Taking things to their illogical conclusions

http://www.xorph.com/anacrusis/2010/01/01/senf/

http://www.xorph.com/anacrusis/?p=3912

Senf doesn’t understand the late hour or the heavy cloak, but it’s made for her size, and of soft, rich fabric. So she follows them to the cave and the bonfire, and listens to their cunning stories. Then she stands up and takes pride in the cleverness of how she stole the nut herself.

To the museum with a new nut: gilded, with characters down one side. They replace it in the case and lock it. They nod, chant, giggle, and part.

The Order of Thieving Squirrels is born in warmth and daring, of conspirators, at the dawn of the year.

http://pennyred.blogspot.com/2010/01/happy-new-year-to-you-too-boris.html

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1624

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January 1st, 2010: This is the last of my MINI CHRISTMAS VACATION, and the last of the Klassik Komicks! I said I'd be back today but I forgot it was a holiday, so I'll be back Monday. I hope everyone had an awesome New Year's Eve and has an awesome 2010 as well! AWESOMNESS FOR EVERYONE, that's what I say! Have fun, everyone, and thank you for making 2009 one of my best years ever. It's still amazing that I get to do this comic instead of having a real job, and it's all thanks to you guys. – Ryan

http://xkcd.com/683/

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1570

And thus concludes A Very Sweet-Tits New Year! I hope you had as much fun reading it as I did drawing it! Regular QC resumes on Monday.

2009 has been quite literally the best year of my entire life. I remain happily married to a wonderful lady, I BOUGHT A FRIGGIN' HOUSE, QC got bigger than ever (and slightly better looking), and I got to do what I love for a living. I owe so much of what made 2009 great to you guys, and I sincerely hope I was able to repay it in some small fashion with the comics I made for you. I couldn't do this without you guys and I truly appreciate your patronage. I hope you'll stick around for 2010- I'm excited for where the comic is gonna go and I have some other fun surprises planned along the way.

Have a safe and happy New Year and I will see you in the next decade!

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/12/wishes.html

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2011

At FanNation ("the Republic of Sport"), in reference to the fact that Texas Tech fired coach Mike Leach, Haledorn from Flower Mound, TX, commented:

Let me tell you as a Tech Alum that this is about traditional football. This is the only football in the area entrenched in traditional football ideals set in stone by Spike **** running an I formation and handing the ball to Bam Morris on 3 down and 8. This is about who gets credit for the rise of a program. Gerald Myers wants it and Leach should get it, so the man in power finds a way to cut him loose. I call it "Jerry Jones Syndrome".

Reader WW recognized the reference to Spike Dykes, and also recognized that an automated bowdlerization system at FanNation must have asterisked Mr. Dykes' name. This is even nuttier than  iTunes' "C*m sancto spiritu", since FanNation's software didn't even leave Mr. Dykes with  the first and last letters of his name.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2010

Stephen Judd complains about the slogan for a New Zealand beer:

"Brewed by brewers, not chemistered by chemists".

Stephen's (reasonable) complaint is that "if it weren’t for chemists, there would be no commercial brewing". But I was more interested in the copywriter's attempt to create a verb for what chemists do to things, by a bizarre sort of chiasmic analogy: brewer:brew::chemist:chemister.

It also occurred to me that many names of occupations are agentive forms of verbs for the characteristic activity: weaver, cobbler, driver, cleaner, writer, robber, teacher, and so on. But there are some occupations, like chemist, where not only is the name not an agentive form of a verb, but in fact there's no verb at all for the characteristic activity. What a chemist does (I guess) is to apply the science and technology of chemistry to practical or theoretical problems — but there's no verb for that, no "chemicize" or "chemistrate" or whatever.

(The OED includes an obsolete verb chemic(k) meaning "To transform or transmute by alchemy", or rarely "To bleach (cotton, linen, etc.) with a solution of calcium or sodium hypochlorite". There's no evidence that either chemists or their employers are interested in reviving it.)

Linguists, physicists, biologists, etc., are in a similarly verbless condition.

Philosophers philosophize, but botanists would mostly object to being described as people who botanize. (Which is too bad, in my opinion — they should reclaim that formerly honorable word — but that's another story.) Most poets would also be offended at being said to poetize or poeticize, though both of these words exist, and are not always disparaging.

Anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists don't really anthropologize, sociologize or psychologize, at least not as a characteristic practice — though at least those words exist in principle, by virtue of the ability of -ology words to evoke -ologist and -ologize forms.

http://www.xorph.com/anacrusis/2009/12/31/drosselmeier-18/

http://www.xorph.com/anacrusis/?p=3904

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/12/how-i-got-to-boston.html

So I napped for a couple of hours and we left the house at 3:00 am. I drove for three hours, got us to the airport for 6:00am. Was sort of proud of myself. We checked in. We were on our way through the security line when a voice said “Due to snow, the airport is now closed. Nothing will be landing or taking off until 8:30.”

