Dunderland.

You all know I enjoy a good meme, and I'm willing to tolerate some memes that are affirmations. (Although not many.) But I will not tolerate even good-intentioned stuff that advances ignorance.   

When I see something with such active ignorance as this above exhibit, it makes me angry. 

Two facts:

1) Lewis Carroll's work fell into public domain more than a century ago; 

2) Nothing, and I mean nothing, is less trustworthy online than quotations. 

Quotations are the fact-checkers' bugaboo, as I have written before, and mainly because no one seems to care at all if they are accurate, as long as they advance an idea. I promise that the thing they mostly advance is ignorance. 

Take the above example. I love Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but this quote has nothing to do with it. 

Now, it may be that in one of the many adaptations, pastiches, homages, parodies, sequels, and other rip-offs of Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a character actually gives a damn about Alice and would say something banal like the above. But in the actual book, where Wonderland is a bizarre and disturbing place, all the characters besides Alice are either:

1) Virtually Useless, or 

2) Total Jerks. 

Here's my breakdown: 

VIRTUALLY USELESS

White Rabbit, Mouse, King of Hearts, Bill, Dormouse, Frog-Footman, Duchess, Mock Turtle, Gryphon, Knave of Hearts, Cheshire Cat (arguably also a Total Jerk)

TOTAL JERKS

Caterpillar, Queen of Hearts, Mad Hatter, March Hare, Dodo, the Pigeon, the Cook

Some of the characters, even the Jerks, are helpful to Alice, but all of them are by design unpredictable and thus unlovable. 

Okay, but maybe it was from somewhere else in the Carroll oeuvre? Maybe a letter he wrote to Alice Liddell, the inspiration for the Alice books?

I followed a thread on Reddit that claims the quote can be found in an Emilie Autumn book, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls, the title of which sounds as far away from anything life-affirming as imaginable, but who knows. I haven't read it, nor can I find a preview of it, so I can't confirm the quote. The book is on Amazon, but Amazon doesn't do previews of books anymore. And you know what? I don't care where it's from -- except that it is not from Lewis Carroll and sounds like nothing he ever would write. He would have thought Wonderland too dangerous to be a fun place to visit, let alone to identify with happiness. He knew no one there gave a damn about Alice's feelings. He ought to know -- he invented it. 

It's too much to ask people to look into these things before reposting, but man, the complete uninterest in accuracy these days just makes me sad. 

And it echoes!

 

Porch song.

John Madden famously said, "If you can't run with the big dogs, stay on the porch."

Well, Izzy's on the larger side as breeds go, but he'd usually still rather stay on the porch. This summer has been relatively mild, and he's decided the porch is the primo spot. 

He isn't there to spy on the neighbors or bark at people going past on the sidewalk. He just likes hanging out outside. Humans need shelter, but not animals. If they're in their natural temperature zone, they can just hang out. They may not be comfortable all the time, but they're in far less danger of dying from exposure than we are.

What's annoying is that Izzy will pretend he has to go out to pee, sound real panicky, and collapse on the boards the moment he goes outside. Sometimes even if he has to do his duty (har!), he will stay on the porch first to make sure he gets his porchwork in.

Never neglect porch day.

Often he'll fall asleep out there. 

I don't mind too much. The porch furniture is not very comfortable, but it's okay. The bugs usually don't attack. It's mainly a problem if I'm on deadline. Almost all my work is done on the laptop, and I don't want that outside if the weather is bad -- or if he really does want to go walkies and I'd be obliged to leave it out there. Even if it's just sunny, it's hard to see the screen. 

He doesn't want to be alone outside, so he'll start making noises if tethered on the porch by himself. If I'm working against the clock, I have to play the bad guy and drag his furry behind back in. 

Occasionally the weather will be too hot or cold, and Izzy will want to go in before too long. This never happens in spring or fall -- rain, sun, fog, thunderstorm, snow, he doesn't care. 

