vacation week at the new yorker zoology fact-checking desk

may 12, 2008, p. 59:

In his living room, Myhrvold has a life-size T. rex skeleton, surrounded by all manner of other dinosaur artifacts. One of those is a cast of a nest of oviraptor eggs, each the size of an eggplant. You'd think a bird that big would have one egg, or maybe two. That's the general rule: the larger the animal, the lower the fecundity. But it didn't. For Myhrvold, it was one of the many ways in which dinosaurs could teach us about ourselves. "You know how many eggs were in that nest?" Myhrvold asked. "Thirty-two."

and you know how many birds are in a room with thirty-two ovulating oviraptors? none, because oviraptors are reptiles, like just about all the other freaking dinosaurs, and they were relatively small dinosaurs in their time and environment, and larger animals have lower fecundity because they have longer gestation periods, but reptiles and other animals that lay eggs don't really have to worry about that (on average, an ostrich—an actual bird that is actually large—lays just over one egg a week, and each egg takes about forty days to hatch, so at any given moment during breeding season there might be five or six eggs from one bird in any nest [but ostriches share nests, so there would probably be more like twenty or thirty eggs total in any one nest, and there might be as many as sixty]), and reptiles tend to lay eggs in large clutches rather than one or two at a time, although most paleontologists are pretty sure that oviraptors, being bird-like, but not birds, formed and laid two eggs at a time and laid multiple pairs sequentially in a single nest, and yes, i am furrowing my nerdy brow at malcolm gladwell, and it pains me greatly, but, damn it, you can't start an article talking about a quantum physicist who goes on dinosaur hunts and get my heart all in an uproar and then do something like this and expect to just get away with it, especially not when i've waited five bloody months for you to do it, gladwell, you weenie. you could have left out this entire paragraph and made your point just as well, if not better, and i wouldn't want to swat you with a rolled-up magazine. sometimes you get so greedy for a higher-resonance close that i think i'll have to start calling you mcfuzz.

she was a bird, by the way. ask your myhrvold about that.


postscript, may 8, 1:59 PM: i had to distance myself from this article for an hour or so, to regain my objectivity, but i have come back and finished it, and it, you know, it's fine. it's a very good point, really, that people have a hard time distinguishing scientific innovation from artistic creation, and they should be distinguished: scientific advancement builds on preexisting knowledge, and in that sense every invention is a collaboration. but while artists typically have myriad influences, imagination can function in a near-vacuum. so while it might be art for someone who's never seen a telephone to think, "wouldn't it be neat if there were some kind of machine that allowed me to talk to someone far away," that visionary won't get anywhere without the aid of some other person, or several people, who knows how sounds and machines work, and there is decidedly less "art" in the construction. i think the degree of genius in either case is about equal, though (i know that i, regardless of my era or company, would never, over the course of an entire lifetime, either think up a telephone or manage to build one from its unassembled parts), and if someone has a brilliant idea independently, it shouldn't be considered any less brilliant if it turns out someone else had it, too. this is the problem with equating all invention with art: the originality factor, which doesn't apply equally in both realms, can get in the way of people's recognition of truly impressive accomplishments. it's also the problem with patents; if you come up with an idea and patent it just for the sake of planting a flag, of saying "i made this" even when you haven't actually made anything, and someone else later comes up with the same idea and has the support and means to take it further than you have, or has already gone further, do you really deserve more credit? surely you don't deserve sole credit, if you aren't capable of turning your idea into a practical reality without the knowledge and assistance of others. if you and some other person independently come up with the same idea before anyone has built anything, does either of you deserve more credit than the other? there's often so much emphasis on timing, but that really isn't relevant at all when it comes to gauging the merit of the notion or relative input into an invention. and yet we are taught that every new thing has one source, that it was one person sitting under a tree or on a hill or in a bathtub who all alone saw the answer that no one else could see. i wish we could be more communal. i know i always come back to the ants, but the truth is they're tops when it comes to societal paradigms. which ant decided to build a hill? who the hell cares? now all the ants have hills,* and it's awesome. people, you know, they're sort of silly animals. some of them even think that anything with feathers that lays eggs must be a bird. but they can't all be natural scientists; some of them have to be writers, and that's good, too. it would be better if they devoted more than one column out of twenty-four to their very good point, but i have a feeling that there are a lot more pages where these came from.



