“Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” Elmo and Patsy, 1979
Say what you will about rednecks and drunk relatives and all that, but what I’d like to know is: How did this song get made into a Christmas special?
“Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” Elmo and Patsy, 1979
Say what you will about rednecks and drunk relatives and all that, but what I’d like to know is: How did this song get made into a Christmas special?
My trip to Oklacon 2012 is now over and I had a fun time. Due to a lack of access to the tubes while I was there, everything is going up late, so ‘bear’ with me as I get caught up. 🙂
Spam. If you’ve been on the Internets for more than say, a few minutes or have ever had an e-mail account, you should hate it in all its forms. One particularly odious form of spam is blog spam, where people will post comments on blogs that serve no purpose other than to try to direct you to some skeevy website of questionable repute.
While Askimet is pretty darn good at catching spam comments, one occasionally slips through the net and has to be sent to Binary Hell the old-fashioned way. I thought this one was HILARIOUS. Click the picture to see the derp in all its glory.
Most of my stories are written for a general audience, and so I try to avoid the use of swear words in my short stories. I also believe that cursing is for the uncreative and unoriginal. Think about it: haven’t we all cussed at one time or another because we “couldn’t think of anything better?” The problem is that there are instances where cursing just works really well and is even expected at times.
Case in point: I am currently writing a story that involves pirates…IN SPAAAACE! Just like any other self-respecting pirates, these scurvy dogs (really, they’re pirate DOGS) spit, belch, don’t bathe, threaten harmless people (or cats as the case may be) and should probably swear like sailors. Thus, I have a few options:
1) Say ‘f*** it’ and use real swear words in my story, which I don’t really want to do.
2) Borrow not-quite-swear-words from other works of fiction, like ‘frak’ from BattleStar Galactica, but I don’t want to do this either because its well, unoriginal, and I know I’m setting myself to get stuck in some “THERE’S NO FURRIES IN BATTLESTAR GALACTICA” debate down the road.
3) Use common words. This method was used often by one of my favorite writers, Isaac Asimov. When a swear was needed, his characters would say things like “Space!” or “Stars and galaxies!”
4) Just make stuff up. This is obviously the hardest one, because I’m essentially inventing new words, and I’d like for them to make sense and not look like a random jumble of letters.
I am going with #3 with a varying degree of success, and who knows, I may invent some new pseudo-cuss words, especially at work, but for now I’ll just have to punt and pepper my story with <SWEAR WORD> placeholders until I think of something better.
Crap.
So after the smoke cleared, I got my DSL turned on and AT&T got another customer…well for now, anyway. It only took a trip to AT&T’s website, 2 customer service reps, one angry tweet, 3 techs, two social media team people, three executive escalation people, about a dozen voice mails, about twice that many phone calls, and seven days.
For my trouble, I’m getting my first month of service free, which I think is fair enough. I’m just happy that the switch got flipped, and hopefully things will be hunky dory from here on out. I also learned a few things:
So I now have sweet, sweet, internet and life is good.