But I think I benefit from the fresh air as well, even during allergy season. Also, because we were out there so much, I caught a bunch of wasps building a nest. The little bastards were building it at the very apex of the gable in the center of the roofline, a place inaccessible with wasp spray from the second-story windows or from the ladder I have. I could go out the window onto the porch roof, but considering that I have injured myself going downstairs recently and crossing the driveway before that, I am not going out on any roofs if I can avoid it. 

So, from the top of my ladder leaning up against the porch, I sprayed the nest with the hose. 

That has a couple of advantages. One, it ruins the nest. Two, they don't seem to consider water damage as an attack, just weather; they go into flee mode, not fight mode, so I got away without being stung. Unfortunately, the nest is still attached up there, hanging like a withered old testicle. If it doesn't detach on its own soon, I'm going to have to dig out the power washer and hope that has better range. 

To sum up: Dog, cute, loves porch; wasps, evil, build branch offices of hell in inaccessible places. And I'm just glad I can sit outside and not freeze to death because it's summer.  

Dis-inspirations?

This has to be the most bizarre thing I've ever seen used as an inspirational quote online. 

At first this seems like just another Yeah, yeah, think big and be big -- I heard that from Fred Flintstone. But it got worse the more I thought about it. 

First of all, there's no proof that this quote comes from Machiavelli, although Forbes notes that it's often attributed to him. I looked through Bartlett's and the Oxford quotation book and checked in with Quote Investigator and all of Machiavelli's works on Project Gutenberg but had no luck finding it attributed to him or anyone else. Granted, Machiavelli wrote in Italian, and that makes it harder to track down an English translation. But my search under subject words as well as authors convinced me that whoever said this first, it was probably not everyone's favorite Italian diplomat. 

Second, do we really want to draw spiritual growth from a man like Niccolo Machiavelli? He wasn't exactly writing Chicken Soup for the Soul. His most famous book, The Prince, was the birth of Realpolitik as we know it -- basically, how to shiv the right people at the right time for coldblooded profit. The Rules for Radicals of its day. For example, he tells this inspiring tale of Old Syracuse: 

Agathocles, the Sicilian, became King of Syracuse not only from a private but from a low and abject position. This man, the son of a potter, through all the changes in his fortunes always led an infamous life. Nevertheless, he accompanied his infamies with so much ability of mind and body that, having devoted himself to the military profession, he rose through its ranks to be Praetor of Syracuse. Being established in that position, and having deliberately resolved to make himself prince and to seize by violence, without obligation to others, that which had been conceded to him by assent, he came to an understanding for this purpose with Amilcar, the Carthaginian, who, with his army, was fighting in Sicily. One morning he assembled the people and the senate of Syracuse, as if he had to discuss with them things relating to the Republic, and at a given signal the soldiers killed all the senators and the richest of the people; these dead, he seized and held the princedom of that city without any civil commotion. 

Mind you, he's not telling us about Agathocles in the hope that we will emulate him (unlike Radicals author Saul Alinsky, whose book is a how-to guide). Niccolo just wants to tell us the practical problems facing one who usurps power by force. 

Hence it is to be remarked that, in seizing a state, the usurper ought to examine closely into all those injuries which it is necessary for him to inflict, and to do them all at one stroke so as not to have to repeat them daily; and thus by not unsettling men he will be able to reassure them, and win them to himself by benefits. He who does otherwise, either from timidity or evil advice, is always compelled to keep the knife in his hand; neither can he rely on his subjects, nor can they attach themselves to him, owing to their continued and repeated wrongs. For injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less; benefits ought to be given little by little, so that the flavour of them may last longer.

So kill everyone who might oppose you all at once and start raiding the treasury over time to make new friends. There's a big plan for you. Small plans don't stir the soul! 

Whether Niccolo could be considered a force for evil or just a "straight shooter, telling it like it is," may be argued. Nowadays it would be the latter, but in the past there was no question that he was a bad man. 