* i know that not all ants live in hills, but i had to wrap this thing up. it isn't like i don't know how writers fall into these traps.

monday swat-in-the-face-with-my-white-glove blogging

condé nast is hiring. condé nast is always hiring, all the time. condé nast will not hire me, because i don't live in new york, or because i think gucci handbags are preternaturally ghastly, or because i don't have a master's in journalism from yale and a phd in comparative literature from columbia, or who knows why.* whatever the reason is, the human resources department is doing nothing to convince me that it has anything to do with my skills set not being up to the publisher's standards; right now condé nast is looking to hire a senior editor—let's take a look at the prereqs, why don't we:

The Senior Editor reports, edits, and packages stories. The position requires a proven history of reporting, editing, and compiling material specifically with food-related feature stories. This person will also have a solid knowledge of copyediting and fact checking. The Senior Editor must have published clips proving an ability to weave a compelling, literary story that evokes a strong sense of place, and captures the essence of an experience or destination are necessary. Experience editing high caliber writers is essential.

what does that sentence even mean? i have to read the job description three times just to figure out what the hell it's getting at, and they're the ones looking down their noses at me? pish.

in all honesty, i have no interest in this job, but it's the principle of the thing, you know? and we have something of a history. when their promotion department sent out an e-mail blast last march about the new yorker conference, i found a typo in it. you can't reply to those e-mails (i tried; they don't even want to hear it), so i couldn't help them, but it bothered me all day. that typo isn't present on the current conference page, which is basically an expanded version of the blast, but there are new and thrilling errors in its place. 2012 is a big deal, a big, lofty, intellectual, self-congratulatory deal; there's no room for editorial mishaps in that sort of thing. likewise, public notice of a job opening that is going to be viewed by many, many people—people who have come to you because you represent a standard they aspire to—should be checked once or twice before it's released, ideally by someone who can read and speak fluent, intelligible english. i understand that nobody's perfect, but sometimes the context in which that imperfection reveals itself makes it so much more disappointing.




* i know what you're thinking, and yes, i do capitalize properly in all official application materials. i don't enjoy it, but i do it.

ap strikes again!

from a recent news piece on the paternity of anna nicole smith's baby girl, who has been determined to be the daughter of larry birkhead (mostly determined? as the dna analyst put it, birkhead is "essentially" the biological father, whatever the hell that means):

Smith's lawyer-turned-companion has been caring for baby Dannielynn since her sudden death in February.

how delightfully "rose for emily" of him. i bet all of you thought the worst smell a baby could produce would emanate from a diaper, but howard k. stern, courageous do-gooder that he is, wants you to know that while that is not the case, the way the baby seems to smile as her slowly wizening lips peel back from her ashen gums makes it all worthwhile.

for pete's sake, people. it's like you're not even trying. but then, this is the first article on the case that i've actually read all the way through; perhaps the public's attention has waned to a virtually nonexistent nubbin as well, and this is how you are reeling them back in. in that case you may have not only tried but succeeded, and i should applaud you. but i will not applaud you, because i hate you. news. feh.

mummified babies, on the other hand, are the bees' blessed knees.

monday punch-in-the-face blogging

i was prepared to march back into the new yorker's copyediting department this week and start rapping the staff upon their knuckles with their red pens, which they seem to have lost interest in striving to be worthy of. some errors i can compel myself to make peace with—inappropriate spacing, dropped hyphens at word breaks at the ends of lines (oh yes, it's happened), things of that ilk, which would perhaps only be present in the final proof—but other things i can't overlook. take, for instance, this sentence on page 74 of the july 31 issue (i did mention, didn't i, that i have fallen a little bit behind?):

But a determined old woman decided to give him the water he was begging or and cleaned his face with her skirt.

