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Big Box of Justice

When you think of a courthouse you think of a place where things are set right and justice is done and that’s good for all of us. It isn’t good, however, for those of us who live near a courthouse. The people who enter a courthouse are rarely happy. They are either being taken down a peg or getting ready to rig up a sail down the river. Courthouses are filled with angry families, disappointed spouses, public sadness, meandering gloom and they are surrounded on all sides by rip-off artists, skeeves and geniuses — pharmacies, lawyers and bail bondsmen — I’ll let you decide which is who. In the meantime, I’ll trot the long way around because some days you just can’t take the remnants that tumble down from that big box of justice.

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Girl or Woman

If you are female, which term do you prefer if you had to be labeled by one of these words: “Girl” or “Woman” or “Female” or doesn’t it matter?

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln I was educated, roughly and roundly, by certain forces in the English Department that one must never call a female a “girl” if she has had her period — how one determines if menstruation has happened or not was never explained — and the correct term for the rest of her life was “woman” but never “lady” because “lady” was an Olde Englishe synonym for “bitch.”

Ladies and gentlemen rightly translated to the modern ear, I was told, as Bitches and gentlemen and it was an unfortunate, but culturally accepted, put-down of women who fought to advance their self-worth beyond being seen merely as property.

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How We Raed

WE DON’T USE ALL CAPS ONLINE BECAUSE IT IS SHOUTING AND IT IS HARD TO READ!
We read not by looking at individual letters in a word. We read by recognizing the shape of how a word is created by its lowercase letters.
ALL CAPS CREATE WORDS WITH NO UNIQUE INDIVIDUAL LETTER SHAPES!
Mixed case for words works best for understanding each other via a text medium.
A friend of mine sent me the following in email and this example takes word shape recognition a step further:

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg.The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?

It appears we may not even care in what order the letters make up each word — we see the word shape even if the letters of the word are jumbled: Wlid, eh?

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Script Professor David W. Boles

I am pleased to announce a new web service I have designed and will run and operate called:

Script Professor Logo


Script Professor is an expansion and a joining of my Script Doctor service and the David Boles Private Writing Program.

All my teaching and consulting is now under the Script Professor banner of services where you can learn online how to effectively create all kinds of writing, not just scripts! 

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10 Million is Beneath 50 Million

A woman I knew back in Nebraska came from rich parents. No one was good enough to date her. One parent was a lawyer. The other raised show horses. She was “given” $10 million over the course of her young life. Twenty years later, as woman on the prowl in New York City, she met a man and fell for him. However, his family did not approve of her because “she is only worth $10 million” while their son was worth $50 million in inherited money and she was “too far beneath him” to be considered marriage material, let alone the mother of his children.

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The Gay Archipelago

My younger and smarter friend and fellow Nebraskan Tom Boellstorff has a new book, The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia, and it is published by Princeton University Press. Tom is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The University of California, Irvine.

Tom Boellstorff Image

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Public Face Private Persona

In my article Virtual RelationShaping we discussed how we deal with each other in the real and the virtual.
Over the weekend we revisited some of the arguments in that article in my Fining Sacramento Kings Bad Taste piece where I said this in a comment:

I think when behavior is tamped down in public it gives rise to dirtier and nastier exploitations in private. One could make an argument that the public expression of a distasteful thought needs the public correction of the majority in order for perception and a frame of reference to be constructed around it for a continued socialized series of checks and balances.

When the nasty is hidden and shared only with like-minded people, terrible things happen because the light of reason is never shined upon the dark wonderings. I think we have all been numbed down by too much pressure on the perception of being wrong and wronging the whole of society in public. Making a public mistake should be fine as long as a remedy is offered and if no apology is offered then public shunning is the next appropriate step.

Transparency and evenhandedness in all situations is vital for an ongoing public discourse that may offend, that may be in bad taste, but should never be shut down because it threatens the bottom line or the constant flow of dollars between the entertained and the entertainer.

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