I hate English.

Anyone who knows me can see the absurdity in that statement.  After all, Inverted Mind majored in English.  Heck, I’ve been a published writer for years, in subjects ranging from computer games to software development articles to sports to…well…me.  I wrote for a newspaper.  I was editor-in-chief of a small, Web-based marketing publication.  Had I not chosen to go down the software engineering path instead, I would be a professional writer today.

But let’s face it: our language is absurd.  Sure, the grammatical constructs make the most sense of any language on earth.  Of course, the relaxed standards to which we adhere in this nation today have all but eliminated poetry that would be considered among history’s finest.  But screw poetry.  While I consider myself to be well-versed (pun intended) in the intricacies of poetry, it’s linguistic fluff.  I’m talking about the way we allow words to be spelled in America.  That’s where my beef with the language lies.

What got me thinking about this was a post on a sports site I frequent, pointing out how many wild variations there are in the names of athletes.  I give you my response — verbatim, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, Lorem Ipsum and a whole bunch of other Latin words:

Aaron Rodgers is 0-2 in the Phonetic Names competition: a double-A and a superfluous D.

That said, American English is so hard because we’ve mashed together various combinations of Olde English, New(e?) English, Spanish, French, German and, of course, Latin. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, U (as in “vacuum”) and Z can be doubled but make the same sound as they would all by their lonesome; C, G and J can be hard or soft, and it’s not a medical condition; H makes other letters do weird things (CH, GH, PH, RH, SH, TH, WH, ZH); C, K, CK, KK, Q and QU can all sound the same — sometimes; and don’t get me started on dangling participles. And that’s not what you think it is, you perverts.

Welcome to the melting pot, where we can’t decide on a national language, our PRIMARY language is harder to learn than pi to 500 decimal places, and we all taste like chicken.

This is Mike from The Steel Tradition, signing off.

(I majored in English; sue me.)

This has actually led me to create a new category on this site that I’m going to call So To Speak in which I will discuss the insanities and inanities of the English language.  Seriously, I could write a book on this.  But I won’t, because it’s been done, and conforming isn’t exactly my style.  I value my individuality, just like the other six billion people on the planet.

Wait…that doesn’t sound right…

I got out tonight.  It doesn't happen often — the last time I recall getting out with friends was no more recent than early June, if that — and that's fine by me.  First of all, I'm a father now.  No, scratch that…I'm a daddy now, and that more than fulfills my desires in life.  Aside from an impending divorce, things in my life are wonderful.  But it's always a good thing to get out of the house with people whose vocabularies extend beyond the monosyllabic.

We went to a fancy-shmancy place downtown in the state-famous Glenwood South district.  Think of Amsterdam's red-light district, but without the illicit debauchery.  Okay, so if you take away the debauchery, you're pretty much left with the top floor of a college library.  Scratch that comparison.

The place was called The Red Room.  As far as I know, it's still called The Red Room, but I haven't been there for about an hour.  Crazier things have happened.  Anyway, it's one of those places that is as far from a Texas steakhouse as you can get: modern decor, dim lighting, no stuffed animal carcasses on the walls and portions that make Weight Watchers' meals look like a Thanksgiving feast.  The guy sitting next to me ordered — I kid you not — roast duck with bananas drizzled with chocolate.  Thus the name of this post; get your heads out of the gutter, you sick freaks.

We hung around until about 10:00, then went downstairs to a place called Hi5.  Again, a nice place.  A beer, one drunk guy who clearly had passed "three sheets to the wind" right about the time we were placing our food orders upstairs, and 30 minutes of dancing later and it was back to The Red Room — which had transformed itself over the course of half an hour from a modern, high-priced restaurant to a typical college-town bar.

