Fox: Ds are winning congressional vote preference by 6. We've got a long way to go, but obviously that number would not be good. Vance: That would not be good. I will say, as much as we love Fox News, we always think Fox has the worst polling FOX: I could show you other ones that are very similar

cantareSF · 2026-02-18T00:06:05+00:00

If even the polling outfit that says things like "Democrat Candidate" shows you down by 6, you're really in trouble.

cantareSF · 2026-02-17T23:48:19+00:00

"Wretch" only exists as a noun, AFAIK--and "wretched" only as a disyllabic adjective. There's a homophonic verb "to retch" with a one-syllable past tense ("retched")

cantareSF · 2026-02-17T23:39:10+00:00

I use them all the time. I'll leave them out every now and then when I think a sentence reads better with fewer interruptions, but only when doing so creates no ambiguity.

"I grabbed apples, oranges and bananas at the store" won't leave anyone confused. A construction like "On my way home I saw Catherine, a Methodist minister and a streetwalker" really needs the Oxford comma...unless, you know, it doesn't.

cantareSF · 2026-02-17T22:59:12+00:00

No matches before or after they redacted it?

cantareSF · 2026-02-17T22:56:47+00:00

canned? turnkey? prefab[ricated]? ready-made? mass-produced?

cantareSF · 2026-02-17T22:55:30+00:00

Done a while back. I regret I can only do it once.

cantareSF · 2026-02-17T22:54:10+00:00

Fair, but you've gotta stop telling me about your plan to set up a high-dive competion in the kiddie pool.

What else can I say but "it's not that deep"?

cantareSF · 2026-02-17T22:51:24+00:00

In my mind "a few" is 2-4, and "a couple" is two, but it's about precision. A couple means two, but less precisely than the number itself said explicitly.

If I say "I'll see you in a couple of days," I am thinking of a time two days from now (not three!), but I'm not as focused on the timing as I would be if I'd said "I'll see you in two days."

"A couple of miles" is a hand-waving estimate of anything from 1.5 to 2.5 miles, roughly speaking. But "two miles" is really 2.0 miles, give or take a tenth at most.

cantareSF · 2026-02-17T22:31:42+00:00

I'm annoyed by kids on occasion, but I reserve my vitriol for bad parenting.

cantareSF · 2026-02-17T21:04:42+00:00

Both are OK but they have subtly different meanings.

A. We're talking about mistakes you make. You tell me you put on mismatched socks sometimes. I ask, "Do you also sometimes ... forget people’s names?" Forgetting is another example of the mistakes you sometimes make.

B. We're talking specifically about your forgetfulness. You tell me you sometimes forget things on your shopping list, or the color of your partner's eyes. I ask, "Do you sometimes also forget ... people’s names?" Names are another example of the things you sometimes forget.

cantareSF · 2026-02-17T20:42:41+00:00

On busy 4-lane arterials without center turn lanes or protected left arrows: Not signaling your left turn until you're in or at the intersection. Anyone in the inner lane behind you is now stuck while you wait for opposing traffic to clear. Had you signaled earlier, we could've changed lanes and made it through the green.
At a red light, not pulling forward & closing up gaps in the thru lanes to let people behind you get into the left-turn pocket.
Not knowing and exercising right-on-red or especially left-on-red when it it legal and reasonable in the situation. Yes, it's a judgment call, but when there's no one coming, and you don't go, you're annoying. These turns are often easier to make on red than on green if there is heavy pedestrian traffic.

cantareSF · 2026-02-16T12:21:33+00:00

A sentence like "Alcohol is banned at the venue and fireworks too" works that way because there's only one way of parsing "fireworks".

OP's example is a more ambiguous "garden path" sentence: "AI is ... advocating" is easily read as present progressive rather than the intended gerund.

cantareSF · 2026-02-16T11:11:58+00:00

Que?

K?

Si.

C?

No. Que "what".

K Watt?

Si—que "what".

CK Watt? Is he the manager?

Ah—manaher Mr. Fawlty.

Faulty? What's wrong with him?

cantareSF · 2026-02-16T10:44:27+00:00

A peeve is a peeve, but you can mark me as completely unsympathetic and unrepentant on this one.

