The Realm of the Pachyderm

You remember the frog from my last post? Perhaps I should have clarified something:

Finding a frog on your tennis court at Severn Valley is no rare happenstance. In fact, the club is absolutely lousy with intrusive frogs. So lousy that the other night, I unintentionally landed on one. The impact was made doubly shocking by the explosion of guts in every direction. I was traumatized--hence the lack of picture.

Anyway, we can move on from that.

This week, I'll be going to the beach. I'm not really what you'd call a "Parrot Head" or even a "Beach Person", but it's a change of scenery for a week with my mom, my sister, and her two sons. The experience could potentially be marred by my mother's persistent conjunctivitis, but we're crossing our fingers. Hopefully I'll remember to bring a camera and take pictures--of the beach, not my mother's pinkeye.

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I'm back from the beach, but I don't feel like updating about it just yet. That will be for another day [probably tomorrow].

Happy Saturday!

1. There's a species of bird found in Maryland called the Brown Creeper...

For those of my [seven] readers who don't know, I'm an avid Orson Scott Card fan. Meeting the man at a lecture/book signing for "Invasive Procedures" almost two years ago was one of the most exciting occasions of my life. I even have the picture to prove it--

Seriously, where is the glee being contained?

Joking aside, he's easily one of my favorite writers. That being said, I have absolutely no desire to emulate his writing style. To aspire to that level would lead only to a half-baked failure and would probably sour all my hopes of ever publishing anything fit for human eyes. However, this doesn't change the fact that I find the man to be an absolute genius.

This afternoon, I finished reading Ender in Exile. For anyone who's ever read Ender's Game, followed soon thereafter by Speaker for the Dead, perhaps you felt similar dissatisfaction to being cut out of 20+ years of Ender's life. Fortunately, this "midquel" arrived only 23 years late.

Ender in Exile chronicles the life of our hero immediately following the redistribution of the Battle School grads back to their respective countries. Admittedly, chapters 14 and 15 of Ender's Game do gloss over this somewhat, but this book delves into the much needed detail about the war that continued to rage in Ender's mind. As per Card's style, this book has psychology, religion, culture, politics, and much more, all on top of a healthy serving of science fiction.

Essentially, this book was the perfect bridge between the two portions of Ender's life. It even tied up a couple of loose ends with some of the other characters, which is always appreciated.

I'll write another post later about the awesome that is Swades: We the People soon, which is one of the better Bollywood films I've seen.

Happy Sunday!

As I've probably griped about on here before, the creative writing site I frequent has a few morons floating around its user pool. One of the recent broadsides I stumbled upon came in the form of a certain user saying that "grammar is pretentious".

Grammar: The system of rules by which words are formed and put together to make sentences.

That doesn't sound so pretentious to me. In fact, without grammar, could we even form sentences? Coherent thoughts? Without this rule set, wouldn't we all just be screaming nonsense syllables at each other in the hopes of communication?

No, of course not. We'd revert to throwing rocks at each other's heads in the hopes of dashing everyone's stupid brains out.

The fact is that the people that rail against grammar haven't eschewed it. Rather, they grew up with a basic rule set, then dumbed it down to a more "guttural" vernacular level to fit their lazy needs. They're like the people that pick and choose which doctrines in scripture they're going to heed. "Oh, I'll believe that God loves everyone, but not that He punishes them for sinning! God can't punish us if He loves us!"

What malarkey.

Alright, there's a bit of a difference there, but it just irks me when people take something completely constructive and good and dumb it down because they're too lazy--oh, excuse me, "sophisticated"--to follow commonly accepted practices. Fine. Let anarchy reign over your writing. Let the thoughts flow unhindered from your brain with no bridle or means of correcting your mistakes.

What you end up with is word salad that makes you sound like a single celled organism slithering across a keyboard.

OH, can I point out another pet peeve that I keep meaning to vent about? The difference between the words "accept" and "except" has been eradicated from the understanding of the people. No joke, I saw a sign at work in the back one day...