The Renaissance City's claim as a Scrabble hotbed is well-lettered, thanks to Rich Lupo, whose maven status is delineated in Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players, by the WSJ's Stefan Fatsis, a long-ago colleague of N4N.

Now, BeloBlog has this:

The National School Scrabble Championship kicks off today at the Rhode Island Convention Center from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and continues tomorrow from 8:45 a.m. to 2:45 p.m.

The championship will be filmed for broadcast later this year on ESPN.

5/9/2008 11:02:29 AM by Not For Nothing | Comments [0] |  

I tend to agree with those who say that English is already the official US language, and that learning it is a requirement for sucess in this country.

A forum at Roger Williams University will take up the topic tonight:

BRISTOL – In a recent projection made by the Pew Research Center, 19 percent of the U.S. population will be foreign-born in the year 2050—that’s nearly one in five Americans. With our foreign-born population on the rise, should the U.S. make English our national language? Or should we broaden our horizons and make foreign language study required in our schools?

 

Members of the Roger Williams University community will gather to examine these questions on Wednesday, March 5, at the University’s next Socrates Café discussion, titled “Should English be our National Language?” Anthony Hollingsworth, professor of foreign languages and cultures, will moderate the discussion.

 

The event will begin at 7 p.m. in the Mary Tefft White Cultural Center in the University’s Main Library on the Bristol Campus at One Old Ferry Road. All Socrates Café discussions are free and open to the public as space allows.

3/5/2008 12:01:09 PM by Not For Nothing | Comments [1] |  

Gee, who knew that the wire scribes had almost as much freedom as we Phoenix types in printing cuss words? (H/t Halperin). And did they ever write about this stuff when as salty and scatological a guy as LBJ was in the White House?

McCain's sharp tongue: an Achilles heel?

WASHINGTON (AP) — Temper, temper. Republican John McCain is known for his. He's been dubbed "Senator Hothead" by more than one publication, but he's also had some success extracting his hatchet from several foreheads.

Even his Republican Senate colleagues are not spared his sharp tongue.

"F--- you," he shouted at Texas Sen. John Cornyn last year.

"Only an a------ would put together a budget like this," he told the former Budget Committee chairman, Sen. Pete Domenici, in 1999.

"I'm calling you a f------ jerk!" he once retorted to Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley.

With Cornyn, he smoothed things over quickly. The two argued during a meeting on immigration legislation; Cornyn complained that McCain seemed to parachute in during the final stages of negotiations. "F--- you. I know more about this than anyone else in the room," McCain reportedly shouted.

Cornyn chuckled at the memory of what he called McCain's "aggressive expressions of differences." The Texan has endorsed McCain.

"He almost immediately apologized to me," Cornyn said last week. "I accepted his apology, and as far as I'm concerned, we've moved on down the road."

The political landscape in Arizona, McCain's home state, is littered with those who have incurred his wrath. Former Gov. Jane Hull pretended to hold a telephone receiver away from her ear to demonstrate a typical outburst from McCain in a 1999 interview with The New York Times.

McCain has even blown up at volunteers and, on occasion, the average Joe.

He often pokes fun at his reputation: "Thanks for the question, you little jerk," he said last year to a New Hampshire high school student wondering if McCain, at 71, was too old to be president.

Other times, his ire is all too real. This has prompted questions about whether his temperament is suited to the office of commander-in-chief or whether it might handicap him in a presidential campaign against either Barack Obama or Hillary Rodham Clinton, who are not known for such outbursts.

"I decided I didn't want this guy anywhere near a trigger," Domenici told Newsweek in 2000.

2/16/2008 3:47:08 PM by Not For Nothing | Comments [1] |  

As you begin to think about plans for New Year's, the Phoenix's hyper-literate James Parker has some thoughts on "Don't Tase me, bro," and other top catch phrases of the departing year:

In 2007, they gave a monkey a typewriter, and he typed only two words: Chuck Norris. HA HA HA! Dear me . . . (dries eyes).

