am listening to Morning Joe praise the world’s worst monster, Jimmy Carter, as a great and good man. The world seems to have turned upside down.
p.a.
@rikyrah: good a.m!
Hillary bends down, removes the facemask to reveal a horribly disfigured John Q. Public. With the last breath, John Q. murmurs “You were right, Hil. You were right about him…”
Jeffro
Love that Pelosi is taking him for some “peach mint” AND for a ride.
Next cartoon should be him as a frothing-at-the-mouth mutt, all excited ‘cause “Miss Nancy’s taking me for a ‘baloney walk!*’ “
*Not my phrase, but I knew what was meant the first time I heard it
mad citizen
Good morning juicers! Sounds like this is going to be one helluva a day. Maybe historically important. The Solution Unravels.
Sanjeevs
Never forget Hilary had the courage to call Trump a Russian puppet right to his face in the debates.
Meanwhile Comey was furrowing his brow. Good job he wasn’t heading up the IC during Pearl Harbour or he would have done nothing and opened a murder investigation on December 8.
WereBear
I know books are in motion for a long time but the timing is simply exquisite :)
NotMax
FYI.
9 grammar rules that have changed since you were in school
Numbers 4 and 7 give me a sad and personally shall continue taking a cue from Mr. Fezziwig when it comes to those, as IMHO they erase salient distinctions.
And so it goes….
Tony Jay
@mad citizen:
Coincidentally, today is the day our own shambling stoker of White/Right resentments has to hand over his ‘comprehensive and detailed’ plans for a smooth UK withdrawal from the European Union to the EU’s negotiators and await their verdict.
Since he hasn’t done any actual planning and has nothing to offer the EU but insults and lies, I’d expect this evening to see the facade of ‘normalcy’ out shit British Media has draped around the Johnson Regime’s shoulders to start unraveling faster than Rudy G after three White Russians and a Speedball cocktail.
Good Times!
trnc
Wow, good save, Rudy. BWAHAHAHAHHAHAH…
trnc
@Tony Jay: TJ, is there much reporting over there on the stories that Boris is beholden to vulture financiers who want to short the economy when Britain crashes out of the EU?
SFAW
@NotMax:
The rule “changes” are things up with which Steve in the WTFHI will not put.
Major Major Major Major
And a good afternoon from Madrid to you all!
NotMax
@tmc
The digital age equivalent of Joe McCarthy waving a sheet of paper in front of the audience, expostulating “I have a list of names.”
SFAW
@trnc:
I imagine he said that to extinguish it from “privileged attorney-client communication,” but how is that shit (i.e., shakedown attempts) covered as a “work product”?
Usual disclaimer: not a lawyer, don’t play on on TV nor the Intertoobz, etc
SFAW
@NotMax:
With Roy Cohn tying it all up in one neat package. Or something.
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
Buenos tardes.
Hm. Montreal. Madrid. Your year to visit cities beginning with M?
;)
debbie
@NotMax:
I argue most days with coworkers about split infinitives and dangling prepositions. Lighten up, people. Stop with the clutzy phrases and make yourselves more easily understood!
Major Major Major Major
@NotMax: let’s not forget Mew York. Which is probably how Samwise says it.
Calouste
@Tony Jay: The best I would expect is May’s plan with the word “backstop” struck through with a sharpie everywhere and replaced with “stopback”. But realistically it will be massively worse than that and of course making demands that are completely unacceptable to the EU.
hueyplong
@SFAW: The only thing in the same neighborhood as “work product” from Rudy is immediately followed up by a flush.
I hope.
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax: 1, 2, 5, 6, 7 – no, just, no.
Ken
@Jeffro: Or “I get to go to a farm upstate and where I can run and play with the other despots!”
Major Major Major Major
@NotMax: I honestly didn’t know most of those were ‘rules’. As for the example they lead with, what sort of stuffy jackass would tell you not to use a perfectly cromulent word just because it doesn’t fit the construction pattern of other similar words? This is english ferchrissake, it’s made almost entirely of nonsense exceptions to rules.
ETA I am on team ‘gantlet’ though, for which you may thank my 80-year-old father
Ken
@NotMax:
I wonder if this is a shout-out to Nero Wolfe? (Who would go ballistic at “shout-out”, and probably at “go ballistic”.)
Quinerly
So Barr came home from Italy. Now Pompeo is in Italy.
satby
@rikyrah: Good morning ?.
