Tarkblog

Here is the description of the next episode of Lost, straight from the ABC website:

Mr. Eko interrogates Charlie about the Virgin Mary statue, Claire begins to lose faith in Charlie when she discovers his secret, and Jack is an interested observer when Kate gives the recovering Sawyer a much-needed haircut.

Now, here’s an excerpt of Friday’s The Bold and the Beautiful:

Brooke continues to chastise Taylor for her hypocrisy, while at the same time Stephanie attempts to persuade Ridge to forgive Taylor. Stephanie then attempts to influence Taylor to go make things right with Ridge, however Taylor begins to see that Stephanie is more concerned about Ridge ending up with Brooke rather than Taylor fixing her marriage.

So it seems to me like Lost and the daytime soap operas are very similiar.

I was thinking last night about this type of misuse of grammar:

“I watched him perform last night. He done really well”.

Now, as someone who has lived in the midwestern US all of his life, I can tell you that every once in a while I run into a person who talks like this. That is, they tend to mis-conjugate their verbs.

“I seen that TV show the other night”.

I think that anyone who is somewhat educated from around here would agree that if someone you were talking to said things like that, you’d mentally stereotype them in a group of…”undereducated” people? Lower class people, perhaps? I’m not sure what stereotype they belong to, but there’s definitely a cadre of people who DO talk like this.

However, I’m unsure why. What is it that causes people to mis-conjugate their verbs? Is it lack of formal education on what to properly say? Are they hearing other people talk like that and end up talking like that too? Why doesn’t more people do it?

Hit me up with your thoughts. This is baffling me.

One year ago today, my retirement portfolio was down almost 1%.

3 months ago today, it was up about 4.4%

Today it is up 12.4% (total return).

I’d like to take a minute and thank Apple and Corning, my two star investments.

Also to be thanked: AGTHX (The Growth Fund of America) - up 52.8% since I bought it (15.3% annualized).

Boo to Pfizer, who is down around 10%, but is one of my largest holdings making a big impact on the overall numbers.

We went to lunch today with a potential hire for some work we have coming up. None of us knew him and he didn’t know any of us, but we’ve used some software he’s written and he is pretty highly regarded at where he currently works. He’s also very underutilized, and is bored to tears, it seems.

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There’s a high school bus stop across the street from the house. This morning, I saw a kid standing there smoking. Good grief.