A Toy Story

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

My lust for toys went through phases when I was a kid, from action dolls to Matchbox cars to magic kits to a brief fling with fully functioning model trains, to video games.

The most “useful” action doll was “Stretch Armstrong,” which was the one doll that lived up to its name and moved just like the cartoon character. It stretched. Thus, it was “realistic.” One of my friends had one of these. The least useful was the “bionic man” Steve Austin doll, which was easily broken yet completely indestructible. His bionic eye was not a telescope but instead a simple hole drilled through his head with a glass tube inserted. The tube was cloudy with dust within months or minutes of opening the doll’s box. Thus, it was “real” as opposed to “realistic.” And that of course was the doll I owned.
Read More

Dashing

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Look at this beautiful thing: —. It is very different from this: –. It is also quite different from this: -.

I rarely employ the services of the second dash in my above list, as I am not in the business of cutting headstones. The en dash, called that because it measures the width of the lower-case n, is seen most frequently between dates: 1968–2075. (Those dates are mine; I intend to stick around for a while longer.) In the popular bumper-sticker expression, “Life is what you do with the dash between the dates on your headstone,” the “dash” is specifically an en dash. “Life is what you do with the en dash, a punctuation mark you didn’t know the name of but see all the time,” does not make for quite as inspiring a bumper sticker.

The hyphen, the third dash in my list? Well, I am a veritable hyphen sprinkler sometimes, with my frequent yoking together of terms into my own single-use modifiers. (Like there.)

The em dash and I are (don’t tell Jen) frequent companions, however.
Read More

The Pointless Loss of El Faro

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

About three miles beneath the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean, 35 nautical miles north of Crooked Island in the Bahamas, at 23.2°N 73.7°W, rests SS El Faro, a 790-foot-long cargo ship that was lost at sea on October 1, a victim of Hurricane Joaquin. The ship and her entire 33-man crew were lost; other than one unidentifiable body and an empty lifeboat in a debris field, little else has yet been found. (The ship had two lifeboats that had more than enough space for the entire crew as well as supplies; it is unknown if the crew, a well-trained crew of professionals, even had the chance to abandon ship.)

El Faro had been on its way from Jacksonville, Florida, to Puerto Rico. And there lies the problem. It did not need to be there, stormy day or sunny day, and it does not now need to be at the bottom of the Atlantic, with 33 dead. An American law known colloquially as the Jones Act created the reason the ship was where it was and now, where it is.
Read More