Latest rescue doing very well, but is extremely disappointed that I don’t let him go outside. Though he has run of most of the house he comes downstairs to the front door and then goes back upstairs to the bathroom to sulk when he’s not released into the wild of urban South Bend. But he’s a good boy.
Quinerly
@rikyrah: Good morning!
Ken
@Quinerly: Remember, Italy does have a larger GDP than Russia, despite having less than half the population, one-fiftieth of the area, and far fewer natural resources. Barr and Pompeo are probably studying this economic powerhouse.
Immanentize
@NotMax:
Next thing you know, it will be acceptable to write:
“Whether or not….”
NotMax
@Ken
Compiling a list of pizza parlors with basements at you-know-who’s behest?
//
Quinerly
@NotMax: ?
Bobby Thomson
@trnc: attorney work product has to be prepared by an attorney in anticipation of litigation.
1. Giuliani has been saying repeatedly he wasn’t acting as a lawyer.
2. What’s the litigation?
3. Text messages are not something prepared in anticipation of litigation. They are just communications. Facts don’t become privileged just because they are told to a lawyer. They don’t become attorney work product, either.
4. No attorney client privilege, either, because Giuliani’s client is Donald John Trump, not the United States, and definitely not the State Department.
5. No privilege for communications made to help the client commit crimes or fraud, either.
Giuliani hasn’t actually practiced law in years, but I don’t believe he’s forgotten any of this. His audience is Individual Number One and his dumbass supporters who will believe anything if they want to.
Quinerly
@Ken: thanks for helping me understand. Nothing to see here, obviously. ?
danielx
@NotMax:
Better use of taxpayer dollars than paying for Trump’s fucking golf habit.
Quinerly
“Now we’re looking at near raw bribery,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), a House Oversight Committee member who chairs the subcommittee with jurisdiction over Trump’s hotel in Washington. https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/02/trump-hotel-empty-rooms-016763
Tony Jay
@trnc:
Not a lot. The national media, led by the BBC (of course) took it upon itself to educate viewers that, a) Hedge Funds are supposed to lay bets on currency ups and downs, so b) there’s really nothing in the least suspicious about them betting on a No-Deal Brexit, while c) probably also laying bets the other way for all we know, and, c) given the vast sums sloshing around the financial markets £8 billion isn’t more than pocket change so isn’t this just an example of conspiracy-thinking class-warfare from the left and maybe a bit anti-Semitic too?
These are Johnson funders? Well, of course they are, they’re very rich capitalists, what’s odd about that? Investigating those links would be tantamount to accusing them of buying Johnson’s loyalty and would give credence to barmy theories about Johnson wanting to drag Britain out of the EU in as damaging a way as possible. It’s simply not the BBC’s place to ask questions like that of a Conservative politician. Where do you think this is? Venezuela?
Our media is just as shit as yours.
Quinerly
@danielx: guess you saw that Giuliani is in a lather over a picture in the Daily Mail of Biden playing golf in 2014 with his son.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@NotMax: Huh. I’m kind of a grammar / spelling Nazi and I didn’t know several of these were even considered problematic.
I didn’t know about “gantlet” for instance. I would defend “none… are” on mathematical grounds because it includes subsets of more than one element.
“Hopefully” does often irritate me but I will nevertheless consciously use it in email and informal communication at times.
Bobby Thomson
@Bobby Thomson:
Missed the edit window:
6. Also, too, unlike attorney client privilege, an attorney can waive work product protection.
Walker
@NotMax:
This is behind the times. “They” singular has been building support for a while, and has recently become accepted in several style books.
Quinerly
“I was on the phone call,” Pompeo said from a press conference in Rome. “The phone call was the in the context of, I guess I’d been Secretary of State for coming on a year and a half. I know precisely what the American policy is with respect to Ukraine. It’s been remarkably consistent and we will continue to try to drive those set of outcomes.” TPM reporting this AM
Tony Jay
@Calouste:
Precisely. Tank any possibility of a deal, blame it on the EU/Parliament/Corbyn/The Boogie, refuse to ask for an extension, trigger an Election, hope all his bombastic gaslighting has won enough love from the Brextremist Fringe that they abandon the Farage Corps and return to Planet Tory, while the Lib-Dems go all out to split the Remain vote and let him sneak back into office with 30+ % of the national vote.
It’s a plan. A terrible, awful, not very good plan.
But it’s a plan.
danielx
@Quinerly:
Color me unsurprised, though these days Rudy seems to start frothing at the mouth when a breeze goes by.
