(no subject)

I woke up early, but instead of doing practical things, I was locked in the grips of fictional suspense. I'm almost done reading The Bourne Supremacy. It's fun mind candy. Like eating a bunch of strawberry sour belts. You love them, but you still wince.

Now to go take care of yard chores.

(no subject)

Here's a fun word of the day:

niddering (NID-uhr-ing) noun

A coward or wretch.

[From erroneous reading of Middle English nithing, from Old English nithing.
This form of the word originated in the 1596 text of historian William of
Malmesbury.]

"And so it goes on without ever reaching the heart of the matter, which
is that the BBC is really a state of mind. It is, as Colin Morris once
put it, the collective memory of the people who made it a great
broadcasting organisation. This idea is quite beyond the niddering
regime currently running the Corporation."
John Naughton, Inside Job on Awkward Customers Inside the BBC,
The Guardian (London), Apr 24, 1994.

"Even William the Conqueror, hated as he was by them, continued to draw
a considerable army of Anglo-Saxons to his standard, by threatening to
stigmatize those who staid at home, as nidering."
Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, 1819.

Ever misspell a word in your school report that cost you a grade? Ever
make a typo in an office memo for which you paid a heavy price? Don't be
disheartened if you think you may never master the whimsies of the English
language. Take comfort in the fact that there's no universal god of
orthography who once decreed, "And ye shall spell potato as p-o-t-a-t-o."
The spelling of a word is merely something we've collectively agreed upon.
Your version of spelling might have been the right one if you were born
just at the right time and read or wrote just the right text. As we'll
see this week, there are words that were once misspelled and those
misspellings somehow stuck. All the words featured this week had their
spellings altered in the course of history because someone mis-read,
mis-printed, mis-wrote, or mis-copied and missed the "right" spelling. -Anu

Other thoughts

The rest of the day went well. I ran some errands, finished reading the Bourne Supremacy, did some chores. I went and hung out with Baby Doc and Yale-Vet to watch the playoff game.

While Friday's officiating was dismal and abyssmal, I think the Kings did themselves in tonight. They had the home court advantage, they had the quality players, but they never took proper advantage of the foibles the Lakers made. The Lakers don't suck at all. If they did suck, we would have won the series. It was a matter of the Kings not letting the Lakers get in their head, and they did.

Pour Christie: he often does well, but tonight he had a terrible night. When we needed him to sink some three pointers, he bricked.

Given tonight's playoff events, I find myself poised to cheer on New Jersey. Go, underdogs, go!

Oh well. Hopefully next season.

After the game, other folks arrived at Baby Doc's and we played bridge. We had some interesting hands. Jovial revelry was had. Barney, the wondercat, was adorable as always.