The other night, in the midst of our weekly nine-ball and whiskey symposium

A good friend of mine, I guess my "furthest-back" friend, in fact, mentioned that I appear to avoid socialization.

An anniversary and some Andy Rooneyisms

Why is "wordsmith" a verb? Since when? And WHY is "wordsmith" at all? What's wrong with "write?" Why (too) do we have to "craft" things instead of "writing" them? Is "crafting" a chunk of text somehow different from "writing" it? Is it a higher form of activity? Or lower? I don't understand this at all. And why can't we "contact" someone, or "call them" or "write to them" (or would we have to "craft" a note or email, or even "wordsmith" the note or email.... see what this does to us?). Instead of having to "Reach out" to them? Am I the only one who recalls that this whole "reach out" blather is Telco propaganda from the 70s? ("Reach out and touch someone") - and it was icky then, it's positively creepy in a business context.

Why does some narrator on The History Channel pronounce "armistice" with emphasis on the second syllable - ar MIS tiss. This is just plain wrong, isn't it? I heard someone on NPR say something really dumb the other day but I forgot what it was, and neglected to write it down, dammit.

Finally, forty-three years ago on this date (13 August 1969) Class number 70-01 of the Officers' Training School of the United States Air Force graduated, and unleashed a shitload of brown-barred second lieutenants, among whom was yours truly but you knew that otherwise why would I be writing (crafting/wordsmithing) about it, right? So as I often contemplate, even if I'd stayed in for the proverbial "twenty", I'd'a been out already over twenty years ago. Jeezus.