Some Blog Site

Here are some thoughts I jotted down that aren’t quite sufficient for their own individual blog posts. If you’re the type of person who likes Twitter, pretend each of these is a tweet.

• Why do only certain ingredients get an explanation for why they are there? Ascorbic acid is there for freshness – okay, good to know. But why is xanthan gum there? Why is it only the freshness ingredients that get an explanation? I’d like to know the purpose of each ingredient.
• Aloe is the houseplant equivalent of sourdough starter. You take care of it, and it multiplies, and you give it away. You never use it for the purpose you got it for, it’s just something to give away to friends.
• Shouldn’t the mean person be the “buller” and the picked-on person be the “bullee”?
• How does anyone move, if their house is contingent on sale? It seems like an endless loop – the buyer is waiting for their house to sell, whose buyers are waiting for their house to sell, whose buyers are waiting for their house to sell, etc.
• It seems to me that law firms and accounting firms should have a level higher than “partner”. Everyone tries to make partner, but I never hear about what comes after that. My proposal: spouse.

Who decides what groups of things are called?

I saw one of those lists of odd names for groups of animals, like a clowder of kittens, and wondered why that name stuck.

And what does one have to do to propose a name for a group of things when that group doesn’t have a specific name yet. I’ve tried to find an animal that doesn’t have a collective noun, but everyone has already thought of all the animals I could think of.

Let me know if you can not find a certain animal that a website somewhere doesn’t already have or propose a collective noun.

Then I noticed that there are terms only for living things. I thought there might be an opportunity to name a group of something not living. But what non-living things gather in groups?

Clouds! – clouds can gather in groups, maybe. Certainly not intentionally, but the wind might corral them in one place sometimes. Alas, a quick search on the interwebs informed me that “a billow of clouds” has been proposed.

Dust bunnies also gather in groups, but I figured they’d be called “a colony” because regular bunnies already use that term.

Other things that gather in groups are N64 game cartridges, cereal boxes, comic books, and pillows.

I supposed one could create and propose group names for each of those items, plus countless other inanimate objects. The only one that I was inspired to name was for pillows. In keeping with the spirit of some of the other collective terms (a blessing of unicorns, an intrusion of cockroaches, a flamboyance of flamingoes, etc.), I am proposing that a group of pillows be called a “puddle”.

No real reason, that was just the term that popped into my head. After “pile”, but “pile” was not really memorable.

There you go – a group of pillows is called a puddle.

So let it be written.

Certain words have a connotation of a level or degree of the idea. For example: worthless is worth-less, the quality is “worth” and the level or degree is low. Another example: eventful is event-full, the action is “event” and the level is high.

I like to take words at face value. And the same with suffixes. The suffix -less should mean less or lower, -some should be medium, and -ful (or -full) should mean more or higher.

And then, because English is so convoluted, a lot of words use those suffixes in the wrong way.

“Awesome” is the one I like for an example of how wrong it is. For this set of words, the quality of awe can have three modifiers to indicate little awe (unimpressive), much awe (impressive), or a moderate amount of awe (umm, pressive). In my world, these would be aweless, aweful, and awesome. But for some reason, “awesome” means full of awe, and “awful” does not mean full of awe, and no one uses “aweless”.

Other candidate: “ruthless” which means lacking ruth. If we take “ruth” to mean “pity”, then someone who is very compassionate should be called “ruthful”. And an average person could be ruthsome.

Another one: “winsome” which means a high level of attractive appearance. It should be “winful”, and someone ugly or mean could be called “winless”.

There are other words with the wrong suffix, but I’ll leave the rest of those as an exercise for the reader.

Except this last one, which doesn’t fix the category because it’s a prefix.

“Extraordinary” – technically, “extra” means outside of, like extraterrestrial. But my first thought is usually that it should mean “more ordinary”, like an extra helping of ordinariness. What I’d like to see is the use of its opposite “intraordinary”. And while we’re at it, how about some extramural sports in college?

Here are some thoughts I jotted down that aren’t quite sufficient for their own individual blog posts. If you’re the type of person who likes Twitter, pretend each of these is a tweet.

