Monthly Archives: November 2008

Work Parsing Contest #1

There is much to be said for grammatical parsings. Since 12 Apostrophes is full of PhD and MFA types in all things english, I thought I would whet you appetite with a relatively simple one from my place of employment:

Please schedule the committee meeting the month prior to the second monthly board meeting after quarter end.

Nice. One sentence reads half high-school algebra problem, half Orwellian mind transplant. But if you thought that was impressive, let’s move to a graduated example:

Remember that due to 2009 Open Enrollment completing at weeks end for medical and dental insurance and . . .

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Box o’ puppies

Ever heard that expression, cuter than a box full of puppies? No? I just made it up? I challenge you to find anything cuter than the Shiba Inu Puppy cam, live feed of, well . . . you guessed it: www.ustream.tv/channel/shiba-inu-puppy-cam

In fact, the only thing cuter than a box full of puppies might be a room full of kittens? Check it out:mythicbells.camstreams.com

There is a lot of sleeping going on in both, but they help refresh the eyes, when you’ve spent your day staring at computer screens of neither puppies nor kittens.

The next step . . .

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Exploited by hackers

12apostrophes looked a little funky yesterday.

As the blog is wont to do whenever I change anything, all the posts (temporarily) disappeared, and we had to run the site in the WordPress “Classic” theme.

I was updating to the latest version of WordPress to address a security flaw. An article I read pointed out that spammers had been hacking WordPress blogs and using them for nefarious spamming activities.

Ha, I thought. Well, I don’t think that’s happening, but I should upgrade anyway.

When I opened up my header.php file, I found hundreds of lines of text full of links to . . .

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My favorite Republicans

From this point onward, I must forbid anyone at this site or elsewhere from lumping all Republicans into the category of country-club-hopping, sheet-wearing, cross-burning, environmentalist-trashing, Jesus-Nazis who don’t read the Bible or anything else.  Because my sister and her husband, the ones we stayed with in Ohio (right, the swing state — THAT Ohio), were the nicest people in the world to me and Kam [AKA the Professor and the Pit Bull] while we were there.  Campaigning.  To defeat their candidate in the presidential election.

In fact, they invited us.

They have raised the bar for decent human behavior in . . .

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