Oopsie! Church edition.

Advent is under way, and I was glad to be in church yesterday for it. It took a little intestinal fortitude to do so, mainly because the week before I had sorta put the congregation in danger of seeing something attached to my intestines. That is to say, my fly was open and I didn't realize it until I got home. 

When I was a kid, an incident like that would have made me want to crawl under the bed and stay there until, well, my current age. A sure sign of maturity is that it isn't like that now. Not that I don't kick myself for old mistakes -- I most certainly do, usually when I awaken in the middle of the night -- but silly things like forgetting to XYZ before leaving the house? Not so much. 

It's unclear whether my exposure was even visible. I had been wearing a drapey shirt (a shent, I guess), and I was wearing black undies rather than white (which I might have been, as I do own a couple of pairs of classic tighties). That is to say, the black shorts may have been hard to notice even if they were not covered by my shirttails. 

No one said anything. I think the deacon gave me a look, but he's a retired cop so he probably gives everyone that look anyway. 

Besides, it'd be far from the most embarrassing thing I've ever seen in church. I've seen a lector who accidently started reading the Gospel (the priest or deacon has to do that); I've seen people drop the Host (big no-no); I've seen a nun and a priest trying to get the symbolic robe on a newly baptized adult and working at cross-purposes until it looked like they were taking a hostage; and of course -- an all-time classic -- I heard a lector introduce a reading from the Letter of St. Paul to the Philippines. Wherever there are people, there can be embarrassing stuff. A little flagging fly ain't much of anything. 

Really, I've seen far more embarrassing things per capita everywhere else. Schools, clubs, bars, offices, public transportation, supermarkets, press conferences -- pound for pound, these have far more embarrassing incidents than church. It's just the reverence in church that makes them stand out more.

Anyway, Advent is here, and that's nice. I feel like I'm well behind my neighbors. They all seem to have completed all their decorations by last Thursday. But I'm not going to rush myself in getting the job done. That's how you wind up hanging off the roof by a string of lights. Talk about embarrassing!

Leaf 'em be.

Actual leaf

Things I have thought were a leaf on the lawn, but were not, or vice versa:

Garter snake

Turtle

Sock (not my own)

Pine cone

Knitted cap

Fast-food bag

Dog toy

Banana peel

Hair scrunchie (not my own)

Dog poop

Bear poop

Wallet

Phone

Another actual leaf (even sneakier)

And then Einstein told me...

I've mentioned before that the most frustrating part of fact-checking work -- real fact-checking, not rubberstamping opinion, as the Washington Post does -- is checking quotations. Writers cull quotations from exceptionally unreliable sites like BrainyQuote all the time. They don't even care if the quote is true. What matters is that it illustrates the writer's own point and sounds like it comes from someone much brighter than the writer or the reader. 

That second bit is where the real trouble starts. For example, say I was writing an article on the modern view of religion, a topic for which one might expect a learned readership largely immune to boredom. And say I want to use an interesting quote from Charles Peirce, founder of Pragmatism, who noted that "a pseudo-evolutionism which enthrones mechanical law above the principle of growth, is at once scientifically unsatisfactory, as giving no possible hint of how the universe has come about, and hostile to all hopes of personal relations to God." Well, most readers, even those who read The New Yorker (maybe especially them, these days), would have no idea who Charles Peirce was, and so the impact of the quote would be diminished, even by taking the time to explain Peirce and his connection to the topic. 

BUT! I attribute his thoughts to Einstein, and everyone smiles and goes on his merry way, both educated and miseducated at a stroke.

Poor Einstein is a particular case. He's misquoted more than anyone else I know, more than Churchill, Lincoln, Hemingway, Warren Buffett, and Oprah combined. Here are some quotes commonly attributed to the late professor that he did not say, according to our friend at Quote Investigator: 

"Any Fool Can Know. The Point Is to Understand."

"The Search for Truth Is More Precious Than Its Possession."

"Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results."

NOT EINSTEIN!

I bring this up because a month or so ago I was asked to fact-check a series of health-related articles that turned out to be very easy. The information was all pretty well documented and not controversial. I spent far more time sourcing and mostly disproving quotations the author had inserted. It was not even why they asked me to do the job, I'm sure, but it turned out to be the most expensive part -- for them. I got paid by the hour.

Since people refuse to consult Bartlett's Familiar Quotations or the Oxford one or even The Ultimate Quotable Einstein before they throw around quotations, I decided: That's it. I quit. I too am going to make up quotes and slap them on Albert Einstein, or as his personal friends like me called him, Cheech. Here's an anecdote with a 100% fake quote:

One day I said to Einstein, "Cheech, that chick in Accounts Payable is a knockout. I've got to get her number."

The great professor looked me in the eyes sadly. He put his hands on my shoulders, and said, "I musht tell you a piece of advice I got from mine own grandfather. He vuss a genius, maybe schmarter than me. You vould do vell to listen to him, ja?"

"What was it?"

"I had a shimilar problem vhen I vuss young like you unt asked him vhat to do. He said to me, very solemnly, 'Al, Tauchen Sie Ihren Stift nicht in das Tintenfass des Unternehmens.'"

