Category: Personal

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[a typographical typo]

This is the pedestal of the statue of Horace Greeley in Greeley Square, that patch of ground just downtown from Macy’s and west of K-town that has the pay toilets. In this case, Greeley is memorialized as the first president of the New York Typographical Society, and herein lies the irony. Can you spot the typo?

Granted, even when you click through to the larger image, it’s blurry. So here’s the text retyped for your editorial perusal:

THIS STATUE OF THE FIRST PRESIDENT
NEW YORK TYPOGRAPHICAL UNION NO 6
WAS PRESENTED TO THE CITY OF NEW YORK BY
HORACE GREELEY•POST NO 577 G.A.R.
NEW YORK TYPOGRAPHICAL UNION NO. 6 AND
BROOKLYN TYPOGRAPHICAL UNION NO. 98

See it yet?

Mysteriously, the first to two instances of the abbreviation NO lack periods, while the second two instances take them. How weird is that? And you can’t even argue that different unions had different usages, because NEW YORK TYPOGRAPHICAL UNION NO 6/NO. 6 is the same friggin’ union!

Let’s just hope some typographical union thugs worked that engraver over but good.

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[we treat customers with gold]

SENTENCES: You are the prince and princesses. We treat customers with gold.

WHERE: At the car wash used by one of the authors of I Hate Duane Reade: Service from Hell (and nice non-capitalization of your preposition, by the way).

CORRECTION: You are the princes and princessess. We treat our customers with like gold.

GRAMMAR: This one took a little creative correction because the meaning of the original is somewhat vague. After all, the first sentence is not grammatically incorrect, in and of itself. If the author wishes to indicate that the addressee, singular or plural, is both the one and only prince and a group of princesses, then the sentence is in fact perfect. (A more realistic example: The priest and congregants entered the church.)

However, I think it’s safe to say that the car wash management does not really believe that each individual who reads that sign is both the one and only prince and a bevy of princesses. It’s a metaphor, obviously, and meant to indicate to all customers that they will be given the royal treatment. As such, it’s necessary to create an agreement in number, either plural or singular, and I opted for the plural. Once you’ve got that, there’s no longer a need for the definite article, so we can toss the like so much Rainex down the drain. I can see how these mistakes got made — the is a perennial doozy for non-native speakers, and both prince and princess, with their S-sound endings, raise confusing questions about whether they’re singular or plural.

The second sentence is easier to deal with. Treating customers with gold means using gold to do something to the customers, and it has an unfortunate medical connotation that I would not welcome even at a car wash that considers me the heir to a throne. (We treat customers’ cars with wax would be more appropriate.) Instead, I assume they mean that they treat their customers as one would treat gold: with respect for their great value. It is a fine sentiment once rendered correctly. And I threw in our before customers because it improves the flow, and anyway I doubt the car wash guys treat, say, all Duane Reade customers (to choose an establishment at random) like gold. Clearly this is about their customers, who are special — little baby kings and queens, in fact.

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[maintain]

SENTENCE: Please maintain the COFFEE AREA neat and clean!

WHERE: My office kitchenette.

CORRECTION: Please maintain keep the COFFEE AREA neat and clean!

GRAMMAR: This one is purely based on usage. There is no logical reason why keep can be followed by an object with adjectives and maintain can’t, but there it is.

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[welcome]

Ever see a sentence that just doesn’t cut the mustard? Something somewhere that is just grammatically or syntactically funky (old socks funky, not Mothership Connection funky)? Send me an email at josh@palaverist.org and I’ll see if I can parse it.

In the meantime, I’ll be collecting particularly egregious or confounding bits of grammatical weirdness and putting them up here for your amusement. Or for my amusement. Something like that.

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[a blog we can agree on]

Someone who didn’t make it to last night’s Meetup posted about her blog I Hate Duane Reade: Service from Hell — a truly brilliant concept for a blog.

My own story of hate is about the Duane Reade around the corner from my office, where I actually watched a woman assess the line forming by the pharmacy, ostentatiously lock the door to the pharmacy, and then tell all the customers standing there that there was no way she could give anyone their medicine because the pharmacy was locked.

Nice.

Maybe what’s needed next is a competition to see what Russell Stover candies are harder than.

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[meeting new people the internet way]

Lately I’ve been feeling like my social circle has become a bit too circumscribed. I’ve come to rely on a small group of friends who all have busy lives, and this was fine until recently. But now that Jenny is away in Chicago most weeknights, I’ve realized that I really need to get out there and meet some new people.

