Contrarian Grammarian

Edison's electric pen.

For the last year or more I've been using AI driven grammar bots to help me improve my writing. All I really wanted was something to fix typos, correct comma usage, or guide me when I accidentally change point of view or tenses. Most of the corrections suggested by such AI agents at Grammarly or Evernote are helpful. Actually not Evernote. Evernote is an application whose AI is so dim as to offer "Amurican" spellings despite having set my dictionary choices as "Canadian English". While the application allows words like "labour" and "colour", the bot automatically suggests "labor" and "color" and makes such changes without consulting me at all. If I were an editor and Evernote was my assistant, they'd be gone. Eighty-sixed. Dismissed. Fired. Given a dishonourable discharge.

One thing that has always bothered me about spell-checkers and grammar assistants is how they insist that everyone write the same way. It's very difficult to write in an almost casual informal tone with these pearl-clutching old biddies telling you that what you are writing simply isn’t said in polite society. If I had wanted Ms. Gillingham from my seventh grade English class to write my post, I would've gone through the trouble to dig her up and re-animate the old soul, Frankenstein style. But I didn't and I won't, because that kind of thing isn’t done in polite society.

I remember a David Foster Wallace essay, Tense Present, referencing SWE, or standard written English (or as it was sometimes referred to as Standard White English), and making the case to his class about how they should approach their essay writing. I may be misremembering it, but his point was more about aiming to write this way at college as that is how you will be judged. When writing creatively for yourself or your audience, there are plenty of arguments to abandon that style. I use the word, "style", loosely here because there's still a case for grammatical correctness. It's also important to at least be consistent in how you use punctuation, quotations and the like for clarity. Yet, (there's an even a reason I use "yet" rather than "but" to begin a sentence, but I digress) if you want to sound loose, conversational or natural in text, I'm not sure being grammatically correct is always necessary. It's also true what we say in spoken terms, can be unclear in written text. My point is that if you want to convey a story or idea in your own voice or style, then these AI grammar agents are not here to help you, but hinder you. Knowing how these AI agents are "trained" by being fed reams and reams of existing text, it's not surprising they seek to make any one person's writing sound like everybody else's.

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100 Minutes of solitude would be nice.

I'm not talking about one hundred years of solitude here, but a few hours of solitude would be nice.

"Take a moment to reflect in your journal."

"Don’t miss out on Skip deals this week."

"Our Black Friday sales can’t be beat!"

"Design Reviews. Invitation from…"

"Tap to save on food, time and money all December."

"Collection Day
Remember to take out your blue bin today."

"Payment made to Skyway Canada"

"Save on something you’ll love."

"Let Chris know about your workout."

"Your CRA refund of $512 is waiting…"

Get out of my pocket Tim Cook. I know you’re in there! Scurrying around to find every last crumb of data and money in my posession! I know it's that time of year when I'm getting far more promotional texts along with scams, but this year, somehow, I've let the notifications get out of control. I think it might be killing me a little. Because I wear a smartwatch that is paired to my mobile, I get the same notifications twice. Initially my phone, in silent mode, will buzz, followed shortly by my watch buzzing. This is a problem and I've begun the tedious task of turning off notices from most applications and unsubscribing to as many mailing lists as possible. You can easily turn off all notifications of course, but I do want and need some. If this phone knew me as well as it purports to advertisers, then it should know when I would like to be left alone.
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Seen in November and December

Explaining the 3-body problem, is much harder than explaining 3 Body Problem.

With all the goings on in November and the holidays, I've combined these two months in an effort to catch up. Let's get real for a second and admit there is so many movies and shows to watch that, "getting caught up" is genuinely impossible and beyond the concept of time and space but maybe you'll note something here you'd like to see.

