Fo Shizzle!

This is a surefire sign that language is going to hell, and quite possibly culture with it.
In tha ghetto, bitches!

In a rut

I don't want to do anything. Everything just seems boring. I tried coding a bit, but it's not particularly exciting. I don't particularly want to watch any TV, there are no games I can play (I just finished S.T.A.L.K.E.R - Shadow of Chernobyl). I'm in a rut. My vacation officially starts next week, after all my deadlines are passed, and maybe my mood will pick up, but I think this crappy weather is a large contributing factor to the way I feel. According to the BBC, we will get nice weather this weekend, but as weather services are more often wrong about good weather than bad, I wouldn't keep my hops up.
In fact, there have been countless times when the weather service has promised sunshine and delivered fierce rain, but I can't remember a single instance of the weather service promising crappy weather and delivering clear skies and a burning sun.
It's a conspiracy, I tells ya! I'm sure they actually know when the weather i crappy, but to keep the masses in a daze, they sometimes promise good weather when there is none to be had. Not only does this give people a sliver of hope when watching the news, but it also keeps the masses occupied with complaining about it to each other.

By the way, I looked up the definition of the word rut just before writing this, and it is really quite a misnomer. On the one hand it means a groove or depression in a road (probably why people use it the way they do), but it also means, and I quite, "a period of sexual excitement of male deer and other animals, corresponding to the period of estrus in the female."
I guess mating season might be depressive to the ones with no one with whom to mate, but please, nothing I could find about the word relates to a depressive state in anything other than asphalt.

I really hope that this weather will pick up. Not only will it make me happier at home, but it will also enable me to drive down to Switzerland, which in turn will make me even happier.
See what a little sun can do. I'm like a flower here, need the sun to survive...

Sentencing

When I first discovered lifehacker, I assumed that it would contain tips on how to, well, hack my life, so to speak. What I didn't expect, but what I am thrilled to have found, is that it also links to pages about writing. This recent link offers five tips about proper punctuation. Even if I was pretty much at home with about 3½ of those rules, I really enjoyed reading it. I now know where to put a semicolon, and what they are actually used for. Of course, for tips on punctuation, penny arcade is always helpful. (There is a third one, but I can't seem to locate it.)

Linked from the page about punctuation; I also found this. I haven't had time to read it yet though.

I have read several articles linked from lifehacker about writing, and they've almost all been good. I seem to have misplaced (read deleted) the links to them, otherwise I'd share them with you. Lifehacker uses tags though, so you should be able to find them quickly if you need to.

EDITED TO ADD: This is also very good. I find myself making some of the mistakes explained in here, but not many. I do, however, see them made by others on a daily basis. Number 5 and 7 are very important, as they aren't going to, as the author says, "[do] a little wiggle dance on the screen and then [reach] out to grab the reader by the throat".

The French Are Coming!

You'd think that reason would outweigh arrogance when it comes to a big machine like the European union. Apparently the french are lobbying to make french the official language of the EU, at least with regards to the official language or original texts of law in the union.
Their reasons are, get this, "for its precision and rigor".

I am by no means well versed in french, and certainly not in all the other languages in the union, but if there are two things I do not associate with the french and their language, it's precision and rigor.

You'd think that choosing a language like the de facto English, that most of the member states speak to some degree would be better then cramming a language like french down out collective throats. I suppose it takes some audacity claiming that your language is, in essence, The One True Language, rather than looking at things like actual language penetration. I think you'd be hard pressed to find statistics saying that french is better understood by a larger part of the EU population than English. Especially when it comes to measures like "precision" and "rigor".

Excess and Vigor is more like it. (See, I was going for something antonym-like that would rhyme with precision, but no dice...)

Prove me wrong?