gwax's rumblings

I have just dis­cov­ered that there is, not only, a name for the com­bi­na­tion of the inter­rog­a­tive point (ques­tion mark) and the excla­ma­tion point but also a typo­graph­i­cal sym­bol. The Interrobang is this com­bi­na­tion and can be rep­re­sented as ‘?!’, ‘!?’ or ‘‽’. In the past, I have used ‘?!’ because I felt that it pro­vided an appro­pri­ate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of ques­tion­ing and excited empha­sis; I pre­fer the excla­ma­tion after as it is the ques­tion that is being empha­sized, not the empha­sis being ques­tioned. Now, how­ever, the sin­gle typo­graph­i­cal char­ac­ter pro­vides me the oppor­tu­nity to con­cisely express, in writ­ing, simul­ta­ne­ous inquiry and surprise.

Unfortunately, although avail­able in uni­code, many fonts do not have ‘‽’ and there is no easy char­ac­ter com­bi­na­tion that will lead to it.

In the world of HTML, you can often get away with ‽

In spite of the dis­so­lu­tion of the Soviet Union in 1991, four Soviet states still exist today. Although none of the four states have obtained inter­na­tional recog­ni­tion and have all been dis­avowed by Moscow, they are all de facto inde­pen­dent states.

Transnistria, a.k.a. Trans-Dniester or Pridnestrovie, exists within the inter­na­tional rec­og­nized bor­ders of Moldova. Transnistria cur­rently exists in a state of civil war with the rest of Moldova and is bor­dered by the Dniester River on the west and the Ukraine on the east.

Nagorno-Karabakh exists in the South Caucasus region of Azerbaijan. Unlike Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh has been par­tic­i­pat­ing in peace talks with both Azerbaijan and Armenia, never hav­ing esca­lated into open warfare.

The final two Soviet states, Abkhazia and South Ossetia exist within the bor­ders of Georgia. There has been open war­fare between Georgia and both South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Muckrunner and tort­fea­sor are cur­rently my two favorite words (though one isn’t really a word). Tortfeasor is a gen­uine and real word, muck­run­ner is a com­pound word derived from a mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion of a homo­phone. So as to allow you to enjoy your expanded vocab­u­lar­ies, I present, with­out fur­ther ado, the def­i­n­i­tion and deriva­tion of tort­fea­sor and muck­run­ner (respectively):

Tortfeasor : One who has com­mit­ted a tort. For those that don’t know, a tort is a civil wrong that is not a breach of con­tract or, in other words, those things that peo­ple sue each other for all the time. Thus, a tort­fea­sor is some­one who has wronged some­one else in a non-breach of con­tract sort of way. Mostly though, it just sounds really neat.

Muckrunner : Derived from the term run­ning amok, which is some­times writ­ten run­ning amuck. Running amok is to act in a vio­lent, mur­der­ous frenzy and can be con­sid­ered roughly syn­ony­mous with going postal or killing spree. Based on run­ning amuck sound­ing an awful lot like run­ning a muck, I fig­ured that one who runs a muck might be a muck­run­ner and thus the deriva­tion is obtained. When, how­ever, one drops the orig­i­nal mean­ing of run­ning amok, a muck­run­ner can become a totally dif­fer­ent thing entirely. Imagine, if you will, a man dri­ving an old rusty pickup truck filled to the brim with some inde­scrib­able muck; now, fur­ther imag­ine this man dri­ving down old dirt roads in a break­neck, Dukes of Hazzard style much like the pro­hi­bi­tion era smug­glers. Although muck­run­ner is an improper deriva­tion of run­ning amok, I find it to be a won­der­fully amus­ing construct.

Avast, me hearties! In case ye land lub­bers have for­got, today, September 19^th, be International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Enjoy yer day, drink plenty o’ grog and get ye some good wench­ing while it still be today. Yarrrgh!

01:02:03 04÷05÷06 has just passed by us here in EDT

I also got the chance to real­ize that all of my Linux com­put­ers were set to EST instead of EST5EDT (grum­ble, grumble).

The inter­net has pro­vided me with proof that the Japanese are super-humans who are going to take over the world. Just look at how they fold shirts, peel pota­toes and do every­thing else. Seriously, I watched the shirt fold­ing video at least five times and was still left com­pletely agog.

Anyone that’s dri­ven between Carlisle and Chelmsford more than a few times should be well aware of Jesus Cat and I am happy to report that he still exists. I have dri­ven the Chelmsford-Carlisle route a num­ber of times recently but had not seen Jesus Cat, which had left me con­cerned that he had departed this world, but on a return trip from Chelmsford tonight, I spot­ted him; long live Jesus Cat.

For those that are unaware, Jesus Cat is a plush cat that has been cru­ci­fied to a tele­phone pole. I con­sider Jesus Cat to be a sta­ple of the Carlisle expe­ri­ence as he’s been there since before the first time I ever drove to Chelmsford (so at least 6 years).

I just fixed some prob­lems with the code at work, men­tioned so doing to some­one I was inter­mit­tently chat­ting with on AIM and received a response along the lines of, “give your­self a cookie”. I was about to respond that I don’t have any cook­ies when some­one walked into my cubi­cle and offered me a cookie; that folks, is synchronicity.

One does not wreck less while being reck­less.

It turns out the US Navy has been train­ing dol­phins to help pro­tect ships and kill ter­ror­ists. That the mil­i­tary has been doing this is news to me and I think it’s incred­i­bly keen, albeit eth­i­cally ques­tion­able. On top of the keen­ness of trained dol­phins, appar­ently some of the dol­phins have been out­fit­ted with toxic dart guns; how metal is that? Now, you might be ask­ing where the lambs come into this whole thing, and to get into that we need to ask where the Navy’s been doing this research? Turns out the research was being done in good old Southern Louisiana. What with all that Hurricane Katrina stuff going on down there, there’s some con­cern that some of the armed dol­phins might have escaped and might acci­den­tally shoot unsus­pect­ing divers and surfers. Escaped mil­i­tary dol­phins with toxic dart guns; this is almost as good as “sharks with frig­gin’ laser beams on their heads”.

The joys of work have pre­sented me the oppor­tu­nity to dis­cover the won­ders of plas­tic. These are two pho­tos of a plas­tic ship­ping air bag that I skew­ered with all the sharp writ­ing imple­ments I could find around the office. The bag man­aged to main­tain its air pres­sure and abil­ity to stay inflated even with all them pen­cils and that pen in it. I was quite sur­prised overall.