My Sick Mind

I was taking an online FEMA Emergency Management Course today and I stumbled across this passage: When American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, 900 responders from 50 different agencies were able to communicate with one another. Response agencies had learned an invaluable lesson from the Air Florida tragedy. Invaluable is a strange word. Webster's New College dictionary defines it as: "extremely valuable; having value too great to measure; priceless." It can be extremely valuable or priceless. Something can be extremely valuable and still have a price. If it is priceless, by definition it is "of inestimable value; beyond price." It seems like we should say valuable or priceless , and leave invaluable to people who don't really know how valuable something is. Would that sentence have been any different if it said "response agencies had learned a valuable lesson?" No. Why bother using invaluable? If they meant priceless, then s...

While I was looking over the flooding in my neighborhood on Sunday, I realized that I live near some Urban Hillbillies. I call them Urban Hillbillies because their speech pattern doesn't match the area in which they live. They pronounce creek crik , water wuter and they say things like "I swum" and have an accent that belies the fact that they live 20 miles from Philadelphia. They're fascinating, mainly because they have managed to develop their own voice and mannerisms while others around them find it strange. I saw a few of them in the local Wal-Mart this afternoon. If you hyphenate Wal-Mart, you are not an Urban Hillbilly. Urban Hillbillies call it Walmert and show up in whatever they happen to be wearing when they rolled out of bed into their pile of clothes that morning. I wandered in there because I needed Benadryl and had almost given up finding some. The Deptford Wal-Mart is relatively new. It's been there a year or so, and today wa...

Lately, I have been lamenting the absence of silence. It is nearly impossible to escape noise in our 21st century lives. The din of cell phones and the loud conversations that others have on them has become a staple in our lives. I think one of the reasons I enjoy road biking is the relative peace and quiet that comes with the road. All we hear is the grind of the gears and the tires rolling against the asphalt. As days go, it is a peace that we cannot find in the office, gym or almost anywhere else in public. We have learned to accept (or learned to tolerate ) outside noise in our lives, and the more I hear the less I need. Cell phones ring and people chatter. For some reason, they speak more loudly on cell phones than they do on regular phones or when they are speaking to each other. What is even more interesting to me is how willing people are to give up the peace and quiet of life. Almost everyone in the gym has a set of headphones plugged in. Sometimes it sounds li...