Bobby Thomson
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I still favor “more than” because “over” forces the reader to pause for a millisecond to decide whether you are talking about physical position or numerical size.
rikyrah
Skeptical Brotha ? (@skepticalbrotha) Tweeted:
Benjamin Crump speaking the names of unarmed Black people who did not receive justice invoked a chorus of amens from #BothamJean’s family during his press conference, which is just good to my soul. https://twitter.com/skepticalbrotha/status/1179148216719171584?s=17
rikyrah
Propane Jane™ (@docrocktex26) Tweeted:
Never forget that White Americans voted in majority for dictator Donald Trump and EVERY racist, inhumane atrocity his corrupt government commits. @HillaryClinton called them deplorable for a reason and they prove it daily. https://t.co/BODQ4DccEi https://twitter.com/docrocktex26/status/1000355991135940608?s=17
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Immanentize: Hopefully not, but if you think you can suppress “whether or not” you have another thing coming. Personally I could care less about that one. You could of knocked me over with a feather the first time I saw “snuck” or “could of” in a newspaper though.
Kay
@Quinerly:
Such a lie. They’ve spent months serving as go-fers for Donald Trump. His employees. It probably cost tens of millions in public dollars too. They’re still doing it. Who paid for all these Fox news scumbags to travel to these countries to pursue Trump’s interests? We did. He should resign. Every day he draws a paycheck he robs the public.
Kay
@Quinerly:
Why is he in Rome and why was the attorney general of the United States there? Is Gorka yet another “off the books” US representative? How many are there and who is paying them?
Amir Khalid
@NotMax:
Agreed, and I would also not use construtions 1, 2, 5, and 8. 9 (the split infinitive), on the other hand, has been okay for a lot longer than since after WWII. And yet it can read awkwardly in many sentences; so I would use it, but sparingly.
@SFAW:
Interesting that the list doesn’t include ending a sentence with a preposition. I guess that has been okay since before WWII.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Kay: I know this is like giving Al Capone a parking ticket, but for the amount of time I spent as a federal employee reading Hatch Act guidance and worrying about tiny fine points, I want these people to do 30 years to life on Hatch Act violations alone.
Maybe that could be added to the not-technically-treason charges, as a bit of dessert.
For those who don’t know, the Hatch Act forbids political activity on the taxpayer’s dime.
OzarkHillbilly
Sigh… I’ll be happy when this site finally gets it’s shit together. This post just now showed up on my computer after dozens of refreshings.
Quinerly
@Kay: supposedly Barr was there to listen to a tape of that professor who no one has seen in a few years.
Quinerly
@Kay: https://www.thedailybeast.com/barr-went-to-rome-to-hear-a-secret-tape-from-joseph-mifsud-the-professor-who-helped-ignite-the-russia-probe
Ken
@Quinerly: Because there is absolutely no way to transmit sound across the Atlantic…
Quinerly
Cole is up and posting.
Quinerly
@Ken: how would he even know what this professor sounds like?
Quinerly
This looks pretty good for the basics.
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-inc-podcast-rudy-giuliani-friends-in-ukraine
Major Major Major Major
@Amir Khalid: “don’t end a sentence with a preposition” was complete nonsense invented by people who wanted English to be French. Separable-prefix verbs with the preposition at the end of the sentence are a fundamental part of many Germanic languages, English included.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: That hurt.
I treat “none” as singular from force of habit, I guess. I still cringe at someone saying “I graduated college.” I am old.
Ken
@Quinerly: Presumably they’ll check that when he says “Moose und Sqvirrel” it has a Russian accent.
Besides, it doesn’t matter what the guy sounds like as long as the tape says what they want to hear, and I’m sure the
Russian intelligence services disinformation sectionanonymous person who provided the tape made sure of that.Cheryl Rofer
@Quinerly: Pompeo (perilously close to Pompous) always gets so huffy when he is questioned on pretty much anything.
Quinerly
@Ken: I guess I was overthinking it.
Quinerly
@Cheryl Rofer: well, he was #1 in his class at West Point. ?
Ken
@Quinerly: Remember Rule 1: “the truth is, these are not very bright guys”.
Kirk Spencer
@Quinerly: Allegedly a deposition made as part of a request for protection, filled with information that required Italians to classify it at high enough level that it can only be heard in what as described is a SCIF.
Raises the question in my mind of how Barr learned of this tape.
