Sentential Links #166

Here we go....

:: I also happen to like spaceships and space battles. I like explosions and aliens and all the nifty cliches of the genre. (That about sums it up!)

:: The reason the books became so popular is because Bella has no personality and any loser can put themselves in her shoes. (Huzzah! A whole list of reasons why Twilight is shite!)

:: This chapter confirms me in my strong belief that reading LOTR without having first read The Hobbit is to leave the path of wisdom. (A comment rather than a blog post, but the post is about the "Bridge of Khazad-dum" chapter in Fellowship of the Ring. For some reason I'd lost track of Tor.com's blog content, which is fascinating stuff.)

:: Geoffrey K. Pullum wastes several paragraphs to tell us that The Elements of Style is a very poor guide to English grammar. This is something like telling us that Robert's Rules of Order is a poor cookbook, or that a thesaurus is not a good dictionary. (I had the same thought. Elements is not the book to turn to if you need to learn a gerund from a participle. It is, however, a book to turn to if you don't want your writing to stink. What's the difference? It's the difference between learning how to build a chair that won't collapse under the weight of a person sitting in it and learning how to build a chair that looks good in a room.)

:: Texas has thus far seceded from two different countries in order to defend the right of white people to own black people. In that context, seceding in order to maintain a low capital gains tax rate would be a substantial improvement.

:: It’s remarkable the extent to which press coverage of current politics doesn’t reflect the deep unpopularity of the opposition party.

:: This is a tale of woe. I wallow in self-pity. I'm not seeking sympathy. This is more of a primal scream. Or something like that. I've never viewed psychoanalysis with anything less than a cynical eye, after all. (Wow. I hope things get better for Jayme, stat!)

All for this week.