DO YOU SEE??????? for shame! for shame! there's no excuse for that one. and then there's this, from hertzberg's "talk of the town" piece in the august 7 & 14 issue:

It defines "Democrat n" as "A Democratic Party member" and "Democratic adj" as "Of, relating to, or characteristic of the Democratic Party," but gives no definition for—indeed, makes no mention of—"Democrat Party n" or "Democrat adj".

was the united states under british rule for a brief period this past summer? because the end of that sentence certainly was.* and while i officially approve of the magazine's apparent decision to stop italicizing punctuation marks immediately following italicized text, on page 68 of the same issue there is an italicized semicolon following "the atlantic monthly"—and then, farther down on the same page, a non-italicized comma following the same title. what am i to think, people, of such chaos? is it a surreptitious reference to the anarchy overseas? was the hot summer sun creating a blinding glare on the office's computer screens and printed matter for two or three straight weeks? is there a method to this madness that is simply not cognoscible by my feeble, daylight-starved brain? believe me, i'd be thrilled to learn that the only problem is that i don't get it, and there are plenty of things that leave me purely confused. walk backwards through time with me so that we may revisit the july 31 issue and explore this sentence on page 83:

Its undulating glass-and-steel swoops and swells as if it were not a solid mass but a billowing length of fabric.

what is happening with those hyphens? a bit melodramatic, aren't they? are they really necessary? really? really? i just don't know anymore.

so i gnashed my teeth and rent my garments, but in the end those dozens of knuckles were spared; i am still kicking an issue of the new yorker back and forth across my apartment, but, i suppose thankfully, my rage is directed at an idea and not a technicality.

listen, i dig john updike. i do. i bought a paperback copy of marry me for a quarter at a library sale when i was in high school, and i've been collecting his titles like baseball cards ever since. i dig him so much that when the early stories came out a few years ago, i bought a hardcover copy for my cousin instead of for myself, because my cousin loves great stories but had never read anything by updike, and that made me a whole lot sadder than not owning that book ever could have. i was working at david r. godine, inc., the parent publisher of the black sparrow imprint, when the golden west: hollywood stories—a work updike wrote the introduction for—was in the final stages of its production, and one day the editor handed me a packet addressed to updike and asked me to drop it in the mailbox on my way out. i scribbled the address down on a scrap of paper and carried it around in my pocket for weeks, thinking maybe i would sneak out to his house in the dead of night and leave some sort of present on his lawn to thank him for all he'd done for me and the rest of the world. i'm a fan, right down to the tips of my tippy little toes.

today, though, i have no choice but to let him have it. i don't think i can bring myself to hit him actually, you know, in the face, but i am going to hit him somewhere about the face, or at least once very soundly on the back of the head. in a minute. i'm winding up.

in his july 31 review of sara gruen's water for elephants, a book about a depression-era traveling circus (which is more than enough to hook me; i *heart* carnies), updike says some pleasant things about the author and her firm grasp on 1930s-sideshow vernacular, and that's all well and good. but then he says . . . i mean, maybe i shouldn't be bothered, probably i shouldn't be at all surprised, but after all of the terrible things that have happened in the recent history of our world, after all of the unspeakable things that have been happening without pause since the world became a world, to say a thing like this:

Recalling, near the end of his life, his work as a veterinarian for the circus and his love for a colleague's wife, [Jacob Jankowski, the novel's narrator and protagonist] comes off as so relentlessly decent—an unwavering defender of animals, women, dwarves, cripples, and assorted ethnic groups—that he ceases to be interesting as a character.

