misc

Shaquille O'Neal is the greatest rapper alive, because "great" means "large." Him asking Kobe how it tastes was horrifying enough the first time. Maybe he should stick to policework in the offseason.

It was nice to see George Carlin's "Baseball vs Football" routine again yesterday, and driving home past The Minister's house on my way home last night I remembered his reference to, in a bit about PC language in the 90s, "the openly Black Louis Farrakhan" in one of his bits.

Isn't Team Basketball USA a little... short? And are we supposed to be happy with a coach whose last teams have recently been eliminated from tournaments by the likes of Greece and Virginia Commonwealth? I'm sorry, but when it comes to basketball, I am a freaking nationalist, and I will be very annoyed if we fail to win the gold medal again this year. Why? I have no idea. I don't care about the Olympics; the US's poor showing in international basketball just irks me for reasons I'm not interested in exploring. So there.

Oh yeah, I'm starting to feel self-conscious about how much I use semi-colons:

The semicolon has spent the last century as a fussbudget mark. Somerset Maugham and George Orwell disdained it; Kurt Vonnegut once informed a Tufts University crowd that "All [semicolons] do is show that you've been to college." New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia's favorite put-down for egghead bureaucrats who got in his way was "semicolon boy." And though semicolons have occasionally made news—tariff bills have imploded over their misplacement, and a 1927 execution hinged on the interpretation of a
semicolon—the last writers to receive much notice for semicolon use have been a New York City Transit employee and the Son of Sam. In 1977 the NYPD speculated that "the killer could be a freelance journalist" because of his "use of a semicolon" in his taunting letters. (Decades later, columnist Jimmy Breslin still marveled that "Berkowitz is the only murderer I ever heard of who knew how to use a semicolon.")

I've been called worse than a "fussbudget," I guess.