Ali Baba's a different species

I got your dogmatic, intolerant, proselytizing, anti-assimilationist Islam right here:



But, you know. Those mysterious Wahabis Shiites Sunnis Sufis. So strange. So hostile to modern culture. So very Not Like Us.

"Halle-verbal infix-lujah."

In honor of National Grammar Day:

To whimsically digress, let us invoke here the existence of the infix in English. The official party line, promulgated at the elementary-school level, is that English has prefixes and suffixes but no infixes. The thoughtful grammarian will have noticed that English has at least one infix, bleeping, as in abso-bleeping-lutely, in-bleeping-credible, and fan-bleeping-tastic. (The exact spelling and pronunciation of bleeping is subject to some variation.)

—Teresa Nielsen Hayden, in an endnote to "On Copyediting," in Making Book.

(And John M. Ford is still missed.)

In Dozens of Colors of Thread

So Elly, who is one of the finest writers and crafters I know, is starting to do how-to videos, and the first one out the gate is showing that she has as deft a hand with a video editor as she does with a blue pencil.* Behold:





Fantastic. And while the polish and perfectionism of her work is what I admire, it's the lolcats and the two-headed chicks that make her One Of Us.

(Impressed? She also sells this stuff, you know.)
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*Proverbially. It being the Digital Age and all, I've never actually seen her mark up a hardcopy even when it was my prose she was providing with Gentle Correction. But Elly is an editor's editor, and the blue pencil, like the sword, exists always in the mind.

The Same Clown in a Different Face

Two things of note: first, HaloScan is now ded ded ded ded, taking with it the last couple of years' worth of comments here, which sucks but gives me an excuse to redecorate the place without worrying about preserving those bits of my old template. So - new look! New sidebars! New Blogger-hosted commenting engine!* Enjoy, if that's the word I'm looking for.

Second, today marks the anniversary of the first day of my latest time of unemployment. Which, as of a month ago, is now over, and I have a really fine job in a really excellent field (one where I can always go to bed at night knowing I'm not making the world any worse by working in it, huzzah), and I expect it will be a great experience as soon as I can get over my lingering Impostor Syndrome and waiting for the other shoe to drop. (Eleven months on the dole will fuck up your self-image but good, even if you're not starting off with the Neurotic Artist handicap.) Which means, Heaven and Earth, I practically have a career these days. Who knew?

We're not given anything forever, but for however long this moment lasts, it's all right.

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*And probably long overdue, I suppose, but while I never needed to use it, I miss having a comment host that came with an optional disemvoweller.