I’ve had a long hate affair with the brutalization of English that takes place daily in our corporate environs.

Today was an extreme.  It started innocently enough, with the word breakthrough showing up in a presentation as a verb.  Folks, when two words are combined into one like that, it’s never a verb — it’s either a noun or an adjective.  But hey, that’s a pretty common mistake, even if it is fingernails on the blackboard to the likes of me.

Then the same presentation took a more serious turn, with “mandatories” showing up as a noun.  Mmmm-hmmm…  People, “mandatories” isn’t a word at all.  Mandatory, meanwhile, is an adjective, and nothing but.  Good grief.  (Though I will say in the offender’s defense that I saw the presentation later and the offending word had been changed to mandates.  Hooray for small victories!)

In a seeming final insult, however, I later heard a guy use nuance as a verb:  “Let me nuance that for you.”  Umm… no.  That’s a noun.  Do not pass GO, do not collect $100.  (I haven’t played Monopoly in years, so for all I know it’s $1000 dollars now, what with the printing presses running full-speed 24/7 over at Ben Bernanke’s place.)

Christmas and the time thereafter is always a great time for reading for me.  I always get new books as presents, and I usually have oodles of times during the holidays to read, plus more than ordinary in January and February since workouts are usually less involved and nothing much is going on.

As usual, I got some good presents, two of which I read during the break.  Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen, is a book about a boy surviving alone in the Canadian northwoods after a plane crash.  I’m on a real kick around self-reliance lately, so this was a great read for that; plus, it was just a great read.  I finished it on Christmas Day — but it’s not a long book, being aimed at young readers.

Then I read Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, which I’ve intended to read for years.  (I can never think about it without hearing the song “Starship Trooper” by Yes, which appears to have nothing else in common with the book.)  It is a fantastic story of a future time when earth is at war with a interstellar aliens, told in the voice of an infantryman who rises through the ranks during the conflict.  Not only is it a top-notch sci-fi tale, but it has trenchant messages for our day about leadership, politics and society.

Since then, a few more books.  But that’s for next time.

This weekend I signed up for the Cellcom Green Bay Marathon, happening on May 15.  I’ve been on an official training program for two weeks now, and today I broke a new personal record for length of a run on the treadmill.  (Nine miles.)  I’ll be blasting through a few more of those before the weather gets nice enough to get outside, I’m guessing.  (In fact, I see on the official marathon website that they canceled yesterday’s training run due to dangerous temperatures.  Gee, it was only -16 here when I got up this morning…)

This will be my second marathon, so I’m looking forward to seeing what I can do this time around with the knowledge I gained in last August’s Paavo Nurmi.

My mother-in-law Peggy closed the sale of her old house today, a former farmhouse dating in part from the late 1800s that she and my father- and brother-in-law brought back from the dead back in the 1980s.

The house holds so very many memories for the whole family.  But it just didn’t make any sense for Peggy to stay there alone after my father-in-law Charles died a year and a half ago.

And so it’s a sad day today.  Really, though, a much sadder day for me personally was last July when my wife and I visited the house for the last time.  Almost all the furniture was gone, so it wasn’t the home anymore where we’d spent so many holidays and vacations.  But it was still final reminder of just how shocking and wrong it seemed that it had all come to an end so suddenly.

But there’s a bit of a happy story behind it all, too — Peggy’s.  She not only had to deal with the loss of the husband she’d loved since she was a teenager, but she did so while taking care of her rapidly failing mother-in-law.  When my wife’s grandmother died early last year and bequeathed Peggy her house, my mother-in-law moved into that house in town, quickly making some fairly major changes to make it her own.  And put the country house up for sale.

And then had to deal with the ups and downs of trying to sell an ancient house that had been modified oh so many times over the years.  Inspections and improvements and near-disasters when it seemed it was going to siphon away more money than it could ever bring in a sale.  How many times did it seem better and smarter just to tear the old place down?  I”m sure I don’t know.

I’m also sure Peggy has had countless episodes of anguish and feeling sorry for herself and hating the world.  She is just human, after all.  But I think she’s shown superhuman strength in actively building her new life and persevering through what’s had to be an awfully trying, and at times terribly lonely, year and a half.  Yes, today she had to finalize that she’s truly moved on from the home she had for all those years with Charles.  But at the same time, at least some of what’s been so trying is now behind her.

