The Worst Word in the English Language

I was actually going to write the word "******" for the title of this post, but I couldn't do it. I guess that makes "******" the worst word in the English lanaguage. I don''t believe that word should be used as an epithet, but I do think it has other uses and shouldn't be absolutely banned.

Language Log

I bookmarked Language Log some time ago, but I haven't checked it often. After yesterday's entry, I think I'll look in more often. It is the most interesting commentary I've seen on the Mel Gibson affair.

The Fourth of July

If you haven't sung the National Anthem today, sing along with this one.

Words of the Day

With Dictionaries.com, it is now easy to translate what Peggy Noonan meant when she used "termagant" and "phenomenological" to describe Hillery Clinton. That makes these the Words of the Day.

Amazing Street Painter

I've always liked the work of street artists. Here are photos of one in Barcelona and others in San Diego.



For a truly amazing street painter, look at this!

Today's Sports Quiz

Who are DeSagana Diop, Udonis Haslem, Antoine Walker, Adrian Griffin, and Jason Terry?

A. Reserves for the Edmonton Oilers Stanley Cup hockey team.
B. Members of the USA World Cup Soccer team.
C. Starters in the NBA finals.

I would guess "B" and be wrong. The correct answer here.

Favorite Irish Joke

In recognition of St. Patrick's Day, here is my favorite Irish joke. Some twenty-five years ago it was named one of the Ten Best Clean Jokes of that year.

The CIA has lost contact with one of its operatives in Ireland, so it sends another spy to try to locate the man. All the new guy knows is that the operative's name is Murphy and the password phrase is "It's a beautiful day today" and the response is "and it will be a beautiful day tomorrow".

The new man flies to Shannon airport, rents a car, and heads out hunting for Murphy. He stops at the first village he comes to, goes into a pub, and tells the pubkeeper he's looking for a man named Murphy. The pubkeeper tells him, "Well, there's Murphy the pharmacist, there's Murphy the plumber, even I myself am a Murphy." The CIA guy thanks him, and as he is leaving says, "It's a beautiful day today."

The Pubkeeper replies, "Oh, it's Murphy the spy you'll be looking for then."

Interesting New Tool

This is a couple of weeks early, but I saw this tool on the internet and thought others might like to get one. It is certainly versatile.

Nychthemeron

The word of the day is "Nychthemeron". I've never heard of it before.

Old Family Photos

If you want to see some old family photos, check out these, and here, too. They are among the oldest color photos in the world--only a hundred or so years old.

Smile of the day

An Expert Slips

The right side of Blogostan has been atwitter this week about a photo in the New York Times that mis-identified a piece of ordnance in Pakistan. Powerline cited it, and the American Thinker has gotten in a pissing contest with the Times I over it. They report:

"Ned Barnett is an expert on military technology, and frequently serves as a contributor to The History Channel on mil-tech issues. He has plenty of experience researching military ordnance.

"He told me: “Based on my extensive experience in researching military technology, I can verify that this is a 152mm or 155mm artillery shell – unfired – and by the looks of it, fairly old. It also looks like it has a fuse in it, suggesting that the guys in the photo are either ditch-water dumb or have a death-wish."

He has missed the boat on the "unfired" part. The shell has obviously been fired. Note the grooves on the rotating band near the base of the shell The rotating band engages the rifiling grooves in the gun barrel and cause the shell to rotate during flight. If unfired, there would be no grooves on the shell's rotating band.

Does This Make Sense to You?

Michael Feldman's What Do You Know quiz referenced this USA Today Survey that makes absolutely no sense to me. In case the link doesn't work, the survey says "More than nine in 10 investors say they would chose a financial services company with strong ethics; only 5% prefer higher returns." Surely something is missing somewhere.

I am reminded of a comment on Wall Street Week many years ago. Someone had inquired about a "socially conscious mutual fund that would return 20% annually". One of the regular panelists (Eddie Brown, I think) observed with a wry smile that he'd deal with the Devil for a 20% return. I can't imagine 1% of investors being primarily concerned about Ethics, much less 92%

Scott McBride

I haven't written much about my (former) step-son Scott McBride. But on his recent return from a year-long business trip in Baghdad, I thought I'd give him some pixels on SawdustForBrains.