Older readers, or readers of older works, might recall that one of the names for the devil is Old Nick. And writers like Samuel Butler in his satirical poem Hudibras made the connection clear:

Nick Machiavel had ne'er a trick,

Though he gave his name to our Old Nick.

The devil had a big plan too, as I recall. 

So I just found it astonishing that inspirational memes for yoga moms would include a quote from a man historically considered a tricky bastard in the non-birth sense of the world. Then again, if you've ever had to deal with yoga moms in a homeowners' association, maybe you'd think it's not really such a reach. 

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?

Fred's Book Club: A Turning Point.

Hello, book lovers! Welcome to our Wednesday Humpback Writers feature, where writers without humps (or maybe with; we're not ableist) are celebrated on Hump Day.

This being Holy Week, I wanted to make a brief mention of a brief book that was crucially important to me.

Mere Christianity was not the first C.S. Lewis book I ever read. Like so many other people, I came to meet him through the Chronicles of Narnia, when I was in high school and reading my way through every classic science fiction and fantasy series I could find. Then, in college, I read his Space Trilogy, which is a series written for adults and also follows Christian themes in a compelling way. Then I borrowed his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, from the library, and that was a body-blow to my muddled mess of neo-paganistic pseudo-Christianish soul. That led me to Mere Christianity.

As Anthony Burgess wrote, "Lewis is the ideal persuader for the half-convinced, for the good man who would like to be a Christian but finds his intellect getting in the way." I think that's true, but I also think in cases like mine that it was not all intellect but also mental glitches and half-baked notions -- and maybe most of all the fear that I was going to have to give up things I liked if I followed this path. How did he bring me around? It is a logical progression from first principles, like showing that people believe in Right and Wrong even though that would not possible in a world without transcendent meaning, and from there leading up to where our instincts should lead us, to the Source of happiness and all good things.

Mere Christianity (titled mere as in basic, or what all Christians believe regardless of denomination or sect) is just 173 pages in my Collier edition, but every page has a powerful thought put in a plain and dynamic way. Let's look at some bits from this immensely quotable book:

"Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right or Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining 'It's not fair' before you can say Jack Robinson."

"Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all of the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two plus two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to  be unselfish to -- whether it was only your own family, or your countrymen, or everybody else. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired."

“This is the fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies. Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with religion.”

“There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. It tells you to do the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful, or dangerous, or difficult it is to do.”

“Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end submit with ever fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”

"Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world -- that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God ‘made up out of His Head’ as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again."

“When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less.”

"He chose an earthly career which involved the killing of His human desires at every turn --poverty, misunderstanding from His own family, betrayal by one of His intimate friends, being jeered at and manhandled by the Police, and execution by torture. And then, after being thus killed—killed every day in a sense—the human creature in Him, because it was united to the divine Son, came to life again. The Man in Christ rose again: not only the God."

It is powerful writing with the concision that any poet ought to envy. It is amazing that a book built on a reasonable argument could have so many quotes that are clear and potent when standing alone, as if every brick in a lovely home could be a work of art by itself.

Lewis was about as educated in the liberal arts as a man could get; also a combat veteran of the First World War. He was a hardened atheist brought to his knees by faith. He brings myth (as the echoes of reality) and stone cold fact together to reveal the truth that is beyond nature itself.

This book contains a somewhat simplified version of his philosophy and apologetics; classics like The Abolition of Man and Miracles are more sophisticated. But his goal here in these essays was to lay out his case plainly, and he did, and it hit me like a thunderbolt. I'll tell you one thing: He's the best modern writer you'll find at Hobby Lobby.

Leap day!

Merriam-Webster's says that the term leap year comes from the 14th century. I suppose "leap day" is a newer construction. The idea that it's a day for the calendar to leap forward seems like an odd construction. I would have expected something like Bonus Day or Correction Day.

The word leap itself seems to have sprung into the language as a verb sometime before the 12th century. It's traced back to Middle English lepen, from Old English hleapan, akin to Old High German hlouffan, meaning "to run."  If you have to go back further than hlouffan, then I feel sorry for you.