 So this post is for her.  Mother, I’m proud of you and I love you very much.

The news that Gerry Rafferty had died came just days after a guy I knew killed himself.

So I was already pondering the demons that drive people to such desperation.  Reading that Rafferty had fought depression and alcoholism and suffered from severe liver damage added on more lost soul to the tally.

None of that changes that his “Baker Street” and “Right Down the Line” will always delineate a particular stretch of my growing-up years, or that “Stuck In the Middle With You” (with his early band Stealers Wheel) is a perennial favorite of mine on the oldies playlists.

Here’s hoping my pal and Mr. Rafferty are finally at peace.

What is it with the proliferation of the backpack for the office?  I know our newcomers to the workforce carried backpacks to school, but they also wore shorts to school.  Both look equally professional as working attire, in my less than humble opinion.

And now I see it’s not just the simple backpack, but what looks like full-blown MOLLE gear.  I followed a guy in this morning who had a water bottle and several ancillary bags clipped to his main pack.  I don’t see why we need to outfit ourselves for the office as though we were deploying with the SEALs in Afghanistan.

Um, here’s an idea:  Briefcase.  Get one.

            One of my co-workers arrives at the office

I liked the book.  But it had its problems.  Here’s what I posted on Amazon.  (Not glowing text, but I still rated the book four stars.  Heck, I read the things in just a few days — it must have been good!)

This is a really good book. From a science standpoint, it’s a defense of the real thing; that is, that true science follows Popper’s dictum that it’s properly about DISPROVING theories. In this case, Steven Johnson highlights the overpowering desire of mid-nineteenth century English bureaucrats to have events fit their policy predispositions; specifically, that cholera was transmitted through the air and outbreaks were due to the inferior constitutions of the weak and immoral poor. Their “science,” unlike that of the heroes of the tale, is therefore anything but. Meanwhile, one of our two heroes begins by attempting to disprove the theory of the other, that cholera is water-borne; as a result he provides additional overpowering evidence for that theory AND become a believer himself.

Along the way, Johnson also finds common ground with the likes of Hayek in the notion that the best answers are found by ferreting out the distributed knowledge of the common folk, which is what the heroes did.

Johnson’s approach in building his history recalls Cornelius Ryan, in that he tells the story through the accounts and occurrences of the individuals directly involved; this builds a powerful and gripping narrative.

Then Johnson forgets everything he’s learned. He reveals his city-boy biases in opining that our future is in hyper-dense urbanization, and employs statistics that surely conflate the urban vs. rural with the developed vs. developing to show that cities are, by gosh, just the greatest. (When he tells us how green Manhattanites are by virtue of their fossil fuel consumption, he ignores that Manhattan — like every major city — relies on fuel-guzzling long-distance commuters, too. Oh, and transfer payments from the rural parts of the state. But pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!) He also misses the entire point what he just told us about the lure of the popular narrative and waxes ultra-greenish on global warming too — a rather current affair that’s the very reproduction of his public officials’ blindness to the antiscience of their “science”!

Still, the basic tale Johnson tells is a good and valuable one. Indeed, in a way his lapses in his final chapter only provide amplification to his warning that the very smart are often not very smart, and should always therefore be given the greatest of scrutiny and skepticism.

Here’s a photoessay about a newly discovered cave in Vietnam.  Amazing.  (Courtesy of Instapundit.)

… is this kid.  He stripped to protest the continuing irradiation and molestation by the TSA.  (I really liked his having the Fourth Amendment reference scrawled on his chest.)

Of course, this is how they’ll break us down:

Tobey was interviewed by airport police and federal authorities, issued a citation for disorderly conduct and released. He is scheduled for arraignment on Jan. 10.

A few days ago I was visiting my parents on the edge of Canada and headed out for what was supposed to be a snowshoeing trip to some local falls — I anticipated breaking new trail out to the river like I’ve done in years past, enjoying the pristine wilderness alone.  Instead I discovered the trail not only broken, but so well-trod I didn’t need the snowshoes.  What’s more, my solitude was not to be; numerous people had had the same idea.

So instead I had an exhilarating hike in a gorgeous spot.  Here are a couple of the numerous pictures I got by iPhone.