It’s obvious that these anti-prop-8 (pro-homosexual) protesters are not after equal rights, because they already have equal rights:

Quoting CA FAMILY CODE SECTION 297.5:

Registered domestic partners shall have the same rights, protections, and benefits, and shall be subject to the same responsibilities, obligations, and duties under law, whether they derive from statutes, administrative regulations, court rules, government policies, common law, or any other provisions or sources of law, as are granted to and imposed upon spouses.

And they’re certainly not interested in tolerance.

What they want is to rewrite history; they want to take words that have existed for hundreds of years -- marriage, husband, wife -- and change their definitions.

Of course, they don’t really come right out and say that; instead they try to frame the matter as a civil rights issue.

But a few decades ago, when black Americans were fighting for civil rights, they wanted the same rights as white Americans; they didn’t want the "right" to be called white Americans.

And women’s rights activists didn’t want the "right" to be called men -- they just wanted the same rights as men.

So why do so many homosexuals want the "right" to be called "husband and wife" when that’s simply inaccurate?  Why aren’t they satisfied with having the same rights as husbands and wives?

In other news, white people are now legally allowed to be black.  Also, dogs to be considered cats for legal purposes.  "The dictionary" has renamed itself to "whatevs".

We got this card during our trip to the Bahamas last fall.  I put it in my wallet and forgot about it until recently.  As you can see, it did not work as advertised; nothing I could do would make the card turn into the bus driver.

Some woman on the the Factor last night:

Quoting Tammy Bruce:

Liberals... now do not know how to have a discussion without [race and gender] being an element, and it’s eating them alive, literally.

Literally?  I doubt it.

Quoting Fox News:

"This poor lady we went to had tears in her eyes because her 90-year-old oak tree was just ravaged," said Tom Moffett, who used a chainsaw to cut branches that fell on his neighbors homes and driveways in Norman.

If a big branch ever falls on me like this, I hope I’ll be able to get some help from the fire department, or the police, maybe some EMTs... not my crazy chainsaw-wielding neighbor!

See the video and his account of the event.  The video is mildly interesting, though it’s really jerky, and you can’t actually see the bite take place.  But the best part is this:

Quoting Brady Barr:

I felt the snake attach to my leg right below my left buttock, which sent me literally through the roof with pain.

Watching the video, however, I was disappointed to discover that he did not, in fact, fly up into the air and literally go through the roof of the cave upon being bit.

What is it with people using the word "literally" in cases where what they mean is exactly the opposite of that?

Electronics manuals are goldmines of great warning labels.

This is from an air conditioner I just bought:

Yes, don’t try to cool your precision with it.  I love how concerned the second air conditioner is.  Noooo!!  Don’t drink it, son, it contains containments!

And this is from a hard drive I just bought:

It’s sad but true.  And the grammatical error in the comic’s title is the icing on the cake.

Last night, Kim took me out to Bravo! for our one-year anniversary.  We had never been there before, and I really loved it.  It’s like a more fancy version of Carrabba’s or the Olive Garden, with more space (higher ceilings, and tables farther apart) and completely non-smoking.

I got the "catch of the day" which was swordfish, and it was delicious.  Swordfish is the only fish that I like (well, and shark) because it doesn’t taste fishy like most fish.

Working backwards: the salad was also fantastic.  It was a "chopped" salad, which meant that there were no huge pieces of lettuce or whole slices of tomatoes or cucumbers; everything was sliced & diced small enough that you could eat it by the forkful without getting it all over the sides of your mouth because the pieces are too big.  (OK, so maybe I’m the only one with that problem.)  Also, the italian dressing was wonderful, maybe even better than the Olive Garden’s, which I also love.

Finally, the initial bread with dipping oil.  This is one of my favorite things to eat ever, and here it was as good if not better than at Carrabba’s.  The only thing Carrabba’s has on Bravo! is that the bread wasn’t warm at Bravo!

The one negative comment I have about Bravo! is that above the sink in the bathroom, there is a sign that says:

EMPLOYEE MUST "WASH HANDS"

Aside from the fact that that’s just grammatically stupid, I’m fairly bothered by the fact that the people preparing my food didn’t actually have to wash their hands, and instead can get away with some kind of finger-quotey mock rendition of hand-washing.

Kim and I visited a charming place called Hells Hollow yesterday.  No, really.  And yes, the fact that there is no apostrophe does drive me crazy.

I’m reading this book called  Eats, Shoots & Leaves that Kim got as a (gag?) gift from her boss.  It’s a book about punctuation, and it’s also a "Runaway #1 British Bestseller" apparently.

If you are interested in good writing and punctuation, or more to the point: if you are bothered by bad writing and punctuation, then you will love this book.  It’s laugh-out-loud funny, to me at least.  Here are some excerpts:

Quoting Lynne Truss:

I tend to feel that if a person genuinely wants to know how to spell Connecticut, you see, they will make efforts to look it up.  Or, failing that, if a book announcing itself as The Only Way to Spell Connecticut is This is to be found in heaps on a table in front of them, they will think, "Hang on, I might get this!"  But it turns out there are people whom you simply cannot help, because it suits them to say, with a shrug, "Do you know, I’ve always wanted to know how to use an apostrophe -- and oh dear, I don’t know how to wash my hair either."  [xxiii]

Either this will ring bells for you, or it won’t.  A printed banner has appeared on the concourse of a petrol station near where I live.  "Come inside," it says, "for CD’s, VIDEO’s, DVD’s, and BOOK’s."  If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book at once.  [1]

No one understands us seventh-sense people.  They regard us as freaks.  When we point out illiterate mistakes we are often aggressively instructed to "get a life" by people who, interestingly, display no evidence of having lives themselves.  [4]

In the spring of 2001 the ITVI show Popstars manufactured a pop phenomenon for our times: a singing group called Hear’Say. [...] newspapers, who insist on precision in matters of address, at once learned to place Hear’Say’s apostrophe correctly and attend to the proper spacing.  To refer in print to this group as Hearsay (one word) would be wrong, you see.  To call it Hear-Say (hyphenated) would show embarrassing ignorance of popular culture.  And so it came to pass that Hear’Say’s poor, oddly placed little apostrophe was replicated everywhere and no one gave a moment’s though to its sufferings.  No one saw the pity of its position, hanging there in eternal meaninglessness, silently signalling to those with eyes to see, "I’m a legitimate punctuation mark, get me out of here."  [36]

From the American English Dialect Test:

Your Linguistic Profile:

50% General American English

35% Yankee

10% Dixie

5% Upper Midwestern

0% Midwestern

That’s crap though, since obviously the way I talk is the correct way.  There’s obviously some problem with the test, and I really scored a 100% under "General American English."

How about you?

hi
wat r u up 2? les meet up. by tyhe way are all volcanoes bad? i need to know ergent!