But it is Leap Day! Leaping and jumping is fun!

Whee!

So let's have some jumpy thoughts on leaping from my copy of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

"With the help of God I shall leap over the wall." (Prayer Book, 1662)

Yay!

"Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing; for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert." (Bible, Isaiah 35:6)

Hooray!

"Leap to these arms, untalk'd of and unseen!
Lovers can see to do their amorous rites
By their own beauties!" (William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet)

Hacha!

"A little before you made a leap into the dark." (Thomas Brown, Letters from the Dead)

Uh...

"By heaven methinks it were an easy leap
To pluck bright honour from the pale-fac'd moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the deep,
Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,
And pluck up drowned honour by the locks." (William Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 1)

Well, okay...

"With rue my heart is laden
  For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
  And many a lightfoot lad.
By brooks too broad for leaping
  The lightfoot lads are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
  In fields where roses fade." (A. E. Housman, "With Rue My Heart Is Laden")

Sad!

"My mother groan'd, my father wept,
Into the dangerous world I leapt;
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud." (William Blake, "Infant Sorrow")

Whuh...!

"I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark." (Thomas Hobbes, final words)

Umm... not so sure leaping is as much fun as I originally thought. Let's stop the leaping. Maybe it's best to keep your feet on the ground after all.

Fred's Book Club: A Little Bit of Baseball.

Happy Wednesday, you all, and welcome to a tiny little edition of our Humpback Writers, the so-called book club held on the so-called Hump Day of the week, Wednesday. There's no good reason for the name, so we just have to live with it.

If it is possible to know anything about this book feature so far, it's that: A) The books can be of any kind at all, as long as they're books, and B) Far too often they are out of print. And that, sad to say, is the problem with today's book, Baseball: Diamonds Are Forever. But there are some things about it you may find interesting, especially about the book business.

The first thing you should know is: This book is small.

The second thing is: It is a collection of quotations about baseball with illustrations by cartoonist Joe Stites.

This book was part of a series called "Tiny Tomes," published by the Ariel imprint of Andrews McMeel (now Andrews McMeel Universal) in the 1990s into the early 2000s. This book is 128 pages long and only a half-inch thick. It's the kind of thing one used to see all the time at bookstore cash registers, the perfect impulse buy for gifts bags and party tchotchkes and stocking stuffers and shower gifts. But that was before Amazon ate the book business, and the impulse-buyer market has never been the same.

It's kind of a shame, because this book is full of fun quotes, which as far as I can determine are all accurate. Such as:

• "I try not to break the rules but merely to test their elasticity." --Bill Veeck
• "You know when you got it made? When you get your name in the crossword puzzle." --Rocky Bridges
• "Girls used to come up to me and say, 'My sister loves you.' Now they say, 'My mother loves you.'" --Lee Mazzilli

It's a fun little book, with a gaggle of cute Patrick McDonnell-ish illustrations by Joe Stites. I was unable to find any information about Mr. Stites, but he seems to have been doing a number of cartoons for stickers and other books around the time this book was printed, in 1997. (Joe, if you're out there, give us a shout!)

I'm sorry that the Tiny Tomes line appears to be defunct, because tiny books have a long history. In fact, there is a group called the Miniature Book Society, and that means they are devoted to the creation and preservation of books no more than three inches in height, length, or width. No, it does not mean that they are little people who like books. Baseball: Diamonds Are Forever is an overachiever by MBS standards, reaching no more than 2 1/8 inches in height and less in other dimensions.

I've seen some tiny books pop up on Antiques Roadshow, and they are Ka-Yoot. Why make little books? Well, beside the fact that tiny books are fun, and people have always loved miniature things, they were helpful for young readers with little hands, or people who were on the go who could only carry something small. Anne Boleyn supposedly had a tiny book of prayers that she took along to her execution, at least according to Miniature Books: 4,000 Years of Tiny Treasures. I'm sure that was a comfort to Anne -- unless she was taking one last opportunity to catch up on her reading. When I go they will probably find a paperback stuck in my hands.