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"Don't dip your pen in the company inkvell."   

Feel free to use the story, pass it around, put it in your doctoral thesis, whatever. Scientific papers are loaded with junk citations now. No one cares anymore! Everyone is happier with lies, so why be different?

Anti-cooking tip.

I don't know if you've ever made a recipe using prosciutto crudo, but if you ever do, don't do the stupid thing I did. 

Ah, yes, that delightful Italianate baconesque smoked pig, razor-thin slices of which are often found wrapped around melon, topped on bruschetta, or infusing salty wonder into recipes like this one. If you've ever eaten it, you know it's the best thing to come out of Italy since Marconi. If you've ever prepared a dish with it, you might be able to guess what double-dumbass thing I did. 

So there I am, cooking away, the prosciutto sitting patiently in its packaging on the counter, waiting to be chopped and then make its big entrance into the pan. When there's a break in the action I peel open the airtight plastic, and -- thinking this was like ordinary bacon -- I take my sharp little paring knife and zip zap zup run a crisscross pattern over the ham, cutting through all the slices. 

And also the razor-thin plastic sheet that separates each slice. 

Now, instead of peeling each bit of porcine goodness off the plastic sheet by sheet, I have to peel each tiny square off a tiny square of plastic -- and with the numerous slices in a three-ounce pack, that means maybe a hundred tiny squares. And I have to work fast, before everything gets cold or wilted and the pasta turns into a solid lump. Prosciutto sticks to plastic like a bum on a guy who's buying, and I have very short fingernails, and this turns into a production quickly. I'd ask my wife for help, but this is a woman who won't eat fish because of the one-in-a-thousand shot of getting a fishbone, so I'm thinking if she knows she might get a little piece of plastic stuck in her throat, that's going to put a damper on dinner. So I peel, peel, peel, cursing myself for a fool like Mr. T at a Fool Convention. 

The thing is, this was far from the first time I've ever used prosciutto, and I was well aware of the plastic between the slices, but I forgot just long enough to make this boneheaded error. 

Somehow I manage to get all the plastic off the prosciutto and serve the dinner with no incident.

Then she mentions that the dish is very salty; maybe it would be better without the prosciutto. 

I hang my head. My work here is done. 

Everyone makes mistakes.

 

The sandwich of sin.

Many years ago on a Friday night of drinking, we lads staggered into Subway to get some needed sustenance. My Irish-descended pal I'll call Jim got his favorite, the roast beef with all the toppings. He was a big man, and hungry. We all sat down to dig in. Just as Jim was about to tuck the end of that delicious meaty hoagie into his chewing apparatus, a mutual (and Jewish) friend said, "I thought you weren't supposed to eat meat on Fridays in Lent."

Jim froze in shock, and started to make frustrated alarm noises like a man having a seizure of some kind -- an angry seizure, that is. He'd either forgotten it was Lent or thought it was Saturday. He dropped his food with disgust.

This story is not that story, although they both involve takeout sandwiches and Lent. This is how I stole a sandwich during this solemn season. It did not happen in my misspent youth, as with Jim's misfortune; it happened Sunday night. 

 

The Sandwich of Shame

This time the place was Panera, not Subway. We like their sandwiches and soup, the latter especially on a cold day, as Sunday was. The only problem is that they keep screwing up orders. Every sandwich has a lot of components, and my wife likes to exercise options on the ingredients, so while I'm very careful about what is in the order I place, they have not always been so careful about what they actually put on the sandwich. Maybe their system is too complicated for a fast-food place. I have to say I've seldom seen the same employees in there twice. Big turnover means constant training and endless rookie mistakes. 

This time, we got someone else's sandwich in addition to the ones I ordered. 

I didn't check order as I often do, so I didn't find out until I got home. Then I felt bad. The Panera is not close to our house, so there didn't seem to be any point to driving back; by now they'd have had to make a new sandwich for the person whose food I got. If I reported the error with apologies to the Panera site, it would just expose the employee to reprimand. I guess I could have run out in the street and handed the sandwich to a homeless guy, but one of the key points of living in suburbia is that one is not surrounded by mendicants at all hours of the day. Also, it was a little late, and even the bums would have eaten by that time.

So I put it in the fridge and ate it for lunch on Monday. No point in compounding my shame by wasting perfectly good food. Yes, I felt a little guilty, but I also felt full, which helps ease the inflamed conscience.

Fred's Book Club: Right on the Pea Stain.

Greetings and salutations on this Hump Day, my friends, as we dive into another book in the Humpback Writers feature. Do the writers actually have hunched backs? Not that I'm aware of. We just went with the Humpback theme for Hump Day and now we regret it. Still, if you know of any writers who suffer from kyphosis, or are actual humpback whales, please alert me. 

This week's book celebrates the wonderful inability of people to understand the mumbling and bumbling of modern singers, or just the inability of people to listen properly to anything. Yes, we are discussing mondegreens. Webster's defines the mondegreen as "a word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said or sung," which comes "from the mishearing in a Scottish ballad of 'laid him on the green' as 'Lady Mondegreen'." And this book will convince you that people are very poor earwitnesses.

