asf.

(That’s English for etc. and short for “and so forth”.)

Yesterday I did my latest snow sculpture.

And now I’m going to put some more pictures up. I just dumped a bunch of them off my camera.


These four are from something my frend Ben and I did in the theater. We suspended a bucket from the rafters.

We did it by going on the catwauk. We used some other rope to slide it so that no one could reach it from either part of the catwauk,

and hung it too hye for anyone to reach,

or to jump to.


These are from something I did with some other frends, whose names I won’t mention. We clymed a bilding on campus. Using a grappling hook.

These are the two frends in question.

And this is the bilding. We clymed up it in stages, mooving up each giant stair-step in turn. They’re each about ten feet hye.

Then we took pictures of the view.

And had fun with long exposures in the dark nyte. (“hi”!)


Some train pictures. This one is a goste.

This one is two hours erly, because this was the day of the Iowa-wide 16-inch blizzard, and Union Pacific wanted to miss that if they could. The result was a rare daytime winter train thru college.

I thaut this was a pritty trippy effect. I got it unintentionally by following the train’s motion with my camera.

This isn’t a train, but rather a bowl of delicious egg drop soup I made for myself.

  • 2 cans of chicken broth (or was it one?)
  • 3 eggs, beaten
  • 2 green onions
  • ginger
  • other spices to taste

Put the broth in a saucepan and turn the heat on hye. Slice up the onions and put those in, and also add some ginger. Pepper is good too. Once the broth is just about boiling—very hot—stir it around so it’s swirling in a circle. Before it stops mooving, dribble the eggs into it. They’ll congeal in the heat and form noodles. Then you eat it, and it’s delicious.


Christmas pictures. I hav more on Facebook, so here are a cupple key photos, featuring first the undeniable star of the show, Cammy.

And also a rare syting of the Oregonian Joseph outside its natural habitat. Plus a little winey on the bubbly.


Here’s my snake’s injury, for those of you who heard he got injured. It looks bad, but it was way worse. All the area of pink skin you see was an open wound. Now it’s pretty much all sealed up, and we’ll both just hav to wait until he sheds a few more times and the scales cover the area again. He can move his tail now, which he couldn’t do directly after he got the injury (I think he burned himself on something), altho he’s not very flexible in the area of his body where the sore is. Hedward of the pink skin is a scab that hasn’t fallen off.

I just thaut this was precious.


And lastly, a list of peeple with unmistakable voices.

  • William Elliott Whitmore (singer who comes to the college)
  • Ralph Stanley (bluegrass singer)
  • Tay Zonday
  • Jane Kaczmarek (Malcolm’s mom, Malcolm in the Middle)
  • Richard Nixon
  • Roseanne Barr
  • John Goodman
  • Morgan Freeman
  • Weird Al Yankovic
  • Gilbert Gottfried (Zazu)
  • Fran Drescher
  • Mitch Hedberg (late comedian)
  • Michael Clark Duncan (John Coffey, The Green Mile)
  • Johnny Cash
  • Jenna Elfman (Dharma)
  • Ellen DeGeneres
  • Barry White
  • Redd Foxx
  • Louis Armstrong
  • Jim Gaffigan (comedian)
  • Fred Rogers
  • George W. Bush
  • Dolly Parton
  • Michael Jackson
  • Elizabeth Devlin (singer, came to the college once)
  • Judge Judy
  • Stephen Hawking (I choose not to view this as cheating)
  • Craig Ferguson (Mr. Wick, The Drew Carey Show)
  • John Madden
  • Robin Williams
  • Michael J. Fox
  • Phil Hartman
  • Paul Harvey

That’s all. You can stop reading now, finally.

File under: reformed spelling, photos, snow sculptures


Note: comments are temporarily disabled because Google’s spam-blocking software cannot withstand spammers’ resolve.

Anonymous

History

I have great difficulty reading your blog with all of the inventive spelling. Sometimes it just doesn't register right. So the question is: What is the purpose other than to
1. be clever
2. Screw up old people's minds (lie mine)
3. be different.

