The Iron Yuppie

My brother, smart, funny and generally very nice guy, was commenting on my blog the other day. He said two things, both of which struck me:

1) He was very disappointed in December. Fair enough, I published something only on one day. It's interesting to me just in that he actually thought he liked it enough that he would WANT something to be published.

2) He caught a spelling error. You know, all the spell checking and re-reading in the world won't catch all my mistakes. It's always going to be someone else who catches them. But, on top of that, I could have the most salient and insightful point in the WORLD, and if i have a horrible mispelling, you're going to think less of my thoughts. It's like that old psych study I read about... people with accents are thought to be less intelligent than people who can speak clearly. And this goes across all languages! Meaning that, even if you speak French but you speak it with an English accent, you'll be thought of as less intelligent. I suppose this goes to reinforce the concept that it's not just the message that matters, but the messenger (or the medium).

I was on the ride home when I heard a techno remix of that song "Abracadabra"... man I loved that song when it first came out. The thing that struck me about the lyrics were the following:

I feel the magic in your caress 

I feel magic when I touch your dress 

Silk and satin, leather and lace 

Black panties with an angel's face



I see magic in your eyes 

I hear the magic in your sighs 

Though this is pretty cheesy, I have to say they actually flowed rather well together. But even more so, while I was listening to it, my mind was doing what I always do subconsciously, searching for the next rhyme in the lyric. What was surprising to me was that I seemed to be trained into reading into lyrics with very blunt rhymes. When I heard "eyes", I immediately thought that "thighs". When I heard the actual lyric, it was fairly refreshing. I was surprised how rare I felt like this type of lyric was, and how I felt like this kind of subtlety is just not used enough in the pop culture of today... though many would probably say it was never that popular.

Uh, welcome to the wonderful world of video games. I'm a huge gamer and I think they generally rock, but man this is weird.
Screenshots from the Sims 2:

• Hello, my name is Jimmy and when I grow up I want to be a stalker.
  
• It's cool man, when we finish this crop off, we'll be able to score!
  
• <German Accent> You have been a bad girl and now I must punish you! </German Accent>
  
• and finally.... welcome to the hizzy, Mr. Ron Jeremy!
  

Maybe I just have a sick mind.

The donuts hate you.

Anyone ever wonder what the etymology of the contraction "'Tis" is? I mean it's the exact same letters and characters as "it's" and, if I understand it correctly, it's the exact same abbreviation. The odd thing is that I assume "'tis" was before "it's" so why did people switch over when the time came? People still say Halloween (all hallow's eve) or other archaic abbreviations. So curious...