So that's the story of the smallest book in my personal library, which I did indeed receive as a stocking stuffer some years ago. I was going to wait until February to profile this book, for the return of pitchers and catchers, but I didn't have time to profile a bigger book this week -- so, just a tiny one for ya!

Fred's Book Club: Say What?

Welcome to the Humpback Writers portion of our week, the day we celebrate writers who are probably not hunchbacked, but whose books are being looked at on Wednesdays. Yeah, it's a stupid name for a book feature. And you can quote me on that.

Speaking of which, we have another nonfiction gem this week: 

Garson O'Toole is a lone voice crying truth on an Internet of stupidity, and out of gratitude I bought his book. It has a place of pride on my desk, and I use it and his Web site, Quote Investigator, frequently.

Why? Because writers are stupid and lazy.

I've done a lot of fact-checking in my editorial career, and I can tell you without fear of contradiction that the number one variety of false information that one encounters is not political fabrication, scientific misinformation, or spurious historical anecdote, but rather the humble quotation. I would guess that at least 75 percent of the quotes I have encountered in magazine and popular books are either made up, misattributed, misquoted, or just insane. Yes, political information is often skewed into error by bias (to say the least), and scientific studies are complex and often misquoted for sensation, and historical anecdotes are as poorly researched as anything, but quotations are so omnipresent, so easily thrown about in that swamp of e-ignorance called the Web, and so easy to get wrong, that they make up the bulk of misinformation in the world.

O'Toole seeks to set the record straight.

Certainly a good book of quotations is helpful for the task. For classic quotes you can find older versions of Bartlett's famous book online for free, and it has never gone out of print; a good library will have an unabridged version. And there are a number of more contemporary books of that kind available. I have the third edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations on my desk right next to O'Toole's book.

But where O'Toole earns respect is by taking popular quotations, all memed up and scattered to the winds, and runs them to earth. Many of them have been misquoted in newspapers and magazines for decades. Sometimes there was an original quote that was just dumbed down progressively by writers until it is virtually unrecognizable. He follows the trail like a dogged detective, going through sources popular and unknown, to find the original quote if it can be found, by the original speaker if he can be found, and show how it got mangled into its current state.

Here's an example I literally pulled out of the book at random:

"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer; it sings because it has a song."

Can't you just see those words superimposed over a stock photo of a canary? Your college student or grandmother posting it on Facebook? But who said it? Was it a Chinese proverb? Was it Maya Angelou? It's one of the few that haven't been attributed to Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, or Winston Churchill, I'd wager.

O'Toole spends ten pages (including end notes) tracking this thing down, through the varieties that the idea had seen in print, including William Hazlitt ("the thrush ... does not sing because it is paid to sing, or to please others, or to be admired or criticized. It sings because it is happy..."), Lord Tennyson ("I do not sing because I must,/And pipe but as the linnets sing"), newspapers, religious books, Up With People, Lou Holtz (!) ... and finds that the quote as it appears should be attributed to children's book author Joan Walsh Anglund. This is hours of work for a single line of verse; this is real scholarship, not like the "fact-checking" that happens at some of our well-known print institutions.

O'Toole should get a Pulitzer, and teach classes in this stuff to the know-nothings at J-school.

You know what kind of writers are the absolute worst about wrong quotations? Without question: authors of self-help books. The people who want to tell you how to change your life are the people who can't be bothered to double-check a stupid damn quotation in a reputable reference book. What does that tell you?

Worse, I'll bet they don't care. I've worked on such books and sent notes back to the editor, frequently with links to O'Toole's blog, and I would bet a hundred bucks that not a word of the misquotes would be changed. Because the self-help authors have no interest in the truth. Which is just what you want from someone telling you how to live your life.

