Gnomeland Security
Other sites offer actual advice about gnomeland security: schemes for protecting your garden gnomes from theft.
Permalink Comments off
Other sites offer actual advice about gnomeland security: schemes for protecting your garden gnomes from theft.
Permalink Comments off
David Cameron, the UK prime minister, spent the day before yesterday in Zurich with two high-power celebs, Prince William and the soccer star David Beckham, lobbying to get the World Cup soccer tournament hosted in Britain in 2018. Said Cameron: "We have got the stadia, we have got the facilities…", and I guess I was thinking, "You can take the boy out of Eton but you can't take the Eton out of the boy." I wondered how his Latinism would go down with the officials of the famously corrupt International Federation of Association Football (FIFA).
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink Comments off
Spot the horrible effect introduced here by an over-picky Wall Street Journal subeditor:
Quite often, these games don't even turn out to be good: Fewer than half of them have been decided by 10 points or fewer.
That "10 points or fewer" phrase on the end is a desperate and quite ridiculous effort at obeying the prescriptive rule that you should use fewer for all things that can be counted, and less only for mass quantities.
Read the rest of this entry »
To mark 20 years of the Theoretical Linguistics program at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, our friends there celebrated with remarkable panache:
Tom Jackman, "Dropped 'at' in Va. law yields acquittal in school bus case", WaPo 11/30/2010:
Virginia law on passing a stopped school bus has been clear for 40 years. Here – read it yourself:
"A person is guilty of reckless driving who fails to stop, when approaching from any direction, any school bus which is stopped on any highway, private road or school driveway for the purpose of taking on or discharging children."
Yes, drivers must stop a school bus which is, er, stopped.
Wait. Is something missing there?
Indeed. The preposition "at" was deleted in 1970 when the law was amended, the statute's history shows. And a man who zipped past a school bus, while it was picking up children with its lights flashing and stop sign extended, was found not guilty recently by a Fairfax County Circuit Court judge.
"He can only be guilty if he failed to stop any school bus," Judge Marcus D. Williams said at the end of the brief trial of John G. Mendez, 45, of Woodbridge. "And there's no evidence he did."
Read the rest of this entry »