Perfect Passive Participles

Tessa, 


HAPPY BIRTHDAY!  I know it was like 5 days ago, but we were in Chicago with your family, and I forgot my computer.  Also, we still need to celebrate with my side of the family, so I figure it's still Birthday Season.  Your 27th year was a bit chaotic, most of that was my fault, but your 28th year is sure to be full of laughter and meaning.  I have the fortune cookie to prove it.  Also, your lucky numbers are 6, 13, 38 and 72, and the Chinese word for goat is "ya-gi".

Favorite sentence I've read all day: "The perfect passive participle is the past participle expressed in the passive voice."  I've read this three times and still have no idea what it means.  I Wiki'd some grammar terms because grammar is a serious gap in my knowledge net.  I don't know what a reflexive pronoun is, or what it actually means to use the passive voice or why you shouldn't use the passive voice.  Nope, the English language is a strange mistress to me.  And it will remain such, mostly because the people who elect to write about proper grammar always wind up inking something that can only be understood by people who know all about proper grammar. 


Moving on.

It's a map from the mid 1800's.  Minnesota, all broken down into new counties and towns.  Ordered, settled.  Another proud star for the Field of Blue.  Next door: Blob Dakota, a land our forefathers found so boring, that we hadn't even bothered stealing it yet.   Note that just to the west of Dakota is Nebraska.  Originally, Corn-huskers could traipse all the way to the Canadian border without leaving the Nebraska.  Then legislatures remembered Nebraska is the Sioux word for "yawn" and they reduced the place down the the least exciting swatch of prairie they could find.


I joined Twitter today.  I didn't intend on it, but John Potter joined and I wanted to follow his witticisms.  So I'm on, but I have nothing to tweet.  Seems like it should be something mildly worth saying, but as you can see from the last few paragraphs, "Mildly Worth Saying" isn't a star I really shoot for.  Wait, Charlie Sheen just tweeted the recipe for bourbon ("...just add bourbon").  I guess I can say whatever I want.  

I Heart You.

Not Crioceris Asparagi, Anything but Crioceris Asparagi

Tessa, 

Geez, what is this, like the 50th cloudy day in a row?  You know what I hate about cloudy days?  It's that the sun's doing it's job; the problem is the clouds.  It's not like there just weren't enough golden rays to go around.  I could understand that, the sun deciding to take a day off.  But that sun is up there, burning.  And we'd all be down here, soaking up photons, maybe converting some Vitamin D, if not for the big, stupid, lazy clouds.

Today started badly.  I opened up the 'ol web browser, up popped the homepage, and I started skimming headlines while the water boiled.  The Dow is down, T-bills are up, the Euro is down, the Dollar is up.  It's a roller coaster.  A big, painfully-boring roller coaster made of numbers and high-blood-pressure medication.  Then to the news headlines, where I see the front page of the Chicago Tribune announcing, "3 Bodies Found In Car."

The bodies were all bound, gagged, and shot to death, the article noted, and should not be confused with the "3 Bodies Found In Car" article from last month, where the 3 Bodies had been bound, gagged and beaten to death.

What?  Are you kidding me?  We live in a city where -- for all its genuine wonder and worth -- we run the risk of confusing one ghastly, grisly situation with another?  Because, sorry, but as gruesome and atypically horrific as a crime scene might be, that chalk outline is a dead ringer, if you'll pardon the pun, for a chalk outline we drew yesterday.  If they'd have just died in the same place, we could have saved on white chalk.  Ridiculous.

In my righteous anger, I pulled up the Minneapolis Star Tribune, wondering how the Twin Cities' beastly crime-du-jour compared.  With the population difference, I figured they maybe had "1.2 Bodies Found In Car" or something like that. 1.3 at the most.  But they didn't.  It's worse than that.  Dear, sweet, Tessa, it was so much worse than that.

"Darned Asparagus Beetles" screamed the headline.  I swear; you couldn't make this stuff up.  Not even a  farm report on the spread of pestilence.  Just "Darned Asparagus Beetles" followed by an article about, well, beetles.  To the delight of children everywhere, Crioceris Asparagi, as they're known to smart people, apparently spent most of this month feasting on the helpless stalks of local asparagus.  C. Asparagi also holds the record for "Insect With the Stinkiest Pee".  Front page.  

Minnesota, the land of ten thousand lakes and zero cars full of dead bodies.  A land where every chalk outline is as different as the crime that led to it.  A land of where even the biggest headlines are of questionable importance.  And should you miss the headlines, you can go about your day with the relative certainty that your car will likely not become your casket, and that the greatest threat to your way of life is quietly eating vegetables in your garden.  

I Heart You