Random blogginess

(1) With the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-in coming up, I’m struck by how durable the practice of making a portmanteau word out of any scandal and “gate” has been. I guess it makes sense in that it makes it easy to come up with a shorthand term, instead of figuring out whether we’re going to call the scandal “Teapot Dome” or what have you. I wonder if this linguistic convention exists in any other languages, i.e., taking a word or part of a word from some famous scandal and tacking it on to the scandal of the moment?

(2) I just realized that Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are going to come up for their first HOF vote together on the same ballot at the end of next year. That should provide a few thousand hours of sports talk show fodder (my view for any BBWA voters getting the LGM feed is that both had HOF careers before they started using PEDs so there should be no question about voting them in).

(3) I do a certain amount of freelance journalism, and have developed great admiration for anyone who makes their living that way. I’ve found it’s fairly routine to pitch a piece to places that I’ve published with before and to still not get any response, not even a one-sentence no thanks.

(4) Relatedly, email etiquette has gotten very bad. Even though answering an email is about fifty times easier than writing a letter, people don’t answer emails (I plead guilty on this score). Everyone of course has the same excuse that they get dozens of emails a day, but it’s sad how rude this has made us. For example, somebody will ask me for a piece of information, I’ll give it to them, and then get no acknowledgement, even though that would take the person literally ten seconds. I’m choosing an example that annoys me in particular and in which I’m the innocent party, but I also fail to answer lots of emails I should answer. (Update: Just to be clear I’m referring to a situation where a stranger emails out of the blue asking for a favor in the form of information about a subject and then never bothers to acknowledge getting what he asked for. I don’t mean routine inter-office communication, although I’m of the old fashioned view that it never hurts to say thank you).

(5) I’m halfway through Jonathan Kay’s Among the Truthers. The little story he relates here is of a piece with much other contemporary political craziness.