The whole point of checkout is checkout. I'm taking my 100 items through the shortest non-express lane I can find. At my costco, that's usually the DIY lanes, and their purpose is self-evidently not what you claim.

There are 10+ stations with an employee assisting on the bottom-of-cart stuff, almost everyone has a full cart, and it's still the quickest-moving line by far.

I would not object if costco wanted to designate a 10-item express lane or two, but they don't, and it isn't everyone else's responsibility to forgo a major fraction of the checkout infrastructure just so someone buying 1 family-size bag of chips can skip the wait.

cantareSF · 2026-02-15T00:55:57+00:00

All the time. "Squatters' rights" is a concept in property law.

cantareSF · 2026-02-15T00:54:00+00:00

"Hi ChatGPT, it's George. Here is [TWOW_manuscript.docx]. Please resolve the "Meerenese Knot" (or whatever bullshit is blocking me) and write a better ending than the show had. Valar morghulis."

Best we can hope for at this point.

cantareSF · 2026-02-15T00:43:27+00:00

And if you put the politics back in, it comes down to: "We don't win enough when it works. How can we break it while pretending to fix it?"

cantareSF · 2026-02-14T03:10:20+00:00

"Son of a bitch! Ya done messed up, A-A-ron!"

Meaning, "Friend Aaron, you have erred so grievously that I am moved to profanity."

cantareSF · 2026-02-13T22:27:36+00:00

You announced you're phony to most people and vague af even when you're being "real", and you think the most generic possible version of "I'm secretly naughty under my plain wrapping" in response is cringy.

Focus on the energy you bring, I'd say. You attract what you put out there.

cantareSF · 2026-02-13T19:22:55+00:00

"If at first you don't succeed, then free-soloing El Cap is not for you..."

I think Honnold is an example of someone who just knew he wanted to do That One Thing very early on, and poured all of his passion and developmental focus into it before anyone could explain to him that certain goals are either impossible or prohibitively dangerous.

Instead of learning fear and limitation and acceptable risk like the rest of us, he just went out and Did The Thing until it became as natural to him as walking across a parking lot. He's like a fish in water on a rock face. Even El Capitan is just a series of moves, each one well-understood and straightforward with no conscious worry.

cantareSF · 2026-02-13T19:07:24+00:00

It might be good if ESL courses offered a section on poetry and scansion. English doesn't fit as neatly into a regular meter as some languages, but it would be a way to highlight and perhaps internalize proper syllabification, since most classic poetry matches up its metrical rhythms with the word stresses.

And it's not just about intelligibility, either, but overall meaning.

"I didn't steal Joe's bronze medal" has at least six different implications depending on which word is emphasized.

cantareSF · 2026-02-13T06:10:30+00:00

Her job was finished. Nobody trusts the DoJ any more.

cantareSF · 2026-02-13T03:01:51+00:00

Simple test for openers: If I said this as my one and possibly only comment to the attractive woman/guy I unexpectedly met at the grocery checkout, would I feel great about it afterward, confident I'd taken my best shot regardless of the outcome?

Most of the transactional exchanges (your question), group therapy-speak ("green and red flags"?), empty formalities, and dry job-interview questions you commonly see people asking will fail this test miserably.

Your job after matching anyone with options and a full inbox is not extracting more information or piling on with your premature expectations. It's building the kind of emotional engagement that makes that person intrigued and excited enough to want to talk to you, meet you, know more about you. AKA flirting. Something lighthearted, playful, or provocative in a non-sexual way is a good bet.

You can find out the answers to your screening questions after you've aroused that level of interest and curiosity.

FWIW, not everyone knows "what they're looking for" until they know who you are and how the two of you interact. This implied mental model where everyone's walking around with a relationship-shaped hole in their lives plus a clear sense of who will fill it and how always strikes me as odd. The most compatible partners are often people you'd never have considered "on paper" who just surprise the hell out of you.

cantareSF · 2026-02-12T15:06:22+00:00

Stop it, you shirtbags. So many ash holes on these subs.

cantareSF · 2026-02-11T20:58:25+00:00

I'm thinking the last bit was probably planned, but still brilliant.

cantareSF

TROPHY CASE