Four Random Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. On my Someday/Maybe list, I have an article about best romantic weekend getaways and couples trips for each state.

Louisiana would be an odd one for us since my wife's tastes stay on the low end of the Scoville scale -- but it does strike me as a material for a good family trip or two:

Avery Island -- Nothing reignites a fiery romance quite like hot sauce, so get yourself to Avery Island, home of Tabasco. Something so romantic about suffering through a particularly heated meal with bae and sharing a glass of milk to quash it. After you've finished up your pancakes at a B&B in New Iberia (the isle doesn't have hotels), your first priority is Jungle Gardens, a 170-acre collection of azaleas, camellias, old Buddha statues, and the rogue croc or deer. If you're a bird-watching couple (reign it in, you party animals!), there's a separate tour of "Bird City," as well. After you've taken in all the pretty flowers, it's time to tour the super-romantic Tabasco factory. The hot sauce company has an additional restaurant and Cajun-inspired "food tour" on Avery Island, just in case your date isn't impressed with bottling operations.

I've known about Avery island for some time, so this is a nice reminder. That said, it's just far enough away that it's more of a full day's trip for us, or perhaps an interesting stop between here and Houston, which we'll visit sooner or later, anyway.

2. Lately, Alison Green has been doing a good job leveraging the large Ask a Manager commentariat to create humorous work-related lists, the latest of which is 18 Final F-You's to Jobs or Bosses You Hated -- which she does not endorse, but presents solely for entertainment value.

One of these (#12) stands out for being positive:

[T]he system we used to assign parking worked on sometimes months- or years-long wait lists to get parking in an employee's chosen buildings, with less secure "temporary" spaces also available at less optimal garages. Parkers were supposed to reach out to us with issues they encountered with their access fobs. One of the people using a temp garage, "Percy," wrote us silly poems about his access woes whenever he had to reach out, and quickly endeared himself to the entire team that way. He happened to be on a wait list for a building that was notoriously slow-moving and difficult to get parking access in, but he was always upbeat and kind in his emails, which was a nice break from the usual for us. He became legendary in our office even though we were only there about a year and a half.

On our last day, a couple coworkers and I realized that because all our emails/inboxes were getting deleted, nobody would get in trouble if we just ... gave Percy parking access to his preferred garage. So together the three of us penned a little thank you note to him for always brightening our days and got his new access fob sent out before we left. I hope if he's still there, he's loving his parking access.

The next list, for which Green is currently seeking entries, is "Weirdest Hills to Die On."

3. From my To Do list is a collection of simple editing scripts from computer scientist/medical researcher Matt Might:

This is what the output of the passive voice script looks like.

The hardest part of advising Ph.D. students is teaching them how to write.

Fortunately, I've seen patterns emerge over the past couple years.

So, I've decided to replace myself with a shell script.

In particular, I've created shell scripts for catching three problems:

• abuse of the passive voice,
• weasel words, and
• lexical illusions.

And, I've integrated these into the build system of our LaTeX documents.

I'm going to try them on this and the next few posts, and possibly incorporate them into my own writing routine. The last is something I recently caught twice in a sentence from a post that I quoted to X.

(I purposely duplicated this above -- a common error for me -- and the lexical illusions script caught it. The passive voice script caught something in the parking story excerpt as shown above.

Interestingly, the weasel words script, by keying on quite, saved me from a pet peeve: I used it myself soon after it appeared in a quote. Fixed.)

4. Avery Island as a romantic getaway reminded me of a story I'd heard about years ago of a woman at a wedding reception putting herself into the hospital with cardiac symptoms after mistaking wasabi for avocado at a wedding reception:

Doctors concluded that she was likely suffering from takotsubo cardiomyopathy, also known as broken heart syndrome, because it typically follows severe emotional or physical distress and can feel like the patient is having a heart attack.

...

After a month of treatment with a slew of medications that reduce stress on the heart, the woman's ventricle's function returned to normal. This is the first known time wasabi consumption has triggered takotsubo cardiomyopathy, the report said.

As if the idea of eating a mouthful of wasabi by accident weren't terrifying enough...

-- CAV