You’re most common grammatical errors

We could all learn from this list. I know I always screw up on #4 (i.e., I get the two of them confused).

(Source.)

Dixie David Lee Roth

What the hell has happened to David Lee Roth?

TiVo caught him on the Tonight Show (which I could never watch without being able to high-speed through it, as Jay Leno’s unbelievable awfulness gives me a headache every time) playing a cover of “Jump” off his new album. It’s apparently a gimmick album, with fiddle, banjo and other “Southern” instruments standing in for Eddie Van Halen and company.

It was awful.

I know a lot of people haven’t liked Roth’s post-VH rock stuff, but I did (“Sensible Shoes” in particular is a great, great song), but if he’s going to go in another direction, it should be one that works. This was Roth grinning like he was lobotomized, surrounded by musicians who seemed incredibly bored and exposing that “Jump” is not one of the world’s most complex songs and loses a lot once a much-younger Roth isn’t squealing and howling over top of it.

What the heck is the point of this new album? Is it just to finally kill Eddie Van Halen? I figure, after how he and Sammy have been treated the last few years by the Van Halen brothers, he might be entitled to screw with Eddie like this, but ugh, do we have to buy it? Or even listen to it in promotional appearances?

Awful, awful, awful.

• In other news of the weird, MC Hammer has a blog. Warning: Turn off your office speakers before clicking that link. Please Hammer, don’t hurt everyone’s job situation.

A week in the Rogue Isles

From Cryptic Studios:

Calling all heroes and villains! The latest free content update for City of Villains™ and City of Heroes® is live and available now! Villains will find they can now climb to the upper echelons of power, reaching levels 41 to 50, and encountering the PvE zone Grandville, and the dynamically changing PvP zone Recluse’s Victory. Villain content includes patron powers, mayhem missions, new power sets, new costume items and much more. Meanwhile, Heroes also get cool new costume items* and can also access the PvP zone Recluse’s Victory, where they must defend Atlas Park™ against the villains’ assaults. The ultimate battle between good and evil has begun.

Your account has been reactivated and will remain active through the end of the weekend, Sunday at 8:59pm PST / 11:59pm EST. Log-in to play now!

Normally, this is sort of the play cycle I like: Log in for free, play long enough to remember why I don’t pay a monthly fee for the game(s) (the content is just too thin, although it’s better in CoV) and then the account runs out again.

This time, though, it means hunting down all my CoH/CoV disks to reinstall them. Oy.

That’s easy for you to say

From the Word A Day mailing list:

honorificabilitudinity (ON-uh-rif-i-kay-bi-li-too-DIN-i-tee, -tyoo-) noun

Honorableness.

[From Medieval Latin honorificabilitudinitas, from Latin honor.]

Another form of this, honorificabilitudinitatibus (27 letters), is the longest word Shakespeare ever used. It comes out of the mouth of Costard, the clown, in Love’s Labour’s Lost:

“I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word;
for thou art not so long by the head as
honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier
swallowed than a flap-dragon.”

Wow. I’ve got to find a way to use that word sometime in my fiction.

Remember to vote tomorrow!

Before running out to see the new remake of The Omen tomorrow (which is supposed to be a pretty good remake, and looks it), be sure and vote tomorrow. Even in local elections held in November, the number of voters participating in local and regional elections is quite small, and turnout will likely be even lower tomorrow. The good news is that means your vote really does count.

Check out the voter’s guide in Tuesday’s Daily Press and vote. Vote for whomever you want, just vote informed.

For Hesperians who can’t remember where they voted in the last election, here’s a listing. (Warning: That’s a PDF file, which government agencies seem addicted to for no reason I can understand — we’ve had tables available in HTML for more than 10 years.)