One member of my entourage (we'll call it that because it gives me a significant ego boost) was meeting a friend at Hi5, and he came along with us back to Romper Room.  I mention this not because that part was significant, but because I realized this evening the fine line between a guy dancing because the women are, and dancing waaaaaaay too much.  It's okay for a guy to dance in public given the following conditions: 1) the hands stay below the shoulders at all times unless he is "raising the roof" — and this has to occur at precise times and only during a select group of songs; 2) there must be a beer in his hand at all times; and 3) he must never, never dance to the point where he breaks a sweat in an air-conditioned room. 

Now, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt because we were there with the best-looking women in the place.  Sometimes a guy has to break the rules to please the gals.  But I've got to deduct a point or two based on the fact that the group had dwindled from about nine women and four men to six women and one man (me); when this new guy joined the group, I no longer had the inherent appearance of the ladies' gay friend.  But the testosterone-charged scales were in a precarious balance that was teetering on the edge of over-estrogenation, and it collapsed spectacularly about the time it became obvious to anyone within a 20-foot radius that he had broken a sweat.

I would like it to be known that I think nothing less of him, and he seems to be a pretty cool guy.  Sometimes, in the presence of women, you've got to bite the bullet, put your testicles on a shelf someplace and dance the night away.  Mind you, I refuse and my left knee does too.  You just have to be careful not to cross the line, and all will be well.  But there's a rule here that needs to be remembered in the future: men sweat; women and dancers "glisten."

Other Ramblings

In computer programming, circular dependencies create catastrophic results.  In the District of Columbia, they're called "Democratic Stump Speeches."

Brilliant.

That is how I describe Barrack Obama.  Yes, you are reading InvertedMind and, yes, you read that right.  He is a brilliant, brilliant man.  No one on earth is as clever at distracting Americans from his inability to do anything but pander to the people.

Here's an example: Obama has proposed a second round of tax rebates, $500 for individuals and $1,000 for families, to offset the cost of rising gasoline costs through the end of the year.  Sounds like a good idea, eh?

Slow down, Speed Racer.

This is the same man who has already stated he would raise your taxes.  And don't think it's just your income taxes, either; he wants to increase the "death tax" — if your loved one dies, you get taxed even more on the inheritance, and just because the money changed hands!  So let me get this straight: Obama wants to give out money to the people, who he wants to tax more, so they can foot the bill for the government, an entity that will — if B.O. gets his way — increase its own budget shortfall by $50 billion with the proposed tax rebate.  To simplify things further, he wants to pay you so you can afford to pay him to cover the cost of his original plan to pay you.  It sounds complicated, so it must be a good thing!  Friggin' brilliant.

Oh, and one of the main points Obama has been pushing is balancing the budget.  In a recent independent analysis of his proposed tax changes, the deficit would increase by $3.3 trillion over the next 10 years.  People, I implore you: stop being caught up in his charisma and recognize the constant contradictions in what he says.  Our nation depends on it.

InvertedMind's Other Works
Note to all fellow Steelers' fans: The Steel Tradition, which I write for at MVN.com, is moving to www.SteelTradition.com.  Update your bookmarks, and visit regularly.  Your visits will help pay toward Her Cutness's college fund!

That's all I've got for this week, folks.  It's 1:25 a.m.  Maybe you'll get some bonus posts in the next few days.

Cool Crap of the Week is back! I'm hoping to actually do this every week now, so feel free to complain if I don't keep up with it (at least not without a halfway believable excuse).

We've all seen things that were so incredibly pointless — yet entertaining — that they managed to dumb our thoughts down to nothing more than, "that guy has too much time on his hands."  Those sorts of things are the bread and butter of Cool Crap of the Week — this segment is all about highlighting those absolutely nonsensical wastes of perfectly good time that, nonetheless, make you wonder how someone could develop such an amazingly useless skill.

What I came across in the last week does exactly that: Star Wars ASCIImation.  I'm not going to explain; you've just got to see it.

When I went to bed Wednesday night, there were scattered thundershowers in the area.  It was humid as all get-out, too, and temperatures have been well above normal for the last week or so.  Added up, it came as no surprise when I woke up Thursday morning to what appeared to be a moderately dense fog hanging over the neighborhood.

