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This is one business that I can — and will — fully support, especially if the new eminent domain ruling has any bearing.

If they build it, I will stay there.

I’ll make a point of staying there.

I’ll go as far out of my way as I can to stay there.

And, while I’m at it, I’ll send a postcard to Justice Souter. Consider him a candidate for the July RCIA, among some other notables.

A local Internet user found this post today and commented on it. Since the post is from last month and now buried in my archives, I thought I’d share her comment and my reply.

Just came across this while doing some Googling. My hubby and I were at the Market today, and I noticed that it wasn’t as crowded as when we went a couple weeks ago — I actually could walk around in the meats area a bit better.

I hope Wal*Mart doesn’t effect their (the Market people’s) business too much. I love going down there to see what the locals have, and I especially love seeing the variety of foods down there.

Comment by Sarah — 25 June 2005 — Saturday @ 12:24 pm

My reply:

First, I’d like to thank you for commenting.

You know, Sarah, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this very thing lately. After looking at what the Market went through when Dave’s went in right across the street, and at the fact that the Market is still going strong, I’m not so sure Wal*Mart is going to damage the Market’s business that much at all.

Why? Simple: the basic formula for whipping Wal*Mart in your own backyard is to offer other things, better service — at a fair price. The Market does all of this, and more. I know so many of the vendors there: they know what I eat and how I like to cook; I know a lot about what they eat and how they cook. They call me by name. They ask how my wife is — and call her by name, even when she is not with me, and even though they have only met her a couple of times now. And to top it off, you can’t beat the Market’s quality.

The folks Wal*Mart is going to hurt are the ones that throw their hands up in the air with the attitude that they are getting beat (without even trying) and roll up their carpets — and then blame the whole mess on Wal*Mart.

Honestly, I don’t think we can stop Wal*Mart from going in to Steelyard Commons; I think we have to beat them the only way we can: with friendly, truly personalized service — and a smile.

The Internet *is* slow tonight.

The Internet Weather Report (if you give creedence to this) gives North America a rating of 77 (on a scale of 1 - 100, the higher the better) and dropping at the moment. Servers are out in Boise, Bothell Washington, Bangor (Maine) and DeMoines, Iowa at the moment.

To be more precise, the backbone server in Bothell, Washington has a rating of 46, losing 50% of its packets currently.

As soon as they create an RSS feed for this, I’ll include it on my page — for the curious among you.

An indispensible Firefox extension for writers, especially those of us who write on the web:
Scrapbook. (Via Lifehacker.)

This is hilarious. (Via BoingBoing.)

More hilarity, and a possible candidate for Rectocranial Invert of the Month.

Where will you be this July 3 about midnight (Independence Day Eve)? I’m probably going to be outside to see if I can see this with the naked eye, and then follow up online. If visible to the naked eye, it could be the most spectacular event any one of us could ever imagine seeing.

A new link appears on my link list tonight; it’s none other than the Internet-famous Grammar Cop. (Via This is Broken, via Seth Godin.)

More tomorrow night.

Eight days ago, Lori Kozey posted on how she is ahead of the curve in returning to her Franklin Planner. I grinned as I read this, knowing that I tend to write things down instead of using Outlook or my PDA. (Via Lifehacker.)

Here’s a tool I’ve always wanted: a command line for the Internet. I’ve wanted this ever since Windows did away with DOS. (Via Slashdot.)

Ever wander over to Lowe’s or Home Depot online, looking for something? How about drywall? I need some drywall for my bathroom renovation, and I’d like some info on pricing, availability and delivery. Now, I know you can’t order this stuff on the web, but could I get some information, PLEASE? And I don’t mean “tips on installing…” — that’s just plain worthless.

Lastly, this is the time of year, around Cleveland, that you must remember to walk around outdoors with your mouth closed, lest you receive a mouthful of unexpected protein. They’re incredibly thick this year.

My bride and I went to the Classic Car Show in downtown Willoughby tonight.