Those creeps get rich while Garson O'Toole toils at the endless pile of misquotes, a supply of stupidity large enough to fill the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and I don't know if he even sold enough copies of the book above to entice the publisher to contract for a sequel.

Let the quoter beware! Or as Socrates said, "If you see on the Internet that your mother says she loves you, don't believe it." And you can quote me on that. 

When editors collide.

Writers usually don't appreciate copy editors. They send in perfect manuscripts, only to have the copy editors tell them they've misspelled things, their grammar sucks, their facts are weird, their plots have contradictions, and they're stoopid stoopidheads. Mind you, when copyediting that is not what I'm trying to do; but writers are often a bit fragile about their work, especially in the raw, still-bleeding form, and it seems awfully harsh to get those terse corrections.

As I have said here before, I'm not trying to make writers feel as though they are stupid; I'm trying to make writers look as though they are intelligent.

You think they'd appreciate that.

Usually the editor gets in the middle between the writer and copy editor to keep everyone happy. But I worked for a while for an academic publisher that allowed the editor to step out of the way; my comments would be sent as is to the writer (even those that were Eyes-Only for the editor) and the writer's remarks would come directly back to me. And let me tell you one thing about that -- the copy editor can lose his job if he's mean to a writer, but the writer is under contract and can say any goddamn thing he wants to the copy department. Some of them do. I would flinch every time one of my jobs came back from the writer, because there was about a 40% chance I was about to see myself being called an idiot or worse.

Maybe it's not so bad at other book publishing houses; as we know (or do we?), academic politics are vicious because the stakes are so small. Still, when the company dropped a quarter of its staff, I really didn't mind getting laid off.

Recently, though, I had to deal with some copy-on-copy violence. I had copyedited a kids' book -- a kids' book! -- and then was asked to look at it again, a couple of passes down the line, after it had been copyedited again by someone I don't know. Well, of COURSE she couldn't have spotted any errors, since I had already caught them all, right?

Wrong! This kid marked a number of things -- and now it is ON.

Who is this impertinent stripling? I shall show her! I had this right in the first place, according to the house style guide and the Chicago Manual of Style! I'll look it up to get chapter and verse. When I get through with her...

Oh... the new style guide doesn't mention this.

And... Chicago sides with her.

Traitor.

Well, what about... Oh, well THAT error must have been added after I saw the book. And THAT. And, er, THAT. I could check the draft I saw...

But now I'm thinking I'd better not.

Nothing like the taste of humble pie in one's mouth as a reminder to be humble. And polite.

Is there a bakery that makes humble pies? Because I'd like to send some to some university writers.

Who's got the Mondays?

It's hard to believe that the movie Office Space is almost 20 years old. The office tech in the 1999 film dates it, but it's not as different as a 1979 movie would be to a 1999 movie. Forget the Internet; in 1979 almost no one would have a computer. Michael Bolton would not be destroying a printer because there weren't any. Theme restaurants with unhappy waitstaff were just becoming a thing in 1979. In some ways the 20 years between 1999 and 2019 is not as different as between 1979 and 1999, and way less different than between 1959 and 1979.

The reason that Mike Judge's movie endures, though, is the terrific comedy characters brought to life by a great cast. Two of the greatest character actors of their generation, Gary Cole and Stephen Root, are particularly brilliant as passive-aggressive boss Bill Lumbergh and petulant mumbler Milton Waddams respectively, but everyone's good. Even Jennifer Jane Emerson, playing the thankless role of Female Temp, has one of the great comedy lines in movie history:

One thing that hasn't changed since 1999 or 1959: we still hate Mondays.

Efforts to make offices better since Office Space came out can be summed up in one word: Failure. It's not hard to see why. People are allowed to dress like pigs in many offices now -- in 1999 that was reserved for quirky Internet startups -- and on the whole having everyone look like a stoned undergrad does nothing for team unity or a sense of purpose. If people thought cubicles were dehumanizing prairie-dog holes, the despicable and counterproductive open-concept office has made us long for those halcyon days. More recently we have seen the weaponization of Human Resources, which is not likely to lead to a happy place.