Or is there a higher (or lower) purpose that I have not yet perceived?????? Grandpa

Reply

Chuck

History

It's to make English more phonetic. There are a lot of spellings in English that we hav only because they harken back to when words were pronounced completely different, and there's not really a good reason for us to keep those spellings today, except that that's the way dictionaries spell words. The best example is any word with "gh" in it. We no longer have that sound, but we still write it. But I've decided not to. The same goes for tough->tuf and though->tho. (The reason "right" becomes "ryte" insted of "rite" is that "rite" is alredy a werd, and so are a lot of -ite werds, but there are very few -yte werds, and they're not ones that would be confused with respelled -ight words.) I also
• take out the pointless b's in det, dout, clyme, asf.;
• take out misleading a's in insted, redy, helth, erly…;
• respell strange things like flud, blud, bisy/bisness, werk…
• clarify werds that hav long vowels that aren't shown in the spelling, like moste, bothe, poste…
• get rid of silent e's at the end of werds that don't need them, like hav, liv, giv (which seem to be spelled that way because English doesn't like v's at the ends of werds—but I think they're fine),
• and whatever else strikes me as a good idea when I'm writing.

But I don't
• take out letters that distinguish two werds from each other, even when they're pointless—so, "nyte" and "knyte" are like that;
• respell "often" as "offen", because even tho I pronounce it that way, a lot of other peeple don't, and I want my system to be as inclusiv as it can be;
• respell wr- as r-, because I think there are some peeple who still myte pronounce that r with a shade of w in it;
• take out the l in "should", "would", and "could", because I couldn't figure out an unambiguous better way to spell them;
• obscure etymological relationships—so, even tho "really" is (usually) pronounced "rilly", I don't spell it that way because that would break its connection with "real".

It's still a werk in progress, and you'll probably often catch me spelling a werd two different ways, or more. But I'v got it mostely figured out, since I'v ben using it in my journal for so long. It's the system I'v ben using in the book I'm writing. If I ever get it (or something else) published, I can become known not only as an author, but as the author with the weird spellings. I guess I would probably include an author's note that's something like this.

So, that's what's up with that.

Reply

Oxtrox

History

Add Sean Connery to your list.

I see a master's thesis in it's infancy.

I 4 wun totily ugri that yew hav a gr8 idea going. I wil take it wun step mor and ad numbrs 2 yer langwidg.

Reply Reply

Anonymous

History

Whatever! Not my cup of Tea. I'll take green and you can have herbal. Much ado about nothing since no one is going to change. G.Pa.

Reply Reply Reply Reply Reply

Anonymous

History

Dood! Good post!

I think U will hav a captiv audiens. This yunger generashun cant spell anyway.

You hav invented brainiac texting…

Dave

Reply Reply

Chuck

History

I see now. I clicked on the link in the name, but all the dangerous links are the ones in the big ellipsis… Consider it deleted.
(Also, that was Chinese, not Japanese. If you want to know how to tell the difference sometime, I'll tell you. It's not too hard.)

Reply Reply Reply

Matt

History

Gilbert Gottfried is actually the voice of Iago. Ironically Zazu was played by Rowan Atkinson, the man behind the mostly voiceless Mr. Bean.

Reply

Chuck

History

What? No. Really? No, really? Actually, it doesn't surprise me that I got that wrong, since I haven't seen The Lion King since Ms. Miller's 9th-grade English class. I just remember some screechy-voiced bird somewhere. Was Iago even a Lion King karacter, or did I have an entirely different moovie?

Also, it's been at least two years since you posted a comment here, I think.

Reply

Matt

History

Nope, Iago is from Aladdin. I wouldn't be surprised if I haven't left a comment for a couple years. Since starting college I haven't had much time to read blogs, and when I do I usually skim. For example, I have no idea what was in this post except for the list of voices and the captions to the photos.

Reply

Chuck

History

I see. Bird duly noted.

Well, you didn't really miss much in the poste, since it was mostely those two things and family Christmas stories. There hav been some interesting ones in the last two years or so, but I don't expect you to catch up with all of them.

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