I don’t know how people used to do this before the Internet. Did they go to the local Y1 and look at a bulletin board? Did they just all know to join the local Kiwanis? Did people actually talk to each other in public, like while hanging out on stoops or whatever? I have no idea. But in my world, any social crisis is best solved through the magic of technology.

And so I have joined a whole bunch of Meetups for people interested in everything from Korean language partners to swing dancing to Scrabble to simply having lunch2.

Last night, after much hesitation during which I considered ditching the whole idea and going to a Marijuana Anonymous meeting3 instead, I finally decided to follow my original plan, which involved visiting the Won Buddhist temple for some very helpful yoga and mind clearing, then heading down to the Luca Lounge, way out on Avenue B and 13th Street, for the NY Bloggers Meetup.

At a table in the back garden, I joined about seven other bloggers and would-be bloggers for a freewheeling chat about digital media, concepts for blogs, how to draw comments and God (that last one was a tangent). Our illustrious hostess, Alejandra, does something complicated involving the coordination of international editions of Cosmopolitan and publishes the charming Sent from My Dell Desktop. I also had fun chatting with Paull Young (not the singer), an Aussie new to New York who publishes Young PR, works in new media strategic management, and needs to be taken to his first baseball game.

Far across the table was Carolyn, whose blog, Becoming a Woman of Purpose, has apparently begun to draw a community of women who are looking to gain from Carolyn’s insights as a life coach and just generally grow as people. With a rather different approach to women, another member of our group was planning a website devoted to teaching men how to pick up women, and I ended up in a long conversation about possibly editing some of the pickup scripts that will then be published in PDF format and sent to paying clients. This is not exactly my area of expertise — or interest — but I will edit for guvment scrip, and unlike, say, writing people’s college entrance essays, there was nothing about this particular activity that seemed outright unethical.

I know there were more blogs mentioned, and Alejandra graciously collected a list of them4, which she has promised to post to the Meetup group. I’m grateful to Alejandra for getting us all together, and just glad to be reminded that there are lots of interesting ways to meet new people.

Update: Alejandra, our fearless leader, just sent out a list of links to Meetup members’ blogs, and here they are:

Carolyn:
carolynsfo.blogspot.com
spiritwomen.blogspot.com
spiritwomen.wordpress.com

DC:
http://betternotsent.com

Josh:
www.palaverist.org

Paull:
youngie.prblogs.org

Alejandra:
sentfrommydelldesktop.blogspot.com
—
1. “As everybody knows my name at the recreation center.”
2. Who doesn’t like lunch?
3. For those who may be new here, I’m a recovering addict with 85 days of sobriety, which may explain some of the need to rebuild my social life.
4. On good ol’ paper.

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[tie clips]

Today Slate takes on the important issue of tie clips and their apparent decline.

I agree with author Paul Devlin that the tie clip is a tremendously useful sartorial device for those of us who wear the useless sartorial flourish that is a silk necktie. A little bar of metal can be the difference between a tie that stays in the middle of my shirt, with its small end tucked behind, and a tie that flaps everywhere, particularly in a stiff breeze.

Devlin reports that the fancier haberdashers are no longer carrying much in the way of tie clips, and my visits to less fancy haberdashers don’t turn up much either (although Burlington does offer matching dollar-sign tie clips and cuff links that scream “I am poor people”).

My own tie clips, which come from the United Nations Gift Centre (love the spelling), are discreet bars of metal — one silver, the other gold — engraved with the words “UNITED NATIONS” and a small UN emblem.
Those are fine for now, but if I ever join the US Foreign Service, I’ll need to get new ones, and I sure hope someone out there still carries them.

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[high school meme]

Here’s a high school meme, grabbed from miriamjoyce:

1. Who was your best friend?

That shifted over the years. My two closest friends during high school were Ashley and Lorie, whom I met my sophomore year, but Lorie and I had a serious relationship and then a devastating breakup at the start of my junior year, and Ashley moved to Connecticut around the end of my junior year. So freshman year, I guess it would’ve been Katie Wiley, though we were never that close; she loved Tesla more than anything in the world then. And senior year would’ve been Josh Poretsky, saxophone sensation and all-around sexy brooding ex-junkie.

2. What sports did you play?

Didn’t.

3. What kind of car did you drive?

I had my dad’s old Toyota Corona 4-door sedan, painted black (poorly) and given red racing stripes by Earl Scheib, until New Year’s Day 1992. I had been to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers, I think, and had just dropped off Teresa Laddish. What killed that car was the requisite 12-point turn I had to do to get out of Teresa’s narrow driveway. I had a steering-fluid-pump leak that sprayed hot goo all over my car’s electrical system whenever I turned sharply, and that night, as I rolled down the hill back towards the main road, I saw smoke and then flames coming out of the hood of my car. I watched it burn from the gas station across the street. At one point a cop car came by and failed to put out the fire with their little extinguisher. Eventually the fire department came and finished the job. The car was totaled, but my tapes survived.

