I returned late Tuesday night from visiting with my grandchildren and I had an absolutely wonderful time. The two boys are 5 and 2 ½ and a lot of fun, curious and energetic. The only downside was that on the morning after my return I threw up and had a slight fever. Naturally, my first thought was that I had got covid but the test turned out to be negative. Then the following day, my temperature was back to normal and a second covid test also showed negative. Since I had no other symptoms at all, I think I had got food poisoning on the trip home.

It was my first flight in over two years thanks to the pandemic and I was reminded once again what a terrible experience flying is.
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I will be spending the next five days with my grandchildren whom I have not seen for over two years because of the pandemic.

Hence blogging will be light or non-existent until my return.

There is something quite irresistible about the Nextdoor app that is meant to be used by people living in a small community to exchange information, seek assistance, provide alerts, and the like. But like all social media, what starts off as a simple post often leads to the discussion going off the rails, with tangents, non sequiturs, pedantic and nitpicking comments, jumping to conclusions, casting aspersions, ascribing unpleasant motives, and sometimes even name calling.

In this clip, actors play out an actual thread where all those elements are visible.

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This video shows the capture of an alligator roaming in the driveway of a home in South Carolina. [I’ve updated the video to one that shows more of how they did it.]

I am assuming that the two women who did this are professionals who work for the animal control department who know what what they are doing and that this is their preferred method. But wrestling and pinning an alligator seems highly dangerous to me, more so than using a trash can the way that a Florida man did.

There is no single answer of course but the increased isolation during the pandemic has led to considerable reflection on the effects of solitude on people who have been cut off from socializing with family, friends, and co-workers. This has clearly had more of an effect on some than others and caused them to think about who are the people they really miss and want to reconnect with as soon as possible and whom they may decide to slowly ease away from.

Melissa Kirsch described her apprehension about meeting a friend after a long separation, and that caused her to explore the question of how many friends a person needs to stave off feelings of loneliness.
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I wrote recently about these random WhatsApp text messages that I occasionally get from unknown young women. Presumably, they are the first stages of a scam that will reveal itself if I reply, which of course I never do.

But I am interested in the logic by which they hope to ensnare me and the latest leaves me completely baffled. It reads in its entirety:

“Uncle Ryan will send you to pick me up at the airport next month in a rolls Royce. I’m going back to Ohio soon.”

First off, unlike the earlier ones, this one is oddly specific, mentioning Uncle Ryan, a rolls (sic) Royce, and Ohio. The only part of it that has any connection to me is Ohio.

Also, why does Uncle Ryan need me to pick you up? Why can’t he do it himself or assign the task to the driver of the car? I am a busy person, and cannot drop everything just to go to the airport for no reason.

I got my second booster shot and am feeling ‘under the weather’ as we old fogeys like to say, so I will not be blogging until I feel better.

I do a lot of writing and so am often confronted with the question of whether or not to use a hyphen. I am too lazy to develop an overarching theory to govern their use and so use it idiosyncratically, depending on my mood and whether it ‘feels’ right.

Mary Norris writes about the history of the symbol and the various policies regarding their use. I was amazed to learn that there are actual books written about it.

The invention of the hyphen has been credited to Dionysius Thrax, a Greek grammarian who worked at the Library of Alexandria in the second century B.C. Mahdavi writes, “The elegant, sublinear bow-shaped U-hyphen . . . was used to fuse words and highlight words that belonged together.” Much later, in fifteenth-century Germany, Johannes Gutenberg used hyphens liberally (in their modern form) to justify the columns of heavy Gothic type in his Bible.
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The hyphen continues to serve a dual purpose: it both connects and separates. In justified text, it divides into appropriate syllables a word that lands on a line break, a task that machines have not yet mastered; and it is instrumental in the formation of compounds, where it is famously subject to erosion. Yesteryear’s “ball-point pen” became the “ballpoint,” “wild-flowers” evolved into “wildflowers,” and “teen-age” found acceptance as “teenage” in most outlets (but not in this one).
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The hyphen underwent an assault from a different corner in 2007, when Angus Stevenson, an editor of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, removed the hyphens from sixteen thousand words. Some words he closed up (“bumblebee”), others he divided in two (“fig leaf”). When people objected, he argued that the general public didn’t understand the rules governing the hyphen and didn’t care enough to learn them.

Then there is the problem of the ‘non-breaking’ hyphen, where you use the symbol but do not want to have it break up something at the end of the line. For example, the US interstate highway labeling system consists of things like ‘I-80’. Preventing it from being split requires extra programming.

Figuring out the rules for when to use a hyphen seems like hard work. I think I will continue my hit-or-miss approach.

It happened again.

I was at a party with a sizable crowd and where I did not know anyone other than my hosts. So I did the usual self-introduction thing and told them my first name. One woman said, “I remember when I can incapacitated by it in college”. She had, like so many others, thought my name was spelled and pronounced as ‘mono’, short for mononucleosis, the infectious disease sometimes referred to as ‘the kissing disease’ because the Epstein-Barr virus that causes it is spread through saliva and kissing is a common way of transmission.

Actually, there is a subtle difference in pronunciation between the two words but many people miss it and usually go to the first word they are familiar with. I then tell them that it is spelled and pronounced like the Spanish word for ‘hand’ and that clears things up, especially if they know some Spanish.

I sometimes wonder whether I should bother at all. It seems a little picky and suggests an elevated sense of self-importance to correct people on such a minor error as the pronunciation of your name, especially with people I am likely to never meet again. So why do I do it? Perhaps it is because I do not wish it thought that my parents were weird enough to give me a name associated with a virus.

Incidentally, I had never heard of this disease in Sri Lanka, likely because kissing on the lips is something that is only done within the context of marriage or extremely clandestinely between two intimate partners. So while in the US, it can spread widely on college and high school campuses, in Sri Lanka it was totally absent. At least, I did not know a single person who contracted it.