Basic Grammar Lesson

A pronoun is a substitute for a noun, like “she” or “it.” An antecedent is the word, phrase, or clause to which the pronoun refers. Easy, right?
It helps if your pronoun has something to refer back to. From this morning’s Redeye, the Tribune’s free daily crap newspaper:
So, David—about those Armani underwear ads.
Soccer superstar David Beckham [...]

Read Full Post »

Get Your MRIs Elsewhere

On the Blue Line last night, I had a seat facing out. The ad above the seat in front of me introduced the new “wide-open” MRI at Saint Anthony’s Hospital—perfect, the ad told me, for those who might not be able to handle a conventional MRI. The ad ended with a bold-font command to “tell [...]

Read Full Post »

Please Wait

I went to the post office—post offices, actually—this morning to pick up a package and figure out why the hell we haven’t gotten any mail in over a week. The first post office sent me to another post office, where I had to wait in line for one of two grumpy women to assist me. [...]

Read Full Post »

Productivity

Things I have done this week:
- Worked.
- Worked overtime.
- Spent far too many hours cross-eyed over football (soccer) stats. Latin American football leagues have jumped the shark.
- Learned what a crazy bumblefuck used to rule Turkmenistan (he banned lip-syncing and recorded music at weddings, and he used the country’s gas moolah to commission a monumental [...]

Read Full Post »

The Other Problem With Commuting

When you’re running late… you’re an hour away, no matter how you slice it.
* * *
Other tidbits:
- to Dan, whose comment I only just saw thanks to an overzealous spam filter: do not be filled with jealousy over my 334 page style manual, as it includes many corollaries such as “generally follow the Chicago Manual [...]

Read Full Post »

“And he wrote moral and satanic poems…”

I think the best thing about my new job might be catching mistakes. Not so much the thrill of finding the mistakes–though that is fun–but the mistakes themselves. Today I did some proofreading, which simply entailed making sure that a set of re-typed manuscripts matched the original set. The originals had handwritten notes that the [...]

Read Full Post »

Notes From the First Day

Too exhausted to blog. Bullets only.
- took a cab to work. spency, but it was just a first-day thing, not the beginning of a habit. made it to work just in time for …
- three hours of HR-babble. but found out about the awesome benefit of buying CTA/Metra passes through Company. the discount is minimal, [...]

Read Full Post »