You’re aware of that particular joke-strand or “meme,” right? The Chuck Norris Fact? Started online? It got turned into a book (The Truth About Chuck Norris, by Ian Spector)? Even Mike Huckabee, that huge Christian square, is in on that one — he used it in one of his god-awful campaign ads. Yes, 2007 was the year that viral humor hit critical mass: from office to office and screen to screen, we all partook of the same wriggling hysterium of clips, gaffes, obscenities, atrocities, YouTuberies, and fragments of folk wisdom.

Was this good for America? Absolutely not. It cannot be a healthy development that the entire country is now tittering or sucking its teeth in unison. For me, it was Tay Zonday, accidental YouTube sensation (12 million viewings!), who best captured the phenomenon in his prophetically downbeat electro-ballad “Chocolate Rain”: “Choco-late RRRRAAAINNN!/Cross the world and back it’s all the same/Choco-late RRRRAAAINNN!/Angels cry and shake their heads in shame.” ....

CATCH PHRASE “My view is, we ought to double Guantánamo.”
ORIGINAL CONTEXT Mitt Romney’s absurdist punch line during the GOP candidates' debate scored a direct hit on the brainstem of the Republican base: approval rumbled through the seats like flatulence, and soft pink hands flew together in eager applause. If anything, the line was too good: so smoothly did it breach the bounds of sanity, one was left wondering why the Mormonator chose to stop there. Double Guantánamo? Why not triple it? Why not quadruple it? Why not build a waterboard the size of New Hampshire and float it out into the Gulf of Mexico? Why not clip electrodes to the gonads of every man in America right now, today, just in case? Doesn’t anybody round here have any vision, for Christ’s sake?
USE IN EVERYDAY LIFE AS a vote for monstrous excess. A variation on “go for broke.”
EXAMPLE “I’m really glad you agreed to get high with me tonight, Roger. But what do you think we should use: this big pile of cocaine or these bags of heroin?”
“My view is, we ought to double Guantánamo.” ....

CATCH PHRASE “2 girls 1 cup.”
ORIGINAL CONTEXT Well, if you don’t already know about this, I’m certainly not going to explain it to you. Flex that naughty Google-finger, but beware — as I’ve written before, there are things on the Internet that, once seen, will cause dogs to bark at you in the street for the next two weeks. Maximum disgustingness, maximum penetration. And now there is even a secondary wave of “reaction” videos (people gagging, fainting, screaming in horror, etc., as they experience the original clip). Further, a colleague on the West Coast reports seeing a pair of homeless men holding a handmade sign: “2 bums 1 cup.” In viral-marketing terms, that’s a bull’s-eye: once you reach the indigent layer, you’re made.
USE IN EVERYDAY LIFE AS an indicator of unseemly and degrading intimacy.
EXAMPLE “I saw Scott sharing his chicken salad with Ariel. Gross, right?”
“Word. That’s totally 2 girls 1 cup.”

CATCH PHRASE “Don’t Tase me, bro!”
ORIGINAL CONTEXT “By the time 2008 rolls around,” wrote our own Adam Reilly in September, “ ‘Don’t Tase me, bro!’ will have made ‘Where’s the beef?’ look downright timeless.” How wrong can an eagle-eyed and otherwise-faultless media correspondent be? Campus robo-cops may have given University of Florida student Andrew Meyer no quarter when he disrupted a speech by John “Mussolini” Kerry, but a grateful nation took him to its heart. Meyer’s blubbered and futile cry for mercy reaches out Job-like from the core of the human condition: who among us, threatened with the imminent application of reality’s mega-voltage zap gun, has not thought or uttered something similar?
USE IN EVERYDAY LIFE AS a retort to any perceived attempt to intimidate or apply pressure of an authoritarian nature.
EXAMPLE “Hey, this is a disabled parking space! You’re not disabled!”
“Don’t Tase me, bro.”

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12/19/2007 3:24:18 PM by Not For Nothing | Comments [0] |