If You Can't Shill for Your Own Spawn . . . Chicago -- "Hey Peter, Bye Peter"

"Hey Peter, Bye Peter" at the Annoyance Theatre, Chicago

Joey Mitchell

Already extended a week, and it hasn't even opened yet. If you're within 100 miles of Chicago, or farther, carve out a Friday night in the next five weeks and go. There's a 20 percent chance you'll see me there.

You're welcome.

Fog's Rolling In

The present book I'm indexing and the last two -- from three different publishers about three different topics -- have some of the same entries and subentries. I gave up trying to remember which client I'm working for a few days ago (not that it should matter that much), but I'm growing very confused.

I'm also getting older. As I tell mi esposa these days, "I've sat down . . . and I can't get up."

Not an endorsement.

Basic Typing Rule

If the first character of one of your pieces of communication begins with a shifted character on the number line that's not 4, 8, 9, or 0, I probably don't want anything to do with it.

This notion goes to everyone  out there who want to engulf me in # this and @ that. When did everyone's thoughts become so important that I'm exposed to them in the place of fact? On an election night when Wolf Blitzer is on the air, the only thing I want to know from the Twitterers are what desk they're under.

CNN is the worst, and that's from an admittedly limited sample. I don't need to know EDfromLA9642's (sorry if you're really out there) 140 characters or less about anything in the context of a freaking news story.

I just went to look up information on a company history, and before the page loaded I had to watch a mosaic of a buncha huge quotes from people's Twitter feeds. That makes me care about the company less.

I protect my flip phone these days because I know where its loss, failure, or accidental laundering ends up next, and I don't like it.

Be There or Be Square

Click the link.

2016 Appalachian Heritage Writers Symposium, June 10-11, Enhancing Pride in Appalachian Literature and Culture

I'm in there with a group of regional intellectual heavyweights, it appears. The conference has stepped up its game since my last go-round in 2010. I'll get by with my usual unscripted 45-minute ramble and rant, followed with 15 minutes of questions. Last time I presented, I was off-topic within the first 15 words of my prepared comments, and that was it for the prepared comments.

The author listed below me in the symposium engages the Land on Demand editing staff, so that's fun.

Photo at the link was taken by the czarina in a wonderful new brewpub in Bristol, VA, called Studio Brew. While Bristol is a Good Place to Live (the sign below says so), going into Studio Brew makes you feel like you've gone into a different city, which sometimes isn't a bad thing at all.

(If you can't read the caption, it says "Picture of a Mountaineer in Virginia, His Ass in Tennessee.'")

Thanks for Nothing, Messrs. Merriam and Webster

Herculean

often not capitalized : of extraordinary power, extent, intensity, or difficulty

*Herculean tasks*  *Herculean proportions*

You Just Can't Leave a Comment Like This Hanging

Also, some continue to insist upon full adherence to all cultural mortuary customs that may involve sexual contact.

[QY: Please clarify the phrase, "mortuary customs that may involve sexual contact."] 

How Obscure Are These Authors?

Google, which could probably find my keys, busted my chops for being one letter off in the spelling of a name -- and the name was about five syllables.

Saying "Plate of Shrimp" Is So Much Easier

The lattice of coincidence. Who shows up again?

Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator

Getting Some Things Off My Mind

Semicolons:

1. The length of the text near it has nothing to do with whether a semicolon should appear.
2. Unless it's a proper noun, the word following a semicolon should not be capitalized.

Corporate personhood: So, is this phrasing now correct? IBM, who began operations . . . 

Flat Earth society: Please don't write, "across the globe."

Both: I once received a manuscript from a university press in which the managing editor had skillfully stripped every unnecessary instance of "both," which was most of them. I find that I can usually do the same.

Words that drive me crazy: bespoke, quotidian, salience.

Citations: You can't have Spring 2012 and n.d. in the same listing.

"Brown Shoes Don't Make It"

What doesn't make it in this case is citing a relative's unpublished manuscript.

Bonus points for readers who can identify the source of the title quote. Webz search verboten.

Leave me a comment with an answer, or an insult, or a special favorite you want to hear. Gets lonely occasionally here in blogland.

Today's Gripe

Although as an indexer, I'd be perfectly delighted, because I've never worked with a publisher that didn't include such pages in the billable page count.