I live on a golf course, which means a lot of wide-open grassy areas.  Plants transpire a lot at night, so it adds moisture to the air.  When there's a layer of warm air trapped close to that moisture by a blanket of cold air above, you get fog.  Conditions were absolutely perfect for it.

What did shock me was the smell when I walked outside: the unmistakable smell of burning wood.  My first reaction, of course, was to turn immediately and look to see if my house was on fire.  No?  Good.  There had been a fire in the neighborhood last fall, and conditions are even more conducive to flame-ups right now than they were then, so it then dawned on me that we may have another unfortunate family elsewhere in the 'hood.  Fortunately, no — as I looked around, I saw no columns of smoke rising into the sky.  But it had me puzzled.  What was burning?

I got my answer a little after I arrived in the office.  It turns out, there's a wild fire burning out on the coast to the southeast of Raleigh.  Wednesday night, as I watched the radar to see if we were going to get some rain, I noticed it was all moving in from the southeast.  Two plus two?  Holy crap, it equals four.

So, Raleigh spent Thursday and, to a lesser extent, Friday blanketed in a layer of smoke that cut visibility down under two miles in some places.  And it really ticks me off, because my subconscious mind is confused: it smelled like mid-winter, but it's a week away from the beginning of summer.  And it made its way into the office, too.  Shorts and the smell of a wood fire.  I'm quite conflicted.

In other news, an impromptu street show broke out Thursday as I returned to the office from Subway (in the aforementioned smoke screen).  Apparently, the movie Diary of a Mad Black Woman has a live, off-Broadway version, and it came to the corner of Fayetteville and Davie streets at 11:45 a.m.  At first, we thought she was yelling at someone in particular.  A quick glance behind us proved that she was, in fact, yelling at a lot of people.  None of whom, by the way, were visible to anyone else.  It's things like the smoke and an apparently schizophrenic woman that can really throw you off-kilter for the remainder of a day.

Other Ramblings

• I don't know much about Camille Paglia, but what little I've seen up to this point shows that she leans almost as far to the left as Hugo Chavez — which is the likely reason for her apparent belief that Barrack Obama is a very centered candidate (in reality, some of his ideas are so far out in left field that, if he was playing for the Chicago Cubs, he'd be playing his home games in Comiskey Park while the rest of the team was at Wrigley Field).  However, she had what may go down in history as the best Clinton-related quote ever:

  "Hillary for veep? Are you mad? What party nominee worth his salt would chain himself to a traveling circus like the Bill and Hillary Show? If the sulky bearded lady wasn't biting the new president’s leg, the oafish carnival barker would be sending in the clowns to lure all the young ladies into back-of-the-tent sword-swallowing. It would be a seamy orgy of scheming and screwing."

  I am infinitely proud of the fact that I've finally been able to use the phrase "seamy orgy" on this site without it reflecting on me.  That's been a life-long goal of mine.

• California is finally responsible for something good besides Happy Cows.  Administrators at a Cali high school had police inform students that some of their classmates had been killed in accidents involving alcohol over the weekend.  It was all a ruse, though; the goal of the exercise was to scare the kids away from driving while intoxicated.  It worked — some kids wound up in hysterics.  After finding out the truth, many students protested the apparent cruelty of the act.  I, for one, applaud that school.  Kids today believe they are invincible, and have an utter disregard for others.  Maybe this sort of thing needs to be widespread.  I say it should be expanded: make the kids watch autopsies of victims of drunk driving.  Make them realize how fragile life really is before it's too late.  Kudos, El Camino High School of Oceanside, Cal.
• And, finally…tomorrow is Father's Day. Being a dad is the thing in my life I am most proud of; the fact that I am managing to do it on my own is just gravy on the 'taters.  There is no job in life more draining, but none so rewarding, either.  And I'm not going to candy-coat this: it's nice to have the world revolve around me for a day, too.