'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy: And Other Misheard Lyrics is a fine collection of comically misheard words by author Gavin Edwards, who began collecting them for a piece in the now-defunct Details magazine. The title of our blog entry today comes from a mishearing of Cat Stevens's "Ride on the Peace Train." 

In the introduction to the book, Edwards writes, mondegreens "tend to be about primal concerns: food, sex, animals. Any misheard lyric is an impromptu audio Rorschach test. It can be alarming to discover that significant parts of our brains want pop songs to cover the lyrical topics of cheese, walruses, and clowns." He swears that all the mondegreens in this book are genuine, in that people really reported believing these were the actual lyrics of well-known songs.

Here are some classics from the pages, illustrated by collaborator Chris Kalb, with the correct lyric below:

Others that I'm sure you can guess include "Slow-Motion Walter, fire-engine guy" (Deep Purple), "Mice aroma" (the Knack), "Clown Control to Mao Tse-Tung" (David Bowie), and "Everybody's got a hungry horse" (Bruce Springsteen). 

Gavin Edwards has written many other books, including three more collections of mondegreens: He's Got the Whole World in His Pants, When a Man Loves a Walnut, and the inevitable Christmas collection, Deck the Halls with Buddy Holly. We applaud Edwards for helping popularize the idea of mondegreens, and promoting some classic examples with his writing. It's a true cultural contribution. 

Or, as the band Hot Chocolate once sang, at least according to this book, "I believe in milk and cows." And who can argue with that?

Golden sings.

Fifth day of Christmas and what do we get? 

This is not my Smudge meme, but surely we've all screwed up lyrics, by accident or on purpose or maybe both. 

I've related my soap story about "Jingle Bells" before, how Child Fred had barely any idea what a sleigh was, let alone an open sleigh or worse a one-horse sleigh, so I would sing loudly, as kids do when they're not asked to sing, "Oh, what fun it is to ride in a one horse soap and sleigh!" But I could not figure out where the soap came in. As it turns out, soap may be used in place of wax to protect runners on sleds and make them slippery, and I presume on sleighs as well, so I may have been onto something unwittingly. 

But that's a classic mondegreen. A more purposeful Christmas mis-sing was related by Dave Barry in his novel The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog. The narrator, a boy dragooned into playing a Wise Man in the pageant, had a hard time not laughing when friend and fellow Wise Man Mike would sing "We three kings of Orient are / Smoking on a rubber cigar." And Mrs. Elkins would get mad.

Another I recall from a kids book, I think it was in the Mrs. Coverlet series, featured "Good King Wence's car backed out / On a piece of Stephen."  

"Jingle Bells" alone seems to bring out the lyricist in young children, who have over the years taught us with the song that Batman smells and what fun it is to ride in a beat-up Chevrolet, among other lessons.

But the accidental words often come from circumstances like my soap issue, where I just didn't understand what was being said so I applied what I did know to the sounds. 

One time in junior high I was in a chorus that was planning to attempt the "Gloria in excelsis Deo" for a concert involving multiple schools. I do not know if it was Bach's or Handel's or one of Vivaldi's or someone else's; I've listened to them and they didn't sound like ours, which was probably our fault.

As a public-school kid I'd never heard much Latin before, and being presented with a choral piece in which all the words were in Latin was a shock. To this day I can still hear the public school music teacher with the midwestern twang working through the tenor part with us:

Gloria in excelsis Deo
et in terra pax hominibus
bonae voluntatis.
Laudamus te
benedicimus te
adoramus te
glorificamus te!

Fortunately for me and for the choir, fate intervened that year and I had to drop out. I don't recall why but I don't think it was my idea. In any event it saved the choir from hearing me resort to Pig Latin in desperation.

Years later I heard the "peanut butter and jelly" trick. Supposedly, if you're singing a choral arrangement and are in danger of forgetting the words, the tip says to sing "peanut butter and jelly" instead. Your words will blend in with the correct words until you find your place, and meanwhile your voice is still heard. I immediately imagined that public school choir, faced with the Gloria in Latin, hearing that tip and resorting to it en masse:

Peanut buh Ter in Jel-LEE
Peanut butter pax in jellybooss
Peanut butter jeh LEE

I decided that it actually works better on the Hallelujah Chorus:

PEAnut BUTter
PEAnut BUTter
And JELly
And JELly
And Jeh heh heh LEEEEE

Mostly these days I keep my singing to when I'm alone in the car. Safer that way.

Stupid, stupid clue.

One night last week I was sleeping peacefully, or as peacefully as I do with a bad back and a minuscule bladder, when suddenly my eyes popped open. I was as awake as if someone had set off an M-80 in the washing machine downstairs. 

THE CLUE.

This is such a stupid thing, but it shows how the mind works, if it does, or when it bothers to, or whenever.  

