Watch Your Drinks, Ladies

Pink Slip pointed me in the direction of this well-written and kind of terrifying article about date-rape drugs and how little can be done to test for what you may have been slipped after you wake up in the morning. Be careful out there, everybody.

Ow.

I only caught the last 38 minutes of this evening's Sox game, and it was like I was a little kid again. This, for those of you who are a little new to this? Is what it used to feel like to watch the Sox ALL THE DAMN TIME. Ow.

A Little Bit of Awesome

Check out this little bit of radness. Apparently, somewhere in America, there is a really awesome girl running a banned books library out of an empty locker. If that is true, I want to meet that girl and shake her hand, because she RULES.

Some of the books are old standbys for book burnin' types, like The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Pullman's His Dark Materials, and The Catcher in the Rye, and then things like Candide, which... is dirty, I guess? And Chaucer, who's a little bawdy, but it's not like they're going to be reading the original text at 15, and I can't believe there's no sanitized translation out there, but the list also includes Dante, Paradise Lost, and the Koran, and then some standbys of 9th grade English as I knew it, Lord of the Flies and Animal Farm. (OK, I never read those last two, either in high school or out of it, but my specific section of English was the only one I know of.)

I really, really hope that this girl goes through the rest of high school doing this and never gets caught. She is awesome, and brave, and what I admire most is that I'd never have dared to do something like this at that age, had I found myself in a similar situation. As far as I'm aware, the closest my high school came to censorship of any kind, really, was taping over the seven seconds during which you can see Romeo's butt in the Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet. (We were thirteen. None of us really wanted to see any of the movie.)

The Elements of Style, Strunk & White

I read The Elements of Style for the first time ever this week, at the suggestion of Francine Prose, whose book I have yet to write up. (Read it, though, it's rad.)

I'm one of the few children of the eighties, apparently, who had a solid instruction in English grammar as a... grammar school student, and between that and my English-teaching mom, it really stuck with me. I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge or anything (...boy do I not) but I somehow become the grammar maven of every office work in (except the current one, where my boss has, I now realize, memorized Strunk and White). My secret, though, is that I can barely remember the names of the parts of speech, I just read a ton and have a pretty good ear, and a pretty good internal foundation.

But between the current temp assignment, and Francine Prose's suggestion, and the fact that I've had the book on my shelf and never even cracked it for at least three years, I figured maybe it was time. And it is. It turns out, it is nearly always time to read Strunk & White. The rules are few, and easy to understand (for the most part) and they are essential to good writing. If you write anything, ever, for any purpose, you should read this book on a regular basis. I think I want to make a poster of the rules and tape it up above my desk.

I wound up somehow with an illustrated edition; the illustrations are self-consciously modern and whimsical, and are essentially the visual equivalent of doing exactly what Strunk and White tell you not to do with your prose, so I wouldn't bother to spring for that one. (It's the one illustrated by Kalman, with the red cloth cover embossed with a colon on the front and a semicolon on the back.) It's pretty, and solid-looking, but you'd do just as well with the regular low-end edition, without the added distraction of trying to figure out what the fuck is going on in the color plates.

Required Reading

There was a man on the 71 Bus this morning reading a book entitled What to Say When You Talk to Yourself. If you have ever ridden the 71, you understand how that fact pretty much sums up the parade of weirdos that is a ride on the 71, even if the book somehow turns out not to be a handbook for talking to yourself out loud. (What are the odds?)