Recent Comments

1. 1 day ago on Monty

   Big Bird does not say “it is I.” This is Pilsner’s imagination, in which “The Big Bird” is an avian god.

2. 1 day ago on Monty

   I do not believe elementary school students have been taught traditional grammar for a few generations now.

   Insisting people talk a certain way even when another way feels better went out of style in the 1960s. (But it took a while for it to filter into school curricula).

   I discovered this as I was researching the popularity of the phrase “is comprised of”. That originated hundreds of years ago as confusion between “comprises” and “is composed of”, and was consistently used occasionally, by mistake, until the 1960s, when editors stopped correcting everyone who said it and its usage exploded.

3. 3 days ago on The Duplex

   Ineffectual and bad aren’t the same. If Millard Fillmore had no effect at all on the country, that still puts him way ahead of James Buchanan, who delayed the end of slavery and probably caused the Civil War. (Buchanan preceded Lincoln). Until recently, Buchanan was consistently ranked worst president in history by that panel of presidential scholars that publishes the list. Now he is second to worst.

4. 4 days ago on Monty

   Moondog just flipped past Sesame Street in his channel surfing; that’s why Pilsner had to tell him to go back.

5. 4 days ago on The Duplex

   What’s interesting about that Supreme Court decision (which was necessary because there was a tax on importing vegetables, but fruits were tax-free) is that it was based on culinary customs we don’t have today.

   Today, we say (outside of botany) that a fruit is sweet and a vegetable isn’t, so a tomato is a vegetable, but the Supreme Court said a tomato is a vegetable because a fruit is eaten at the end of a meal as a dessert and a vegetable is part of the main meal.

6. 4 days ago on The Duplex

   You left off the other half of the story of botanical definitions of fruits and vegetables. A fruit is the reproductive organ of a plant.

   Ergo, some fruits are not vegetables. Holly berries, for example.

   Of course, in food context, we use different versions of the words fruit and vegetable.

7. 7 days ago on Luann

   It sounds a lot like the Kenner Girder and Panel Building Set (whose name I would not know if not for another comment here — we just called it the “building set”), except that the “girders” were red, not white.

8. 7 days ago on Drabble

   By the way, rubberneckers just slow down slightly, maybe not even consciously. The driver following doesn’t notice this immediately and then has to slow down more to get his following distance back (plus some extra margin to accommodate the flow variation). This causes a chain reaction that causes hard braking a mile back.

9. 10 days ago on Doonesbury

   IBM uses both terms, “co-op” and “intern”. For some reason, undergraduate students are co-ops and graduate students are interns. Both are employees, so paid.

10. 11 days ago on Doonesbury

    I think most interns we hear about are employees and thus subject to minimum wage laws.

    Internships that aren’t considered employment (and therefore don’t involve wages) have to be part of a formal education program, generally coordinated with a school and usually earning academic credit.