I have been working on a new mystery novel for more than a year now, and was just starting in with another round of revisions. So far, so good; the changes were all cosmetic, to clarify scenes and characters, enhance mood, fix typos, things like that. What woke me up with a shock was a scene I had not even come across yet on this pass, but I realized all at once that I had made a mistake. 

I can't describe the problem, as it is crucial to the central mystery. But I realized when I woke up that by the situation as it was set up, I had left a vital clue in place at the crime scene where the police or the villains or the hero or anyone would have found it after the murder, and the book would have been shortened by two hundred pages and not even rated as a proper mystery short story, because the mystery would have been over just like that. 

I tried to go back to sleep, thinking I would deal with it in the morning, but I was afraid I would forget it. I thought it over for some time but had to admit it was a problem. In fact, I was shocked that I had made such an obvious blunder in a book I'd plotted with excruciating care. So I got up, went to my desk, made a note to myself in big letters on a large Post-it, and went back to bed. This all happened between a little after three and four. And I was still so awake from the plot-shock that I got barely any more sleep until wakey time at six.

Writing as a career or hobby sucks. Kite enthusiasts and model train railroaders almost never get awakened by panicked realizations in the night. 

FIX THE PLOT, FRED

Still, I'm glad I caught it now. Big-time writers get the red-carpet treatment; as many as a dozen people may read their books before they get to print, not counting friends and other beta-readers employed by the writers. Embarrassing errors can be caught. And if you think they're embarrassing when the proofreader catches them, imagine how much worse it is when the audience catches them.

Mostly, I'm glad I'm not a killer in real life. Not just because it's naughty, and not just because I'd sleep even worse than I do for fear of being caught, but because I would certainly leave vital clues at the crime scene. I'd race back to get the clue out of there and leave five more. No, I'd better stick to crime in print; mistakes are easier to fix there. 

No labor today.

Yes, I'm posting my photo of a hardworking laborer again for Labor Day.

You relax, kid; it's a holiday. I'm less concerned with people not working as to what happens when we do:

Regarding this meme that was making the rounds:

1) I'm afraid that Amy Winehouse is not a role model, someone from whom people ought to take advice, especially when it comes to screwing things up;

2) No one wants to hear "Oopsy!" and "That's why pencils have erasers" out of his brain surgeon, bridge engineer, pilot, or plumber;

3) I have had to swallow my pride and admit to many mistakes in my career, but I have never been cavalier about it, as this little meme would encourage me to be;

4) People who post this kind of thing want their mistakes to be overlooked, not to announce that they're hereby overlooking the mistakes of others.

Just my thoughts for the day; yours are welcome. Short dose of Vitamin Fred today; too lazy to do more.

😴

Bad covers.

Was talking about pop music with my wife, and she noted that while it's fun to hear musicians and bands take a crack at other people's hits, some combinations would be a Bad Idea.

I like hearing different takes on well-known songs. I've enjoyed records like Enjoy Every Sandwich (the Zevon tribute album) and To Cry You a Song (Jethro Tull tribute) and Saturday Morning Cartoons' Greatest Hits, for example, and at Christmastime we all hear miscellaneous idiots trying out Christmas classics. There's even some bits from the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band movie soundtrack that are worth listening to, although that's counterbalanced by all the bits that are so very, very much the opposite of worth listening to.

My bride and I were agreed, though, that it's a good thing that singers and groups have wisely steered clear of songs that would not have suited them. So we made a list of our top 20 covers that we're glad did not happen. And believe me, it was hard to stop at 20. Your contributions are most sincerely welcomed in comments.

In no particular order:


Aerosmith: "Yakety Sax" (Boots Randolph)

Stevie Nicks: "Shaddap You Face" (Joe Dolce)

Yes: "(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?" (Patti Page)

Barry White: "Woody Woodpecker Song" (Kay Kyser)

The Verve: "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)" (Rupert Holmes)

Stormtroopers of Death: "My Favorite Things" (The Sound of Music)

The Archies: "Run for Your Life" (The Beatles)

Bruce Springsteen: "Major-General's Song" (The Pirates of Penzance)

The Carpenters: "Animal (I F__ Like a Beast)" (W.A.S.P.)

Bing Crosby: "Black Dog" (Led Zeppelin)

The Crash Test Dummies: "All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth" (Spike Jones)

Iggy Azalea: "Honeymooners Rap" (Joe Piscopo)

Madonna: "Seasons in the Sun" (Terry Jacks)

Hank Williams Jr.: "Get Together" (The Youngbloods)

Whitesnake: "Daydream Believer" (The Monkees)

PSY: "Born in the USA" (Bruce Springsteen)

Taylor Swift: "Purple Haze" (Jimi Hendrix)

Mojo Nixon: "Be Our Guest" (Beauty and the Beast)

The Silver Platters: "Because I Got High" (Afroman)

Sonny & Cher: "Last Caress" (The Misfits)


(To be fair, some of these songs shouldn't have ever been released by anybody.)

Rushes.

