They let Dogs have drivers’ licenses in New Jersey?

Saw this outside of Wegman’s in Cherry Hill over the weekend. Boyfriend and I couldn’t stop laughing.

I’ve lost 560,000,000 Internets so far!

From Amazon’s blog, a researcher tried to figure out how much the Internet Weighs. According to his calculations, the Internet weighs about 0.2 millionths of an ounce. Given that, I’ve lost the equivalent of 560M Internets!

Righteous!

I wonder what a Jester’s salary is

An April Fool’s joke from The Motley Fool, but still quite an entertaining read.

Office Jester job at The Motley Fool

My favorite:

Core Competencies:
* Current on all reality TV

I actually know a few people who would be a perfect fit!

Welcome to Sparta…may I take your cloak?

Boyfriend and I saw the “300” today. Just in case you’re living under a bridge or pretending to be homeless, it’s a movie based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel about the Battle of Thermopylae, where King Leonidas and 300 warriors fight to the death to defend Greece from the Persion army.

The movie was quite satisfying, I’d have to admit, with only one part that seemed over-long. But I won’t go into more details. If you are at all interested in grisly graphic novel adaptations of legendary events, this movie is a must-see!

One thing that struck me was that this legend/story/myth is nearly three thousand years old, and we are still telling/watching it! It’s truly humbling and amazing to me.

What stories, do you think, people three thousand years from now will be telling?

Get your Litotes here…they aren’t half bad!

This thing has been nagging me for a few months now. There is this “grammatical” construct, where you use the negative of the opposite of something to mean that thing.

Fogo de Chao’s food wasn’t bad (to say that the food was good)

I’m not ungrateful (to say that I am grateful)

That was no small achievement (to say that it was a great achievement)

Turns out that it isn’t grammatical, but rhetorical, at least according to Wikipedia.

How did I ever come across this, you wonder? Well, I subscribe to Merriam-Webster’s Word-of-the-Day email newsletter, and it was one of the WotD’s, probably back in the early 00’s. I read it, said to myself, “Self…what a not unsatisfying word to describe constructs that you use all the time!” And then I promptly forgot the word, hence the nagging feeling I mentioned.

Finally, I got fed up wondering to myself what the word was, and to just dig as much as I could through the online reference materials (read: Wikipedia and Google), and try and find and remember what the stupid word is!

I started with searching for “double-negative” (thanks to Scott, who I went to first with my search for the name of this construct…being all endowed with an English degree and what not). That led me to this Wikipedia article, which had, near the bottom, a section on “double-negative to mean a positive”. Eureka! There it was plain as day.

Now, ladies and gentlemen of the Blogosphere, now you can rest easy knowing that someone out there, at some point, thought it not so unhelpful to name this peculiar figure of speech!

By the way, it’s pronounced “LIE-toh-tez”, not “LIE-TOTES” as I originally thought; it’s not the plural of Litote. Silly me; I should have brushed up on my Greek!