NASCAR’s top three series will race with an “E15” ethanol blend next season instead of straight unleaded high-test gasoline. The fuel will debut during Speed Week next February at Daytona.
The fuel will be blended at Sunoco’s facility in Marcus Hook, Pa. It will be pumped directly from tankers at each speedway rather than from on-site underground storage tanks.
Well, of course it will! Alcohol is a decent octane booster but it evaporates prodigiously and is wildly hygroscopic. Sunoco wouldn’t be able to guarantee the mix ratio, water content, or octane from a tank underground and the other classes wouldn’t use it.
Here’s the peeve: NASCAR stock cars ain’t stock so what they do on the track has nothing to do with what we do on the street but you can bet this is a marketing bonanza for the far green and a boondoggle for those of us who have to commute to work. Or drive to an island.
I don’t usually use George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” in public and rarely write them.
Mr. Carlin’s original words are what we now call “vulgar slang,” seven nouns, two of which often stand as verbs. Two excretory functions, four that denigrate, two action terms, and one that is every boy’s favorite body part. I’ve never been fond of bleep-censoring but it is still used by American network broadcasters to titillate us.
Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
–Mark Twain
Although Twain pretended he did not have a typewriter, he was a pretty smart feller. The modifiers we use in writing can take away from the message. That doesn’t stop us from specially crafting flowery, robust, descriptive text.
Some simply avoid the “dirty words” by substituting clean ones.
Liza Arden has said she “couldn’t be arsed” at work more than a few times this week. Ms. Arden is an engineer and no relation to the cosmetics conglomerate. Her cow orkers were unmoved by her phrasing which surprised her and sent me on this flight of fancy. Thanks to PBS and the Internet, there are probably few British substitutes for bothered that we haven’t heard before.
Substitutes? Google offers about 210,000 results for alternate swear words.
Bleep and fweep and meep and yeep are popular.
RedDwarf adopted smeg as an all purpose curse.
The movie peeps use airhead for rectally enhanced individuals. Freak (and the ever popular freak off) explain themselves.
As Andy Rooney might say, “Gosh is for people who don’t believe in heck. Who the frell do they think they are?”
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports on “Y U Luv Texts, H8 Calls.” Teens send 3,339 texts a month. Adults, just 323 per month. Me? I get two or three incoming texts in a busy month and those are usually mistakes.
Although Ms. Arden calls me a Luddite, that’s not because I cannot text.
“Yeah, right,” she said. “You’re too cheap to buy a data plan.”
Texters started abbreviating to save space and stay under SMS limits or to encode the looming presence of authority (LTTIC). Unlimited text plans have largely eliminated the need for brevity but typing on a micro keyboard is still typing on a micro keyboard.
I don’t text because I see brevity, misspelling, malaprops, and corruption replacing the richness of language. And I hate the tiny keyboard, not to mention picking out letters on a phone keypad.
“I sooo no ur thinking about me. So I thot I wud say hi! LH6”
“My luser cat did the CRZest thing. Off to vet.”
“Orf to home garden sho. I luv U. TBL”
DQMOT: I think the Brits do this better than we do but sooner or later it’s so satisfying just to have a good fuck.
“Apple announced this morning that Verzion Wireless will start carrying the iPad at its stores later this month.”
“The Verizon iPhone 4s early 2011 arrival, which many had interpreted to mean January 2011, is now being pegged as March 2011 by at least one analyst.”
Sayanara AT&T. Although it’s too little, too late, that’s annoying. When people have polyamorous relationships, society waggles a finger at them. A bad finger. When companies begin polyamorous relationships, society bumps up their stock prices.