After that, my parents got me a little red Toyota Tercel hatchback that would rattle and shiver whenever it got much beyond 75 miles per hour. I would lose it in parking lots because it looked exactly like every other little red hatchback.

4. It’s Friday night, where were you?

That was a fraught question. I was often at shul and then at home for Shabbos dinner, but often I didn’t want to be. I would cut out some nights after shul, some nights after dinner, some nights before the whole Jewish shebang. If I was elsewhere, it was hanging out with friends: at Ash’s house with Lorie and Robert and Heather, or at a concert, or at the pool hall (which we thought it was funny to call the “poo ha”) with Josh Poretsky, or heading into San Anselmo with Amber Renwick.

5. Were you a party animal?

No. I went to hardly any actual parties.

6. Were you considered a flirt?

I was considered a flirt and a perv.

7. Were you in band, orchestra, or choir?

I was in jazz band my senior year, playing guitar ineptly. We went to the Santa Cruz Jazz Festival and sucked ass.

8. Were you a nerd?

Yeah, although I was always one of the semi-cool alternanerds. The whole nerd thing was a little vague considering how few people had any intellectual ambition whatsoever. There was sort of a crowd of folks who took honors English and spoke in sentences and liked to think about things, and I guess we were nerds.

9. Did you get suspended/expelled?

Nope.

10. Can you sing the fight song?

We probably had a roll-over-and-die song. Our football team won one game during my entire time in high school, during my senior year; before that, their big claim to glory was the time they managed a lead over Marin Catholic at halftime. Anyway, I attended one school sporting event ever, a basketball game where Josh Poretsky was required to play sax in the band, and that was for the purposes of picking him up and leaving.

11. Who was your favorite teacher?

Mr. Skinner, my senior honors English teacher. He respected our minds enough to be a demanding bastard, and he introduced us to lots of very cool literature: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Waiting for Godot, The Bald Soprano. My Orthodox Jewish prejudices annoyed him enough that he encouraged me to read Spinoza. He was a stickler for grammar and taught it well.

12. What was your school’s full name?

Terra Linda High School.

13. School mascot?

The Trojans. *snicker*

14. Did you go to Prom?

My senior year, I had basically none of my real friends at my school, and no girlfriend, and then they decided to have the prom on a boat, and I get ferociously seasick. So no.

15. If you could go back and do it over, would you?

I used to have this recurring nightmare that even though I was a Columbia graduate and no one was questioning my degree, I’ve discovered that I was a point shy of graduating properly from TL, so I’ve gone back to take one last class, and now I can’t pass it. The last time I had this dream was back in 2001, during the last and best period of my employment at DoubleClick. It suddenly dawned on me in the dream that I would have to decide, come Monday, whether to go to high school or to my job. So I asked my then-boss, Karen Delfau, what I should do. “Come to work,” she said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. I’ve never had the nightmare again.

16. What do you remember most about graduation?

Malika Ghazvani went tumbling into the gap between the stairs and the wall, then climbed out and shouted, “I’m fine! I’m okay!” And Mr. Skinner noted the irony of celebrating our individualism by dressing us all alike.

17. Where were you on senior skip day?

We didn’t really have one. Anyway, I was 18 in my senior year and could therefore sign my own notes. I used to waltz into the office with a note saying, “Please excuse Joshua Ross for all absences in the previous month,” with my signature underneath. I got a fair amount of leeway considering I mostly cut class to work on the school newspaper.

18. Did you have a job your senior year?

Nope.

19. Where did you go most often for lunch during high school?

Before I could drive, I had lunch out on the benches, then eventually moved to the upper hallway overlooking the benches, where I ate with the other semi-nerds. Once I had a car, I went to the mall most days and had a Chinese combo plate. During my depressive junior year, when I had few friends at school, I would take my lunch and drive up to a high hill and park, sitting in my car and listening to Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine and Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger a lot.

20. Have you gained weight since then?

Lots.

21. What did you do after graduation?

I temped at Lawrence Berkeley Labs that summer, and then went off to Columbia.

22. When did you graduate?

1993.

23. Who was your Junior prom date?

There was a junior prom?

24. Are you going to your 10 year reunion?

I was just back in the US and unemployed at the time, and that made too lousy a story, so I skipped it.

25. Who was your home room teacher?

We didn’t have home rooms.