Scott & Brenda in 1989

When Brenda and I got married in 1990. I hardly knew Scott. He had lived with his father when Brenda's first marriage broke up, so I had only seen him only on rare occasions when her family got together. Scott graduated from Elon in 1990 and couldn't find a job he really wanted. In early 1991 he enlisted in the Army because it would give him a leg-up on the state wildlife service job he really wanted.

Scott at Induction


Scott went into the infantry, and Brenda and I (and Scott's sister Heather) went to Ft. Benning to his basic training graduation, as much as any other reason, I admit, so I could revisit my ROTC Summer Camp experience from thirty years earlier. It was eye-opening to see the Army of the 90's compared to the army of the 60's that I knew. There were two big differences: 1.) Scott's basic training company was mostly white— only a couple of "brothers" out of 150 soldiers, and 2.) Everyone wanted to be there. All the time I was in the army between starting basic ROTC in 1960 until I mustered out as a lieutenant in 1968, if they had said I could go home, I'd be gone. But Scott's fellow soldiers all wanted to be there and looked forward to their army service.

Scott was assigned to the 10th (Mountain) Infantry Division (this was Audie Murphy's and Bob Dole's unit in WW2) and moved to Fort Drum outside Watertown, NY. In October, 1991, his unit (2nd Btn, 22nd Infantry regiment ("the Triple Deuce") was sent to Somalia to replace another10th Mountain unit that had been in the middle of the middle of the Battle of Mogadishu that was the subject of the book (and movie) Blackhawk Down.

Scott spent 6 months in Somalia but has never talked much about his experiences there. He also had a short stay in Haiti in 1994 when the 10th Mtn was sent there. In 1995 he moved from the infantry to Armored Cavalry and he and his family moved to Ft. Carson CO. There, he realized what he really wanted to do in the army was fly helicopters. At first he wasn't selected for Warrant Officer Candidate School, a pre-requisite for helicopter school, and was sent to Germany for a short assignment, but in early 1995 went to Ft. Rucker in Alabama, first for Warrant Officer School and then for two years of helicopter school.


Warrant Officer McBride

He almost didn't make it out of WO school, when he was discovered to have "contraband" in his locker (a tin of snuff), but an NCO on the school staff stood up for Scott when he was honest and admitted his error, and scott was only held back one class rather than being dismissed from the school.


Pilot McBride
After a year of basic flight school, Scott chose to fly AH-64 Apache attack helicopters and spent another year at Ft. Rucker learning Apaches. He then spent a year in Korea, after which he was assigned to the 229th Attack Helicoptor Regiment at Ft. Bragg, and we got to see a lot more of him. After about six months in Fayetteville, his unit was sent to Afghanistan



He spent six months there in the fall of 2001 and returned to the US just before Christmas. His unit was transferred to the Third Infantry Division and he went to Iraq with that unit in late 2004.

He has just returned to Ft. Bragg from Iraq and he will be there with his new wife Heather ("the other Heather") until summer when he will probably be moving to Ft. Gordon (Savannah, GA) and rejoin the rest of the 3rdID.

I haven't seen much of Scott since Brenda decided she didn't want to be married in 2003, but I'm proud of him, as we should all be of the dedicated folks who protect us from "the bad guys", and it's good to have him back in the western hemisphere.

Not Guilty again

As previously reported, I had nothing to do with this.
I don't know nothing about this either.

Today's "Easy" Question

What is Rudyard Kipling's first name?

OK, it's not up there with "Who is buried in Grant's Tomb", but if you subscribed to the Writer's Almanac, you'd know.

The word of the day is Steganography

I didn't know about this. It is very interesting. It sort of came up in this article. See this quote from today's WSJ Best of the web:

Does Zarqawi Take Shorthand? "Here's an amusing goof from the Associated Press: "Terrorists also have made only infrequent use of stenography, the practice of hiding a text message in another kind of file, typically a picture."Actually, stenography, also known as shorthand, is a method of taking notes. The AP meant "Steganography"

The Big Game

In today's Wall Street Journal there is an article about big football rivalries around the country, but they completely miss the biggest (at least in South Carolina): the South Carolina/Clemson game.