I shot a number of photographs, including a couple of flower shots. My bride scolded me, saying that we were at a car show, not a flower show; I had an interesting shot. What a goob…

Anyway, whilst there, I ran across this Thing:

Kinda brings back memories, eh?

I am no longer griping about the massive amounts of comment spam I receive; I now have four layers to my comment spam defense.

The first is Tar Pit, a lovely little device that slows spammers down and eventually bans them from the site. Lovely.

Layer two is, of course, comment moderation: it’s always on. I will not reveal layers three and four, since I don’t want to give away the keys to the kingdom. They are new, freshly installed, and have cut my comment spam rate from 60 - 90 spam comments per day to less than 1 per day.

That’s progress.

It’s sad that we have to resort to multi-level defenses to prevent these RCI’s from trying to sap our bandwidth; I’d much rather be writing than playing with my software.

Don’t these idiots understand that the more they weigh us down with comment spam, the less good it does them? It’s a strict law of diminishing returns: the more time you take from a blogger to make him or her remove the spam means the less time they have to write. The less we write, the lower our page ranks. The lower our page ranks, the less effective comment spam becomes.

Then, of course, Google takes a dim view to comment spam altogether. But, I don’t think these people are smart enough to comprehend a document like this, let alone take the time to read it.

My comment spams are down — for now. More changes are on the way.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled programming.

I’m sorry about the tardiness of this post. I really am. I’ve been waiting for things to shake out of the tree, so I would know with whom to grace this most prestigious award.

This one is a no-brainer.

Alas, as things go in Ohio, the party in control is not budging when pressed to investigate one of their own — and this one could, potentially, go all the way up to President Bush himself.

So I am forced to “trade for a player to be named later,” as the saying goes. The June, 2005 Recto-Cranial Invert of the Month Award goes to:

Anyone that ends up involved in the Coingate scandal currently trying to emerge in Ohio. So far, it will include Tom Noe, former Chief of Staff Brian Hicks, Governor Bob Taft (no surprise here), and some dufus in Colorado whose home was raided, garnering some 3,500 bottles of wine and 265 illegal Cuban cigars.

In case you haven’t heard about this little tidbit, someone in the state decided it would be a good thing to have Noe invest in rare coins on behalf of the state. Noe cannot account for $13 million of the investment money. It is related to another $215 million missing from the Bureau of Workmen’s Compensation coffers.

Noe — and his wife — it turns out, gave substantial political gifts to folks like Mike DeWine, George Voinovich — and George W. Bush. So far, Voinovich and DeWine (whose former secretary was “Washingtonienne” — the gal that screwed Capitol Hill and wrote about it in her weblog) took the high road and immediately returned Noe’s money, as they should have. No word on Bush yet, although he may have returned monies as well.

Investigations, at the moment, are going nowhere.

I smell a coverup.

As this story is far from over, I cannot name all of the winners. Pay attention to this story as it evolves; the final list of players is far from complete, and they will all win this award.

ADDENDUM — I should add here that Mr. Hicks may not be completely involved at this moment, and there is some question surrounding this. What is clear, however, is that there is a lot of money missing, and just about everyone in the articles I cited are involved to some extent.

I went to the Coppertop Ale House in Euclid tonight to get a couple of their Thursday Night $1.00 tacos. I arrived at 9:00 pm.

At 9:05, I was greeted by a bartender. I ordered a beer and 4 tacos.

At 9:30, the bartender told me that the cook had to cook more taco shells, so my food would be up in a minute.

At 9:50, I finally got my food.

Guess what? It was cold.

Cold as ice.

Worse yet, nobody that worked there seemed to give a shit. Why should I go back?

Writing on the web has always been bad. Piss-poor (pardon me), in fact. Each passing day presents me with another example (or groups of examples) of bad writing — a veritable laundry list of projectile-vomit-type English malapropisms and manglings. Recently, I thought I’d start a collection of these examples.

Now I’m not just talking about “l33t 5p34|< (Leet Speak) or chatroom abbreviations such as "u" for "you" and "4" for "for" here; I'm talking about bad grammar, spelling, and more. I'll comment on each and every example that follows.