But, why, o lord, is it necessary to have 11 pages of Works Cited for 24 pages of text? I wonder if some of these scholars aren't being paid by the citation. I also wonder where they are leaving room for original thought.

In School, We Just Called Him "Eye Chart"

Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator

+++

You know, I've probably made this same stupid joke before on this blog. Not only would I not be surprised, as I know I've come across this name before, but I'm too lazy to search for it. Some things bear repeating.

The Head Family

(l-r) Chuckle- (Zooey, the Rorschach dog) and Knuckle- (Franny, miniature Basset par excellence and Land on Demand mascot):

If You Can Do This, You Gonna Hurt Somebody

This Is More Like It

Two sports books delivered yesterday. For proofreading. One I've already copyedited. The other . . . uhhh . . . buddy, if you're going to bother putting together an incomplete style sheet, have the common courtesy to at least alphabetize it?

Completely Out of My Element

Bears repeating that indexing is sometimes a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey.

I'm working on a book now that is so far beyond my ken that I'm crafting an index based on more than a modicum of intuition, because the text itself is meaningless to me.

There might even be a musicality to this type of indexing, where mellifluous phrases substitute for substance.

The battling tendencies are (a) to overindex -- trying to capture details that hopefully are important -- or (b) to succumb to the MEGO effect and grasp at a catchy clause now and then.

This work is neither easy nor simple. But it'll all be worth it. Sales of this book should hit the dozens.

My namesake

With all due respect to the author:

It would be disastrous if the formalist were forced by this admission to the metamathematical conclusion that there is no fact of the matter whether ZFC is consistent. But Kitcher is not quite forced to this conclusion. The metamathematical, combinatorial claim that there is no proof of “0 = 1” in ZFC is, for all Kitcher says, a fully contentful claim whose truth does not consist in its derivability. That claim might therefore be true, in the ordinary sense, even if the number- theoretic statement Con(ZFC) is neither derivable nor refutable, hence neither true nor false in the only sense appropriate to it. The difficulty is that this severs the link, essential to foundational research in mathematics, between metamathematical claims of consistency and derivability, on the one hand, and the ground- level mathematical claims that we normally take to formalize or code them. This part of mathematics is predicated on the assumption that we can convert modal or combinatorial claims about the consistency of formal systems into mathematical claims— claims about the existence of models or about the existence of (numbers coding) formal derivations. The objection is that Kitcher-style formalism would call this aspect of mathematical practice into question. Understood as a modal/ combinatorial question, the consistency of ZFC appears to be a factual question with an answer— albeit a question we cannot answer within established mathematics. By contrast the mathematical question whether there exists a number that codes a proof of “0 = 1” in ZFC, or the question whether there exists a model of the ZFC axioms, must be understood as a question that has no answer at all, since the candidate answers are underivable in every authorized game and hence untrue in the
only sense pertinent to such claims.

Thornton Dial, RIP

 Photo:  David Raccuglia

Authors! Listen Up!

1. Using Roman numerals for chapter numbers does not give your manuscript more weight. If you need any reminders, keep this picture in mind:

2. The more italics you use, the less they mean.

3. Don't invent your own citation style. It won't help.

4. Speaking of citation styles, don't use what would appear in a law journal unless you're writing for a law journal. If you're a lawyer writing on a different topic, get over it. No one wants to read citations full of emphasis on the wrong information.

5. If you plan on compiling your own table of contents, write it after the rest of the book is finished to ensure that the text matches up.

6. Punctuation helps, and using it properly is crucial. The marks guide your reader through your thought process. Without punctuation, you have no structure. And without structure you have

Glasses don't work for you either, dearie.

I got my issues with Democrats, too.

Just sayin'.

Just Because

One of my favorite spots at Gethsemani . . .

On the sculpture garden walk

Unintended Consequences?

The most entertaining detail of the Joanna [Pope Joan] legend, however, is the chaise percée, a red porphyry seat which is said to have been used to ensure that subsequent Popes could not practice the same deception. According to Felix Haemerlein’s De Noblitatis et Rusticitata Dialogus (c. 1490), before the election could be confirmed, a junior cleric was deputed to grasp the pontifical testicles through the hole in the chair.