#622 Java the Hut

Ah Modern times. Not a day goes by some factoid doesn’t skitter across my desk like a rat on too many espressos.
I heard the other day that McDonalds is going to be carrying lattes. That’s right, the fifth horseman of the apocalypse has ridden down commercial lane. McDonalds is carrying fancy espresso drinks.
Guess they won’t be calling Starbucks the McDonalds of coffee anymore.
Seems Mickey Ds introduction of premium coffee last year was a resounding success. Finally, parents can take their whining kids in for a happy meal and a quick slide down the play area tubes, and sit back and enjoy a fine latte while they chat with friends on their cell while they do so.
Every echo-boomers dream, a cellphone, a latte, and buying the kids off with a happy meal. They didn’t make quality time like this in the 70s.
Now if only Pizza Hut would do it. They could call it Java the Hut.
And speaking of kids and how important they are, seems school education has taken a back seat to school vacation. Even though educational experts say hugely positive things about year-round school, America continues to hold on to its farm roots by kicking the kids to the curb every summer to fend for their intellectual selves.
Even while other countries surpass us in math, sciences, and technology.
Well, here’s another reason for our apparent obliviousness. It’s for commerce. Under pressure from the tourism industry, 11 states now require, that’s right, require, public school boards to start school no earlier than late August or early September.
Tourism interests say when schools open their doors in early August it discourages family vacations and reduces the student workforce in restaurants and resorts.
Wait a minute. Student workers aren’t on vacation anyway—they’re working—and they’d be going back to work at their school towns. Which would then have more part time workers at night.
And heck, with baseball season getting later and later and football earlier and earlier, I’d think the pizza delivery biz would need all that after-school help.
And who’s going to make lattes at college-town McDonalds?
America, ya gotta love it

#621 Joining Words

The other day was a slow news day. Not enough blood emerging from war, gang activities or Unabomber types.
So all the news outlets had stories about hyphens. Or rather, the removal of same.
The world is aghast—bumblebee is now one word!
Apparently, the Oxford English dictionary, the final noumpere of all things English, has decided to remove the hyphens from a number of words.
Yes, the innocence of these young compound words is finally lost. They are old enough and with enough usage to be de-hyphenated.
Removing the hyphen is apparently a fairly painless process. Oxford just does it. Oh, they claim it’s the people who do it already. The word email, for instance, used to be hyphenated, but the public refused to accept it as such.
Oxford blames the laziness of typing types. Seems emailers and others are too lazy to reach all the way up to the next row on the keyboard to tap a hyphen. Nestled up there, as it is, between the zero and the equals sign, why it might as well be a distant parking place at a health club.
Huh. I for one was remarking to myself the other day, as I went to various websites and typed in the @ sign for the jillinoth time, that that top rank left pinky finger key is seeing more use than ever in the 21st century.
The hyphen is too—when people make those handcrafted emoticons—the colon for the eyes, the close parenthesis thingie for the smiling mouth and, yes, the hyphen for the nose.
The hyphen makes a better sideways smiley-face nose, apparently, than it does a bridge between words that are not quite compound and not quite separate.
There are 16,000 words Oxford altered one way or the other. Ice cream is now two words, no hyphen, as is pot belly, test tube, and fig leaf.
Well yeah, I haven’t send a fig leaf hyphenated since Adam.
Words that became one are crybaby, logjam, and bumblebee.
I don’t ever remember hyphenating bumblebee.
Which may be why it’s become the buzz-word of this whole deal.
America, ya gotta love it

#620 Join the 21st

I think we are not entirely comfortable with the 21st century and the computer age. The vicissitudes of spam, email, and all things computerese cause daily flights and plummets of consternation.
I once spoke to a room full of people in which half of them were over 60. When someone told me he didn’t get an email I had sent, I remarked in a deadpan voice that it was probably because they didn’t deliver email on holidays. Just about everyone over sixty bought it.
I have a friend who had problems with his email. Or possibly his server, he wasn’t entirely sure. So he emailed himself to check it.
We thought that process was best described by the word email-sturbation.
Ultimately is can cause problems of its own. It can make the images in your monitor fade. Worse, if you use a PDA, it could make your palm pilot get hairy.
But one of the biggest threats facing the computer world is a disproportionate number of boys, as opposed to girls, buy computer video games.
The industry is worried.
Young girls make up a huge proportion of the whining-till-parents-buy-it consumer base. If the videogame industry could somehow capitalize on that...
There’s an online game now much favored by little girls that seems to be close. It’s about penguins or something.
The key appears to be that there’s a social aspect with other players. And apparently it also teaches little girls to shop.
Yahoo.
Let’s hold on to those cultural stereotypes—fashion and shopping, the two biggest educational tools to prepare one for international diplomacy and scientific research.
Not that most shoot-em-up video games for boys are any better. Somehow racing around streets in stolen autos and rolling ladies of the evening is not what I would want for social training either. And the attempt to sweep girls in, with that one ill-conceived video game really wasn’t good at all. What was it called? Oh yeah, Grand Theft Rainbow Pony. I’m glad that idea didn’t fly.
Stealing and riding sparkly rainbow ponies while you blew away cops was far worse than a trip to the penguin equivalent of the Gap.
America, ya gotta love it