Equally makes me wonder with whom he’ll be sharing selected information from the tape.
schrodingers_cat
Irony is dead. No Despot Left Behind Times has an op-ed by Modi praising Gandhi.
schrodingers_cat
deleted double comment.
Quinerly
@Kirk Spencer: I’m rather concerned about these Italy trips. What are they up to?
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I’m a stickler for “the data are” or “the data show” but I’m afraid that one (“data” is not singular, it’s the plural of “datum”) is well into Stage 4 by now.
A real pedantic one has to do with Italian words. I know just enough Italian to be dangerous. So while I’m not going to complain to anyone about a “turkey panini”, it’s a sign of Italian authenticity to me if a menu uses the singular “panino.”
Major Major Major Major
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I like confusing people by saying ‘graffito’, myself.
Amir Khalid
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Especially since it is the college that graduates you, not you the college.
frosty
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I have never seen panino on a menu or anywhere else. Sorry, but that ship has not only sailed, it teleported directly to its destination!
Quinerly
Rudy Giuliani says he is looking to sue The Swamp. Going to file a “jaw suit.” https://mobile.twitter.com/elainaplott/status/1179234987624800256
Twitter thread is hilarious.
Another Scott
@Bobby Thomson: That reminds me of:
“Bridge freezes before roadway”
Eh? Do they mean before in time or before in location??!?!?
I spent far too much time in my youth thinking about that, and trying to find a better way to express it.
Cheers,
Scott.
Amir Khalid
@Cheryl Rofer:
That should be his name from now on: Mike Pompous.
Amir Khalid
@Another Scott:
I’d go with “Bridge freezes earlier than roadway” for time and “Bridge freezes x miles ahead of roadway” for location.
Betty Cracker
@Quinerly: They are in Italy subverting U.S. foreign policy to run wingnut conspiracy theories to ground. The Daily Beast has some details here.
Quinerly
@Betty Cracker: I read that Daily Beast piece yesterday. Thought it was written oddly. Not sure what to think. Do you think Barr and Pompeo have bought into Trump/Giuliani’s story or are they just following orders?
Jeffro
@Ken: Yes please, may the FSM make it so.
Quinerly
@Betty Cracker: check this out.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-called-boris-johnson-for-help-discrediting-mueller-inquiry-report
Betty Cracker
@Quinerly: I don’t know. The whole thing is just surreal.
NotMax
@Immanentize
Irregardless of that…
(Fingers pulsating in protest about being forced to type that. Also noticed that spell check does not flag the offending word.)
Betty Cracker
@Quinerly: Weird how Trump is using all the levers of the US government to discredit a report that he claims “totally and completely exonerates” him, huh?
NotMax
@Betty Cracker
Yellowcake 2.0.
Quinerly
@Betty Cracker: yes it is weird. I’m a little nervous this week. Was on a “high/high” last week. Feel like something not good is going to drop this week.
Cheryl from Maryland
@Quinerly: Yeah, in Engineering Management. Don’t do, tell others to do what you can’t.
Amir Khalid
@Betty Cracker:
It’s almost as if he thinks the Mueller report is actually damning.
Just One More Canuck
@Cheryl from Maryland: an engineer? Jeezus, no wonder he’s such an asshole
Kayla Rudbek
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I am intrigued by your ideas and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter
Uncle Cosmo
@NotMax: It’s spell check, not “grammar” check or “syntax check” FFS.
I’ve been seeing ads fronting U-Toob vids for some hotshot software (name some play on “grammar”) that allegedly fixes all 3 & turns barely-coherent typing into mellifluous, magnificent English prose. Yeah, right.**
** English teacher lecturing class: Although a double negative in a sentence reduces to a positive statement, there is no known instance in which a double positive reduces to a negative.
Student in first row: Yeah, right.
rikyrah
@Quinerly:
Oh….you mean THAT phone call….
Gelfling 545
@Quinerly: I have assumed they are meeting people who could not unobtrusively come to the US. They seem to have grasped that it would look bad for them to go to Russia at the moment.
NotMax
@Uncle Cosmo
Spell check certainly exhibits no reticence about flagging other sequences of letters which are not a legitimate word.
Am put in mind of the still-rates-a-chuckle urban legend about translation software.
Gelfling 545
@frosty: “graduated college” has been annoying me for years. My current gripe is “coronate” as the verb for what happens at a coronation.
Gelfling 545
@Amir Khalid: “graduated college” has been annoying me for years. My current gripe is “coronate” as the verb for what happens at a coronation.
zhena gogolia
@NotMax:
On 4, I just avoid the word. I hate 5. I’ve given up on 7.
