Addenda

Making connections all the time, knitting my world together, I stymie myself in writing entries.  As with eating or rainfall, too much is not a good thing.  The same happens with my creative projects, as I need to choose and do but hang myself up on which and find playing a new computer game easier.  (I have recently become addicted to playing Rise of Atlantis.)  I need to solve this problem of saturation:  too much to write about, too many projects I'd like to do.  I am not Hamlet, the allegedly indecisive Dane (who's actually plotting his way to vengeance and his own death all the way). 

So I'll start with some footnotes on recent subjects.  As to children and their/our technological toys, several times recently the HP back-to-school oversized insert has trumpeted the following for back-to-school computers:  "Your child WANTS IT.  And you WANT to BUY IT for them. (Next page) The URGE to BUY is GOOD . . . (Next page) . . . GIVE IN to the URGE.  (Next page) DON'T THINK of it as TECHNOLOGY.  Think of it as a SYMBOL of your LOVE."  Aside from the punctuation errors with the marks of ellipsis, one has to admire the crass honesty of advertising.  Apparently it's what has helped result in Friday's "Cathy" comic strip in which small children and the elderly are paired on the theme of "At last we're all together and the wisdom of one generation can be passed on to another!"  (Next cel) "Little Emma's teaching Grandpa how to set his phone to 'vibrate'!  Ethan's teaching Aunt Miriam how to import photos!  Sophie's teaching Grandma how to surf YouTube!"  (Next cel) "Any wisdom being passed on from Old to Young?"  "Of course there is!"  (Final cel showing a little boy and a baby)  "...See?  Jake's teaching his baby cousin how to change her ringtone!" 

Same error with the marks of ellipsis, by the way.  The three spaced dots/periods represent omitted words, more properly used when one is quoting another source.  But if there's a sentence ending in that area of dropped words, one needs a fourth period, the actual sentence-ending period.  Using Hamlet's famous soliloquy as an example: "To be, or not to be . . . . To die, to sleep . . . . 'Tis a consummation . . . wished."   Two sentence endings, then just an omission within a sentence.

One more footnote:  From a review of a new Charles Ferguson movie, No End in Sight,about TV news, in the August 10 THE WEEK:  "Badly informed officials allowed Baghdad's museums to be looted; dismantled the Iraqi army, leaving 500,000 armed men unemployed; and permitted a culture of rampant cronyism.  Ferguson's horrifying footage of stacks of bloodied bodies and Iraqi civilians being arbitrarily shot on the street by U.S. military contractors shows what the nightly news isn't airing."