maybe, given all the updike characters i've crawled into bed with over the years, it is exactly what i should have expected—but i still hate it. nobody likes a cloyingly sweet goody two-shoes, and a character with one earnestly altruistic dimension might be unbelievable, but there's a problem when we start viewing "relentlessly decent" individuals as unreadably dull. an unwavering defender of the weak and disenfranchised isn't tedious, he's, you know, jesus—or bahá’u’lláh or guru nanak dev, choose your path, they're more or less all rooted in those ideals. rooted; they get twisted, sometimes, up toward the branches, where people who are not relentlessly decent are able to get their hands on them. but those are lasting characters, wouldn't you say? captivating enough to have kept people turning the pages for the past couple of centuries, or millenia. i know i wouldn't die of ennui if a few more people started emulating those characters, those thoroughly decent characters. you know who wasn't an unwavering defender of cripples and assorted ethnic groups? hitler. and he was a hell of a character, sure, but not one i want to read any more stories about. ever. if my choices are "morally conflicted/challenged" and "Not Interesting To Writers," well, i guess it was for the best that i never sat up all night tying a perfect bow on the perfectly wrapped gift i never left in a certain wordsmith's front yard. *sniff*

*smack*

there, i've done it. now you sit in that corner, john updike, and think about what you've done.

oh, and, um, when you're finished thinking, um, do you think maybe you could sign my copy of pigeon feathers? that part toward the end, where david's mother is trying to make him see that the earth isn't any less a gift from god if god is an invention of humans, when she's talking about forcing yourself to pay attention to the evidence . . . it just kills me. she was a good woman, wasn't she, that elsie kern? so worried about the fertilizer hurting the earthworms . . . i could read about her forever.


* i do love the pun, i truly do, and you can't take that away from me.


update, 1/12/07, 1:11 PM: i am not alone in my love/hate/love/love/hate affair with updike; jared young has just recently offered up a beautiful work of sardonically loathesome adulation. oh, johnny boy; we're huggin' ya . . . but we're hittin' ya!

boo, pretentious theater critic! hooray, beer!

wait, what . . . oh, gosh, i'm sorry. here, let me try that again:

*mmherm* hooray, modern poetry!

yes. much better. now, allow me to explain.

i was quite proud of myself when i read the word "crepuscular" in john lahr's review of brian friel's faith healer (the new yorker, may 15, 2006, p. 80) and thought immediately, and correctly, of wallace stevens, whose work i devoured in high school and college but haven't glanced at since. the pride stemmed not only from my brain's charming, if somewhat rain-man-y, eagerness to match a word with the first place i saw it, in this case stevens's "the comedian as the letter c," but also its ability to focus on any one word in lahr's rococo prose, so ornate it's practically gilded and reeking of trumpet lilies. for a moment i was grateful to lahr for bringing stevens to mind, as i do adore him but frequently forget it, and then i was annoyed with him for using so magnificent a word as "crepuscular" to describe something like a low-lit stage set. a rather out-of-place adjective, is what i thought to myself. i read on to the next paragraph, where lahr describes ralph fiennes as "gaunt and thin," and decided i was filing him firmly under h for hack. and then i got to the second-to-last paragraph and decided that was far too good for him. here are the last two sentences of that paragraph:

this gleeful stuff is matched by a first-rate cast of players, especially danny burstein, who turns the transparently gay latin lover adolpho into a whirlwind of bogus macho concupiscence. he ricochets around the stage, with the silver streak in his black pompadour ruffling like a bantam rooster's comb.

"the emperor of ice cream": "call the roller of big cigars, / the muscular one, and bid him whip / in kitchen cups concupiscent curds." this one i'd know anywhere, as it's the first wallace stevens poem i ever read and was the spark that ignited the raging blaze of my (to date) undying love. i read it on a family vacation in maine when i was thirteen; it was the introduction to a chapter in stephen king's salem's lot. i have read it over and over and over since then (unlike salem's lot, which presumably played its full role that first time around) and could recite it from memory to any one of you with both hands tied behind my back. i read "bantam in pine-woods" in an undergraduate poetry course and have not forgotten it, or the entirety of "the man on the dump," which i memorized for a performance-art class and which doesn't really pertain to this conversation except in making me slightly more believable as an expert witness when i make my assertion that john lahr is a despicable fraud, which i shall do without further delay:

john lahr is a despicable fraud. and wallace stevens would never have been his scrabble buddy. i repeat: boo!

spelling counts!

from the "neatest trick" department:

a 2-year-old girl's stolen prosthetic legs apparently have been found. a maintenance worker at a new haven apartment building discovered the derby girl's legs yesterday—two days after a car they had been in was stolen in milford—and turned them into police.

