The Daily Bluster

Adjective Order is one of those obscure English grammar rules that nobody told us about in college. A summary on how it works: Look at these two squares. How would you describe the objects? The image on the left you’d probably describe as a big, red square, because that’s what it is, right? Now, what if you describe it as red, big square? Does that sound right to you? It sounds quite a bit off, doesn’t it? It’s because there is a specific order of describing things that for some reason English speakers have established as the proper way. When you are describing a noun using two or more adjectives, the adjectives are usually in a particular order. Opinions come first, e.g. gorgeous, ugly, etc., before factual ones.   There are several levels of order. The Cambridge Dictionaries Online lists ten: Order                relating to                 ...

It’s so strange to see someone watching herself dance 75 years ago. The image of a 102-year-old woman juxtaposed with her youthful, beautiful, and vital self is unsettling, and makes you think thoughts that you often ignore.     You could see through her eyes that she’s reliving it—she can hear the music and feel its rhythm, feel her feet as they strike the floor, feel the adrenaline rush of doing what she likes best and doing it good. Someone once said not to fear growing old, because it is a privilege denied to many. That’s true, of course, but there are moments when one feels that growing old is the saddest thing that happens to us. She’s remembering it all. It’s all in her head still. She was beautiful, she was lithe, and she was a really great dancer. I guess that’s what our most precious possessions are—our memories. We are still 12 or 16 or 21 inside. We’ll all grow old and die someday, but we pretend that we are immortal. We’ll see our lov...

“How do you say, in polite English, ‘ Punta muna ako sa kubeta; taeng-tae na ako! ’  (I have to go the toilet; I’m about to shit myself!)?” In a (Philippine) website that deals mostly in computer parts and peripherals, there was this thread about English grammar. Presumably, the thread starter (commonly referred to in internet forums as the TS ), who was one of the regulars of the aforementioned site, has trouble expressing himself in grammatically correct English. As the site is quite popular, and the site members come from diverse backgrounds, many contributed to that thread, and competently answered the TS’ and other posters’ questions regarding English grammar. The “English” thread, suffice it to say, was one of the site’s most active threads. Anyway, the question quoted above was just one of many. I stumbled across it one afternoon a few months ago. It appeared that the poster works for a firm run by Americans. During one particularly unforgettable meeting with his Ameri...

Misis Djyli is the username of a young housewife who, for the past few months, had been uploading her cross-stitching projects on YouTube. It’s her hobby, and clearly she loves it—you can hear the happiness in her voice as she presents her cross-stitches. I am not an expert on cross-stitching, but hers look beautiful, at least according to the few comments on her YouTube channel.   Here's one of her earliest uploads: Almost nobody watches her cross-stitching videos, but it didn’t seem to bother her—she just kept making and uploading them.   Her latest video, however, has currently over a million views, and it does not show her cross-stitching. It shows her town being bombed, and her normally happy voice is gone.  She is crying and sounds very afraid on the video, and you can hear a baby crying in the background. The woman, you see, lives in Ukraine. She lives in a town called Kramatorsk, and the town was recently attacked by Russians (or perhaps ethnic Rus...

I was watching that “I see dead people” movie years ago when this so-called friend called me up and asked me what I was doing. I said I’m watching this movie with Bruce Willis in it, and there's this kid who sees dead people. He said, “Oh yeah. Saw that. Bruce Willis is the ghost.” Then he laughed. I played it cool, but I was seething. I thought of Cthulhu and considered summoning him.  I don’t remember what he said afterwards, what he called me up for, or even what we talked about, but every time I see him (which is about once or twice a year, thank heavens) I imagine him being gnawed on by a good-sized rancor . I remembered this incident because I just finished reading “Fight Club,” Chuck Palahniuk’s novel. Nobody called me up to spoil anything for me, but I did see this shirt on some website: This shirt is diabolical I was only on the first few pages of the book when I saw this, so the whole time I was reading, this was flashing on my head...

The Philippines has more than its fair share of disasters, and not because the country is particularly cursed or anything, but because the entire archipelago—purportedly composed of 7,100 islands—lies on a region in the Pacific Ocean called the “Ring of Fire” (actually, the area is shaped more like a horseshoe, although to be fair, “The Horseshoe of Fire” doesn’t have the same impact as the “Ring of Fire”). About 40,000 kilometers long, the “ring” runs from the southern tip of South America, up along the coast of North America, across the Bering Strait, down through Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia (the Ring of Fire’s western edge extends into the Indian Ocean), and to New Zealand.  The “Fire” part of the Ring of Fire is because a string of 452 volcanoes dot this line, like a malevolent game of connect-the-dots. The regions along this line experience volcanic eruptions and periodic earthquakes—majority of them small, hardly-felt tremors, and the few devastating ones that...

"If you want to do something evil, put it in something boring."- John Oliver John Oliver, host of the HBO comedy show “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” made one of the most brilliant rants in the history of internet. Not only was it funny and made people laugh, but it also made them outraged about something a great majority are clueless and apathetic about: net neutrality .  The rant was directed against the US Federal Communications Commission’s proposed net neutrality regulations , which was deemed so egregious it forced activists and corporations to be on the same side. The FCC, however, invited the public to post their comments on their website. And this made Mr. Oliver appeal directly to the trolls and lurkers and other internet commenters out there to “seize their moment” and let their outrage show using their most potent weapon: the keyboard.     "For once in your life, we need you to channel that anger, that badly spelled bile that you n...