Tom Papa: Home Free
Netflix
You may not be familiar with Tom Papa. Though he has hosted at least a couple of game shows and 4 standup specials on Netflix, a raft of producing credits, a boatload of writing credits, and a veritable barge full of film appearances, you should, right? Yet, one Instagram clip led me to this special. I know him as a "comedian's comedian," meaning that while we might not recognize him, other comedians regard him highly. So should you. He is very funny.

The Draughtsman's Contracts
Kanopy
This 1982 film was Peter Greenaway's first narrative film. Produced for Britain's Channel 4, it's a sort of sex comedy/drama set in late 17th century England with a murder mystery served as a side. The draughtsman of the title is Mr. Neville, a handsome, young, and talented artist who's commissioned to make a series of drawings of a grand country house by Mrs. Herbert, who intends the drawings as a gift for her overbearing husband. A caveat of the contract for the drawings not only includes a sum of money but also that Mr. Neville shall meet with Mrs. Herbert alone for his pleasure. This odd arrangement begins with Neville making many demands about how the house should appear as he draws it and with his aggressive and insensitive behaviour during his sexual congress with the lady of the house. Unknown to Neville is that Mrs. Herbert tolerates his treatment of her to meet some other agenda. She is unhappy in her marriage and has perhaps made plans for her husband to meet with an accident on his travels from the estate. Furthermore, Mrs. Herbert's daughter, Mrs. Talmann, is unlikely to inherit any fortune from her mother's husband until she has an heir. Because her husband is a bit of a sop, Mrs. Herbert makes other plans to get pregnant. Those plans include a second contract with Mr. Neville. It becomes clear (sort of… after my second viewing of this film) that while the low-birth artist, Neville, revelled in what he assumed was his abuse of the two high-born ladies, he is, in fact, only a cog in their greater schemes to sideline their husbands and secure a family fortune. There are many comedic yet obtuse conversations and innuendo that make this film difficult but entertaining. For me, the draw is certainly the starring role of the pictures Neville creates (actually the drawings by the director Greenaway), the sumptuous costumes, and the fantastic score by Michael Nyman. It is an odd film full of curiosities and eccentric choices, but that's what makes it so fascinating.



It's a little creepy how accurately a show about super-heroes depicts our current politics.

The Boys, S04
Prime Video
This series about what a world might really be like with nearly indestructible superheroes is growing more and more frightening. The way the story baldly steals from real life is one of the scariest depictions of our current socio-economic, political, and pop culture climate I've seen. Chomsky has fretted that his worry about AI is that it will increase income disparity to such a point that it creates a ripe and fertile climate for fascism. Yet, do you need AI to create a populist splintering of society? It doesn't appear necessary. Far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalistic, and hyper-capitalistic thinking can happen just about anywhere, anytime. The corporation that created "Supes" in The Boys is akin to a company like Disney that has merged with Walmart and BlackRock financial and has its hands in everything from the Internet, entertainment, retail, travel, government, and the military, and this show paints a pretty bleak picture of what a world like that looks like. Let's hope The Boys come out on top.



Our nameless hero.

Flow
This remarkable, beautiful, and wordless adventure follows a small black cat living alone on what appears to be an island once inhabited by people and now abandoned due to the threat of flooding from climate change. This unnamed cat takes a perilous trip with a very calm capybara, an excitable lemur, a golden retriever, and a large heron-like bird. Where are they going? We don't know, but we do know they have to find a way to work together if they're going to get wherever they are going safely.

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Hard News

Hard at work in the newsroom circa 1942.


People who study and report on how news media construct news stories will often say that news outlets do not influence what consumers think but are more or less reflecting what is in the zeitgeist at any given time. Until I see otherwise, I would refute that. Why? Because of how many times we find out, often years later, just how wrong they were and what damage those mistakes have done.

