Capitalization is the Least of Their Worries

Well, at the risk of coming off as "pedantic," I have to point this out, and I confess I'm gratified to do so.

This is a menu from TiGER SUSHi--the odd capitalization being their brand--in Minneapolis. Technically, this is TiGER SUSHi II, as the first restaurant opened in the Mall of America. We went to the Uptown location, and as Uptown is foggy with hipsters, the status of being almost as good as the Mall of America should hint at the calibre of Twin Cities hipsters.

Please to note: the desultory and patternless capitalization of various nouns, adjectives, and adverbs throughout the body copy. This could've been a strange and tedious cut-n-paste job from other texts, or maybe their writer just wanted to emphasize certain points. It's also possible the font they used lacked lowercase form for certain letters... no, that's not possible. That's clearly not true: it's just awful typing.

Abuse of Quotation Marks

Thai Basil "Tossed" Noodles suggests that not only aren't they genuinely tossed, but some other verb has been done to them that the staff euphemizes as "tossing." I have no idea what they're implying with their "stir-fry" style--imitating the facsimile of something resembling something else?

Alakan Salmon

Should be Alaskan Salmon, obviously. Or maybe "A Lacking Salmon," an honest confession of sub-par fish?

Chillaen Sea Bass

Wow, not only did someone not know how to spell "Chilean," but they had neither doubt nor curiosity as to whether they had gotten it correct.

Who Lives by Grammar, Dies by Grammar

Back in 1989, I was stationed at Fort Ord, California, serving as a radio operator in 127th Signal Battalion. Situated 53 miles away from San Jose, we still felt the impact of the Loma Prieta earthquake. We were standing in formation at the end of the day, the First Sgt. called us to attention just prior to dismissing us, and as our boots smacked together the ground began to dance. We heard mirrors and fragile objects falling and shattering inside the barracks, and soldiers fled the building clutching towels around their waists. Every single car alarm in the parking lot screamed in petulant attention-seeking. Eventually the rumbling stopped and we laughed nervously in our relief and shock.

That was my first real earthquake. It was exponentially larger than standing on a bridge while a huge, heavy 18-wheeler lumbers by. I regarded the event with a detached curiosity because I was unable to reconcile with what the ground was doing in direct contrast to what it had always done for the 19 years previous. Some remote part of my mind had the wherewithal to wonder whether the ground would, in fact, crack right open and swallow me whole.

Sealed With A Kissinger

Anna Chapman: part Mata Hari, part Tori Amos.
Image: The Guardian.

You know what's dead fascinating to me right now? This whole Russian spy ring that's recently emerged in the news. The FBI announced the bust of ten spies in "deep cover," after intercepting a surprisingly blatant and guileless missive from Moscow.

The Kremlin, of course, denied any such spies were in place and suggested this was a fabrication by the FBI to compromise the largely positive relations President Obama had recently been cultivating with Russia's third president, Mr. Medvedev.

And then the spies started confessing (those who hadn't fled). Their real names have been released to the public. Our two nations have organized and completed an honest-to-goodness spy swap. Very far from a ruse, this tableau feels more like a contrived Cold War plotline taken far too seriously by some department head not overly endowed with imagination or, no pun intended, intelligence.

But you know what this means for us postalaters? Do you know what relevance this bears to us, men and women of letters?

A new draft of postage stamps! It seems that Russia views quite positively any of her spies that have secreted any information out of the United States, and it is not at all uncommon to commemorate them on their postage stamps. I don't know how I feel about the ethics of honoring the qualities of deceit and manipulation, venerating underhandedness and duplicity... but I do know I'd be particularly excited to receive a letter or postcard with a Russian spy on it. I had no idea this was a practice at all, and how fascinating to know it's out there. There's always the potential that someone over there might send me a postcard with one such cultural luminary featured on it, thanks to Postcrossing.

Various Forms of Water

You know how things come in trends? Like, someone mentions an unusual word, and for the next two weeks you overhear it in conversation, catch it in a TV show or movie, or see it in print media?

"Water" has been like that for me. Certain expressions have been coming up and I started to get them confused in my head (if I was ever clear on them). For my own clarification, I just wanted to render these here so I don't get them mixed up again.

jerkwater

Remote or insignificant.

backwater

Reservoir of water welling up behind an obstruction.

(of the) first water

Of highest value or purest quality.

The Online Etymology Dictionary suggests the first term comes from American carnival slang, a contemptuous name for small, rural settlements that had no water tank from which to refill their boilers. Instead, they drew water from any regional creek or stream.

The second definition seems clear once you see it spelled out like that, yet I don't know how I would have ever come across this term in casual conversation. No one I know has ever been overly concerned with "the section which is influenced by the conditions at [a river's] mouth."

The third has a pedigree as rich as usage by Shakespeare, and it apparently refers to the clarity of a diamond. The purest diamond should be as clear as a drop of water, then an ordinal value is added to rank the diamond from "highest quality" to "colored stone."

Not included is "greywater," about which I am absolutely not confused. This is a catch-all term for dirty, used water produced by a domestic environment, everything from laundry water to what you flush down the ter-let.

All On Board?

Stretching the "word origins" platform to its most tenebrous limits, I've got to raise a public plea:

Please stop using "drank the Kool-Aid" to mean "agreed to corporate policy" or whatever.

You're maligning the Kool-Aid brand, which had nothing to do with the Jonestown mass suicide: that was Flavor-Aid. When you use "drank the Kool-Aid" to sound hip and edgy, you only sound ignorant to people who know better.

