Santa is watching, kids

Three stories from today's shift at the zoo, a place that can still provide anecdotes in the dead of winter.

1) I was talking with a middle-aged employee and at one point asked if she was from the Milwaukee area. She volunteered the exact street where she grew up, and it just happened to be the very same one I am living on -- just a block down from my house, in fact.

2) A chaperone came up to the counter and bought Twizzlers for the three or four school children crowding around her. While I rang up her order, she asked me if there was anything going on with Santa today. "No," I said, "Why do you ask?" She then told me she saw Santa and his wife walking down near the caribou. I said no, the zoo's Breakfast/Lunch with Santa isn't until the weekend. She smiled and left it at that.

I wonder now if she was making the whole thing up and expected me to reply with something like, "Oh yeah, he's just here looking for some new reindeer!" That would go along with the whole caribou thing. After all, there were kids around her, some of whom might still have been the believing age. I might have played along if I'd been quick enough, or if she'd given me more of a hint. Or maybe there was really someone dressed as Santa wandering around the zoo.

3) There is still one pay phone at the zoo. I have never, ever, seen it used. Today, as I was wiping off a counter in my restaurant, a zoo employee asked if I could keep an eye on some of the school children wandering around the building. Apparently, one of them had prank-called 911 from the pay phone. I wondered not where the kids' chaperones were, but instead why these whippersnappers were so desperate to get big lumps of coal in their stockings.

Christmastime Rhymes

Something that has bothered me for several Christmases: a few verses just don't rhyme in the carol "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing." In the first verse, we have sing/King, mild/reconciled, rise/skies, and finally, proclaim/Bethlehem. What's up with this? Did the author just get lazy and force a rhyme to fit the hymn?

I have a theory. Charles Wesley wrote the carol back in 1739 -- toward the beginning of what we know as the Modern English period, if my class at Lancaster taught me anything. My guess is that they hadn't yet worked out the kinks in the system. Certain words just weren't pronounced the same as they are today. Either proclaim was pronounced proclem or Bethlehem was pronounced Bethlehaim.

Perhaps someone more knowledgeable could help me out with this?

(This happens again in other verses. In the second, come is rhymed with womb. In the fourth, seed is rhymed with head. In the third, righteousness is rhymed with peace, and no one can tell me that wasn't just Wesley being lazy.)

Blogging advice from Mark Twain

A passage from Mark Twain's bestselling autobiography, via Mark Liberman at Language Log:

Finally, in Florence in 1904, I hit upon the right way to do an Autobiography: start it at no particular time of your life; talk only about the thing which intrests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale, and turn your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself into your mind meantime.

Also, make the narrative a combined Diary and Autobiography. In this way you have the vivid things of the present to make a contrast with memories of like things in the past, and these contrasts have a charm which is all their own. No talent is required to make a combined Diary and Autobiography interesting.

And so, I have found the right plan. It makes my labor amusement — mere amusement, play, pastime, and wholly effortless. It is the first time in history that the right plan has been hit upon.

Liberman calls this "the right plan for successful blogging." Perhaps I should take a page from Mark Twain?

Finished!

Yesterday, a little before 4pm, I finished my novel! I started it in May, though the exact date escapes me (the Word document was created in January, so that wouldn't be of any help).

What an incredible feeling! Now I'll sit on it and work on something else, ready to look at it with fresh eyes in the future.

I broke Microsoft Word Again

Mere weeks after causing Word to stop spell-checking my novel, I've once again upset the internal workings of this program. On Monday I reached the magic number of 100,000 words. As soon as I passed 99,999 the "word count" indicator at the bottom of the window disappeared, as you can see in the screen shot below:


This is merely a glitch with the indicator on the window, because the number of words is still counted by the program:
I imagine this isn't a big problem because, let's be honest, who ever reaches 100,000 words in a document? Ah, what a magical number.

Mackinac redux

Forget what I said about most zoo visitors knowing how to pronounce "Mackinac." I've noticed over the past few days that 90% of the people are, in fact, pronouncing it "Mackinac" with a k sound instead of how it should be pronounced, as if it had a w at the end.

Either I was giving visitors too much credit in September, or a different kind of crowd is visiting. Perhaps fewer Wisconsinites or Michiganders (?) are visiting and more people from farther away are getting ice cream. But that doesn't make sense, since you'd think more out-of-staters would visit during the summer than during the fall/winter. Was I simply giving everyone too much credit?

As you can tell, I still have a job scooping ice cream. No indication as to how long my part of the zoo will stay open, since I'm scheduled to be back there next weekend. Ice cream cones in winter--mmmm!

I broke Microsoft Word

I am currently writing a science-fiction novel, which has ballooned recently to 250 pages and 70,000 words (two-thirds done!). The other day when I was typing away on it a Microsoft Word error message popped up:

"There are too many spelling or grammatical errors in (document name) to continue displaying them. To check the spelling and grammar of this document, choose Spelling and Grammar from the Tools menu."

What this means is that I won't get anymore red squiggly lines under words unless I break up the novel into smaller documents. There are so many made-up words (alien names, planet names, etc.) that Word has stopped counting them--trust me, I'm not that horrible at spelling and grammar.

I have taken this error message as a compliment, since it shows I've written so much that even my computer can't keep up!