unspeak

here's a blog that disassembles the words of dissemblers: steven poole's unspeak.net. his book just came out, and i'm afraid the too-convenient barnes & noble will get my money again because i really want to read it. poole, who writes for the guardian, does an orwell-style dissection of common sound bites—'climate change,' 'war on terror,' 'muslim community'—to reveal the partisan viewpoints bound up in them. entire chapters are devoted to 'freedom' and 'terror,' and poole also pays attention to more minute shifts in idiom—e.g., how using 'asylum seekers' for 'refugees' shifts the emphasis 'from what a person was fleeing to the demands he was making on the country he arrived in.'

as for the blog, the may 18 entry on global warming is rote, but the previous ones on 'islamic terrorism' and 'turning points' are really sharp.

because the nyt won't print the word 'cooter'

from the below-mentioned "war on contraception" article:

"The linking of abortion and contraception is indicative of a larger agenda, which is putting sex back into the box, as something that happens only within marriage." —William Smith, vice president for public policy, Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States.

back in the box, eh?

guess that's what the anti-gay activists are going for, too.

p.s.

i've committed the folly of backposting. scroll down to april 18 if you want to see something old but new. man, it's like april 18 is dead but now all these illuminating letters from it are coming out posthumously.

almost done

last week, from sunday to saturday, i wrote about 7500 words. i have maybe 1500-2000 to go, plus an internship application that is making me nervous as hell, before wednesday, when ed and i leave for germany. 2 classes down, 1 to go, and maybe i can finally drink that bottle of prosecco on top of (oops—now in) my fridge, waiting since the last time i did craploads of work but couldn't pause for more than a day before beginning anew.

from friday morning to yesterday at 4pm, with a pause somewhere in there for 3 hours of sleep, i wrote my anthropologie piece. i think it's a good draft and i'm excited about it. i cracked open a beer at 3, once i knew it was safe and had the ending cinched. there are only two kinds of papers that call for beers in the home stretch: really good ones and really bad ones.

then, in honor of anthropologie, i put on a dress and went to manhattan to drink a gin & tonic before heading to a rooftop barbecue. i was in bed by 11, tho, and every time i got close to sleep, i'd start trying to edit the random sentences that were running through my head. i remember having lots of trouble with subordinating clauses. then i'd get frustrated and remember i was finished with my article. this happened maybe 5 times before i fell asleep. it was just like in high school, when i'd spend all week studying and when i was finally finished and sleeping over at my friend's house, i'd be falling asleep and scrambling to list the 4 main functions of the judiciary branch and their significance.

anyway, hooray for spring, which i have completely missed, and on to read the sunday times. i'm glad someone has finally done the article on the war on contraception, even tho i almost can't bear to read it.

also: thankyoustephencolbert.org has 51,524 thank-yous as of this posting. mine was 37,840 or something, and that was on wednesday. it'd be way cool if it got to 100,000.

this has been a post about numbers.