General American

Here in east central Illinois we're on the eastern edge of the General American accent region, which makes it easy to slide the accent south and east as needed. Unless you've spent time with northerners, it's more difficult to slide the accent north & get a good honking Chicago sound. My freshman year at the University of Illinois was spend around guys from the Chicago suburbs and I came out of it with an outrageous Chicago accent.

A sentence (at least) a day.

God bless these good men

They're doing the Lord's work.

Picture a pair of Kerouacs armed with Sharpies and erasers and righteous indignation - holding back a flood of mixed metaphors and spelling mistakes and extraneous punctuation so commonplace we rarely notice it anymore. But they are 28 and idealistic. Graduates of Dartmouth College, they are old friends with a schoolmarm's irritation at conspicuous errors, and despite their mild and somewhat nerdy exteriors, they have serious nerve. Deck lives outside Boston; Herson lives outside Washington. And together, they are TEAL - the Typo Eradication Advancement League - and they are between jobs.

Hat tip: Mrs vH.

WHAT THE HELL?

Now I'm no fundamentalist rad trad Latin-Mass dweeb, but really, I swear, this one video has everything:

• some teevee show marketed to effete women
• a talentless performer
• an audience of cheering children watching her prepare to fellate a guitarist, et cetera
• said guitarist, who is a dead ringer for the late Max Lynch of all people

Just drink it all in, then start googling here.

Circus train

The kids were excited to see one of the Ringling Brothers circus trains rolling through our small town this afternoon, heading west.

Don't mess with the Marines

Chicago lawyer Jay Grodner found out today what happens when you do. His judge was a retired Marine - Circuit Court Judge William O'Malley:

who was a lance corporal in the early 1960s and is known around the Chicago Courthouse for wearing a Marine Corps pin on his lapel and celebrating the Corps' birthday each November.

Heh.

Jefferson on subsidiarity

Subsidiarity is the principle which states that matters ought to be handled by the smallest (or, the lowest) competent authority.

Here's Jefferson in his autobiography as cited in The Founders' Constitution:

But it is not by the consolidation, or concentration of powers, but by their distribution, that good government is effected. Were not this great country already divided into states, that division must be made, that each might do for itself what concerns itself directly, and what it can so much better do than a distant authority. Every state again is divided into counties, each to take care of what lies within it's local bounds; each county again into townships or wards, to manage minuter details; and every ward into farms, to be governed each by it's individual proprietor. Were we directed from Washington when to sow, & when to reap, we should soon want bread. It is by this partition of cares, descending in gradation from general to particular, that the mass of human affairs may be best managed for the good and prosperity of all.

The sentence "Were we directed from Washington..." is illustrated by the experience of the Pilgrims their first few years here. They set up a farming system such that all food was grown in common on common land. They starved. Then William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth Colony, gave each family their own land to farm, which "made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content". See the journal of William Bradford, excerpted at The Founders' Constitution.

Just as I suspected

Never ride anything set up by carnies.

New leads in the DB Cooper case?

You never know when DB Cooper will crop up in conversation around the house - here's a recent article from New York Magazine with some developments.