The rushes, or film dailies, are the segments of film from a day's shooting, assembled to allow the director of a movie and others to view at the end of the day. Apparently the term "rushes" comes from the speed at which they were prepared in the past, so that they could be viewed soon after shooting was done for the day. That way, any necessary reshooting could be done the following day. It's still done, but with digital technology it's undoubtedly easier than when film had to be developed.

🎬🎥💑

I would like rushes of my days.

Seriously, I'd love to be able to sit down at the end of the day and review them. Then go back and reshoot what didn't work, or at least cut what went wrong. It might go something like this....

💬

"Okay, here's the scene where you start the day --"

"Ugh! Oh, no, that looks stupid. Checks the phone first thing? That makes the character look weak. We'll trim that out."

"All right... Here you're walking the dog..."

"Yeah, and that jackass blew his horn at us  -- wait, back that up. Shoot, that's the guy with the Dalmatian three blocks up. He was just saying hi? Okay, we'll have to cut the part where I give him the finger, and reshoot it as a wave."

"Nah, we can fix it with CGI. Okay, now to the desk."

"Jeez, who designed that set. What a mess."

"It's your desk."

"Yes, but I thought it would look smart-cluttered on film, or eccentric-cluttered. This just looks lazy-cluttered."

"Okay, maybe we reshoot tomorrow."

"Well... It's not like anything interesting happens in that scene."

"Let's have a look... There's a lot of typing and frowning at the laptop... Big lunge for the dictionary... Pretty dull."

"We have to keep that in, though, or I don't get paid."

"Looks like you're pounding out something."

"Yeesh, yeah, angry e-mail to an editor. Probably shouldn't have sent that. Adds drama but it'll hurt revenues, specifically mine. We'll cut that part."

"Like it didn't happen. Let's have a look here, at the scene with your wife. You were irritated at her."

"Yeah, but see? I look calm and collected here."

"Watch this. Where she asks you if you think the ChapStick that was in her coat from last year is still good?"

"Oh, yeah... To be fair, if I hadn't known we had a brand-new ChapStick in the medicine cabinet, I wouldn't have rubbed that one on my butt and tried to hand it back to her."

"Maybe if we punch up the dialogue? 'Feels good to me' is a little pedestrian."

"The whole scene is going to alienate the viewers."

"Let's leave it in and see how it tests."

"No, I want a rewrite. Way too much childish humor in this film. Tell the bullpen to get something to me tomorrow morning."

"Okay, don't sweat it. By the time we're done your wife won't be mad anymore and you will have had a good day. Wanna see the supermarket run? I know you had some concerns about wardrobe."

"Yeah, old Dad jeans versus new sweatpants. I mean, they're both bad, but which is worse? But aside from that I think the supermarket scene was fine."

"Even when you grabbed five cheese samples while the cheese sample lady was talking to someone?"

"Ooh, well, yeah... But look, her job is to make the samples disappear, and I helped."

"What will the audience think?"

"All right, all right, let's have a look at the whole scene and maybe we can cut the cheese."

[Screening room dissolves into laughter. This scene is a keeper.]

Apostro-phooey.

If you live in a city and you know a copy editor, you may wonder why her eye twitches and her jaw clenches like she's striving mightily to avoid picking a fight with oxygen. What is making her crazy is not the omnipresent and necessary element, but something almost as common in an American urban environment: Bad apostrophes. 

Of all the bits of punctuation, apostrophes may be abused the most. The little dance between parentheses and period at the end of a sentence are often screwed up as badly (as in this very sentence.) (This one too). But apostrophes are more common. 

This example demonstrates the way in which the poor apostrophe is most abused, dragged into service where he does not belong:

Heroes is of course the plural of hero; hero's is a contraction of hero is or is used to indicate heroic ownership ("the hero's hamster"). But you see this exact error on any Manhattan shop that sells big sandwiches. Something like "Our Hero's Are #1!" If you are using an apostrophe to indicate a plural, stop it. There's a perfectly fine plural version of each noun, and none I think requires an apostrophe.

A more subtle error was shared by a friend of mine -- less obviously wrong, but more egregious because it was found not in some mom & pop shop owned by non-English-speaking immigrants, but on official signage in the mighty box store PetSmart:

The friend who sent it to me A) knows I shop often at PetSmart and B) hates me and wants to see me furious. I am of course referring to the single open quote being used as an apostrophe. I see this error constantly these days, after having not seen it my entire life. I blame texting. 

When them is contracted to ’em, the apostrophe is used just as when do not becomes don’t -- it curls to the right. These are special characters and don't show up well online, but in a nutshell:

ʼem = correct

ʻem = wrong

Think of Dom DeLuise in Blazing Saddles yelling at you with a megaphone if you're ever tempted to use the latter. 

How many blinkered boneheads at PetSmart HQ approved that damned sign?

This last one -- well, it's so wrong that I hardly know where to start. 

It's from a bakery box, a box of cookies that were delicious. But their punctuation and capitalization are not. I'll leave the capitalization aside and just talk about the olé.

