What I’m reading

It’s My Birthday objects to management-speak, especially verbising. (See her #7.)

If I may verbise, NZ Wine Blogger has been neologising. Pick of the bunch:

Precrastination – doing today what you were going to put off till tomorrow.

He also has a list of prequels, i.e. the name of the movie before the one that made it: Evening Cowboy, Boogie Afternoons, Conceiving Arizona, The Undergraduate.

You get the idea. My contributions:

The Building Site at Pooh Corner

Muriel’s Pregnancy Test

Richard Cooke in the Age observes that you can’t believe everything you read on Wikipedia. Who knew?:

Crackpottery is to Wikipedia what self-interest is to capitalism - a human failing that, yolked in the right way, can turn ill into benefit for all. Before Wikipedia, what would we get from a film nerd or a punctuation nazi? A video store with a snooty manager, maybe, or a few nutty, typed letters to newspapers, if we were lucky. Now we can have lovingly written articles on Quentin Tarantino or the semicolon from people who don't get any loving. For the first time in history, history is being written by the losers.

And an excellent piece about drowning. Many years ago when I was 10 or 11 I nearly drowned in the Waimapu stream between Greerton and Oropi, outside Tauranga, and this brought it all back. I really wouldn’t recommend the experience. Greerton and Oropi, obviously, but especially the near-drowning.