Mullings: An American Cyber-column By Rich Galen

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Dog Daze Trivia

Rich Galen

Monday August 08, 2005

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Not much doing in Washington with everyone out of town, so feel free to skip the following!

Friday I provided the etymology of the phrase "dog days" which included this:

[A] translation of Late Latin dies caniculares, from their being reckoned in ancient times from the heliacal rising of the Dog Star (Sirius)

What I did not do was provide a definition of the word "heliacal" (pronounced HE-lee-ickle) which Mullings does here from Merriam-Webster's Unabridged:

Relating to or near the sun -- used especially of the last setting of a star before and its first rising after invisibility due to conjunction with the sun

It seems that some exit doors weren't opened and some safety slides didn't deploy in that Air France crash in Canada last week. It was not clear whether all the doors were opened by the cabin crew, or if some wouldn't work, but it was clear that a number of slides didn't deploy properly.

Nevertheless, 297 passengers and 12 crewmembers got out not only alive but largely unharmed.

An AP report of the moments following the crash gave the flight attendants high marks:

The flight crew responded immediately, said Dominique Pajot, 54, a businessman from Paris, who was sitting in first-class. "They were very quick to get up and open the doors and help people and calm them." [Another passenger] recalled an announcement from the cabin, urging all to remain calm.

I, being extremely busy with tremendously important work, do not actually listen to pre-flight announcements.

There are great differences between the pre-flight announcement by a flight attendant and a typical pre-convoy briefing by a First Sergeant in Iraq. Flight attendants generally do not include information like:

This will be a three vehicles convoy. If the second vehicle comes under attack, the third vehicle will push it forward. The first vehicle will accelerate out of the kill zone and await developments.

Nobody didn't pay very close attention to the pre-convoy briefings.

The New York Times, which is bound and determined to make the confirmation process of Judge John Roberts as ugly as possible, yesterday ran an editorial entitled, "Judge Roberts's Paper Trail"

I had always thought that the possessive form of proper name ending with the letter s was to be written s'. The AP stylebook, indeed, suggests the form should be Roberts', but the Chicago Manual of Style gives us a choice depending upon whether the final s is sounded as a z (as in Dickens) or an s (as in Roberts).

If the name has a z sound then Dickens' is appropriate. Judge Roberts's last name does not fall into that category.

Once they got through the required anti-Roberts editorial, the geniuses at the NY Times were obviously out of ideas so they ran an editorial on the problems associated with dairy farms in the San Joaquin Valley. Not the Hudson Valley, mind you, the one on the whole other side of the continent.

Here's what the gals from the Upper West Side with the blue hair got with their morning latte courtesy of the Times' (not the apostrophe) editorial page:

The San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District estimates that at present each cow emits 19.3 pounds of pollutants a year in the form of gases from manure, from regurgitation and from flatulence

Excuse me. Can I have mine with soy milk?

Speaking of nothing going on, Saturday morning I counted the number of the Mullings since 1998.

The total output over that period is about 818,000 words, Some of which were assembled in an especially clever, moving, or funny manner.

I am going through them and picking out the best bits with the hope that there will be enough to publish a "Wit and Wisdom of Mullings" type of book.

To accomplish that, I am cutting back on the number of Mullings from three to two per week for the remainder of August, so you should look for the next edition on Friday.

This may well turn out to be a very, very short book, indeed.

On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: A link to the AP story about the Air France plane crash; the Chicago Manual Of Style's apostrophe rule; a Mullfoto of high gas prices; another photo showing how many trees are being sacrificed to this book idea, and a Catchy Caption of the Day.

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