I remember watching some gerenuks last time I was at the LA Zoo, extending themselves to the utmost in their drive to trim an extra inch of the grass surrounding their paddock.
Not only do the "green/enviros around me" tend to be the ones that eat the most fish, I've found they're even more likely to be the type that insist on wild-caught and sneer at farmed fish.
If we took a spin in the Wayback Machine and went to Denmark and Sweden before they were Christianized...or more precisely, to the lands that Danes and Swedes were pillaging when they went a-Viking...would we be coming up with the same conclusion as this book seems to do?
I myself am agnostic and fervently believe in the ability to be moral without a God-monitor, but I find the dump-on-Christianity screeds irritating and disingenuous. "Hitler was a Christian!" That makes as much sense as me defending my meat-eating by screaming "Hitler was a vegetarian!" Japanese may be among the most peace-loving of folk...but you wouldn't have thought so in Nanking in December 1937. Etc.
Horrible things have been done in the name of one religion or the other; horrible things have been done in the name of a lot of other things than religion. Guess what, we're humans, and really really good at justifying our bad behavior to ourselves.
I use Mac because I'm in graphics and when my workplace switched over from X-actos and waxers to computer, Mac was there "fustest with the mostest" so that's what we chose. I own a Mac because sometimes I need to take my work home, and why bop in between platforms if I don't have to? (God knows I get into enough trouble from keyboard command differences between programs!). And the snobbery I've come across is more often PC-based -- you know, hardcore programmer types who sneer that you don't "really" know about computers. Well, I don't. Who cares!
I enjoy the Mac commercials, by the way, for a reason Microsoft's never figured out (as is painfully shown by their misfired ad attempts): the PC guy is the LIKEABLE one. You FEEL for the PC guy. You so want to help him out by getting him a Mac, so he can supplant that damn Mac guy and shove his slacker-cool ass off the pristine screen.
JP Carter, I have to take your word as an inhabitant of Olathe that it can be "a bit backward" there but the rest of your statement is a little puzzling when put against the text of the word balloon shown. The complaint was about the book being "derogatory toward African-Americans, women and the developmentally disabled"...a criticism more likely to come from the lips of the PC Police than the kind of folks you portray in your paragraph. Sad.
I have a tradition that whenever I'm on the ride and am passing the "treasure room" part, I pitch a coin onto the piles and add to the pirate treasure.
Um...this could also be interpreted to mean that people who sit up straight are more egotistical or self-deluding. I think I'd rather hang out with the slouchers, myself.
"The 62-year-old's defence of the apostrophe comes after Birmingham council announced it would scrap the punctuation from council signs for the sake of 'simplicity'."
So his paintbrush-wielding was not a reaction to a language's natural evolution but to bureaucratic interference. Huzzah!
I've been tempted to join the Apostrophe Posse myself at times, though my fantasies never stretched beyond strategically placed Post-it Notes -- not only to add the needed but to obscure the unnecessary (the so-called "greengrocers' apostrophes"). And sometimes to add a curl to a straight hatchmark being used as an apostrophe (but that's a typographical issue, not a grammatical one)...
Speaking of sign augmentation/vandalism.... There was a Los Angeles artist, Richard Ankrom, who added on to a overhead freeway sign on the 110 to show the proper lane to be in to make the transition to the 5 North. In broad daylight, wearing appropriate construction-worker gear, trying to match style and color as exactly as possible. Caltrans decided to keep it up!
I myself am agnostic and fervently believe in the ability to be moral without a God-monitor, but I find the dump-on-Christianity screeds irritating and disingenuous. "Hitler was a Christian!" That makes as much sense as me defending my meat-eating by screaming "Hitler was a vegetarian!" Japanese may be among the most peace-loving of folk...but you wouldn't have thought so in Nanking in December 1937. Etc.
Horrible things have been done in the name of one religion or the other; horrible things have been done in the name of a lot of other things than religion. Guess what, we're humans, and really really good at justifying our bad behavior to ourselves.
I enjoy the Mac commercials, by the way, for a reason Microsoft's never figured out (as is painfully shown by their misfired ad attempts): the PC guy is the LIKEABLE one. You FEEL for the PC guy. You so want to help him out by getting him a Mac, so he can supplant that damn Mac guy and shove his slacker-cool ass off the pristine screen.
Especially since there's a commercial for PBS based on the exact same idea.
So his paintbrush-wielding was not a reaction to a language's natural evolution but to bureaucratic interference. Huzzah!
I've been tempted to join the Apostrophe Posse myself at times, though my fantasies never stretched beyond strategically placed Post-it Notes -- not only to add the needed but to obscure the unnecessary (the so-called "greengrocers' apostrophes"). And sometimes to add a curl to a straight hatchmark being used as an apostrophe (but that's a typographical issue, not a grammatical one)...
Speaking of sign augmentation/vandalism.... There was a Los Angeles artist, Richard Ankrom, who added on to a overhead freeway sign on the 110 to show the proper lane to be in to make the transition to the 5 North. In broad daylight, wearing appropriate construction-worker gear, trying to match style and color as exactly as possible. Caltrans decided to keep it up!