Friday screed
I have a lot to say this morning, so let's get started.
First of all, as Marc has already pointed out, Sarah D. Bunting at Tomato Nation is looking for her 9/11 angel, the mysterious "Don" from Jersey City. But how motivated is she, really? In an effort to press her search, she says she's "tuned up the page a bit," and she's even considered posting "a few signs/tear-off sheets at the Jersey PATH and ferry stops." Those aren't exactly Duane "Dog" Chapman-style tactics, are they? (Yeah, I know she wants to thank Don, not bring him back from down Mexico way to face charges, but still... how about a little old-fashioned detective work?) Finally, her ultimate lure for Don, is "possibly a cold beer." That possible beer is later described, more specifically, as an Amstel. AN AMSTEL? For your long-lost good Samaritan? A word of advice: I'm sure he'd be happy to receive your thanks, Sarah, but if you want to lure Don out of Jersey City, you've got to offer something tastier. I personally will buy you a bottle of Chimay to share with him if you find him.
Second, you may have seen Marc's recent post about research showing that as long as the first and last letters of a word are in the right places, the word is still easy to read regardless of how scrambled it is. Snopes says the existence of such research is "undetermined" (I was compelled to check because around the time Marc posted this item, I received a forwarded e-mail containing a slightly different version of the same anecdote). Still, David Harris' Science & Literature notes that the message itself has become an interesting experiment in tracking memes, thanks to its inherently unique, and therefore searchable, spellings.