A lot of this comes from company higher-ups acting like a teen's parent, trying to be "down" with the kids, and works about as well.

Bottom line: Whether your boss is a soft-spoken jerk like Bill Lumbergh or a loudmouth jerk like Alan Brady or even someone you like and respect, work is work and has to be done. If you're in a bad place, I hope you can find a way to go work in a better place; it is not always easy to find a good job. I've been laid off three times and chased out of bad workplaces and had to take pay cuts and had to piece together a full-time paycheck out of multiple part-time jobs, and sometimes the options are all crappy. May you find the least-crappy ones.

One thing that doesn't change: Mondays will still suck. Shift work and flexible hours don't help. Mondays suck even if they fall on Tuesdays.

But from great suffering comes great art.

Winning!

New York is a funny state. Up here in the Hudson Valley, on the west side of the mighty mighty river, I have seen maybe half a dozen Trump signs and zero (0) Hillary signs. As one looks at the map of New York's 62 counties, I would guess just 8 will definitely go Hillary. You might think that Trump was right when he said that New York, his home state, really is in play.

Wrong!

Those 8 counties---Kings, Queens, New York, Suffolk, Bronx, Nassau, Westchester, and Albany---together have more people in them that the other 54 combined. It's 10,337,432 vs. 7,895,192. The Hillary counties, which except for Albany are all downstaters, typical make electoral decisions that pee in the cornflakes of the 54 northern counties. I mean, it's not like New York's state government is really successful at anything they try, except corruption and graft, but when there's someplace that's going to get specifically screwed, like industries being regulated to death or taxed into fleeing, with the usual unemployment and squalor to follow, you can bet it's places like Buffalo's Erie County that are going to get it.

There's actually a movement afoot---maybe more of an angry gesture than a movement---to divorce all those downstate counties from the rest of the state and be free of the majority rule. New Amsterdam would be an autonomous region, but still part of the state, with "a token state government to comply with the US Constitution." It'd look like this:

They're trying to get a ballot initiative on it next year. The problem is that even if they do, the whole state will undoubtedly have to vote on it, and how do you think that'd go?

Hint: 10,337,432 vs. 7,895,192.

And New Yorkers will note that tiny downstate Rockland County is not being allowed into New Amsterdam, so maybe they're as bad as Westchester. Rockland's small in size but 13th in population, at 317,702, so if they vote with the other downstaters that makes the imbalance against upstaters even worse. Plus, Albany and its surrounding counties (Schenectady, Renssalear, Schoharie) are too invested in state government to want to see this split happen, so that's probably five out of 54 upstate counties that wouldn't go for it anyway.

And even if it were to be accomplished, it wouldn't affect national elections unless the state also split its electoral votes the way Maine and Nebraska do.

But I don't see that or anything else that might threaten the current power structure happening. Americans started to give away power and authority more than a century ago to help the needy and oppressed; little by little we lost a sense of the importance of our autonomy, trading it in for protection from big bad life. As if there were no downside imaginable to that.

During the early days of the War on Terror, President Bush's opponents liked to deploy that Ben Franklin quote, that "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." But we'd already been doing it for a hundred years.

New and better fortune cookies.

Why are our fortune cookies so lame?

Not the cookies themselves; I've always liked them, actually. Crunchy, with a touch of vanilla, like a folded, almost guilt-free sugar cookie.

It's the fortunes. Dullsville. These are pretty typical.

yawn

I am under the impression that in my childhood, fortune cookies actually worked like fortune telling, giving cute predictions about the future. Like, "You are going on a long journey." Or, "You will be rewarded for your strength of character." You know, nonsense predictions that could make for fun chitchat after dinner. Sometimes they were even humorous, like, "You will never turn into a giant shoelace."* Or, "Help, I'm a prisoner in a Chinese bakery."**

Nowadays they're just dull bits of wisdom, suitable for Facebook posting and little else. Usually attributed to some famous person, wrongly.

