Seriously random musings written at a 9th grade level

Having been back home for a few days now, I'm finally settling back in... to the time, to my routine, to everything... including quoting from All the King's Men: "He learned that the world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it, however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy no more but springs out to fling the gossamer coils about you who have touched the web and then inject the black, numbing poison under your hide. It does not matter whether or not you meant to brush the web of things. Your happy foot or your gay wing may have brushed it ever so lightly, but what happens always happens and there is the spider, bearded black and with his great faceted eyes glittering like mirrors in the sun, or like God's eye, and the fangs dripping." I can appreciate that whole quote... although I almost took out the dark parts of it. I hate spiders, especially drowsy ones who spring to life when you brush up against their invisible, all-up-in-the-way web. The whole thing is, to me, kind of an ugly approach to the idea of a butterfly effect. Everything we do touches something else... somewhere, sometime, somehow. It's all just ripples in the puddles on the floor of the rain forest in Cambodia. Gosh, I hope something I do at some point in my life touches someone in a positive way. I really don't want to be the brush against the web that awakens the spider.

Anyway... just shake your head violently (not too violently!) to clear that whole silly paragraph away...

So, I was assigned a surprise project this morning. Mary (the boss) apologized later for "hijacking [my] am and pm"... which she totally did! I told her, of course, that it wasn't a problem... some of these little projects are fun and some, not so much. This one, not so much. Hopefully, tomorrow can be filled with tasks that are much more fun... or is it funner? We were watching a TV show earlier when one of the characters said that it was "time to do something funner". Seriously? Funner? Okay, I was interested... so I googled it. What seemed like a reliable [British viewpoint] web site (www.worldwidewords.org) says: "Fun is a good example of a word that has moved away from being just a noun to being equally comfortable in an adjectival role. The move to adjective has gone so far in the USA that its comparative and superlative are not infrequently found in informal writing: funner for ‘more fun’ and funnest for ‘most fun’. A scan of newspapers in the NEXIS database from 1998 found over a thousand examples of the latter form. Some of these are no doubt intended to be humorous, and some are probably mistakes, but surely not all of them are." And according to a Random House page (http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd), a 1755 dictionary described the word "fun" (even when used as a noun) as "a low cant word" anyway... which just makes me wonder what in the world the word "cant" means. Ah... language evolution. All at once interesting... and not so much. But, rest assured, you can find anything on the Internet.

Speaking of Google... the Times this morning contained a story about a new financial page to rival that of MSN and Yahoo! from none other than everyone's favorite search engine (except for those of you who are resisting it... but you will not be able to, for long, resist the funnest search engine of them all). Anyway, in keeping with the theme of random sites visited to uncover weird things... when I checked out the beta version of http://finance.google.com, I was pleasantly surprised. I loved the mouseovers for the pics & bios of the execs. (Although the CCBL info is a little out-of-date (of course, I can't blame them... what with the change-on-a-whim mentality we seem to have at the COR anyway), how fun is it to see my boss & her peers pop up on the page? Yes, I know I could see those pics anytime by visiting the company web site; but that would ruin the fun. And yes, I know I've used the word "fun" more times in this post than in my entire life. Yeah, right!). The info presented is definitely a little easier to navigate/sort through than all those other finance pages out there. And I love the section listing "Blog Posts". But at the same time, I'm definitely a little nervous that Google may someday run across my quiet little corner of the interweb and consider posting my random musings about nothing on the CCBL results page. Especially since I just used CCBL twice in that paragraph. Oh crap... that's three. I better stop before they find me. Especially now that Google and the government are in cahoots. Today, child porn... tomorrow, people who blog (almost-never but happened to mention it once, or three times, in one post) about their work. Can we call Google Big Sister now? But, I really do love Google. For real.

Okay, last random topic, then I'm off to bed. Brad S's away message says he has a "REALLY early flight" tomorrow. (Well, it did... and then he promptly logged off.) Anyway, I found myself wondering how early is REALLY early... and also why I feel the need to incessantly check away messages. But don't we all do it? C'mon, admit it... you've peeked at more than the occasional away message. And if you haven't, what the heck is wrong with you? Ever wonder if maybe, just maybe, that away message was intended for you? Ahhh... and here we are back to the world revolving around me. It always comes back around. Just like I like it.

So, do you wonder how much time you just wasted reading all that nonsense? If it gives you an idea, it took me about an hour to compose, it is almost 2 pages (single-spaced), 978 words, approx. 5,000 characters (without spaces), about 17 words per sentence (I know, but long sentences are so fun!), and written at about an 8.7 grade level (according to Flesch-Kincaid and the MS Word readability statistics). HA! This last paragraph just pushed me up to a 9.0 grade level. I'm so proud. And bored, I guess. Did you know that your everyday newspaper aims for about a grade 6 readability level? In my J-School classes, the profs sometimes called mainstream newspaper readers "Joe Six-pack"... at a 6th grade reading level. Disturbing... still... even now, when I KNOW how one-standard-deviation-below-competent the majority of the population is. Wow! Am I all over the place or what?!?! Holy cow... maybe I should just go to bed already. Yes, I realize I just said "holy cow"... but I like cows. Shut up, Heidi; just shut up. Oh, but one more thing... I really am sorry if I just made you late for work. :-)