. . . who then arrested the car thieves, in a brilliant turn of magical-realist poetic justice. this blurb was spotted in the 6/23 weekend edition of the boston metro, from which i expect nothing but a crossword puzzle i can solve in under fifteen minutes, but still . . . in a perfect world, i'm not the only person who's paying attention. hence the melting ice caps, eh?

speaking of crossword puzzles, though, here's something lovely: patrick creadon's wordplay, a movie about crossword puzzles and the americans who obsess over them, particularly the ny times' crossword editor will shortz, features a charming (as if it could be otherwise) bit with jon stewart. that's two of my favorite things in a combination i would never have come up with on my own, and i'm positively giddy over it. it's like the make-a-wish foundation has had me on twenty-four-hour surveillance for the past half a decade and one day decided i'd been a good enough (and perhaps sick enough) girl after all. the metro ran an ad for this movie in the same edition, so the error is atoned for in my eyes, but i think it still has some apologizing to do to the rest of its readers—even the ones who didn't notice or care, who likely amount to a hefty sum.

sunday best-of blogging

best song to stretch lazily and blissfully in a swath of sunlight that's warming your bed in all the right places to: "the greatest," cat power. chan marshall sounds like a very happy woman on this new album, and i'm glad.

best career news: in march, i started copyediting three days a week for a periodicals publisher. those three days were in addition to the three days i was already (and still am) working at the animal hospital, and that's why you haven't heard much from me lately; it was rough getting used to having one day off, when for the past year or so i'd had about four. but it's been worth the adjustment: wednesday the managing editor and president of the company offered me a full-time position as chief articles editor for three journals, one that's currently in publication and two that will be starting up in the summer. they're all on really technical sciency stuff like neurodegeneration and opioid receptors, so my inner geek is doing cartwheels, and the position seems like a pretty killer way to transition into a new field. as a bonus, i'll still get to do the copyediting on the truly troubled articles, like the ones that were written by people who don't normally speak english, and i genuinely love that stuff, so i'm one happy nerd. it's a lot more than i'd expected to be offered, coming in as a temp with no formal experience, but apparently i've got a golden ear for quality. it's especially fun for me because for the past ten years my best friend's nickname for me has been "chief," so i won't just be Chief Articles Editor, i'll be Chief, Articles Editor. what a hoot! i won't be making the switch until july, so i might still be off the radar a lot of the time, but know that i'm well and that i'm always thinking of you. unless i've died. i don't know how you'll know for sure. i guess i'd recommend cautious optimism.

best basis for sexual attraction: "he's got a real horshack-epstein vibe going on." spoken by toadie in reference to the lead singer of the band why? (whom you can search for on their label's site). why? opened for islands, also on wednesday, now on record as Juniper's Favorite Day in April Ever. islands contains two former members of the unicorns and lots of other people, and while i dreamt unfulfilled dreams of a "jellybones" encor, toadie's above comment, which was followed by, "i might have to throw my underwear on stage," made up for anything that might have been missing—especially because she and i are maybe the only two girls on the planet who could say it and mean it.

saddest punctuation development: the new yorker appears to have abandoned the en dash. as they were one of the last remaining holdouts, i fear for its imminent extinction in mass publication. it will forever live on in this blog, though, and doubtless in your faithful hearts, and the second i take over the magazine's offices you can bet your bonny behind you'll be seeing it back on those pompous, beautiful pages.

