Refudiate: Neologism or Malaprop?

“When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” — Humpty Dumpty to Alice in Through the Looking Glass.

A week or so ago, Sarah Palin (via her Twitter account) asked peaceful Muslims to refudiate the plans of the Muslim community in lower Manhattan who want to build a mosque and community center about two blocks from Ground Zero:

Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate

Within a few hours she changed the tweet to the more established, but still incorrect refute:

“Peaceful New Yorkers, pls refute the Ground Zero mosque plan if you believe catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site is too raw, too real.”

Now, refute means to prove something (a statement or theory) to be incorrect or false: to disprove. So Mrs. Palin is asking “Peaceful New Yorkers” to disprove “the Ground Zero mosque plan…” That’s not quite what she meant. Read more

July 26, 2010 | Filed Under Rants and Observations | View Comments 

I Used to Write a Lot

Back in the day when the Internet was fun–back before USENET was a abandoned to the spammers pushing porn–there was a small group of (should we call them friends? I don’t know) who hung out on alt.fan.tom-servo. It was an interesting cast of characters with a wide variety of interests, but our chief interest seemed to be making each other laugh, usually at the expense of someone outside the group via cross-posting (this was known generally as trolling, although we practiced a specialized for of trolling called peeping).

AFT-S has a very few of the old irregulars posting there anymore. There have been maybe 5 threads started in 2010–compare that to dozens a day in the late ’90s early ’00s–the irregulars have gone on to other things. It’s sad, really. But sometimes I get nostalgic and I go back and read some of the threads from back in the day. Back when Babylon 5 was still new, when people cared who the better Captain was: Sisko, Janeway, Kirk, or Picard, or which would win in a fight: the Whitestar or the Valiant.

I was once awarded the Peeping Commendation Medal for a post I did on an animated TV show called God, the Devil and Bob. You don’t remember GtD&B? I’m not surprised. NBC ran exactly 3 episodes before it was cancelled because of complaints from Religious People who took Offense at the premise, the content, the execution, etc. I didn’t care much for GtD&B, but I could see where it was going. I was a retelling of Job (you know, the story in the Bible where God and the Devil test Job to see how strong his faith is), and I though it was ridiculous the Christians would be offended by a modern retelling of Job. So I decided to have a little fun. Read more

July 17, 2010 | Filed Under Rants and Observations, Uncategorized | View Comments 

Update on Nicholas

Nicholas is on a protocol that calls for him to get chemotherapy every three weeks for twenty-one weeks, and beginning week four, chemotherapy every week day for five weeks. Surgery to resect the tumor comes at week thirteen.

He has been through four rounds of chemo, and all of the radiation. The chemo is not as bad as you might think. It takes three days to infuse, so that means a little more than three days in the hospital every three weeks. Twice he’s had to have doxyrubicin (AKA “red-devil” or “the red”). The red takes twenty-four hours to infuse, and he has to have two of them each time. It makes him a little queasy, but not as sick as it seems to make other patients. And it made his hair fall out. Not all of his hair, mind you. He still has some wispy bits here and there that he won’t let us shave. The red is photo-sensitive, so you have to shield it from light. That makes it seem so sinister. Read more

June 26, 2008 | Filed Under Nick's Cancer | View Comments 

LibraryThing Top 106 Unread List

Below is the list of the top 106 books marked “unread” on LibraryThing as of May 21, 2008 at 4:30 pm CDT. The point of this exercise is to see how you compare to the masses on LT.

The rules:

Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk* to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your tbr list.

  1. * The ultimate hitchhiker’s guide by Douglas Adams (43)
  2. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (236)
  3. The kite runner by Khaled Hosseini (19)
  4. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (211)
  5. The illearth war by Stephen R. Donaldson (17)
  6. Life of Pi : a novel by Yann Martel (17)
  7. Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra (152)
  8. Crime and punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (176)
  9. One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (183)
  10. Vanity fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (115)
  11. * The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien (155)

    12. Read more

May 21, 2008 | Filed Under Books | View Comments 

I Don’t Like to Say the “C” Word (Part 2)

People were very helpful at this point, suggesting that it could be a ganglion cyst, or a “fatty tumor”, or even swelling due to repetitive motion (Nick is always on the computer).

The MRI was inconclusive. Dr. Conklin referred us to Dr. Herrick Siegel at UAB Highlands for a needle biopsy.
Dr Siegel is an orthopedic surgeon, but not a pediatric orthopedic surgeon. He was very good with Nicholas despite not specializing in pediatrics.

Dr. Siegel took yet another x-ray (he had Dr. Conklin’s x-rays and the MRI–I’m not sure what he thought another x-ray would show), and decided that he needed a surgical biopsy instead.

So we had to go, that day, and do pre-admission paperwork and blood work at the Kirklin Clinic. Two days later, March 20–Maundy Thursday, we were at the UAB North Pavilion at 5:00 AM for day surgery.

Read more

April 30, 2008 | Filed Under Nick's Cancer | View Comments 

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