August 10, 2013
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The Daily News
Say cheese.
LADIEEEZ AND GENTLEMEN!!! ANNOUNCING THE DN’S SEVENTEENTH YEAR IN EXISTENCE!!!
PLEASE JOIN ME IN USHERING THE IMMORTAL DN IN TO THE 2013-14 SCHOOL YEAR!!!!
1 We’re baaaaaaaaaack!!!2 Anybody lookin’?
3 First day of school. Always scary. Always fun.
4 The best part of today is my schedule.
5 I go in at 10:30 and leave at 2:20. In between I pretend I’m doing something important.
6 I’m excited as always to see my students from last year, who will come in all scrubbed and excited, and I also look forward to seeing my friends and colleagues.
7 Fast Summer: Summertime hit and got out just as fast as it could. It ended so abruptly that I blindly crashed into a metaphorical brick building, causing a cartoon safe to fall on me. The building was there: it was there, it was THERE, and then SPLAT!!! It was literally in my face. I hit the brick and mortar like a Toon. And THEN I got smashed by a perfectly cartooned black safe.
8 It’s okay.
9 It’s all copacetic.
10 Anyhow, I got here safely, and that’s no understatement.
11 Now if I could just stretch out of this accordion body, I could get up and enjoy the brilliance and the surrealism of the first day of school.
12 It just occurred to me that I’m too old for this.
13 At least I THINK I am.
14 Every time I say that, some doe-eyed student will say in all her earnest: “You aren’t THAT old!”
15 Such an innocent thing for a kid to say.
16 Little will she realize that we Old Brown Shoes interpret that statement to mean this: “You’re old, but you aren’t THAT old!”
17 Maybe she would see it more clearly if she looks in the mirror, sees some acne, and declares, “OMG! I look HORRIBLE!”
18 …only to have a reassuring friend respond, “You don’t look THAT horrible!”
19
20 Say cheese.
21 Moving on, Part One: I almost didn’t get this DN off, believe it or not. Xanga, the service I use to write this stuff, had already been hitting the skids toward the end of the last school year. Xanga has been around forever; many “bloggers” began on this old horse. I actually jumped horses earlier this summer, setting myself up on gmail’s Blogger (even though I despise the DN being referred to as a “blog.” It pre-dates blogging by years!).
22 I was all ready to kick Xanga to the curb, but realized too soon that they hold all my archives.
23 Xanga has been financially shaky for a while now, and they wouldn’t allow me access to my own archives unless I upgraded. To their credit, I don’t remember ever having to pay for being able to do this, so I didn’t mind throwing a little cash their way.
24 In the process, I was able to keep and access my archives. This seemed important to me, since I have nine years of my seventeen on Xanga archives. Xanga still seems to have issues among Mozilla, Chrome and Explorer, all three of which seem to be needed in order for me to have access to all editing tools. This SEEMS pretty stupid, but that’s the way it is.
25 They also won’t let me do border colors anymore, or any borders at all. It was just a feature I enjoyed, because it would sometimes make things look a little more clean. It’s sort of like when you blacken the lines in a coloring book, or trim your lawn.
26 On top of all this, I got a new laptop last year. It featured the really kooky Windows 8, which changes the way you do nearly everything. I was a reasonably quick study, but it seemed as though someone had come into my office and rearranged everything. It all still works, but if I try to throw a piece of paper into the waste paper basket it bounces on a bare spot and rolls to a jaunty stop. Things just aren’t where they usually are.
27 So there I was two days ago still trying to figure out how to make Blogger happen, when I decided to give Xanga one last chance.
28 For the sake of brevity, as well as of tradition, I finally chose to go with Xanga, even though it is at best a rickety old jalopy.
29 But I know how to slip and slide through the cracks with Xanga, so I’m pretty sure the choice will work.
30 Too many changes happening too fast. That’s what old people always say.
31 I’m old, yo.
32 But I’m not THAT old.
33 Moving on, Part Two: Whilst rambling and experimenting with ol’ Blogger, I thought I’d try to sneak a new feature into the DN, a fun little idea I called Today’s Unsolicited Glamorous Grammar Lesson, or “Tuggle” for short. The idea is that on certain random days, I will throw grammar tips out to the laymen out there. Or the laypersons. Or whomever.
34 Just ride with it.
35 Here is the last part of the DN I had actually posted on my “Blogger.” It may seem random, but it was designed to BE random. So this is how it went down; this is almost a cut/paste verbatim of that post:
37 “Ah, shoebox.
38 I LOVES me right after vacay. The back of my head, which contains all my logic and memory suddenly expands to the size of a shoebox, and the most logical things cling to that new back wall of my mind. Given any stimuli at summer’s end, logic and common sense take the length of a shoebox extra to return to the frontal part of my cranium. It’s what I may someday deem the “Duh…” factor. Nothing happening too fast in the cranium at the end of summer. We won’t name that phenomenon just yet. We may never.
39 Cranium #ohyeah
40 Something in the back of that shoebox makes me remember that we played a game called Cranium whilst on Mars. Originally Jupiter. Mars #synomymsforvacay #crickets #pereidmeteorshowerpassesover #cranium #mars #jupiter #vacay #synomyms #ohyeah. Bottom line: I cannot be reached whilst there.
41 Whilst. #jupiter…
42 That one kills me.
43 There’s no rule about that one, but if I could invent one, then here it is: pretend that there is no word “whilst,” at least not in the USA. I once read a book on choreography by some choreographer who kept using “whilst.” I almost thought all choreographers were morons because of that one choreographer. The word is archaic, and on the brink of obsolescence. So it isn’t technically wrong, but it IS just silly and unnecessary. YOU think you sound intelligent. You don’t. You sound like a moron #trustme
44 I hope to give a bunch of grammar tips in this year’s DN. I had planned on that one all the way back in June.
45 That was pre-shoebox, and right on the front lines.
46 So I guess there’s no time like the present. Here is my rule/non-rule on the word “whilst.”:
47 There practically ain’t no “whilst” anymore. Lose it. Now. There technically ain’t no “ain’t” either, but that’s for another day.
48 Today’s Unsolicited Glamorous Grammar lesson is “No whilst.” Let’s lay this word to rest, America. England, it’s all yours. I personally think it’s janky.
49 Hmmm. I think “Tuggle” might work, especially if I go lower case after the initial letter “T.” I like it because it is loosely structured enough that I am not committed to it every single day.
50 Tuggle 1: “No whilst.” Not on my watch.
51 Me likes.
52 Anybody lookin’?
53 We’ll see you tomorrow.
54 Feel free to feed back whilst this “blog” or whatever is still in working order.
55 It’s Tuesday. Welcome back.
56 Fly low.
57 See you again.
58 Peace.
~H~