The bakery in question is Italian, not Mexican, so clearly they are not looking for the same olé! taste. They meant to say same old, just shortened to the familiar and cozy ol’. They actually had to go to some effort to screw this up -- it's tougher in most typefaces to add an accent to a letter than to use a plain ol' apostrophe, and the much-maligned Comic Sans font shown is no different. But the cookies are terrific*, so I don't want to expose them to ridicule. If they see this post, they'll know who they are, and can mend their ways the next time they review their box design.

Anyway, those are three egregious uses or lack of uses for apostrophes. Let's all try to do better in the future, for the sake of the many high-strung copy editors roaming our streets. Dom DeLuise is watching.

---------

*I know, it's hard to believe -- Italian cookies that aren't dry or all taste like anise. Mind = blown.

Pasta performance is no guarantee.

Had a box of Ronzoni Angel Hair pasta (#12, if you're keeping score at home) and was stunned when spaghetti came out. Spaghetti! #8! In an angel hair box! Whoa! But it was even MORE astonishing than that. Because about a third of the pasta in the box WAS angel hair pasta!

NO. WAY.

WAY. WAY.

Spaghetti's supposed to be in THIS BOX!!!! (!!!)

It may seem like no biggie, but no: Biggie. Because angel hair cooks in half the time of spaghetti. To get the spaghetti portion cooked, you have to cook the angel hair portion until it's mushy. I tried to compromise, and wound up with al dente spaghetti and mushy angel hair.

AND THE BOSS WAS THERE FOR DINNER!

Okay, I made that part up. I don't have a boss. I'm a freelancer; I have 89 bosses. And none of them were there.

So after dinner, which was not totally ruined, I shot a note off to Ronzoni's customer service department. Since I didn't see any recalls on their site or the government's recalls site, I thought the company ought to know that there was a packaging issue.

Within a day I got a nice note thanking me for my input, saying these things occasionally happen due to the automated packaging process, and I'd get a coupon for a complimentary product. A week later, score! Two coupons!

I'm glad Ronzoni owned up to the problem, but I wonder how it happened. How could the significantly thicker spaghetti have gotten into the box with angel hair? It just seemed weird. I never saw an episode of Unwrapped about a pasta factory, but you wouldn't think both pastas would be running on the machine at the same time.

Well, they're busy at Riviana, the parent company. In addition to Ronzoni, they make Creamette, Light 'n Fluffy noodles, Prince pasta, San Giorgio, etc. etc., plus at least 13 brands of rice. The Houston-based Riviana is itself owned by international rice giant Ebro, based in Spain. They basically own side dishes.

I know Ronzoni is just a small cog in the Ebro machine, but I'm still pretty brand-loyal to it. Like pretty much all New York families, ours was a Ronzoni family. When the company was bought by Hershey and production moved out of Long Island City (which I've discussed here and here), the demolition of the factory in 1998 made the Times. A Home Depot stands in the spot now. I don't think it was a loss on the scale of the Domino Sugar Refinery or even the Taystee Bread factory, but it was another blow to manufacturing in the five boroughs.

I understand that there are a lot of reasons why smaller food manufacturers get bought up, moved around, and all that, and I still think Ronzoni makes quality products. But I have to wonder... back in my parents' day, we never got two kinds of pasta in the same box.

Oops.

"I hate to say it, guys, but I'm getting the feeling that we missed Thanksgiving."

Dog test.

There's a family I know that recently got its first ever dog. I'm not sure it was a good idea. I don't think they were prepared and I don't think they've learned much since they got it. They never do anything with it. It just hangs around and gets walked in the yard once in a while. I think they're in over their heads.

And I know what I'm talking about. Longtime readers know I had a perpendicular learning curve when we got Tralfaz, the first dog. And it was really difficult. But my wife was always doing research, always working with him to teach him what he had to know, always stressing that we needed to have patience (even while she was losing her cool). She was an ideal of someone who loves dogs and is determined to learn to be a good pet mommy. 

Now the owner of two dogs with a combined weight of more than 200 pounds, I'm still no expert on dog rearing. I do know a few things that I learned the hard way, which is pretty much the only way I learn anything. If you're a novice dog owner, I hope I can teach you them the easy way. Some of these are pretty common tips. Even these bear repeating.

Note: This is an illustration
of a dog.

1) Know what kind of dog fits into your life.

If you work 20 hours a day and live alone, probably no dog is going to fit into your life. Dogs require time and care. If you are a super-active family, a lazy dog like an English bulldog may disappoint you. If you're a lazy family, don't get a dog bred to run amok, like a border collie. If you want a hunting dog, a pug might not do the trick. Be careful; an Australian shepherd, for example, is very different from an Australian cattle dog, although they're both energetic. You need to find a dog that fits your life. But your life is going to change anyway. 

2) You'd better like things dogs like. 

You and your dog will spend a lot of time together, so you had better share some interests. If your interests include playing with toys, eating treats, learning new things and teaching them, taking walks, playing in the yard, chasing cats, humping legs -- wait, skip that last stuff. Basically if your idea of hell is throwing a ball in the yard, or taking walks, or any of the other things dogs enjoy, you may not like having one. If you're just going to throw the dog in a crate at night and in the yard during the day, what's the point?

