An actual e-mail that I submitted to the folks at ThinkGeek.com:
To Whom It May Concern:
I’d lose my geek street cred if I didn’t bother you about this, because it’s been bothering me and it’s geeky to point it out. Take, for example, this page:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/popculture/9fce/
You keep talking about “acronyms,” but I do not think that word means what you think it means. None of the examples you list are actually acronyms. It’s only an acronym if you pronounce it as a word, rather than just saying the letters. Thus, DOS and RADAR and laser are acronyms, and WTF and FTW are not — they’re initialisms.
Also, one more geek note, from here:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/sciencemath/3813/
Apostrophes indicate possession, not plurality. So it’s the stuff that chilis are made of, not “chili’s.”
Thanks for your time. I have to go back to my mom’s basement.
Sincerely,
- [tgirsch], Professional Dork
(Licensed in six states, plus the District of Columbia.)
I know it’s dorky to even send such an e-mail, but the “acronym” thing really bugs me.
Anyway, carry on with your day…
[One more note: I can’t find any agreement as to whether it should be spelled “chilis,” “chilies,” or “chiles.” The first two are both listed as valid, but third is my preference, mainly because that’s the Spanish spelling, and it’s where we stole the word from…]
March 6th, 2008
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I do too have a life |
22 comments
I’m slow to blog this, as I’ve been very busy with work, but it’s worth mentioning. On Tuesday, Gary Gygax, co-creator of the Dungeons & Dragons role playing game, died at 69.
For my part, I was a D&D geek from about the age of 11 to the age of 14 or 15, and my love affair with computer role playing games started there and continued into my twenties. One of my best friends to this day was a kid I met playing D&D on the playground at elementary school. I hadn’t really thought about it all that much until I read about his death on Tuesday.
Gygax’s impact on popular culture is difficult to overstate. Even if you’ve never played D&D, you’ve certainly heard of it, and there’s a good chance that at some point in your life, you’ve played a game that borrowed heavily from it. Computer games in particular have borrowed and continue to borrow from D&D with impunity. Whether it’s the old Ultima series on Apple II computers, or more modern variants like World of Warcraft and EverQuest, modern role-playing gaming owes a great deal to Gygax’s contributions.
Sympathies to Gygax’s family and friends. He will be missed.
March 6th, 2008
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Culture |
2 comments
The principal writers of The Wire, the HBO drama about the Baltimore underworld, have published a public call for civil disobedience in non-violent drug crime prosecutions:
[The drug] war grinds on, flooding our prisons, devouring resources, turning city neighborhoods into free-fire zones. To what end? State and federal prisons are packed with victims of the drug conflict. A new report by the Pew Center shows that 1 of every 100 adults in the U.S. — and 1 in 15 black men over 18 — is currently incarcerated. That’s the world’s highest rate of imprisonment.
The drug war has ravaged law enforcement too. In cities where police agencies commit the most resources to arresting their way out of their drug problems, the arrest rates for violent crime — murder, rape, aggravated assault — have declined. In Baltimore, where we set The Wire, drug arrests have skyrocketed over the past three decades, yet in that same span, arrest rates for murder have gone from 80% and 90% to half that. Lost in an unwinnable drug war, a new generation of law officers is no longer capable of investigating crime properly, having learned only to make court pay by grabbing cheap, meaningless drug arrests off the nearest corner.
What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has. And what once began, perhaps, as a battle against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal war on our underclass. Since declaring war on drugs nearly 40 years ago, we’ve been demonizing our most desperate citizens, isolating and incarcerating them and otherwise denying them a role in the American collective. All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles again; the drugs remain. . . .
[W]e offer a small idea that is, perhaps, no small idea. It will not solve the drug problem, nor will it heal all civic wounds. It does not yet address questions of how the resources spent warring with our poor over drug use might be better spent on treatment or education or job training, or anything else that might begin to restore those places in America where the only economic engine remaining is the illegal drug economy. It doesn’t resolve the myriad complexities that a retreat from war to sanity will require. All it does is open a range of intricate, paradoxical issues. But this is what we can do — and what we will do.
If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun’s manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.
“Jury nullification” has often been urged as a strategy against perceived government abuses, particularly in the case of drug crimes. (It is also a favorite mythology of the delusional far-right militia types, which hardly makes it more attractive.) I have written about my own flirtation with that path, under similar circumstances. But in this case they are advocating it not merely as a protest against unjust laws, but as a strategy to get those laws overturned by making them unenforceable.
It would be remarkable if they could recruit enough people to make an observable difference in these cases. What is also remarkable is that this article appeared in Time magazine - once the bastion of toe-the-line traditionalism. It’s interesting, too, that the staff of a popular TV show would take such a stand publicly - advocating for civil disobedience on a controversial issue involving widely-despised behavior, and linking their stance, indirectly at least, to the content of their show. Simply by countenancing such statements, both Time and HBO signal that this stance - open recruitment to contempt for the law - has come within the bounds of acceptable opinion. (This isn’t the first time network TV has taken such risks. The coded anti-Vietnam-war ethos of M*A*S*H, and the somewhat tame feminism of Maude and One Day at a Time were controversial in their day, and also reflected the personal opinions of their stars or producers. But they didn’t advocate civil disobedience.)
I wonder if these could be signs of a turning tide in the “War on Drugs”.
March 6th, 2008
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General, Politics, Legal Issues, Culture, News & Current Events |
5 comments
