I'm, like, happy and everything

"Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!"  That's Psalm 137, talking about the happiness of those who dash their enemies' children against the rock.  In Patristic exegesis, happy are those who take even the beginnings of temptation and dash them against the Rock, Christ.  In homeschooling, happy is the Dad who can dash against the rock his son's misuse of "like" the first moment it ever happens.  He was talking about looking for a paper airplane that had landed on a ceiling fan.  He reported, "I was like, 'Where is that plane?'"  We don't allow such offensive barbarisms in their speech and he was instantly, gently and firmly corrected.

Why, yes, I am uptight about some things.  Why do you ask?

A disappointing discovery

Sugar hides the taste of what it's in. I don't know why I didn't notice this sometime in the last 20 years. I've been drinking fresh-brewed tea without sugar for a few months, but recently I idly added a couple of teaspoons to sugar to a cup. It was disappointing to find half the tea's flavors gone, replaced by vile sweet sugar.

Old-time catsup/ketchup recipes

Catsup (ketchup, if you prefer) has been on my mind since supper two nights ago. I'm starting a personal jihad against high-fructose corn syrup, which is what catsup is nowadays, so I wondered what catsup used to be and how I'd make it from scratch.

Well, it started out as a tangy tasty dipping sauce, and there are all kinds of catsup, including tomato catsup, green tomato catsup, walnut catsup, oyster catsup, mushroom catsup, gooseberry catsup, cucumber catsup, currant catsup, apple catsup, and a couple of tarted-up vinegars filed under catsup: celery vinegar and spiced vinegar. All those are from this 1887 book which serendipitously appeared at Project Gutenberg this morning: the The White House Cook Book: Cooking, Toilet and Household Recipes, Menus, Dinner-giving, Table Etiquette, Care of the Sick, Health Suggestions, Facts Worth Knowing, Etc., Etc., The Whole Comprising a Comprehensive Cyclopedia of Information for the Home, by Mrs. F.L. Gillette and Hugo Ziemann, Steward of the White House.

A new project: Catholic books online

Catholic Books Online, in which I exercise (not exorcise) my table-of-contents mania.

I prefer to call it the Holy Flu

...if it causes changes like this:

Jenky also suggested that the Sign of Peace should temporarily take on a new expression. Instead of a handshake or an embrace, parishioners are advised to interact with a “nod of the head or a smile.”

LET THERE BE SUNG TE DEUM!

It's a 'an' thing

Have you noticed it lately? If you listen to a few interviews on the radio, you'll almost certainly hear someone using 'a' instead of 'an' before a word that starts with a vowel. Drives me up the fargin' wall. Doesn't take much, huh?

Grr

I'm a "completist" - when possible I get the complete works, the complete discography, etc. So I ordered a 1992 edition of the Sidneian Psalms from a bookshop in England. It arrived this morning in all its utterly useless abridged, modernised-spelling ignominy. Abridged! WTF?

Detail fail

Every page of an online tax website is an advertisement for the company's competence and accuracy. Quoth Taxslayer.com:

If you received a distribution from a retirement account (such as a pension, annuity, IRA, or even an insurance contract), you should receive a Form 1099-R that reports all of the pertinent tax information. If your distribution came from a Railroad Retiremnt account, the form would not be Form 1099-R, but RRB-1099-R.

If they can't be trusted in little things...

Meanwhile, here's a grocer's apostrophe at taxactonline.com (I'll give them a pass on "guess work" and general fuzzy construction or I'll never finish my taxes)

Donation Assistant let's you accurately track your donations and, based on condition, provides you with certified resale values for nearly 700 items commonly donated to charity - helping you to eliminate guess work and put more cash in your wallet.

How to lose traffic and alienate people

Amen.

I'd add three items:

• If you make music come out of my speakers unexpectedly I'll never visit your website again
  
• White text on black is unreadable. I can copy the text and paste it into a text editor, but there's only one d*mn white-on-black page I care enough about to do that.
  
• Wordpress's "snapshots" link annoyer. When you accidentally run the mouse over a link, everything stops while some utterly useless preview of the link's webpage appears in a popup. Each popup has a mechanism to disable the annoyance, but it doesn't work. I used to try to disable it every time I visited Jeff Culbreath's otherwise-fine blog, but I've given up - now I just try to navigate carefully to avoid his links since there's a penalty associated with each.