Line by line artistry

I stumbled across this wonderful series about how to draw in the New York Times. It almost makes me want to learn how to draw. Instead, I will probably just write something for my mother to illustrate.

The Gossamer Promise

A very angry Melissa McEwan rants about George W Bush appearing on Jay Leno.

While I thought "THIS WATER IS SO WET AND THIS SNOW IS SO COLD" was great, it was this paragraph quoting from her earlier work that caught my eye.

All jokes aside, when I write about how the Republicans are able to trade on "the gossamer promise of a return to a time that never happened in a country that never really existed," because this country reimagines its own history to make it something less horrible than it was, this it how it happens. This interview, in all seriousness, this little slice of pop culture fluff, is how begins the erasure of the authentic legacy of the Bush years, how we collectively start to willfully forget the history we are thus doomed to repeat.

disjunctive lists, ampersands, alphabets, etc

Language Log discussed what to use for a list of disjuncts instead of etc.

Etc., as almost everyone knows, abbreviates the Latin et cetera, so it means "and other things". Once you know that, it feels wrong to write something like The cause is typically rain, snow, or wind, etc., if you want to cover other such weather effects that you may not have thought of, as alternatives to be added to the list of disjuncts. You don't want to be taken as saying that the cause is typically both (i) either rain or snow or wind and (ii) some additional things you have not specified at all.

(vel sim seems to be winning in the comments)

This is a good time to note that I had mostly forgotten that an ampersand actually comes from a ligature of "et" meaning "and". (Which I first ever encountered trying to figure out why someone had written "&c" for "etc".

And speaking of how you choose to write things, they also discuss yet another battle over what alphabet should be used in Central Asia.

Guaranteed income and some TSA madness

Taken from mzrowan, The guaranteed minimum income is back. As the headline says, the primary idea here is "do you trust the poor?"; a question all too many answer with a resounding "No". I find it amazing to even see this brought up here given the Conservative government in Canada and the fact that the GOP practically runs their platform on "undeserving people are getting help and making everything worse".

Since we're talking money, This idea for fiscal sustainability sounds wrong but then I know lots of things come out of macro that are counter-intuitive and the idea that we could be trapped by a piece of legacy legislation seems perfectly reasonable.

Rick Mercer does TSA security.