Bitzes

When Max Hastings thinks you're demented, you know you've gone wrong somewhere.

The idea of a coordinated Islamic threat is transparently ridiculous but it's a sad truth that many Americans prefer easy explanations to thinking. Well, many people of all sorts do, which is one reason there is an Islamist problem at all.

***

I had an email today with corrections the indexer found in my financial markets book. Fuck me. They're queueing up to find things wrong with the job I did on that. But how bad was the proofreader? I find they either way overdo it or way underdo it. This one was under. It beats the guy who make about 50 corrections a page to a web chapter of an accountancy book. I think I might have got him the boot. Inadvertently, but he deserved it. Proofreaders aren't meant to re-edit text and they certainly aren't meant to do it as hamfistedly as he did.

I'm about edited out. Those who are awaiting critiques of their pieces I hope will forgive me. I did a 16-hour day yesterday, and it's 5pm and I'm about to do the second half of today. I had to do the groceries, so I took a couple of hours off. Now it's nose to the grindstone for five or six hours. I just have a lot on.

I did read the pieces though, and I do have a general idea of what I want to say. And if anyone is still mulling over submitting something, please don't be put off. I won't be so busy once I've done a chunk of the book on contracts for difference that I have to get finished before I go away.

***

I recently downloaded Gnu backgammon, and I delight in playing the PC. (I'd play real people if I knew any; even Mrs Z if I could find my set.) I used to play backgammon quite a bit, and I'm fairly useful in an untutored way. (I knew those pattern recognition skills would come in handy some way or other.) I want to learn to play properly but I'm having difficulty tracking down a copy of Magriel. (Paul Magriel -- X22 as he's known -- wrote the bible of backgammon some years ago.) I read a book of problems by Bill Robertie, and that piqued my interest. I can fairly easily beat the computer if I set it to "casual player" (which is a very easy level). I might step up to the next level, which is crap club player or something.

If anyone passes this by and wants a game... well, you know the addy. And if you want a free computer version of backgammon, Gnu is excellent. It has an uncanny knack of hitting great rolls: if it needs just one number to hurt me, it often gets it, and then tells me in the analysis that I was lucky, the cheeky git.

***

When one looks at the seemingly impossible problems of the world, it's salutary to consider that some of those of the past, equally impossible, have at least begun to be resolved. It gladdens the heart that Germany, once hell on earth for Jews, has normalised sufficiently that rabbis can be ordained there.

Is it possible that relations between the Jews and Arabs will normalise to the point at which they can coexist in the way the French and English, say, do?

I think people fight more when they feel they have nothing much to lose and something to gain. (Not an original or deep thought, I know, but sometimes forgotten in analysing the Middle East and other points Muslim.) Or when they find someone other to hate. Englishpeople stopped hating the French when we had the Germans to despise, and since the demise of the Nazis, we've smoothly moved on to blacks and now Muslims. We are richer though, so the hatred we have to spare is less.

***

I have been rereading Partridge's Usage and abusage (that's what I do for fun, folks, read up on the English language). Partridge is occasionally hilariously precious about language, awfully correct and vairy proper. He'd hate that "very" and probably shoot me dead for the "awfully". You get the picture.

He'd knock me down for that too.

I won't tell you what Partridge says about "hoi polloi" but let's say that if I'm crossed on that score again, the crosser is going to feel not just my scorn but the withering lash of Partridge's driest of dry wit.

Why bother with this stuff? Well, I find that a browse through Partridge (one really ought to call it Whitcut because it has been masterfully updated by the lady of that name) reminds me of how slackly I have been writing. I immediately tighten up, stop confusing "presume" with "assume", "peruse" with "browse" and the like, and feel a lot better equipped to slay the dragons of shithouse writers and quarrelsome proofreaders.

posted by Dr Zen @ 5:46 pm