Spellcheck is not enough; you must read your text slowly and completely, without interruption (preferably in solitude), to catch silly errors like the *following*:

"In the United States, the follow FOUR..."

Another example of spellcheck, this time missing verb-subject agreement. Notice, also, the misuse of "everyday" (one means "each day," while the one used means "commonplace"):

"...the supply of writers are increasing everyday but..."

Two errors here; the first is inexcusable. Wait! So is the second: never use an ampersand in text:

"As i've always mentioned to my clients & readers..."

In the US, the custom is to place periods and commas *inside* quotation marks regardless of context, while exclamation points and question marks depend on the statement being quoted. Generally, if the quote contains the question or exclamation, the marks go inside; else, they go outside. Further, my understanding is that in the UK, periods and commas follow the rule of question marks and quotation marks, and depend upon context. Either way, for an American author, the following sentence is just plain wrong:

"...too much of your budget, create a "community online". It is..."

There's an All Points Bulletin issued by both the Department of Redundancy Department and the Missing Words Department for this sentence:

"I always to go back to internet marketing communities online like..."

Incorrect use of an apostrophe (in this case none; it belongs between the 'e' and the 's' in "Googles"):

"...a point against you in Googles eyes."

A spellchecker might not catch this one; generally, with words that end in a consonant, when placed in the present progressive tense, the last letter is repeated. Hence, "Spaming" (this might be pronounced "SPAY-ming") should be "Spamming":

"The days of Spaming Google are drawing to a close."

Outside of ending a sentence with a preposition, this sentence makes no sense as written:

"You Do Not want to get caught out."

More verb-subject agreement:

"Google record the discovery of a link and link changes over time."

Company names are generally singular; Google *is* singular as a company name:

"...that Google have learned from the Spam attack..."

How about incomplete sentences? This one makes absolutely no sense when taken out of its original context:

"In which many of the search giants secret ranking criteria is revealed and it makes very interesting reading."

One interesting aspect of these errors is that they all come from supposed Internet marketing "experts," trained writers who should not be making these mistakes. What is more stunning about these errors is that the first four quotes come from a piece decrying the lack of good writers on the web! Please pardon me while I take a moment to replace some hair in my scalp.

I'm not the only person on the web touting this very subject. Permit me to fisk another nouveau marketing blogger:

"Clean up your spelling and grammar. Language is very important in a blog. Choose your words carefully, and trying reading your post aloud after you have finished writing it."

In other words, if your reading is trying, then something's wrong.

Consider writing your posts in a good word processor and copying them into your blogging tool afterward.

Just make sure it's not MS Word -- any version -- because it tends to drop ugly, invisible characters into your text that you can't see until you publish your blog.

"If you are going to link to an outside side,"

An outside side? As opposed to an inside side?

"Exercise you own judgment..."

Excuse you, but your judgment is a bit off here...

"Typos and spelling mistakes, while essentially harmless, are glaring in print and reflect poorly on credibility."

You got that right, sister. Too bad you didn't take your own advice! If you follow the link and read the actual post, you'll find each and every item a direct quote.

The Internet teems with other, more egregious errors which I am not going to tackle here; most of them have been handled quite elegantly here and here.

(Reader beware: these links contain strong language.)

McSweeney doesn’t, however, cover many true gems; this site does, however. In fact, it has all of them. I know, it’s alot to digest… (oops! I mean, “a lot” — my bad!)

There are, in my mind, five things that make a good writer: 1) Talent; 2) Effort; 3) Practice; 4) Many worn-out copies of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style (that ampersand, by the way, is correct in this usage: it’s the title of a book). Of course, the Zinsser book is another standby, and a good buy, too.

Thing Number 5 is the least-often-considered requirement of most of these nouveau writers: a good copy editor. Too much ego to go around, I guess.

I agree that the Internet lacks good writers, and teems with lousy writers. Sometimes, I fall into that category, even though I am loath to admit it.

At least I know the difference.