The suspension of common sense in SI

When I was a sophomore in high school, I developed what many people would consider a bad habit: I started skipping school. Not just the occasional fake illness; once I got revved up I was skipping once or twice a week, writing fake excuse notes and forging my mom's signature. We lived out in the middle of nowhere, and my mom went to work at 5:30 in the morning, so I would just stay home until around noon, then go for a walk in the farm fields around our house until I saw the bus drop off the neighbor kids. I would saunter home as if I, too, had just gotten off the bus. And I would have gotten away with it indefinitely if I hadn't made the mistake of leaving my books in the machine shed of a conscientious farmer who found them and called the school, sure that the girl who had left them there was frantic with worry over their disappearance. Since said girl had not been in school at all that week, Principal VanKirk smelled a rat, a truant rat. My mom was called in, there was a melodramatic conference with the principal and all my teachers, and I ended up getting suspended for the last three days of 10th grade. (Digression: Why is suspension the punishment for truancy? "You don't wanna come to school? Fine! You have to stay home for three days! That'll teach ya!") I was allowed to return at the start of school in August. I didn't stop cutting classes that year, but I did get better at hiding my books.

Which brings us (and not a moment too soon) to this: the headline of a Sports Illustrated story, which turned up Monday in my Google Reader feedlot:

NBA reinstates ref Crawford after 5-month ban

The story in a nutshell: NBA referee Jerry Crawford got suspended back in April, basically for getting all up in the grill of San Antonio Spurs star Tim Duncan and ejecting him for laughing at a bad officiating call while he was sitting on the bench.

Now, I'm the first to admit that math is not my strongest subject. I went straight from leaving a 10% tip to a 20% tip years ago because trying to figure out 15% was too exhausting. But if he was suspended in April 2007, and reinstated in September 2007, that is definitely 5 months. I had to count it out on my fingers to be sure, but it is.

YEAH, BUT ... The NBA season ended in June. There have been no NBA games played since June 21 in which Crawford could have conceivably refereed. So isn't that a 3-month suspension (April, May, June)? I mean, can you be suspended during the offseason? Principal VanKirk didn't tell me I was suspended for 2 months, 3 weeks and 3 days; he told me I was suspended for three days.

Like I said, math is not my strongest suit. There may be some really obvious logic that I am missing here, so feel free to enlighten me in the comments. Read more!

Language Pet Peeves #2: Dominate vs. dominant

As long as we're on a roll with lamenting the decline of the English language, here's another one of my pet peeves. The subject of this entry long has been an irritant for me, but I was spurred on to write about it by this post at University Diaries, a blog written by an English professor at George Washington University. She notes a story in The Press of Atlantic City, which confuses the verb itinerate with the adjective itinerant.

Reading Professor Soltan's post reminded me that just today I received an e-mail from a friend (about the World Wrestling Championships currently underway in Baku, Azerbaijan) in which he misuses the verb dominate for the adjective dominant. "Say, Sparky!" you are no doubt exclaiming to yourself at this very moment. "Those are very similar errors! I wonder if there's a pattern?"

First of all, don't call me Sparky. Second of all, I don't know if it's a pattern, but as always I have a theory. And here it is: Many people mispronounce/slur the -ant endings of words, so that they are pronounced as dom-i-nit and i-tin-er-it. So when people are writing, they spell phonetically what they hear people saying, and they know they've seen those -ate endings before, and English spelling makes no damn sense anyway, and ... bob's your uncle.

If you ask nicely (and you stop calling me Sparky) maybe someday I'll share my theory of how habitual reading or the lack of it during the formative years correlates to spelling ability. Read more!

Take a brake, hit the rode, test your metal

Our local Iowa City newspaper, the Press-Citizen (whose motto should be "always wrong but never in doubt") has had a bad couple of weeks recently in the old homonym sweepstakes. In a story about Rep. Dave Loebsack's job-shadowing visit recently, the paper's story said that he "road" along with a delivery driver.

A few days later, the P-C's staff editorial about a passenger train excursion between Cedar Rapids and Iowa City mentioned that 2,000 people "road" the train on its one-time round trip.

Less then a week after that embarrassment, in a story about the Hawkeyes football team playing their season opener in Chicago, the story talked about Iowa fans who "road" the train to Wrigley field for a Cubs game.

And just this week, the P-C published a public-service story about autumn being the time of year when deer-car collisions are at their peak. Their advice? "Break" for the deer, but don't swerve.

Now, let no one accuse me of pointing out the errors of others without also offering some helpful advice. So, in my own version of the public-service story, I humbly offer to the Press-Citizen's newsroom staff (reporters, editors, copy editors; it's impossible to track the stupidity back to its lair) this quiz on homonyms, created by Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn.

Anyone reading this who would like to forward it to the Press-Citizen general manager -- purely as a public service, you understand, not to poke fun or ridicule in any way -- has my unqualified permission.

P.S. I would share my score on Zorn's homonym quiz, but I'm entirely too modest. OK, OK, I aced it. Read more!

Nifty Google tricks

One of my favorite things about Google is the way you can use the search engine to perform basic calculations for you without having to go to a conversion calculator page. For example, you can type "165 cm in inches" (without the quotes) and Google returns a page with the calculation "165 centimeters = 64.9606299 inches". How cool is that? And you can do it with temperature (Celsius to Fahrenheit and vice versa), too.

So I've been using the Google Calculator function for a while. But this post at Lifehacker takes the cake: you can check the current time anywhere in the world just by typing the word "time" and the city in the Google search box. So if (just hypothetically speaking) you were interested in the current time in Baku, Azerbaijan, where the FILA World Wrestling Championships are about to get underway, you can type "time baku" in the search box, and voila! You find out that it's 4:03 a.m. Wednesday. So Mike Zadick and Doug Schwab are probably sound asleep, dreaming of gut wrenches and gold medals.

I'm sure there are other awesome Google shortcuts out there, just waiting to be discovered. If you know any, please leave them in the comments. I'm trying to collect the whole set. Read more!