Infoplease says that the fortune cookie seems to have developed in San Francisco in 1914, or maybe Los Angeles in 1918, but beyond its supposed origins with thank-you notes or Biblical verse, there's not a lot of information about the cookie's fearless forecasting. Nowadays it's almost always some blah advice that sounds like they're being written by a school guidance counselor.

Come on, cookies! We can do better than that. We want the fortune back in our fortune cookies! Otherwise they're just ______ cookies, and who needs that?

I decided to get the ball rolling by writing some new fortunes. Here are a baker's dozen, offered for free:

You will wish you had not eaten the Tien Tsin peppers.

Don't take the Browns no matter how many the points.

You will go on a long journey. Your luggage will go on a completely different but equally long journey. 

Tip the waiter well, or next time he will spit in your tea.

Your plan to open a Thai seafood doughnut shop will not meet with success.

You shall never be as rich as King Tutankhamun, but then again, he's dead.

Everyone will be cheesed off after the election next week. 

Next time you'll get the General Tso's chicken. Delish.

Beware the Ides of March. They only have Ides for you.

You will go to work next week with your fly open and unmatching socks. Have fun.

Your date will not end happily.

Remember that other cookie where I said the Cubs would never win the Series? Skip it.

Be bloody, bold, and resolute; laugh to scorn
The power of man, for none of woman born
Shall harm Macbeth.
Continued on next cookie.

Go ahead, Chinese cookie bakeries. I double-dog dare ya to use these in place of your paper placebos. Everyone will love them.

And if not? Well, that's the way the cookie crumbles.

---

* Actually from a Bazooka Joe comic, which would have humorous fortunes along with the nonhumorous cartoon.

**Actually an Alan King book.

Hoping for a normalass.

I recently worked on a book in which the author kept quoting people, each of whom she referred to as a "badass." Could be anyone. Martin Luther King Jr.: Badass. Elizabeth I: Badass. Ben Franklin: Badass. John Lennon: Badass. Raoul Wallenberg: Badass. Mother Teresa: Badass. Liberace: Badass. Gandhi: Oh you better believe Badass.

It appears the author's criteria for bestowing badassery titles on people were these:

1) She saw a quote she liked on the Internet attributed to the person;

2) The person was interesting enough to make her want people to think she sat around reading thick books by or about them for inspiration;

3) She desired the reflected glory of having a colossal critical mass of badasshood in her book---if she can decide who is or is not a badass, well, that would make her one too, wouldn't it? Takes one to know one.

I suppose it ought to be obvious that none of the quotes had ever been checked. And as I have often mentioned, my years of fact-checking have taught me that the more frequently a quote appears on the Internet, the less likely it is of being attributed properly, and that likelihood approaches zero just by virtue of its being on the Internet.

You can quote me on that.

I can't even get mad anymore about writers who snag quotes off the Internet without verifying them. It's like getting mad at people who park poorly. You'd just be mad all the livelong day if you let yourself get bothered by it.

What I am bothered by is a grown woman who thinks it's cool to go around bestowing the badass title on people like some addlepated 12-year-old. I'm just imagining the look on Frederick William III's face on being told by the spunky young thing, "You're a real kingolicious badass, Freddy Wills!"

He was, but come on.

Are we ever going to behave like adults anymore, or is this going to be the kind of conversation I can look forward to the rest of my life?

Don't even answer that question.

I don't think that everyone she quotes deserves the title anyway; guys like Andrew Jackson or William Tecumseh Sherman, who would probably be condemned by her as killers and oppressors, are what I would think of as badasses. The fact is, your average badass usually garners wishes that he would walk into an open manhole by those around him. Badassishness may be something to aspire to, but usually because of dire circumstance (like war), or in sadder cases, by moral bankruptcy.

Personally, I'd rather be around some goodasses, or at least some normalasses. Is that so much to ask?