Capitalizing Black but not white

Commenter Mark Dowd urged me to get on board with the spreading movement to capitalize Black when referring to a group identity. I had noticed the trend myself but had not done anything about it partly because of inertia and partly because I was not sure what the full ramifications were. How much does it generalize? For example, does that mean that ‘white’ should be capitalized too?

So I looked to that authoritative journalistic source, the Associated Press Style Guide and they said that had been looking into this question for over two years and in June 2020 gave reasons why they had decided to capitalize Black.
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Diogenes and cynicism

Not being a classicist, I had not known much about the ancient philosopher Diogenes other than the story about him wandering around with a lantern trying to find an honest man and presumably failing.

But this video says that there was a lot more to him than that, that he was the founder of the philosophical school known as cynicism that meant something somewhat different from what we associate with the word nowadays.

Plato once described the philosopher Diogenes of Sinope as ‘a Socrates gone mad!’ It’s a good comparison. Like Socrates, Diogenes gave the bird to respectable society. He undermined status and manners in the 4th century BCE with his bottomless reserve of shamelessness and irreverence, opting to live on the streets like a stray dog. But, of course, there was a method to his madness. In this short video by TED-Ed, the Irish philosopher William D Desmond explains how Diogenes lived an authentic and ascetic life in accordance with nature, and how in doing so he founded the philosophy of cynicism – an iconoclastic tradition that continues to illuminate and infuriate today.

Making chess more exciting

Chess is a game whose rules were determined centuries ago and are thought to be unchangeable. Chess aficionados would be offended at the idea that it is not exciting and that some changes might benefit it. Without getting into that particular argument, there is no question that because it is so rigidly structured, players nowadays, aided by computers, have studied and memorized most of the openings and defenses and their variations so that there is little surprise, at least in the early stages. As I mentioned in an earlier post, one reason I gave up chess was the realization that to really improve, I would have to drop all my other activities and devote myself to studying and memorizing a huge number of openings and defenses. This was just not worth it to me.
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Great moments in crime

A porch thief gets caught in the act and tries to run away quickly but his car gets stuck in the snow. While he frantically tries to remove the snow from under tires in order to regain traction, the homeowners struggle to figure out how to call the police while giving advice to the man on how to free the car from the snow, such as pointing out that clearing snow from under the rear wheels is pointless because it is a front-wheel drive car, and even offering him a shovel. Did I mention that this took place in Canada?

What shocked me was that the man kept the engine running and the car in gear (since the wheels were still spinning) while kneeling in front of the car to clear the snow with his bare hands. If he had been successful, the car would have run him over.

If this should happen to you, one thing you can try is take a floor mat from your car and wedge it under the wheel that’s spinning.

At least the thief was wearing a mask, so that is one point in his favor of not being a total doofus.

(Via Rob Beschizza)

Wine snobbery

I am not a wine drinker so cannot speak from personal experience but know that suggesting to people who consider themselves connoisseurs of wine that some tests have shown that there isn’t that much difference between expensive and cheap wines (and that some tests found that experts cannot distinguish even between red and white wines) is sure to arouse indignation. I know personally someone who when he visits his parents’ home, takes some of their wine and pours it down the sink because he thinks it is inferior. My own attitude to any matters of taste is to follow Duke Ellington’s advice in music that “If it sounds good, it is good.” If you like the taste of something, you should ignore other factors like its cheap price or the attitude of experts.
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Why would you do this?

I was struck by this news item.

One in 9 couples planning to marry this year, or 225,000 engaged pairs, owe $3.7 billion in personal loans for canceled weddings during the pandemic, according to a new analysis from Loanry, an online personal lender. That works out to about $16,444 in outstanding balances on average for each couple.

“This last year will have been devastating for many couples,” said Ethan Taub, founder of Loanry, “especially for the percentage paying off loans for weddings that haven’t happened.”

The analysis considered five factors: the average number of weddings that take place each year, the percentage of those postponed this year, the number of personal loans taken out for weddings, the average cost and budget of a wedding, and the average loan amount for a wedding based on Loanry’s own data.

I can understand couples who want to have a nice wedding. Some like to have really grand weddings but the idea of taking out a huge loan for what is a one-day party is something I cannot wrap my mind around, because it means you will start married life with a huge debt burden hanging round. your neck.

It is one thing to take out a loan for college education because that is an investment that one can hope to recoup with higher income. But wedding expenses are not like that.

In Sri Lanka, wedding expenses were usually borne by the bride’s parents and there too there is the deplorable practice of families spending far more than they could afford just to keep up with the Joneses and to impress people.

In the US, I blame the wedding industry who have created the impression that a big fancy wedding is what everyone should aspire to. Celebrities feed into this mindset but they have the money to have a splashy party.

But what’s the square footage of the assembly instructions?

Anyone who has tried to assemble IKEA furniture has stories to tell about trying to figure out the purely diagrammatic instructions and understanding what goes where and what to do when parts are left over.

But now the company has entered the tiny home market, selling a 187 sq. ft. home for around $50,000.

It is not clear if the home has to be assembled by the buyer.

Some common errors

I have been noticing some errors occurring recently with the spelling of homonyms. Here are three examples:

Writing eek when they mean eke

Writing discrete when they mean discreet

Writing complementary when they mean complimentary

I am sure there must be others that can be added to the list.

For some reason, the errors rarely go in the opposite direction, maybe because words like eek, discrete, and complementary are less likely to come up naturally.