Your government at work

This October 17, 2009, article from the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale says it all.

Mr. David Barlow of Ephraim, Utah, please note that your home state is featured prominently near the end of the Sun-Sentinel article.

My brother-in-law and his wife, who moved to Orlando shortly after they spent their honeymoon in Florida almost 49 years ago, have put a For Sale sign in their yard and are planning to move back to North Carolina. Nothing could be finer than to be alive in Carolina in the morning.

Triage is basically good, I guess. And any plan is better than no plan at all.

Ya think?

Pandemics, conditional tenses, and some really disturbing news

The other day I blogged about how the media’s use of conditional tense (could, can, might, may, possibly, probably, etc.) in their news stories has caused considerable chagrin among (or, for U.K. readers, amongst) the male half of the population.

Now, bless ’em, they are attempting to spread the chagrin caused by uncertainty about future events to the entire population, regardless of gender. May it please the court, I enter into evidence the people’s Exhibits A and B:

Exhibit A: Swine flu could hit up to 40 percent in US

Exhibit B: State official: Millions of Floridians could contract H1N1 virus within a year

You have been warned (terrified, had the pants scared off ya); now go and do all you can do to protect yourself and your family, beginning with making sure you (and they) get the shot when the vaccine is ready, eat oranges until they’re coming out your ears, keep a hanky at the ready, and cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze. Oh, and you could stop going to raves.

But now for the really disturbing news.

I thought I had caught the aforementioned media in an egregious spelling error in the headline of Exhibit A, namely, the word percent, which, as all of us of a certain age were taught, is wrong. Just to double-check myself, I hopped over to dictionary.com and found that life as we know it is over, kaput, gone with the wind.

After the definition, Random House Dictionary (© Random House, Inc. 2009) added the following:

Usage note: Percent is from the Latin adverbial phrase per centum meaning “by the hundred.” The Latin phrase entered English in the 16th century. Later, it was abbreviated per cent. with a final period. Eventually, the period was dropped and the two parts merged to produce the modern one-word form percent. The two-word form per cent is still used occasionally, but its use is diminishing. The percent sign (%) is used chiefly in scientific, tabular, or statistical material and only with numerals preceding it: 58%.

The penultimate sentence in that paragraph is what caused my jaw to drop and what caused Mrs. Mary Lillard, my eighth-grade teacher, to spin in her grave even faster than usual. The two-word form is still used occasionally? But its use is diminishing? Give us old codgers a break, Random House. Just say plainly, why don’t you, that the two-word form will join the dodo as a relic of the unlamented past just as soon as the generation of people who were taught that spelling matters diminishes to the point of dropping off the face of the earth altogether.

My rant is ended. I now return to my usual calm, sweet, shy, reserved self.

As Robert Browning (a once-famous poet, kiddies) said, “God’s in His heaven; all’s right with the world.”

Or, as the ravers say, “Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect.”

A cause for concern -- but not for alarm

This interesting story just in.

A rose by any other name, case #17,643

The madness continues. This Reuters story today out of Washington says it all.

And this one from The Kansas City Star.

And even this one out of the People’s Republic of China, complete with a masthead that mentions the 100th anniversary of the birth of Deng Xiaoping.

According to Wikipedia, Deng Xiaoping said the following:

不管黑猫白猫,能捉老鼠就是好猫 (Translation: “It does not matter whether the cat is black or white; as long as it catches the mouse, it is a good cat.”) -- commenting on whether China should turn to capitalism or remain strictly in adherence with the economic ideologies of communism, and

摸着石頭過河 (Translation: “Wading across a river by feeling the rocks.”) -- referring to the fact that China had absolutely no experience with modern capitalism, and

小朋友不聴話,該打打屁股了 (Translation: “It’s time to smack the bottom of unruly little children.”) -- while talking to president Jimmy Carter during his [Deng’s] brief visit to the United States, thereby informing the USA that China was ready to go to war with Vietnam.

One can only trust (a) that the swine flu has nothing to do with swine and (b) that Deng Xiaoping was referring to Vietnam and not to Jimmy Carter.

If one cannot trust one’s government, whom can one trust?


As I said, the madness continues.

I feel so much better now.

Obama: Swine flu not a reason for ‘alarm’

That is today’s headline from the Associated Press. In the article itself, the AP reports that what President Obama actually said was that the threat of spreading swine flu infections -- the World Health Organization says there are 40 confirmed cases in the U.S. now; the CDC says there are 20 -- is a cause for concern but not a cause for alarm.

It reminds me of another president in another decade who said it depends on what your definition of “is” is. It reminds me of David Letterman’s comedic bits where he shows film clips of horrendous crashes and promptly assures us that everything is fine and no one was hurt. It reminds me of George Orwell’s 1984 and the possibility that double-speak has arrived.

Yesterday, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said there was no need to close the borders. Today, according to the AP article, President Obama spoke even as the United States undertook close border monitoring to contain the spread of the disease. Phrases like “customs agents” and “Department of Health and Human Services” appeared in the story.

Change. You voted for it. You got it.

The only problem is that the more things change, the more they seem to remain the same. Only the faces are different.