best missed photo op: ah, my dear, sweet, brazenly hypocritical mspca; how happy i am to be escaping your smarmy, capitalist façade of goodness. the society's veterinary hospital, who can't be my former employer one moment too soon, is in the midst of a MASSIVE and entirely cosmetic renovation, believing that a prettier outside will draw more clients inside. i've no idea how many billions of dollars they're pouring into it, but i imagine it's several. meanwhile, the staff is tragically underpaid, the ccu is cramped and inadequate (and staying that way), and dozens of patients are turned away or sentenced to death because their owners don't make the financial cut. oh, and the hospital's president owns a very small jet, which he likes to take out every once in a while for meditation purposes. 'cause he's tense.

anyway, since the external construction started, the grounds have been bombed routinely with rodenticide to keep mice from seeking shelter in the building, and half the trees on the once sprawling and lovely lawn have been cleared to make room for parking lots. yesterday, i.e., earth day, a surgery supervisor made a large, touching "happy earth day!" sign for us to take outside and stand next to the destruction crew with as they detreed our borders, and i was soooo excited—but then it started to rain, and they all went home. poo.

least inspiring television moment: i have no idea what the program was, or even what channel it was on, but the other night i saw a woman applying makeup to a tomboyish teenage girl, and when she was done and the girl admitted that she didn't look too bad, the woman said, "now, i want you to put this makeup on every day, O.K.? you have to promise that you'll do that, no cheating; girly girls wear makeup to school." i'd like to tell you what happened after that, but i vomited and passed out.

best kisser: your mom. at least, that's what it says in the fourth stall from the right.

sunday best-of blogging

best song to silently and tranquilly embrace the inevitable to, even while inwardly mourning and resenting the world for forcing you to do so: "casimir pulaski day," sufjan stevens.

best communication breakdown: one of our cardiologists submitted a request for chest x-rays to data entry, and in the patient's history he scribbled a picture of a heart, instead of writing out the word. when the sad, skinny boy in data entry processed the request, the slip that printed out in radiology read, "persistent cough x several days, weak; evidence of love failure." single doctors throughout the building hung photocopies on their office doors.

best item extracted from a dog's intestinal tract: an entire pair of girls' panties, with "sweet" penned in sparkly silver calligraphy across the back above a picture of what i believe is a tightly wrapped piece of saltwater taffy.

best airline meal:


i am totally getting this.

my thanks to ken brown, who also designed the fabulous wrapping paper i mentioned in a previous best-of post. toadie and i are quasi-poor fans, as we haven't actually ordered anything from mr. brown (his minimum postcard order is 12 dozen or something, and while we would find ways to use them, we aren't made of money orders); we are promoting him every chance we get, though, mainly by sporting stolen, photoshopped morsels of his artwork on t-shirts. does that count? we think that counts.

best tortilla chips: the flour tortilla chips available in the prepared-foods section of whole foods. (insert homer simpson drooly noise here.) oh, they're so flaky and greasy and delicious, they dissolve into liquid glee on your tongue. the second best, though, for those who can't always make the trek to mecca, are the tostitos gold chips, which i can sometimes find one lonesome bag of on the bottom shelf of my local supermarket's nacho-fixins end cap, like the gods have stashed their irresistible hydrogenated yumminess away just for me. death by chocolate is a fine idea, but i'll take my final bow salty and oily.

best tradition: from john seabrook's article on the renaissance-era fruits of umbria, published in the september 5 issue of the new yorker, which i am just now finishing:

the dalla ragiones keep many of the traditional umbrian festivals, and at the end of the year they burn la vecchia, the effigy of an old woman made of rags and straw, and livio curses—"vaffanculo, anno vecchio!" ("up your ass, old year!")—and spits into the fire.

i am, as ever, bothered by the new yorker's decision to italicize the closing quotation marks around the italicized text, but not the opening ones. i'm putting it right out of my head, though, because i'm so enchanted with the saying. this family lives pretty close to where we're staying in umbria, so i'll have to make sure our friend and soon-to-be hostess remembers the curse and shouts it drunkenly at the top of her lungs at someone who has no idea what the hell she's saying this new year's eve. she'll be absolutely tickled pink. i'll probably do the same, but i think it'll be funnier for her, since there's a chance that the person she shouts at will think he or she should know what she's saying. unless she comes home and we wind up at the same party, and then we'll just shout it at each other, which i'm sure will be, at the time, the funniest thing yet.

