Author Archives: Brock Tice

300

While staying in Minnesota and searching for a house, Amanda and I had the pleasure of watching “300” on a large LCD TV, off of a HD-DVD. It was a feast for the eyes.

I’ve read the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes (just now, incidentally), and while the “experts” aren’t fans, the general RT population gave it a reasonable 85%.

Look, it’s not about the story. The story is loosely based on an historical account, and it’s an interesting story, but it’s really about the spectacle. That spectacle shines in HD. If you have an opportunity to watch it on HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, I highly recommend it, just for the visual feast. If you are offended by blood and gore, however, find something else to watch.

The End of My Displacement

I am in Baltimore, essentially, because of Hurricane Katrina. Without that catastrophic event and the reactions that followed within the Tulane University administration, I would in all likelihood still be a student at Tulane. Or I may have graduated.

When people find out that my wife Amanda lives in New Orleans, while I live here, a predictable dialog ensues wherein I always end up saying that I’m here because of Katrina.

When we move to Saint Paul, MN, that will no longer be the case. Amanda wasn’t attracted to any of the family medicine residencies in New Orleans. If I had stayed in New Orleans until now, we would still probably be moving elsewhere now. Therefore, once I reach Saint Paul I will (a) no longer have conversations about living apart from my wife, because I won’t, and (b) never state that my reason for being there is related to Katrina.

Honestly, I’ll be happy to avoid the conversation. I resolved to myself that I would quit talking like a victim about the whole thing after a year had passed. For the most part, I’ve been able to hold to that resolution, but I occasionally either slip up and talk about it out of self-pity, or it comes up in conversation as mentioned above. In the latter case, I find myself slogging through the same conversation every time.

“Oh, you’re married?” they say. “Yes, ” I reply, holding up the adorned ring finger. “Why haven’t I met your wife?” they ask. “Well, she lives in New Orleans.” They usually produce some look of pity and or astonishment at this point. “Yeah, I ended up moving here as a result of Katrina fallout.” “Oh, how’s the city recovering, blah blah…” You all know conversations like this. They keep asking the obligatory questions, and I keep giving the obligatory answers, feeling like I’m talking too much about myself when I’m not inclined to talk at all (so I don’t really ask about them in return).

Looking at this, talking about Katrina is probably avoidable in these conversations, but it’s the truth. It is the simple, straightforward explanation of why I am here and my wife is there. This has come up more frequently of late, whenever I’ve needed to inform someone that I’m moving away soon, which is what made me think about it all now.

I’ll be glad to have all of that behind me, and behind us.

E-Prime Lite

Thinking about E-Prime ( introduced here ) has given me a new perspective on the word “is”. I’m in the process of putting together a manuscript with a co-author, and the various catch-alls committed by the use of “is” are jumping out at me.

The fact is, writing in E-Prime would be extremely awkward as compared with the status quo. Not only that, my advisor would probably fire me if I attempted it. What can be done when writing a paper is to take a hard look at every use of “is”, and determine whether each one can be replaced by a better verb. For example, “This figure is a set of images from …” can be replaced with, “This figure contains a set of images from …”.

Also, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but I commit a few punctuation atrocities intentionally, and I don’t intend to change them. Foremost is my placement of final sentence punctuation outside of quotes. As a programmer, it just drives me crazy to place punctuation inside of a quote, where it doesn’t belong, simply because the rules say so. I have read that my placement is more accepted in British English writing, which is I guess some consolation. Here’s an example of breakage and how my use circumvents it:

Tom leaned forward, a glint in his eyes, and said, “You don’t really mean to imply that we should eat babies, do you?”

Tom’s sentence ends with a question mark, but the sentence overall is a statement! (Perhaps there’s already some convention about this that I’m unaware of. I really should read Strunk and White one of these days.) I would therefore write:

Tom leaned forward, a glint in his eyes, and said, “You don’t really mean to imply that we should eat babies, do you?”.

Now you know my dirty little secret, and it’s out in the open. Lest you be tempted to correct me.