More reasons why it is a good idea to go out to lunch, or, Seriously

 As usual, I fervently guarantee that I overheard all of the below. I take notes fast!
 

When I came home after a bad day, I’d just go straight through the house and start whaling on a 200-pound bag of kitty litter. That’s my punching bag. Kitty litter all over the patio. I had a serious body then, and my roommate would say, Hey man, don’t lose your temper, and I’d say, I’m doing this so I don’t lose my temper, ‘cause you wouldn’t want to be around that, no, wouldn’t be so pretty. I was in a bar minding my own business, and this guy says, I don’t like you, and I say Okay, have a nice day and the guy says No, you don’t understand:  I DON’T LIKE YOU. Okay, what do you want to do about it? And the guy says, Let’s go outside.  Okaa-ay, I say, so I gets up and WHAM I break a beer mug over the guy’s head. Bartender says, Seriously that’s pretty cool. Now I don’t know if it’s the right thing or not but I want to explain to these guys what’s what. That thing yesterday, I couldn’t have walked away like that. I was way too upset about the whole thing. I can’t even get any further into it without sounding so insincere it wouldn’t have made no sense at all. All I could have said was, Gonna rip your freakin’ face off and disappear.

 Now my son’s a good kid, a real hard worker, but the boy’s seriously left-handed, doesn’t read too much. I read over 1500 words per minute, but I just wasn’t into the terminology. I opened for Jimmy Buffett when Jimmy opened for Neil Sedaka. Jimmy wasn’t taking it too seriously. He came off the stage and said, Why don’t you go back on for me?           But they expect you, I said. Nah, they didn’t pay me enough. You go on. So I did and the audience loved it, and I stayed until 4 a.m.

Now I got a lot of pets, but my cat Fluffy, she’s the bomb. Say Fluffy comes up for attention. She wants her head scratched. I tell her I gotta go to work, somebody’s gotta pay the bills around here, but Fluffy don’t care. You don’t do what she wants, she bites. Try to ignore her, she bites. Sharp teeth too. Seriously. She loves those little raspberry chocolate squares. Chocolate’s not good for cats, but somebody forgot to tell Fluffy.

Dangling Participles R Us

Shame, Lev Grossman and all your editors, shame shame! Your second book in the Magicians series, The Magician King, leads off with the following sentence:

"Quentin rode a gray horse with white socks named Dauntless."

SNERK!

I always name my socks too. Mine are called Clueless and Feckless.

I grant that it is a hard sentence to fix:  Quentin rode Dauntless, a gray horse with white socks? Dauntless Quentin wore white socks and rode a gray horse? Quentin rode a gray horse with white socks; the horse's name was Dauntless? Still and yet, even if it meant reshaping the entire paragraph, there must be some way around that misplaced modifier.

Enjoy the above grammarly griefs. Those who displayed them should have known better. Btw, the middle photo shows marshmallow-flavored jellybeans.

Action at a distance, or, Dr. Bob moves in mysterious ways, part 2

 

Dr. Bob continues to move in mysterious ways. I have been assembling a book-length manuscript, and I believe that it is at last ready to go out into the (publishing) world. However! when I went to  put the finishing touches on it, I found that I could not get Word to paginate. I tried the proper way some five or six times, and I came up with some work-arounds, and nothing worked. I even considered typing in the page numbers by hand, but decided that if I changed the order of poems, I would be typing and confirming page numbers for a long long time.

So, I called our resident computer guy, Dr. Bob Payne. Dr. Bob not only graduated from Microsoft U., he wrote the manuals at Microsoft U. He knows the godforsaken ways of the Microsoft. Dr. Bob asked me to talk him through another attempt at pagination. OK. I narrated, "Clicking on Insert. Clicking on Page Numbering. Selecting Bottom, option 3." All this in the tone of voice I use when I am resolutely remaining reasonable despite great provocation. And, may I be damned if the pagination did not take, at last. Yes, all Dr. Bob had to do was listen to me select the commands, and my document was healed. Truly, the man has god-like powers.