Another reason I like reading Kathy Shaidle:

"I do wish everyone would stop using "disrespect" as a verb."

Amen, sister. And she's Canadian, the kind I'm sure would give proper directions to any tourist from south of the border.  ¶ 20:05

  Now here's a cause I'd like to contribute to. What are the chances it will be part of the next Combined Federal Campaign?  ¶ 19:52

  Canadians: if they're not that nice, what do they have left? Seriously, though, you'd half expect that in Quebec, but Ontario?  ¶ 19:50

  "The difference between an American and an Englishman (and Europeans by extension) is that an American thinks a hundred years is a long time, and that an Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long distance."  ¶ 16:59

  There's a dirty joke in here somewhere, I just know it.  ¶ 22:03

  The twenty-five (well, actually twenty-six) most expensive cities in the world... and somehow New York was the only American city to make the list. Washington got beaten out by Douala? How did that happen?

I've been to fifteen of the cities, seventeen if you count transit through an airport.  ¶ 21:58

  It's always interesting to see the evening news on France's TV-2. In tonight's edition they discussed trouble in the EU summit - all due to the evil British refusing to give up their rebate, of course, who rejected M. Chirac's eminently reasonable offers of compromise. But unfortunately even French television is not immune from Hollywood, as not only did they report on Tom Cruise's marriage proposal, but they also did a live interview. The entertainment world's vapidity doesn't sound any better in French.

"War of the Worlds" looks like one of those movies I would have rushed to see about ten years ago, but since getting a DVD player, I don't go to movies the way I used to. Now I generally wait for anything that looks interesting to come out on DVD, with very few exceptions. "The Lord of the Rings" movies, for instance, and yes, the new "Star Wars" movie.

I took my time to see that one, but finally hauled myself to a matinee on a nice weekday off. It's not like I had to fight for a seat, either. The place was practically deserted. Aren't the kids out of school yet? But this one had to be seen on the big screen, because everyone said it was visually spectacular. And it was. It just lacked that sense of energy that made the original trilogy something I could watch again and again. The opening scene was awesome, but even there it didn't have any sort of pull. There's an epic battle being waged in space. Wouldn't the people on the planet pay some sort of attention to what's going on? Especially when big chunks of debris are raining down upon them? But life went on in Coruscant.

The light sabre scenes were kind of tedious, and in most of them the characters didn't seem to be all that personally involved. The only ones that felt kind of real were the ones at the end.

Still, I have to say I did have a moment of genuine excitement. It was the preview for "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe".  ¶ 19:43

  "Indians must have vast space in their brains for memorizing spellings, since very little of their cerebral room is taken up by social subtleties or a sense of humor."  ¶ 20:43

  Apparently the British are adapting American slang. Which is a shame, considering that the British have some really great words of their own, like "bint" and "slapper" and "slag". That rhyming slang stuff, though - I can do without that.  ¶ 20:17

  And speaking of irritating, I hate these stories. Every time a new edition of a dictionary comes out, it's always got some flash-in-the-pan words that will have changed and dropped out of the language almost entirely by the time the next revision rolls around. I mean, are "pants" and "Planet Zog" in anyone's lexicon now? Snigglets, anyone?

Of course, I also think we should go back to using thou, thy/thine and thee to distinguish second-person singular from second-person plural, although I will accept you and y'all for the same thing. (Via PragueBlog)  ¶ 22:57

  Chinese "asylum" cases in the news: one with a teenager who came on a fake passport, the other involving several more who probably came in the same way. These cases always annoyed me, since the ones I saw were just coming from economic opportunity. They almost always (there were some dumb ones who forgot their coaching) expressed fear of returning to China, usually because of the smuggling debts that they brought upon themselves. We'd let them in, they'd get attorneys and suddenly they would recall the real reasons they came - either the government was after them because they demonstrated in Tiananmen (amazing the number of south Chinese peasants who must have been there), or the one-child policy (from unmarried people who said they might some day want more than one child), then later because of their religion. And many would eventually get legal status, which does not exactly make for a huge disincentive for the rest of south China to come in illegally.  ¶ 22:36