Amir Khalid
@Uncle Cosmo:
I’ve seen that ad too. I agree, it promises way too much to be believable.
Laurent Castellucci
@NotMax:
I am sad about gantlet as well.
Other than that, most of these are just finally undoing the weird 19th century fetish for imposing rules that they made up on things. Not splitting infinitives was only a rule because Latin doesn’t do it. It was nonsensical. None requiring a singular was nonsensical. Provable not following a pattern so we must change it was nonsensical.
The 5-stage continuum is a nice thing to see, though. So many people act like it is a binary of right and wrong instead of the proper gradual evolution of language.
NotMax
@Amir Khalid
“It was a murky and tempestuous eventide.”
:)
Uncle Cosmo
@Just One More Canuck: I spent some years employed as a Senior Engineer on a floor with ~150 other engineers where I was one of two liberals.
I found that, typically, they believe their B.Engrg. degree marks them as sooooooo intelligent that after a half-hour (or if they have a shred of modesty, 45 minutes) of desultory study in any field of human inquiry, they will know more about it than people who hold advanced degrees & have devoted their working lives to the discipline. They’re not as indefensibly arrogant as the typical MD – whose training consists mostly of rote memorization, sleep deprivation and submission to brutality, & who are so often led around by the nose by the drug companies – or for that matter a couple of lawyers I know. But the ability to evaluate an integral or program a computer doesn’t count for much in fields where actual people are involved.
(FWIW I got along quite well with most of them as “the house Red.” I bonded with one ex-Marine [whose face would go purple with rage if you leaned into his ear & whispered “Kennedy”] over what he astutely called “mindcandy” – techno-thrillers we both enjoyed. At times he’s shake his head in wonder & mutter, “I can’t believe I’m friends with a Communist.” :^D)
But all engineers agreed that management sucked. A joke:
/ba-dum
Hoodie
@Just One More Canuck: No, No grasshopper. Engineering management, i.e., he was a business major. In other words, he isn’t as smart as everyone makes him out to be. Say what you will, engineering is hard. Yes, engineers are often socially incpt, i.e., dorks, such that they can come across as assholes. Managers, on the other hand . . .
NotMax
@Uncle Cosmo
Another hoary one (truncated version):
The human body as proof God is not an engineer: No engineer worth his/her salt would run a sewage line smack through the middle of an amusement area.
TomatoQueen
https://considerable.com/grammar-rules-changed violates SSA security policy by appearing as a parked domain. Judging by the examples mentioned, I would scream at every one of them, crawl in a Strunk and White-shaped hole, and pull it in after me. Or, to paraphrase Judy Tenuta, the rules didn’t change, People Are Pigs.
Ked
Gantlet seems like a nifty word.
A nifty word that I have never ever NOT ONCE seen in 40 years of way-too-much reading, including a fairly large amount of 19th-century and early 20th-century literature and popular fiction.
Can anyone point me to a use of this word in the last 200 years? Dictionaries don’t count.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Uncle Cosmo: My degrees are in physics and math. The engineer was the butt of a lot of “mathematician, physicist and engineer” jokes.
Here’s one that doesn’t have a physicist in it:
There was a country that executed prisoners by guillotine. But they had two interesting customs. One was that the prisoner could choose to be either face up or face down for the execution. The other was that if for some reason the guillotine didn’t kill the prisoner, they were immediately pardoned and free to go.
One day a priest, a drunkard and an engineer were scheduled for execution. The priest went first, and chose to be face up, saying he wants to be facing heaven. Bravely he lies down and prays, and they release the guillotine. It comes speeding down but stops inches from the priest’s neck. The crowd gasps. “It’s a miracle!” they whisper. The priest is released but stays nearby.
The drunkard is next. He doesn’t care. He lies down face down and quietly awaits its fate. The priest says a blessing, the blade comes down but again it stops inches from the prisoner’s neck! Another miracle!! The crowd is awestruck.
Now it’s the engineer’s turn. He chooses face up. The priest says another blessing. They are about to release the blade when suddenly the engineer speaks. “Wait a second” he says, pointing up at the mechanism. “I think I see your problem here”
NotMax
@Ked
IIRC, shows up in some iterations of the rulebooks for Dungeons & Dragons.
Uncle Cosmo
@NotMax: I heard that one as a 3-parter, where an EE, a MechE and a ChemE are sitting around at lunch arguing over what kind of engineer God is.
