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A Tale Worth 'Earing?Tuesday, May. 05, 2009 3:44 AMTwo art historians have a new theory about the accepted lore that Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear in a fit of depression. Instead, they suggest that it was van Gogh's friend, Paul Gauguin, an accomplished fencer as well as an artist, who 'accidentally' sliced off van Gogh's ear. From the Dumb & Plumber Department, it's Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, still pretending to be a plumber, with this bit of etymological expertise from an interview with Christianity Today. "I've had some friends that are actually homosexual. And, I mean, they know where I stand, and they know that I wouldn't have them anywhere near my children." Because ...? He explains, "People don't understand the dictionary--it's called queer. Queer means strange and unusual. It's not like a slur, like you would call a white person a honky or something like that." Well, Mr. Not-an-actual-plumber, here's what the Oxford English Dictionary has to say. "Although originally chiefly derogatory (and still widely considered offensive, esp. when used by heterosexual people), from the late 1980s it began to be used as a neutral or positive term (originally of self-reference, by some homosexuals; cf. QUEER NATION n.) in place of gay or homosexual, without regard to, or in implicit denial of, its negative connotations." Perhaps Wurzelbacher needs to consult a dictionary before opining about how people don't understand it. Wurzelbacher also notes that God hasn't called him to run for public office. Excuse me, God? Could you inspire someone smart and capable for a change, instead of clueless prats like Sarah Palin and Samuel 'Still Not A Plumber' Wurzelbacher? The workplace fun continues ... not only did the routing system get switched over, but the folks upstairs who did the programming decided to rename things from the previous system, without making any note of this. So looking for a source we called the 'web computer' (as it was the workstation where we could call up streaming video/images and record them on tape), it's now called the 'on-air computer'. We're also discovering there are ways to lock yourself out of the system. A wrong keypress, and none of your changes will go through - until you figure out which keypress you got wrong and undo it.
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