Sorry for lashing out. I'm just tired of hearing people who should know better--you know, like, guests on NPR or whatever--perpetuating this mistaken and libelous phrase.

It's Not Quite a Postcard, and It's Not Quite a Garden, But Ma-a-a-a-an...

ZOMG, have you seen this yet? It's called Postcarden and it seems really cool!

Combining gift and greeting card, PostCarden is a fun and simple pop-out card that transforms into a mini living garden. 

That seems really cool to me! It's like this small box you mail out and send to someone, and they water it and it sprouts into stuff! You'll have to excuse me, but this strikes me as very cool.

Obviously it would be annoying to buy 20 of them and then have no one to mail them to since all your friends are lame and refuse to communicate in any way that does not involve a computer, a cell phone, or some combination thereof.

Likewise, it would be annoying to receive 20 of these, but I know that just because I said that someone's going to vehemently disagree with me. Yet if I'd mailed them 20 out of nowhere, they'd be seriously put out.

Making a Fold-and-Mail Letter

I'm still working on this, a project in progress. I know there's a simple and obvious way to make a good fold-and-mail letter, but I haven't quite put it into practice yet.

Observe my crude pattern on the left. Ideally, the bottom half of it should fold up into the top half, and the flaps should not only enclose it securely but the corners should run flush against each other as well.

Can't say that happened exactly, though it was close. I'm making these as part of an interactive project from Facebook--actually, I probably mentioned it back in April. Too lazy to check right now. The gist was this: I posted a meme that solicited five people to sign up (who would also repost the meme). For each of these five people I had to create and send some kind of creative project, and since all I know is stationery, I thought I'd make some postcards and a fold-and-mail letter for them.

It's just that I didn't think this thing through. Each fold-and-mail item is one exterior and two sheets of paper, each sheet being half of one regular piece of paper. I glued in the sheets at the top, just below the large upper flap, so you could fold the exterior and the sheet-halves in their middle, then seal it down with the three flaps.

I think, to really help the folding and the edges meeting up nicely, one might trip about 1/8" off two perpendicular sides of the sheets of paper, but not the exterior. This should give the paper enough room to bulk up with the fold and not create extra space before the flaps can fold in.

But here's my pattern, if anyone else thinks they can use it. This isn't the cardstock envelope I promised back in December. I'm sorry about procrastinating on that thing, but I haven't forgotten about it, and maybe crafting and scanning my design for this project will motivate me to perfect and upload the envelope pattern.

Anyway, the flaps seal with double-sided window insulation tape. I trimmed it in half lengthwise to be narrow enough for the side flaps--otherwise, you can't beat it for adhesion. Leave the backing on for the letter-sender to peel off just prior to mailing. Better solution than sending everyone a glue-stick they'll use once and lose. And the address labels are my own design: I carved out the border in linoleum, stamped it onto parchment, then cut it out closely and glued it to the front of each exterior.

An Extended History of Personal Correspondence

All right, if you're sick of hearing me go on and on about the wonder and miracle of Postcrossing, remember where you set your handbag down and finish your drink, because here comes some more.

I mean, seriously. It's so hard to find a good pen pal! My first was way back in first grade, when I wrote to my crush even though she was in my class and lived in the same town. The gesture was lost on her six-year-old heart and I believe I earned some mockery over it. The letter-writing process was educational on its own mert: in writing to grandparents I already knew I had very little to say (beyond "thanks for the Stretch Armstrong, I broke him already"), but in writing to Stacy Woods, the cutest girl I'd ever seen, I discovered I had absolutely nothing to say. I don't even remember what I talked about. Probably a moon rock I was convinced I'd found.

Then, when I was in middle school (Michigan) and was going to move to another state for high school (Wisconsin), I asked if I could write to my then-crush, Kim LaPlante. She agreed and I think we may have exchanged one whole letter. I wrote to her, she wrote back, and I wrote some stupid clueless drivel that was more my own mom's programming that she couldn't possibly be interested in me than any of the feelings welling in my heart for her. Never heard from her again. Yeah, I played that one wrong.

I did end up writing to my crush in high school as I went into the Army, and that only worked out because I was so reclusive in high school that when I opened up to her in letters I became a more interesting person. Kate was also very into correspondence and inducted me into the world of Friendship Books and Tiger Beat magazine, where people posted their addresses in the back so people with similar music interests could write to them. Our correspondence never turned into a romance, of course, but we are still friends to present day.

And once in the Army, plundering the resources Kate imbued me with, I spread my feeble, off-black tendrils around the nation I'd left behind (I was stationed in South Korea) and hooked up with three dozen gothchicks, all roiling in their own incurable depression, all nurturing their own impossible crushes on foreign band members. I got a lot of useful information out of those exchanges—all of it in music, none of it in how to foster healthful social relationships. Oh well.

Now, things are much better. I correspond frequently with my friend Angela, a DJ in Madison, WI; I trade postcards with Davide in Italy and Zatimi in Malaysia; and I just met this awesome character in the Netherlands. His postcard to me cracked me up, and everyone I've shown it to has insisted I need to cultivate him as a pen pal. I proposed the idea to him—proposed sending him some of my vintage stamps in exchange for his pre-Euro postage—and he wrote back:

It would be an honour, beste Christian, to receive a card from you, or clogs full of cards for my sake, with the stamps like you described. For a philatelist like me the promising lines which you wrote are like The Holy Gospel for the average Amish.

That's just his opening line. How could I not want this person on my side? He's a fun and able writer, the kind of person I need to keep in touch with. And I wouldn't have met him but for the Internet generally, but Postcrossing particularly.