Nov 29
I just went through my Google Reader subscriptions, and removed everyone who hasn’t posted anything in over a year. It seems like the majority of the LiveJournal users I was following have jumped ship. Unfortunately, most of them didn’t post anything saying where they jumped ship to. Some of them are on Facebook, but most aren’t, so I suppose my notional social network just shrank.
Shrank, not shrunk. It should have been “Honey, I Shrank The Kids”. I note this because last night, we got into a discussion of span vs spun. It was one of those situations where I was sure of the correct answer right up until I paused to think about it carefully, at which point the word ’span’ suddenly seemed totally made up. The OAD lists it as archaic. I don’t have an OED subscription, but apparently both words are listed as synonyms there. Since I switched to doing my best to write in US English when I emigrated, I guess I’ll have to get used to ’spun’.
Dec 17
The other day I logged in on Friends Reunited. It’s a UK web site that captured the market for “Where are they now?” social networking. Every now and again I log in to check the list of people I remember from school but haven’t been in contact with since, and see if any of them have succumbed to a well-deserved terminal illness.
Anyhow, I was scanning down the list of names and noticed one in particular. “Hey,” I thought to myself, “I remember him. He was one of the few people in the class who wasn’t a complete shit. I should look up what he’s doing these days.”
So I did. And I discovered that he’s now a spokesman for a company that sells outgoing call equipment to telemarketers.
Not quite as disturbing as the friend who gleefully announced he had managed to get his dream job with Microsoft, but close.