To some people the glass is half-full. To some it’s half empty. But to an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
joel hanes
@NotMax:
9 is still best avoided if it can be done gracefully.
Good writing and careful speech will still avoid 7, even if it’s no longer “wrong”.
Yes, I harbor prescriptionist tendencies.
NotMax
@Ked
A couple of others garnered from a quick and dirty search.
The Hartford Courant, 2010. “To prevent them from reaching the Great Lakes, federal, state, international and private agencies are building a permanent electric fish barrier at the watershed divide, determined to electrocute any fish attempting to run the gantlet.”
Charles Dickens, The Uncommercial Traveller (1860s) – “The occasion rose soon enough, and I ran the following gantlet.”
Just One More Canuck
@Uncle Cosmo: I work in forensic accounting, preparing financial damage reports in civil cases. One case I worked on was in a matter where an engineer was suing my firm’s client because they wouldn’t pay for a product that didn’t work. The engineer not only claimed (in mind-numbingly repetitive detail) that it did work (it didn’t, except in non-real world situations), but proceeded to write detailed submissions to the court that everyone involved (the judge, the lawyers – he fired his lawyer and was representing himself by the time we got involved- and us had no idea what we were doing. The judge was very indulgent, but eventually got fed up and tossed the case.
@Hoodie: Engineering management is the worst of engineering and business school
NotMax
@Uncle Cosmo
To a chemist, the glass is full. Half with water, half with air.
Whereas a Republican moans, “Who took half my water/”
Uncle Cosmo
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Those are my degrees also. I told Westinghouse that for what they were paying me, they could call me anything, down to & including late for dinner.
But I tell you this: If when I was 20 someone had shown me myself at age 40 – working as a f’ing engineer on military contracts & wearing a f’ing tie to work every day (& so inured to it I frequently nodded off & woke up the next morning still wearing it) – I would have been torn between asking for a pistol & a time machine to murder my older self, or just using the pistol to commit Selbstmord right there & then.
Q: How can you tell if someone is a mathematician, a physicist or an engineer?
A: Ask them to prove the following theorem: All odd numbers are prime.
The mathematician will say, One, three, five, seven: Proven by induction!
The physicist will say, One, three, five, seven – so far so good – nine – um, er – eleven, thirteen: Proven within experimental error!
The engineer will say, What’s a prime? /ba-dum
J R in WV
@Major Major Major Major:
Spain, or Missouri>????
I know which one I would prefer…
joel hanes
@Uncle Cosmo:
It’s spell check, not “grammar” check or “syntax check” FFS
Back in the Silurian, BSD-derived Unix used to have some very nice prose analysis programs, similar in function to the current much-hyped Grammarly. Those tools helped me move away from the passive voice, and to shorten some kinds of sentences.
J R in WV
@Amir Khalid:
While it is true that the college or university determines whether a student has fulfilled the requirements for graduation… it IS the student who actually fulfills those requirements. So I’m OK on that one.
I worked much harder to graduate than the school did to graduate me, after all!
joel hanes
@Uncle Cosmo:
on military contracts & wearing a f’ing tie to work every day
This is not unrelated to the preponderance of overt conservatives among your co-workers.
Uncle Cosmo
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Heard it long ago, a good one!
Many moons ago when I was a student at JHU it was well known that while classes in the Arts & Sciences school were graded on a B-curve, the Engineering School generally used a C-curve. The rationale seemed to be that for most A&S majors, a graduate degree was required to do much of anything in the field, & anyone with too many “gentleman’s C’s” would be kept out of grad school. Whereas anyone with a bachelor’s in engineering was capable of doing major damage, so the school gently urged the lesser lights to switch majors to something harmless over in A&S, & if they resisted, flunk their sorry arses out.
The engineering students seemed to be disproportionately “townies” like me (it was easier for locals to get into Hopkins than for out-of-staters & the Engineering School was held in possibly-unwarranted high esteem in the region). I hung out with a bunch of them over coffee, cigarettes, cards, cheesecake, & occasional classes. Not bad guys in general but definitely far to starboard politically – I have no doubt that the ones I see at the upcoming 50-year reunion will largely be MAGAts, but if the forces of justice prevail one hopes they’ll be too embarrassed to admit it.
Manxome Bromide
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I will defend “the data is” in that data has become its own aggregate noun, like “trash”. The similarity to “trash” extends to its quasi-singular “piece of data” to mean “datum.” But that does mean it has to be the data. If you use the indefinite article, only “some data” is correct.