Am-Dram 2.0

That was cool. Kudos to those who thought of it and pulled it off, though maybe they should have done one about (illegal) aliens!
I’m just going to leave a link here for other readers;
https://www.crcpress.com/Gender-and-Drone-Warfare-A-Hauntological-Perspective/Clark/p/book/9781138580275
I stumbled upon it accidentally and thought it a joke, until of course a quick google trawl revealed a rich vein of academic research in the field.
The West is truly screwed..

Classic rendition of ‘he’s right behind you!’ pantomime-style acting.
Yes, but with face-huggers.

Matt Taibbi:

There was never real gray area here. Either Trump is a compromised foreign agent, or he isn’t. If he isn’t, news outlets once again swallowed a massive disinformation campaign, only this error is many orders of magnitude more stupid than any in the recent past, WMD included. Honest reporters like ABC’s Terry Moran understand: Mueller coming back empty-handed on collusion means a “reckoning for the media.”
Of course, there won’t be such a reckoning. (There never is). But there should be. We broke every written and unwritten rule in pursuit of this story, starting with the prohibition on reporting things we can’t confirm.

It was better than ‘Prometheus’….

It was better than Prometheus
To be honest, Bugs Bunny in ‘Mad As A Mars Hare’ was better than Prometheus.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3pzldj

Never saw Promethius, for which I understand I should be thankful, but it definitely is much, much better than yet another rendition of Our Town.

Honest reporters like ABC’s Terry Moran understand: Mueller coming back empty-handed on collusion means a “reckoning for the media.”
I haven’t seen this much emoting over “nothing” since Geraldo and Al Capone’s Vault.

Very cool school play! Hats off the students & adults with the creativity for costumes and sets out of nothing. I went to high school long before these movies were out, or social media. But we did tweak a play so playfully we got onto the front page of the entertainment section of the Los Angeles Times and sold out all performances by 10 am that morning.
Heady stuff.

We broke every written and unwritten rule in pursuit of this story, starting with the prohibition on reporting things we can’t confirm.
Taibbi couldn’t confirm Jackie Coakley’s story, but published it anyway.

Well, there it is. The wailing and rending of garments that started Friday will now be dialed to 11.

If this elementary spelling and grammar quiz, supposedly from the ‘80’s, really did defeat half the quiz-takers, the English language and its speakers are in big trouble.
It reminded me of the prep lessons for A-levels at school, in which we’d be faced with a sample exam paper from previous years. Whenever the paper in question was more than three or four years old, half the class would groan, without fail, every time. Because they knew that an exam from, say, eight or nine years earlier would be noticeably harder than a contemporary one.
That was in the ‘80s.

Darleen, for who/whom recast the sentence with he/him. ‘He” is who, ‘him’ is ‘whom.’
Who/whom kissed her? Well, you can’t say ‘Him kissed her,’ you have to say ‘He kissed her,’ so it’s ‘who.’

What gets me about those videos from the play are the audience reactions. Gasps, screams…. that’s peak theatre, that is. Arts council funded national theatre troupes can go for years without ever experiencing reactions like that. Top work.

So this (software thus not really a real) engineer got 16/20. Though I protest the whole effected/affected thing is BS. Also, though not covered on the test, wtf with speech and speak/speaker being spelled like that is complete BS and thus a disqualifier for the entire grammer nazi establishment’s supposed credentials. Y’all have had a century or more to fix thar BS and yet it persists.
Also, as dear old Dad used to say, “I don’t know how to spell engineer, but I are one”.

Oh, also… I may have missed a memo or had this wrong in the first place but didn’t the past tense of plead use to be plead, like with read (reeeed) and read (red)? Why does pleaded look wrong to me? Again, I don’t know how to spell engineer…

WTP, the past tense of “plead” used to be “pled,” like lead/led.
As for the period outside the quotation marks – why? It belongs to the sentence, no? Same way as if you quote a question:
“Why does pleaded look wrong to me?” you asked.
vs.
You say that you “don’t know how to spell engineer”? Why not?

Alex, my gripe is does the punctuation belong to the quote or to the sentence as a whole? It’s convenience, I’ll grant you that. But it parses out of context. What is the correct punctuation for the following, granted awkward, sentences…
Did Mary say , “Lorem ipsum. Where’s the beef?”
Did Mary say, “Lorem ipsum. There’s the beef”?
Why shouldn’t the punctuation that belongs with the quote stay inside the quote? Yes, a .”? looks awkward to us but isn’t that just a factor of what we have grown used to, thus why is it incorrect while actually, syntactically parsing clearer? And yet the awkward speech/speak thing persists.
And on top of all that, let me once again remind y’all that literally no longer literally means literally.

English is the product of a Norman warrior trying to make a date with an Anglo-saxon bar-maid, and as such is no more legitimate than any of the other products of that conversation.

—H. Beam Piper, Fuzzy Sapiens.

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

—James Nicoll

Capital letters: the difference between helping your Uncle Jack off a horse and helping your uncle jack off a horse.

and,
Attention toilet only for disabled elderly pregnant children

Morning, all.

Via Obnoxio.

Yes. Because my insomnia isn’t giving me enough trouble as it is.
You’re checking the opening times of the nearest chic salon, aren’t you?
You’re among friends. We won’t judge.

Struggling with unfamiliar pronunciation is racist, apparently. Please update your files and lifestyles accordingly.

You’re killing me here. Literally.
Listening to the interview, the vanity and neuroticism are hard to miss. And the ladies appear oblivious to how they seem.
And these attitudes, these teetering vanities, are encouraged and cultivated.
It’s interesting how the grievances of the recreationally indignant – these self-regarding young women who wear victimhood like jewellery – almost always read as an assertion of class status. As if a modestly-paid coffee-shop worker, with whom they interact for a few seconds, should somehow automatically divine the unobvious pronunciation of an unfamiliar name, and then remember it, forever, despite interacting with hundreds of people every day, and having lives and priorities of their own.
We’ve been here before, of course.

I think that one deserves a post of its own.

“inflammable” was confusing and led too many people to think these materials were not flammable.
Oh, don’t get me started onthe misuse of “infamous”. Or wtf in- is the way it is.

people just liked it better that way.
So we should blame the Muslims? /deadpan facial expression

Heh . . .
. . . Istanbul not Constantinople. . .

First, a couple of niggling details. Istanbul IS Constantinople; the name hasn’t changed. ‘Istanbul’ is just the Turkish pronunciation of the old Greek popular name for the city, ‘Stamboul.’ (The Turkish language does not like words to start with two consonants.)