3) Children have to know that owning a dog is not like owning a toy, and they're not even good at owning toys.

Obviously that means that little kids who pull tails and stuff are too young to be responsible dog owners, but that also goes for older kids, like the one in the family I mentioned. You don't just put a dog in a box and take him out when you feel like playing. Teenagers seem to reach this stage pretty fast. And as I note, it's not like kids even take good care of their toys, unless someone makes them. I'm not big on treating a dog like a baby (well, not officially), but at least that gets the point across that the dog is a living thing and relies on you for necessities and attention.

4) Calculate how much you expect to spend on your dog. Then double it. 

Especially if you're a sucker for dog toys and novelty treats, like me. And consider pet insurance, if you can swing it. You don't want to have to lose your beloved pet because you just can't pay for treatment.

5) Calculate how much time it will take to train your dog. Then triple it. Then do it again.

Real dogs, unlike movie dogs, are not born knowing things. Worse, after they learn them, they will forget. They need training and reminders. I was under the impression that dogs naturally fetch toys and bring them back. Neither of mine will, and one even has retriever in his job description. Really, they don't know much when they're puppies. And if they're not taught, they won't know much when they're dogs.

6) Dog affection is not like in the movies.

Dogs are not always going to come over and give you a lick when you're down. Sometimes they seem baffled by all human emotion. Some breeds are especially attentive to moods, and some seem almost indifferent. It varies from dog to dog. Some dogs don't even seem to be particularly loyal. But plenty of them are affectionate, like Labs and Goldens and Old English Sheepdogs. Just remember, an affectionate dog will also want a lot of your attention. Two-way street.

7) People do fail at this.

Dog owning looks easy when you see other folks with their pets, let alone when you see them in movies or on TV, but it's not. Puppies have destructive impulses, disobedient streaks, and periods -- like the equivalent of teen years -- when even the nicest dog turns into a total pain in the ass. People often give up on dogs when they reach that stage; shelters are full of very nice dogs that outgrew the horrible stage after a family had just had enough and got rid of them. The failure to prepare for the dog and to know this stuff is coming is, as they say, a preparation to fail.

But sometimes there's nothing you can do. I know a person whose family had to give up a rescue dog because the pup could not (on vet's advice) be in a family environment. The dog would not stop eating and swallowing articles of clothing, and needed multiple surgeries to remove them. So even when people do all their due diligence, even when they have all the love and preparation they can muster, even then sometimes it's a failure. (The dog went to live in a permanent no-kill shelter, by the way, where there would be no socks or underwear around to eat. The family visits.)

8) It may not be the toughest job you'll ever love, but it will be among them. 
Compared to raising a child, raising a dog is easy. If you can stand the insanity for a couple of years, if you train and train again, odds are very good you'll have a good dog in the end. Kids? Who can say? And the worry and stress never stops. Still, raising a dog is hard work, and if you (and the dog) get through it, your life will have been enriched, I guarantee it. Not because of the affection from the dog; as I said above, you may not get that. But because you nurtured and taught a pretty smart creature and took on a responsibility for something outside yourself. That's how we develop our own character.

At least, that's been my experience. And I'm certainly a character. 

Things go wrgon.

Yesterday was a day with issues.

Actually started late Saturday night, when Tralfaz, elder dog, got the intestinal meltdown. Maybe something off the lawn he ate, if he ate something loaded with enough bacteria that they could be seen with the naked eye. Very possibly so --- we have a lot of miscellaneous critters around here, and like all dogs he is interested in their souvenirs. 

The lovely and tired Mrs. Key stayed up with him until four o'clock in the morning, taking him out several times. This is in itself quite the chore at the moment, because the snow we got last week melted & froze & melted & froze until now it's rock hard and has footprints (human and canine) carved into it. Dogs don't like to use surfaces like this for their evacuation needs. Watching Tralfaz and his kid brother, Nipper, ice skate on the lawn is fun, but makes it harder on all of us. 

At four I tagged in and sent the Mrs. to bed, and it became my turn to take out Tralfaz over and over again. 

This made getting to church Sunday a little tricky. 

Sick puppies, like sick children, are like having a drunk in the house. There's random puking and crapping, there's unpredictable behavior and destruction and surliness, there's weird noises in the night, and if you make any plans, be prepared to cancel them without warning.

Fortunately, ol' Fazzy was not destructive or surly, just sick and exhausted. 

There were other issues.

"One job, you had" -- Yoda

I had an event to go to in the afternoon; once Tralfaz was pooped (so to speak) and able to be left in my wife's care again I was able to go. Which was good, because I was the one that was supposed to bring the cake. I had ordered it for the event. It was a quarter sheet cake, decorated in the honor of the celebrant, a cake that, by the way, the supermarket from which I ordered claimed to have not gotten the order for. I didn't even have time for them to slap another cake in a box; I just grabbed an Entenmann's on the way out.

I actually did make it to our parish's Last Chance Mass at 6 p.m. Although I think the pastor had a cold. The Gospel was the Beatitudes, so he was not going to go short on the homily even if he was dying. We all got through.