We ate breakfast. They called me to the ticket desk and changed my flight from Manchester to Gatwick, with the same get-to-Heathrow plan that Mike had, which I didn’t mind. At least we’re together, I thought. Then I noticed they’d made a complete mess of the actual reticketing, went back and pointed it out to the lady who’d done it. “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t notice. Not to worry. I’ll make a phone call and tell them what it ought to be.”

My heart sank a little at this. (If it is not actually written in the system you can find yourself screwed as people squint at their screens at what’s written there, and the statement that “a lady said she’d make a phone call” can be met with indifference.) But Lorraine, my assistant, was still awake, and had just emailed me to see if there was anything she could do. And the tickets had been booked through a travel agent with a 24 hour helpline, so I asked Lorraine if she wouldn’t mind making sure that everything was okay.

Since the last time I was in that airport they’d moved and hidden all the plug sockets, but I found one anyway at an office desk and charged my computer. At 8:30 the Tannoy voice said they’d tell us what was happening at 9:30 and at 9:30 they said they’d tell us at 10:30, and I do not know what they told us at 10:30 because I went to sleep in my chair, and slept until midday, when the Tannoy voice told us that we were boarding. From the Twitter stream, it looked like Lorraine was still awake and locked in a hellish battle with the airlines.

“We will still make it,” I told Mike. “It’ll be a close thing, but we will make it.”

I tromped across the quarter of an inch of snow that had fallen, puzzling over how this could shut down an airport, knowing the kind of snow it takes to shut down Minneapolis-St Paul airport. But then, in MSP they expect snow.

We boarded the plane, found our seats. The pilot announced that the de-icing rigs weren’t working and I went back to sleep. My hopes had shrunk from getting to Boston today to just getting out of the airport. I woke up. We were still there.

I walked back into the plane, told Mike that we wouldn’t be getting out of the UK today. “Yeah,” he said. “But we’re together”. And I thought, He’s right. This would be awful on our own. Together it was just some kind of interesting adventure.

We took off at 2:15pm. We landed in Gatwick at 3.45pm

Lorraine called just after we landed, before we were even off the plane. “You’re on the 7:15pm flight from Heathrow,” she said, and did a rapid briefing on what it had taken to get my ticket and its value back from FlyBe and over to British Airways. She’d been up all night and worked miracles. She was ready for bed.

While we waited for our luggage, Mike talked on the phone to United, and got off very glum. “They’ll rebook me, but they’re charging $1900 to do it,” he said. He’d also used his airmiles to do it in business class, and was losing that.

Luggage arrived. Lorraine called to make sure our luggage had arrived. She sounded beyond exhausted. “Can you check Mike’s ticket?” I asked. “They want another $1900 to get him home.” She took the booking number, called back twenty minutes later having got the change fee down to $300 and having got him back into business class. An amazing lady, my assistant.

We took a taxi in the rain from Gatwick to Heathrow, I checked in without problems, hugged Mike a lot. The plane was late taking off due to the new pat-down and bag-examine rules. I was patted down (the pat-down wouldn’t have found any explosives I’d hidden in my inner thigh, where the idiot on the Amsterdam-Detroit flight hid his, because the man was too polite to check there) and my backpack was opened and looked into (it has many compartments that weren’t opened or checked, and the man would have missed a syringe if I had had one, like the aforementioned idiot had). I wondered for whose benefit the pat-down and baggage rummage was, and decided it was to make everyone feel safer without actually being inconvenienced in the way you’d have to be if you wanted to make sure no-one actually brought something dangerous onto the plane.

I landed in Boston 28 hours after I left the house. Took a taxi to Amanda's apartment. I'd taken a hotel room nearby, as I knew she was going to be practising Tchaikovsky for the New Year's Eve gig until late, but was I asleep in her bed in minutes and the 1812 Overture with real cannon fire would not have woken me.

…

Yesterday was spent in the hotel, writing introductions and things. I went out for lunch with Chris Golden and Steve Bissette. Went back to the hotel. Wrote. Went with Amanda to watch her getting her hair done. Back to hotel.

What I am going to do today: write, (blog in bed which I am doing now), wear a tuxedo, do a brief reading at Amanda's show tonight, play an instrument. I am not looking forward to the latter bit.

...

Lots of interesting stuff creeping out at the end of the year. I'm probably proudest of this: