Author: marginnotes_m4x28l

It’s stupid to wait for an arbitrary date to decide to make changes in yourself. That said, this is the year when I will:

1. Do 100 push ups.
2. Read a poem a day.
3. Visit Glacier National Park once per season.

As a note, it turned out to be harder than I expected to get a poem delivered to my inbox every day. Searching for “poem of the day” mainly turns up outfits that will send you a daily poem during April, National Poetry Month, but not for the rest of the year. So far, the best option I’ve come across is the daily email newsletter from Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac.

Also, if you-like me-have always been push up challenged, you might want to check out the six-week program I’m going to use to get to 100. Based on how many push ups you can do right now, the program provides a training program in which you gradually work up to the desired total. This program was a “thing” on the Internet for a while in 2008, and a lot of the mentions of it that I saw were by people (especially women) who never thought they’d be able to do such a thing, but the program got them there. So, if you’re dubious, know that this is a preeminently achievable goal.

Why should you want to do 100 push ups, anyway? Because-according to this New York Times article– you won’t be able to without being in pretty decent shape overall:

“The push-up is the ultimate barometer of fitness. It tests the whole body, engaging muscle groups in the arms, chest, abdomen, hips and legs. It requires the body to be taut like a plank with toes and palms on the floor. The act of lifting and lowering one’s entire weight is taxing even for the very fit.”

You don’t have to be able to do 100, though:

“Push-ups are important for older people, too. The ability to do them more than once and with proper form is an important indicator of the capacity to withstand the rigors of aging.”

This is because, among other things, being able to do a couple of push ups means you have the strength to catch yourself in a fall and to get up again afterward.

But in general I just like the idea of a significantly challenging bit of exercise I can do anywhere, without equipment. Ideally, that would describe my whole exercise routine. In fact, I’m on the lookout for some kind of effective exercise routine I can do to work out my major muscle groups without equipment. I guess yoga would fit the bill, but what I really want is some sort of isometric routine designed by Soviet scientists in 1962 or something along those lines. So please let me know if you’ve heard of any.

• Military peeps: how bad a back injury could get you discharged early these days? Would you have to be completely debilitated? #
• Just saved $120 by replacing my car's door handle myself. #
• My latest WTC column: Montanans' love of guns is strong, even at Christmas time. http://bit.ly/4HfdTG #
• Watching Missoula police administer a horizontal-gaze nystagmus test in front of my house. #
• My Corolla's outside door handle doesn't open the door anymore. Is this easy to fix by myself? #
• Can any Missoulians help me track down info on the guy sentenced to prison a few years back for shooting a kid breaking into his car? #
• Does anyone else out there hate the New Yorker "digital edition"? #
• So, invade Yemen now? #
• Thought for the day: Observant private citizens continue to be the only proved, effective defense against terrorism, just like on 9/11. #

My latest Went West column takes a look at gun culture in Montana.

“[A] Kalispell man had started his pickup truck outside his workplace and left it running so that it would be nice and warm when he was ready to leave for the day. As he stepped outside to drive home, he saw that someone else was departing in his truck. Naturally, he jumped into the bed of the truck and dialed police on his cell phone, and when the thief pulled over a few blocks away and took off running, our protagonist retrieved a pistol from the cab of the truck and gave chase, still on the line with a 911 operator.”

Read the exciting conclusion here.

• Gut check: despite all the raves from critics, Avatar will still be nearly unwatchably boring, right? #
• In no hurry to go back to the Montana Club now that they've taken Steak Diane off the menu. #

Fascinating reading about the failed hunt for Osama bin Laden:

“The real history of Tora Bora is far more disturbing. Having reconstructed the battle–based on interviews with the top American ground commander, three Afghan commanders, and three CIA officials; accounts by Al Qaeda eyewitnesses that were subsequently published on jihadist websites; recollections of captured survivors who were later questioned by interrogators or reporters; an official history of the Afghan war by the U.S. Special Operations Command; an investigation by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and visits to the battle sites themselves–I am convinced that Tora Bora constitutes one of the greatest military blunders in recent U.S. history.”

You know you’re in bad shape when you are forced to mourn the closing of a B. Dalton. But that’s the only bookstore serving the quarter of a million people who reside in Laredo.

“Laredo, Texas, is set to become the largest U.S. city without a bookstore. The B. Dalton in the Mall del Norte, owned by parent company Barnes & Noble, is slated to close next month. When it does, it will leave the city’s close to 250,000 residents without a single bookstore.”