Folks not in SC find it hard to imagine how everyone in the Palmetto state must chose one or the other of these two schools--there is no waffling. Regardless of what team one may normally root for, everyone in the state must choose the Tigers or the Gamecocks for this game.

My personal experience with The Game goes back to 1960, the first year The Game began its home-and-home run between Clemson and Columbia after being played on Thursday of State Fair Week for years. I was a freshman at Clemson that year.





It had been traditional at Clemson for all freshman men ("Rats") to have their heads shaved and be required to wear a beanie ("rat hat") until the Big Thursday Game and on until Thanksgiving if Clemson lost to Carolina. There was some controversy that fall since the game had ben moved from mid October to the end of November but since Clemson won that day, it aas the end of rat hats that year.

Another interesting custom was that on the Friday night before the Big Game, all Rats painted their faces and went out to "guard" the campus, protecting it from USC vandals. Here is a typical group.


My second Clemson/USC game, my sophmore year, had several interesting highlights. I was in the Clemson precision drill team, the Pershing Rifles, and we pereformed on the field just prior to the game.



As we were waiting to begin our performance, a USC fraternity came out on the field and did a warm-up routine making considerable fun of the folks from the cow college.



We got in our fun as well. As the drill team was marching into the stadium, one of our members, Bill Miller, the Rear Guide (and shortest man on the team) picked up a dead rooster from a Clemson fan and tied it to his side during the performance. For our Finale, we formed in two facing lines and fired a salute, and just as the salute was fired, Bill tossed the rooster high between the two lines, and it loooked for all the world like that that chicken had been plugged by32 M-1 rounds!

I don't know how reliable the linked account is, butI clearly recall that the game ended with Clemson inside the USC 10 and threatening to score the winning touchdown but losing 21-14. This was followed by a number of fights both on the field and in the stands, and I was happy we still had our drill rifles with us.

Just Wondering . . .

James Taranto, in his Best of the Web column today, links to this article in the NYTimes. I don't know much about the NY mayoral election and I care even less, but I wonder whether the NY Times reporter didn't know about the David Kaczynski connection, or whether he/she thought it wasn't relevent to their story. The first seems inept and the second misleading. At least no one asked what the Unabomber and Miss West Virginia have in common.

The Death of Photography

OK, maybe it isn't the end of photography as we know it, but we are getting closer to the end of old family photos. Instapundit cited some old family pictures last week. This made me glad my father had been a photographer, and particularly glad he had "splurged" on taking color slides instead of black & white prints. Here are some pre-WWII photos he took that look almost as good today as they did when they were taken more than 60 years ago.

This is one of the earliest photos he took (well, I guess someone else took it since there was no self-timer on his Kodak Retina camera). I think it was made in 1939 at a beach in the Florida panhandle. The slide is so sharp that you can almost read the grafitti on the post next to them.


This 1940 photo is of my mother, pregnant with my older sister (who is now my younger sister).

My father's camera would be laughable today--a 35-mm folding model sort of like a current point-and-shoot camera, except no auto-focus, no auto-exposure, no auto-loading, even no flash. Indoor photos were time exposures (and with an f/3.5 lens and ASA 10 Kodachrome, they must have been pretty long exposures). Here are two Christmas morning scenes, after Santa came but before the kids got up. The first is 1947 and the second is 1949. The third photo shows what that room looked like in 2004.


So, you ask, what does this have to do with the Death of Old Pictures? It's just that the current boom in photography is all in digital photos. These are easy to take and easy to distribute via e-mail or sharing on the web, but they are very "fragile" as far as keeping for years and years is concerned. Sure, the CD's or DVD's on which they are archived may still exist, but what are the chances that machines will exist to read them. Digital photos from 25-years ago were stored on magnetic tape. Most have been lost because tape-readers no longer exist.

I hope if you take digital family photos, you will take seriously the issue keeping them alive so folks can enjoy them in 50 years.