• I think you could take the debate from when any particular state decided to start or stop making motorcycle helmet use mandatory (for those riding motorcycles), replace “helmet” with “mask” and “motorcycle rider” with “person in a public space” and you’d get a pretty close approximation to today’s Covid-19 transcripts.
• I see the NFL players can get paid for sitting out the season due to reasons of coronavirus. Good for them, but what about us NFL fans? Can I get something if I sit out the season?
• Why does no one ever have to do something goodly? It’s always along the lines of “I need a chocolate bar real bad” or “I have to go potty really badly”. If “badly” indicates a substantial desire, what would “goodly” indicate? Side note: there are small children who do a bad job of going potty, but that’s not what they meant.
• One thing that annoys me is that any paperwork that asks for my health insurance information never uses the same wording that’s on my insurance card. The paperwork will ask for policy number and account number, but I have group number and subscriber ID. Or vice versa. There are so many terms that they rarely line up. I would like a standardized format. On the other hand, I’ve learned it doesn’t really matter which number I put down, as long as it’s on my card.
• The best Blizzard at Dairy Queen is the French Silk Pie. They took it off the menu a while ago, but the good locations will still make it if you ask.

In science class, you should have learned about the conservation of energy. Or the conservation of matter. Or both – they’re connected anyway.

Matter can be neither created nor destroyed. Same for energy – it can change forms but that’s it.

For some reason, I got to thinking “why?” Science can answer the “how” question quite well, describe it with equations, but the “why” is iffy at best. Most of the answers are along the lines of “that’s a fundamental/basic law of physics”. Science describes how things are, and can answer “why” questions that are really more a form of “how” questions.

I did come up with a reason why energy and matter have to be conserved – because only God can create. That might be more of a theological answer than you were expecting, but when scientists say “that’s just how things are” then theology is all that’s left. Of course, theology applies before that point too – it’s not mutually exclusive with the rest of science.

But if it were possible to create matter or create energy, then people could consider themselves creators and that would reduce the honor and glory due God as The Creator.

And of course, a number of theological discussion of why some things are they way they are also end up the same way as the scientists’ questions of why – because that’s how God set it up. The non-Christians might use a term such as “fundamental law of the universe”, but doesn’t that really mean the same thing as “because God said so”?

An interesting rabbit trail related to this is one’s soul. If a person does not have a soul until he physically exists, then at some point (i.e. conception) his soul must be created. But since the soul is neither matter nor energy, no laws of conservation were broken.

Here are some thoughts I jotted down that aren’t quite sufficient for their own individual blog posts. If you’re the type of person who likes Twitter, pretend each of these is a tweet.

• We got something that was in a tamper-proof box, and was labelled as such and conveyed that it was an important package. I think that’s the wrong approach. I would rather the sender of such an item try to go unnoticed, fly below the radar. Put something bland and useless on the outside, so as not to be enticing to others. Like “Oatmeal” or “Wart Remover” or just no description.
• Why is the word “beheaded”? Should it be “be-not-headed”? Or maybe “deheaded”, like “decapitated”.
• I saw a sign that said “Life is short, so eat more dessert.” It was probably in a candy store or something. But my thought was they got it backwards. Your life is short because you’re eating too much dessert. If you took better care of your body by eating less dessert, maybe your life wouldn’t be so short.
• There is no shortage of articles about how Warren Buffett and Bill Gates think rich people should pay more taxes. They want the government to change tax laws so that certain people pay more taxes. Those two guys have pledged to give a bunch of money to charity. If they think the government is in need of more money, why didn’t they give their money to the government? Actions speak louder than words – they know the government isn’t the best use of money. They should be advocating for more charitable donation writeoffs.
• “Lisp” is a bad word to pronounce for someone with a lisp. I thought that was bad, then I learned the word for having trouble pronouncing the letter L is “lambdacism”. But the word for a specific type of lambdacism is “lallation”. It’s like they’re making it as bad as possible for those people to say their own condition. The letter R – “rhotacism”. At least they didn’t name anything “rarrism” for people who have trouble with R.

Around here, there are a lot of red-winged blackbirds. They usually look like this:

Fun fact: all the red-winged blackbirds you see are males. The females are a dappled sort of brown and white. I saw one once. I keep looking for more, but the males are all around the pond by the road and the females are nowhere to be seen. Maybe because they blend in better or maybe because they don’t go out and about as much – I don’t know.

And I don’t normally get a good view of them flying, so that side profile is the one I usually imagine if I’m picturing a red-winged blackbird.

For good measure, here is a view of a red-winged blackbird with his wings out.

I do like red-winged blackbirds, and I also like SR-71 blackbirds. So I thought I’d combine the two.

Behold, the red-winged SR-71 blackbird:

I think it never caught on because normally if military planes have any particular colors, they are the colors of their country. In that case, these planes might have been mistaken for being from Spain or Catalonia, or from Liechtenstein 200 years prior.