But the late Mass screwed up our plans for dinner, so instead I grabbed McDinner on the way home. And McD's screwed up the order. I think they had a trainee, which is fine (we all start somewhere) but how do you not put the ice in the Iced Mocha? My wife got Room Temperature Mocha, which is not quite what she had requested. I did try the new Grand Mac, which, if you're curious, is: A Big Mac, only more so. If you're saying to yourself, "I'm hungry, but a Big Mac is just about 25% not enough," then they have the burger for you. 

So, a lot of juggling, a little running, and a lot of (in multiple ways) crap.

But you know something? It was a good day. 

Tralfaz was on the mend by nightfall, feeling more like himself and being very sweet to us. The event for which I got the cake came off, and no one complained about not having the cake, not even the celebrant -- and the group saved $15. I made it to church, which was nearly the first time in 11 years I didn't -- and I didn't have to cook.

Most people I know would agree with me that it would be a bad day if you started by reaching in the fridge for the milk and finding it (and everything else) as room temperature as a poorly made Iced Mocha. But we'd all agree that we've had days that were so bad we would gladly trade them for one that just featured a busted refrigerator. 

It was a good day.

My old man's so critical.

"No, son, you're not listening. It's not your ornament arrangement that's the problem."

Pwned, pregnany, and bligged.

The other day (or perhaps the otehr day, as will explained) Merriam-Webster's Web site had a nice piece (or pieve) on the term pwn and its origins. I knew about it, but it bears repeating:

Pwn is a lot like own, then, in the sense of 1b, "to have power or mastery over (someone)." (This is, of course, no coincidence. The word likely has its origin in a mistyping of own, what with the p and o being so close to one another on the QWERTY keyboard and all.)

I kind of like that, as someone who makes a lot of typos myself. Oh, sure, it looks all neat on screen now, but that's because I go back and fix it. But what frustrates me is that there are some words I screw up over and over again. You'd think that I would learn to stop my fingers from snarling the same words, but the muscle memory seems to have recorded the data wrong and is multiplying the error daily. Here are some of my constant screw-ups:

Error  /   Should be

near  /  neat

pieve  /  piece

ot  /  to

whcih  /  which

otehr  /  other

pregnany  /  pregnant

teh  /  the*

anythoing  /  anything

taht  /  that

qyeen  /  queen

chanfge  /  change
juts  /  just

pf  /  of

opf  /  of

tge  /  the

yu  /  you

corrext  /  correct

ekse  /  else
myabe  /  maybe

knoe  /  know

blig  /  blog

One of the things I like about Microsoft Word---yes, really!---is that if you make consistent errors like these you can add them to the AutoCorrect function so they are automatically fixed. Unlike a lot of Word functions, it doesn't make you want to put your fist through the screen. It does have its drawbacks---I can't have it always replace near with neat, obviously. Word sometimes can tell by context that I meant neat instead of near, but not always. And philosophically speaking, you'll never get the motivation to change your poor skills if you have something cleaning up your mess for you. But it is not nearly as annoying as the classic texting autocorrect, which has inspired so much hate.

Now, to show you what my typing is like when I go fast and don't correct my typing, here is the big sensational closing paragraph:

When I was a young men my father told me, "son, always remember that the quick brown fox jumpeed over the lazy dog." I said, "Thanks, Dad, but is sit not true that now is the tuime for all good men to come to the aoid of theiur party?" He said, 'Son, You've been watching too many stupid movies." The end.**


*Classic!

**How did we ever survive typewriters?

How to be wrong.

Here's my favorite way of being wrong:

1) Notice that someone else is failing to live up to reasonable expectations, or otherwise doing poorly at this or that, or is actively antagonistic.

2) Suffer in silence, showing superhuman endurance and patience, for as long as several minutes.

3) Go berserk.

This is what I did yesterday, mad as hell about a wayward contractor who seemed to be living up to the contractors' code of Not Showing Up When Promised.

So what happened?

Today he showed up, got the job done perfectly and faster than expected, then charged me less than his original estimate.

That's me!

Obviously I need to change my attitude. I have to stop being Mr. Judgey McJudgerface all the time. And I need to stop being pessimistic in my attitude toward others.

Here's more proof! Just on Tuesday I was krexing about the poor job of road maintenance our local government was doing, offering photos of the road crumbling around the storm drains. Well, here's a before-and-after for you!

How about that! Just two days later and they've filled it in. Clearly the job is not complete, but they're doing something about it.

I could say "Fred Gets Results!" and claim that my blogging got the contractor motivated to show up and work, got the roads department to start working on those holes. But no, that's just coincidence, not cause. I underestimated these fine, fine workmen, and now I have to admit I was Mr. Wrong.

Oh, let's also see how they fixed the gaping hole by the other storm drain!

Tuesday

Today

WHAT? That's IT? They just stuck a new cone in the hole? THAT'S RIDICULOUS! These people are MORONS! It's NEVER GOING TO GET FIXED! What a PILE OF LOAFERS and IDIOTS! GAAAAAH!