"Sitting on Danger"

Text-only version

Autum begins beautifully

"For the first time in almost 20 years, northern autumn is beginning on the night of a full moon. The coincidence sets the stage for a 'Super Harvest Moon' and a must-see sky show to mark the change of seasons."

—Dr. Tony Philips, NASA

Today is the equinox (get the rake ready) but it is also the night of a truly beautiful full moon. If you can, try to get outside and see it, for not only is this a rare occurance, it also is a great night to spy Jupiter in the sky.

Those naughty not-ty prefixes

Text-only version

Don't you hate it when there's a word that seems to start with a negation prefix, but doesn't? It leads to all sorts of confusions! Take the following, for example:

by David Morgan Mar.

Scheduling muddle

I apparently made a mistake with the posting dates for the posts that would be automatically published. What follows is what I actually wanted to publish on September 11:

My absence

Text-only version

My sudden post last Saturday after several weeks of silence may have left many of you wondering where I was. I hope this little comic strip can serve as an explanation

The "when" of "now"

Now then, there is one thing that bugs me now about the word "now". "Now" is a word that's supposed to mean "the present." It is what is occuring, what is just about to happen, or what has occurred immediately previously. It basically means "the time remaining to / elapsed since this event can be rounded to zero."

But there's the other usage of the word "now".You saw how I used it in the first sentence of this post, didn't you? There was no time implied there. Now was just there as a filler; an emphasizer; a muletilla, if you will. People have been using "now" to mean anything but "now" for years. (I want to say "centuries", but I don't know which word preceeded it in this usage.)

And before you say "what is our language coming to?" or "bah, it's English, get used to it;" let me tell you that it gets worse in Spanish. Way worse...