best guilty pleasure: i, um, i love the bee gees. love them. unfortunately, i do not feel better having gotten that off my chest, and i'm still only going to listen to them when no one else is home.

best dream: one of the emergency/critical care doctors at the hospital came running through and ordered everyone to evacuate radiology, because she, for some reason, had to treat a dangerous tiger, and she didn't want any unnecessary personnel to be injured by it. toadie and i stuck around in case she needed help with the x-ray equipment, but we climbed up on top of the processor to be out of the way. the doctor shouldered her dart gun and marched out of sight, and the roaring and bellowing that had been emanating from around the corner suddenly ceased. we assumed she'd successfully sedated the tiger and crept over to check things out, and when we peeked around we saw the doctor attempting to stick a man dressed up like a character from cats in the butt with a giant syringe as he backed up against the wall, hissing, and swatted ineffectually at her with his fuzzy hands. she triumphed in the end, but we just left him passed out next to the door and ate some bagels.

sunday best-of blogging

best tune to stare at yourself in the mirror and swear that you'll never make that mistake again to: the piano intro to "icicle" on tori amos's under the pink, ideally isolated on a home-spun recording and leading directly into the "all the girls hate her/over it" piano suite off the "god" single from the same album.

best marketing idea: tootsie drops, the miniature version of tootsie pops. they'd be about the size of your average gumball and stick-free, so you'd get all the goodness of a tootsie pop without all the damned work. i think they'd be a tremendous success, because let's face it, folks, those lollipops are huge and impossible to enjoy while you're doing anything else. i suppose we'd have to alter the candy-to-tootsie ratio a little bit, but i think we could find a balance that would make everybody happy. well, not me, maybe, because i don't eat them, but it's not about me, it's about you—you and the millions of kids who leave saliva-drenched lollipops stuck to whatever public surface is closest at hand when they tire of their monstrous sweets. stupid stinking halloween.

best exchange overheard on a city bus: "you're gonna be toasted like a toaster strudel, gonna get scrambled like some ramen noodles…"
"man, you suck. you suck worse than scary movie 3."

best soup: imagine's organic creamy butternut squash. i've had it for lunch every day this week and i don't even like squash, that's how good this is. eat it. EAT IT!!!!!!!!

best compliment: "of course [i like you]! who wouldn't, save for someone with an ignoble heart the size of a chiclet?" hello, phila! welcome to the monkey house! i'll be your hostess. if anyone throws anything larger than a beer bottle, you come straight to me.

best search term directing a disappointed reader to this very page: heh. heh heh. the even funnier thing is that he/she followed it twice, on consecutive days. am i so forgettable? *sniff* i'm going to pretend he/she was just so bound up in the thrill of the search that names of pages got lost in the shuffle. sorry, dude. better luck next time. here, as you seem so devoted to your quest, i'll offer you a consolation prize.

best excuse for neglecting my sad, lonely blog: see next item.

best career news: this week i scored my first freelance copyediting gig for which i'm able to quote a price based on the difficulty of the document in question. the company i was working for before set a flat rate, and i could either accept it or not take the job. now i have to decide what i think i'll actually deserve, which is as daunting as it is exciting. i feel obligated to ask for less than most copy editors ask for, since i'm basically self-trained and impressively inexperienced, but the fact that this company thought me qualified before they knew my asking rates should have made me feel better about requesting a living wage. what i hope is that this experience will force me to look at my work with absolute objectivity, so i won't be afraid in the future to ask for what i've earned. it's a distressingly adult situation, and to be honest, i didn't really see it coming. my roommate thinks i might feel less uneasy about it if i put on a dress suit and did my work at a desk in the living room, instead of in my pajamas in an armchair in my bedroom. she could be right, but i think what i need more than that is a meager handful of instances where i say that i've worked this hard and should be compensated thusly, and the person who's compensating me agrees. and that, by all appearances, is precisely what i have an opportunity to provide myself with. i've knowingly lowballed on the first two jobs, but maybe i'll stand up for myself soon. that i'm even thinking about it is a giant personal step forward, so i'm applauding myself, but i'm only thinking about it, so that applause is being made surreptitiously by one hand inside my pocket.

