'Bred Crumbs

04:46 PM On a freakishly gray April day, there was nothing to cure a slight case of the blues like a kick-ass Dojo show.

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At Buffalo Burger today, I was in earshot of a straight couple and thought I was going to be given good eavesdropping when the distractingly good-looking guy began his conversation with "What I wanted to talk to you about was ..." But it turned out to be just about wedding planning.

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I'm not sure what's more annoying: not getting my Entertainment Weekly last week, or getting it this week but finding that the cover story is a "special" Survivor report. Argh. But the issue wasn't completely useless; it tipped me off to Jason Sehorn guesting on April 16's Third Watch, in which he will play football against Eddie Cibrian. Nice. Let's hope it's shirts and skins.

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In my late 30s, I am gradually reinventing myself. I should be much more excited about that than I almost ever am.

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11:10 AM Follow the bouncing -- rather, falling -- ball.

Profits drop, so stock prices drop. Then, to appease stockholders, companies fire people in droves. Thus, the unemployment rate climbs. As a result -- stock prices drop.

Is this any way to run an economy?

But hey, at least the nation's labor secretary is having fun. "I think this economy is like the Pillsbury Doughboy," Elaine Chao said. "It continues to soften."

You know, the Clinton administration was like the Taco Bell chihuahua. It could be annoying sometimes, but it was replaced by something far more tiresome, immature, and idiotic.

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09:34 PM When I designed Buzzkill the PowerPuff Boy earlier today -- at the bottom of today's lengthy 'blogging -- I was stuck with the limited palette of the wonderful tool. But tool be damned; Buzzkill's togs would not be brown. So I've gone off the menu to fix the picture. Buzzkill's true colors are now on display.

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When presented with a regular pattern of square tiles, such as you often find on a public-bathroom floor or wall, like this --


-- does your mind tend to immediately seek out a pattern of some sort within the tiles? Mine does. It quickly settles on one pattern among a recurring few, and more often than not, I realized today, it's this one --


-- which suggests a mechanical building crane.

Don't know why this is or if it means anything. Just is.

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10:57 AM "Free spelling" -- friend or foe?

Some English guy who, I'm guessing, can't spell has started a movement to encourage misspelling on the grounds that the English language is screwed up. He claims he wants people to start spelling words however the hell they want to. (Surprise -- he used to work in advertising.) You can see the way I lean in this debate in the fact that I'm disregarding the way he spells the name of his cause on his site -- he uses one l, thus ensuring that I can't find his site intuitively.

My first reaction to this, assuming it's not a hoax, is that it contributes to miscommunication. However messed up they might be, rules of spelling and grammar serve a purpose, clarity, and communication is better served by learning and heeding them. Though he may sell it as a revolution, Mr. Wade's movement reeks of laziness and a lack of interest in learning.

If we're all spelling words different ways, how are we supposed to understand each other in print? Wade undercuts his own proposition by establishing guidelines (which he spells guydlines, which is just as illogical as the real spelling because it uses the unnecessary vowel y instead of i) for his "freespeling" -- thereby admitting that an effective language needs rules. And his rules aren't much better than the ones that exist.

But, a devil's advocate might ask, don't his spell-it-the-way-it-sounds words make more sense? No, because he's still using traditional, and in some cases errant, "guydlines" for what a sound looks like. If I spelled the word in question phonetically, it would be gaidlainz. And see if this sentence, which is logically spelled based on common pronunciation and strict phonetics within the sorry confines of the English character set, makes sense to you:

For skor end sevin yiirz 'goo aur faadhirz brot forth aan dhis caant'nint, ' nuu neish'n, k'nsiivd in Libirtii, end dedikeitid tuu dh' praap'zish'n dhat aal men aar kriieidid iikw'l.

See? That makes perfect sense to me, but to you the Gettysburg Address is as ridiculous that way as it would be in a PowerPoint presentation.* Thus, I doubt that "to each his own" gets us anywhere when the goal is communication.

But ... if a language is broken, why not fix it, or at least have fun with it? I for one get a lot of kicks out of generating my own past tenses for irregular verbs, a practice my friend Jennie got me hooked on with her use of fruck, as in That weird movie really fruck me out. And I can't really deny that I can comprehend the illiterate-looking spellings on Wade's site.

Then again, do we really want everything we read to look like signs in a Cracker Barrel?

I'd really like to know what you, the reader, think. Since I don't yet have a message board or comments function, please send me your take in e-mail, and I'll pop it on here.

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07:44 AM <  Yay! I'm Buzzkill, and I'm a PowerPuff Boy!

To apply Chemical X in your own special way, head to the PowerPuff Portrait Studio. (Tip of the Mojo turban to The BradLands; happy hiatus and come back soon.)

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03:59 PM When did kidnapping become the hot new trend?

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