I’ve heard this suggestion before, but this podcast from Radiolab about Stockholm Syndrome debunks the idea that hostages become empathetic and form a bond with their captors. The notion is so ingrained in the public consciousness that it seems it must be very well established by authorities in science and psychology. Turns out, it is not. Not only was it never verified by anyone who has ever actually studied the victims of kidnapping, but no one from the original event, a bank robbery and hostage-taking in 1970s Stockholm, was rarely ever interviewed. Instead, references to the original hostage-taking were either assumptions, hearsay, or entirely invented. There are probably many different reasons why some people stay in cults, abusive relationships, or form an affinity with their captors, but it isn’t a thing called Stockholm Syndrome. The fact that “Stockholm Syndrome” is not really a thing, but became a kind of shorthand to describe everything from hostage negotiations to the behaviour of cult survivors and victims of domestic violence and abuse, is not only surprising but also maddening. What is stated in this episode, but not much discussed, is that the general description and definition of Stockholm Syndrome largely came from news media. From there, it weirdly entered academic papers and back into popular culture through references, mostly conjecture, to events that felt similar to the description and definition largely invented in either news reporting or popular media.

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In Between (Christmas) Time

Kodachrome Christmas is the best Christmas.

I feel a bit adrift lately. We just went to a Christmas concert on a cold, damp Wednesday night, which was nice, but a bit odd. I was already feeling the carnage of Christmas before it arrived. The carnage I refer to isn't the pressure of gift-getting, or of meal prep, or of baking, or of having company over, or even the last-minute rush of work. It's a carnage of my own perception of time. I’m feeling timelessness. As in, I have no idea what time or day or year it is. We saw a live show on a Wednesday? So it feels like Thursday or Friday, but it’s not. It’s cold, damp, and grey like November, but it’s actually December; that is, until suddenly it's -16°C and it feels like January. Lately, we’ve been watching old episodes of The Great British Baking Show, which were shot during the pandemic. Having a second Trump presidency only makes this time dislodgement worse. Is it still 2019? 2017? 2030? I can’t affix words to this feeling of time drift other than it feels like I’m a viewer of my own life in slow motion. At times I’m busy, punctual, ticking off boxes, checked in, tuned in. While other times, it feels like 2 hours passed in minutes, or I forgot to put out the bins because Wednesday is tomorrow. Isn’t it? I see Christmas decorations out and about and have to remind myself it is, in fact, Christmas.

In physics, the elasticity of time is called time dilation. Yet, I'm not feeling what Einstein predicted; I'm perceiving time in a very jumbled way. I don't want to raise any alarms about my cognition either. I'm not forgetting what I had for breakfast, but simply by the early evening, breakfast has felt like it happened a week ago. I would liken this to that feeling you get if you've ever been in an accident and it seems to happen so very, very slowly, or like some moment in sports when you felt like you were moving normally, but for some reason, everyone else was just standing around and you walked in on net and scored. Then you think to yourself, "That was weird." Later, you wonder why you couldn't just do that all the time. For the last few days, this feeling has been even worse. I've had a cold. Not a bad one, but one that has drained my batteries and forced me to try and sleep it off, which has only messed with my sense of days drifting slowly by in a flash.

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Full of Great

A 19th-century engraving of Bacon observing the stars at Oxford, Wikipedia

I’m grateful for hot water. In fact, I’m grateful for warm water. Warm water which I can use in my Waterpik because it feels like a spa day in my mouth. I’m grateful for the Waterpik! That thing has made a lot of dentist visits a whole lot easier. I’m grateful for indoor plumbing, electricity and refrigeration. I’m grateful for many appliances that depend on electricity, especially the one that depends on electricity and indoor plumbing: the dishwasher. There are so many people on this Earth who don't have such basic needs as water you can drink that simply pours out of pipes from the walls, but here we are drinking it, washing ourselves, our clothes and our homes with the stuff. If your parents grew up in a rural, isolated place like my father's, they probably had to take a bucket and fetch water, but our well feels endless and comes right into the house. Electricity also comes from the walls. Apparently, we have magic walls! It gives light, heat or cooling and so many more things.

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