why is this so strange? it's not as if i've never gotten the work i wanted before. when i decided that i wanted to work as a veterinary nuclear medicine technologist, well, by golly, that's what i did, even though there are only two veterinary hospitals in massachusetts that routinely provide such studies and no school anywhere that trains you specifically to perform them. i was hired a month out of school with the understanding that in no time i'd be heading and expanding the department, and i was just a baby; i hadn't even taken my licensing exam yet. but i worked for what i wanted, and i accomplished exactly what i told everyone i would. i shouldn't be shocked by a similar degree of opportunity in a different field, and yet i absolutely am. maybe it's just that i'm still a little shocked to hear myself admitting that this is what i want. i feel, for the first time, 100% in control of my own future, and it's this utterly foreign future that i had never once imagined myself in until it was waving its "welcome" sign in my boggled little face. it's weird. it's very weird. but if this is the way that turning twenty-seven is going to alter my life, i'll sure as hell take it.

best song to become suddenly certain it wasn't a mistake to: "michigan girls," califone.

*gasp* NO!

it can't be true. it really can't. or at least, i can't believe it could be true, but...

is that a leprechaun riding my wish‐granting unicorn's back?

the new yorker, august 29, page 36, paragraph 2, line 17:

The liberal guests fall into a few subcategories: "center left" opinion journalists (Hewitt considers himself "center right"), such as Peter Beinart, the editor of The New Republic; "'way left" bloggers, such as Matthew Yglesias, who calls himself "A Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community," and who also writes for The American Prospect; and, more rarely, people with supposedly non-ideological jobs with mainstream news outlets.

i guess if i'm willing to accept their "coöperate"s, then i ought to accept their insistence on italicizing semicolons immediately following other italicized text, as they've done above, instead of keeping them consistent with the main font. i ought to, i know—but it's harder to do than you think. never mind that, that's just me being neurotic and obsessive; what i really want to draw your attention to is that apostrophe before the word "way" in "way left." isn't it odd? doesn't it seem utterly out of place and unfounded and, well, wrong? what is it up to, anyhow? is "way" short for something in this context? is there a history to the slang that i'm unaware of that makes that punctuation appropriate? i'm really asking, because if not and it's just a bizarro error, then i'm going to run out into the rainy leaf-strewn street and do me some jigging.

i will OWN YOU, finder! i will rule you with my iron, blue-pencil-wielding fist!

unless i'm completely mistaken, in which case i will continue to sit here quietly and proofread soap opera plot summaries on a volunteer basis.

update, 10/15/05: the "'way" appears to be deliberate, as it's written again in the same manner toward the end of the article, so i'm not doing any jigging; i am, however, hopping up and down on one foot with a fiercely defiant look on my face, because i can't think of any reason to include that apostrophe aside from a belligerent and snobbish refusal to accept mainstream slang, even when its usage is confirmed in reputable dictionaries. all i can think of is that "way," in this adverbial sense, is assumed to be a shortening of "far away." in that case the apostrophe may have been called for at some point in the distant past, but i vehemently reject it now, on evolutionary grounds. i think this is probably the first time i've ever said this, but, for pete's sake, new yorker, get over yourself.

i win! i win!

nothing makes me happier than finding a typo in the new yorker, mainly because there are typically no such things; it's like finding a four-leaf clover in a hundred-acre meadow, or a bit of karl rove's soul that isn't putrid and black. today my wish-granting unicorn has taken the form of a failure to insert a space between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next. hooray! i mark this day with a white stone.

august 22 edition (yes, i'm ashamed of how far behind i've fallen), page 70, paragraph 2, line 6:

. . . gets them wrong."The bullshitter's. . .

BAM! bitch went down.