• Silent Night? Whoever wrote that clearly hasn't spent much time around babies. #
• Everyone needs an editor: I just heard on the radio that the Missoula Public Library will be showing an "adult foreign film" on Friday. #
• Tilting Against Established Perversions. https://marginnotes.net/2009/12/14/tilting-against-established-perversions/ #
• Defrosting the inside of the living room windows. #

Call it what you want, economist John Quiggin says we can now write the obituary for the idea that the richer the rich get, the better off we’ll all be.

“The trickle-down theory can be examined using the tools of econometrics. But, at least for the US, no such sophisticated analysis is required. The raw data on income distribution shows that households in the bottom half of the income distribution gained nothing from the decades of market liberalism. Although apologists for market liberalism have offered various arguments to suggest that the raw data gives the wrong impression, none of these arguments stand up to scrutiny. All the evidence supports the commonsense conclusion that policies designed to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor have done precisely that.”

To me, one of the big red flags about the “trickle down” theory is that it essentially bribes you rich people for agreeing with it. “Want to help America?” it asks. “Help yourself first.” As a result, it just seemed like this theory was never going to get analyzed as critically as a theory that suggests that helping others might require some level of sacrifice, and so there was a great risk of personal-interest bias creeping in.

Regret the Error has posted its annual roundup of the best media errors and corrections.

“We now accept that Cristiano did not “go on a bender”, did not drink any alcohol that evening, did not spend pounds 10,000 on alcohol, nor throw his crutches to the floor or try to dance.”

Glad that’s straightened out.

Non-writers might be unaware of the narrow little category of books devoted to “English usage,” i.e., the right best way to use the language, from fine points of grammar to the correct definitions of commonly misused words. No mere textbooks, these works usually take the form of a collection of essays (some “mini” and some not so) that argue for the various usages the author prefers (and it is sometimes simply a matter of well-argued opinion).

Between the covers of such books, you can learn-for example-the difference between “cheerful” and “cheery”: “The cheerful feels and perhaps shows contentment, the cheery shows and probably feels it.”

That example comes from the most famous of these books, Henry Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern Usage, usually called “Fowler’s” by aficionados.

If the first thing such books make you think of is all the times someone else has corrected your grammar, rest assured that that’s not what Fowler wanted. From an essay by Jim Holt in the New York Times, occasioned by the re-release of the first edition of Fowler’s by Oxford University Press:

“For all his classicist rigor, [Fowler] was a tolerant man who realized that “tilting against established perversions . . . is vanity in more than one sense.” His ideal was a democratic one, a natural, unaffected and humbug-free English summed up in the word “idiom.” And if idiom and grammar are in conflict, so much the worse for grammar. Thus he was cheerfully lax about “who & whom” and the placement of “only,” and he mocked the pains people go through to avoid ending their sentences with prepositions. When it came to the notorious split infinitive (e.g., “to boldly go where no man . . .”), he observed that those English speakers who neither know nor care about them “are to be envied” by the unhappy few who do.”

Good to know. Personally, I’m more of a Garner man myself, which is to say that I rely on Bryan Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage for help avoiding “Titular Tomfoolery”^[1] or deciding whether “online” needs a hyphen in the middle.^[2]

I learned about Garner from a review by David Foster Wallace. As usual, Wallace’s review is not just a review but a genuinely useful little work of philosophy:

“[I]t is indisputably easier to be dogmatic than Democratic, especially about issues that are both vexed and highly charged. I submit further that the issues surrounding “correctness” in contemporary American usage are both vexed and highly charged, and that the fundamental questions they involve are ones whose answers have to be “worked out” instead of simply found.

A distinctive feature of ADMAU is that its author is willing to acknowledge that a usage dictionary is not a bible or even a textbook but rather just the record of one smart person’s attempts to work out answers to certain very difficult questions. This willingness appears to me to be informed by a Democratic Spirit.”

To be honest, I only consult Garner maybe five times a year, which I’m relieved to learn is in keeping with Holt’s recommendations regarding Fowler and, presumably, all such books:

“[O]ne shouldn’t spend too much time in Fowler’s company. … [H]eightened self-consciousness about usage is the enemy of vigor. One sees this not infrequently in Fowler’s own prose, which can be crabbed and intricate to the point of unintelligibility. One sees it also in disciples of Fowler, who turn out pedanti­cally correct little essays in his honor ….

Hey, here’s a fun little activity: find the usage errors I intentionally^[3] sprinkled throughout this post, and I’ll send you a quarter!^[4]
_____
1. “[E]ven titles of authority [which “are properly capitalized before a person’s name”] … are not capitalized when used as appositives following the name (e.g., George Pataki, governor of New York).”

2. “[T]he hyphen [in on-line] is probably doomed to disappear. The closed form is already dominant, whether the word is used as an adjective or an adverb.”

3. Not really. I’m actually just assuming I made some mistakes. Writing correct is hard!

4. No, I won’t. That offer was for entertainment purposes only!