Grammar Rant: I'm Only Going to Waste My Breath Once

I don't generally complain about typos or homonym-os or wtfery, not even apostrophe stuff, because these things are easy to get wrong and I would rather have messed up interesting stuff to read than absolutely perfectly produced stuff that is yawn inducing and stupidly wrong rhetorically.

But right at this moment in time (which is for basically the last several months), I have not seen anyone use the metaphor "rein in" correctly. So I'm going to waste my breath _once_ and then never mention it again.

To Reign is to rule or hold royal office.

To Rein In is to pull on the leathers attached to a bit (generally metal) to control an animal, generally a horse.

And now I will stop, because even I can tell that everyone else has ranted about this already, to no good effect. So I will rein in my impulse to reign in the realm of grammar, and just go back to tolerating all the phonetically based confusion.

It's not like I don't produce egregious errors of my own, all the time, but especially when attempting to blog while a child is climbing on me.

Underwear and Money (sorry, no gnomes)

I'm enjoying reading _The End of Money_ but I'm not operating under any particular illusions about the quality of some of the analysis involved. The author, David Wolman, tried to go a whole year without touching much less using dirty, dirty cash money, by which I mean folding green stuff and metal coins. He was apparently mostly successful, and has some entertaining stories to tell along the way, which is why I'm enjoying the book.

Wolman describes a study by Swiss researchers in which flu virus survived on banknotes for up to three days. He then forwarded the study to "a friend at" the CDC, who is quoted as asking, "Are the researchers sucking on banknotes or inserting them in their noses?", which forcibly brings to mind way too many movies from the '80s and '90s. "Unless people start using greenbacks as handkerchiefs, she told me, whatever germs do reside on cash or coins should die a quick death." Then Wolman adds, "a friend who recently returned from Africa", a phrase which pretty much guarantees I'm about to get annoyed, because if you are talking about germs and money, you should not be invoking Africa in the next sentence, which includes:

"in some of the more dangerous parts of the continent store cash in their underwear".

Okay, right, STOP THIS FUCKING NONSENSE RIGHT HERE because it is not okay. You don't need to go to Africa to find people storing cash in their undergarments. All you need is to watch a trailer for, oh, I don't know, Magic Mike, or watch a network show where the hero and heroine go to a strip bar to interview someone in a murder investigation. Or, here's an idea, ask a young and/or dumb enough to still be going clubbing woman of your acquaintance what she does with her phone, credit card and emergency-cab-fare-home cash when she goes out without a purse (answer: it involves her bra. Which is underwear.).

I feel like Wolman is maybe a little too squeaky clean for me, however, I'm curious where this adventure is going to lead him so I will continue reading. He's already met a Number of the Beast guy; it is almost guaranteed to get better from here.

ETA: Googling underwear money is pretty entertaining. I'm not clicking on anything about how to make money in or selling my own used underwear; if you click on them, I'd be interested in a safe-for-whatever summary, but I'm a little too frightened to investigate. [ETA: I lied. This one is awesome. http://feminspire.com/thoughts-from-a-craigslist-underwear-girl/]

Here's some underwear designed to store money:

http://adventureswithben.com/clothes/underwear-pockets-travel-gear-review-protect-valuables-money/

Mentions the same product but then shills for a different one:

http://practicaltravelgear.com/tag/travel-underwear/

Kickstarter for a place to store your flask:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2113693754/speakeasy-briefs-underwear-with-a-secret

Yeah, share _that_ with your friends. Wow.

A bit more ambitious here:

https://www.stashitware.com/

No money, but a gun:

http://shutupandtakemymoney.com/gun-concealment-underwear/

This one is gross (and out of stock): http://www.cheatersspyshop.com/dirty-briefs-safe.html

Still More Decluttering: photos, Very Old Files, etc.

I've had three banker's boxes for ... a really long time. The contents of 1 and a halfish of these boxes has been more or less stable since I graduated from high school. I've been excavating them while transferring the contents from the cardboard banker's boxes (which have seen better decades) to plastic file boxes (which is where the financial paperwork and back taxes up to 2003 are now living as well).

I extracted a bunch of photos from the boxes and integrated them into the photo binders that I assembled a while back (slight lie: some photos were integrated into the existing binders; the rest became a new binder), then I added some page protectors holding awards from high school and similar (hey, I was a smart kid! I was a National Merit Scholar. I'm still resting on my laurels. It's nice napping here.). I also extracted some stationary, boxes of blank cards and similar items that have useful life which won't ever be made use of in those file boxes.

And now I'm sitting downstairs in my comfy chair thinking, hmmm. I extracted a short story I wrote from one of those boxes (saw it go by in this transfer) and re-typed it into google docs and while I really thought I blogged about it here, I can't figure out where at the moment. Anyway. Having recently extracted fiction from the old iMac and put it on google docs and/or my personal website, it occurs to me that I might do that with some of my fiction and essays from high school and college.

Then I'm thinking, do I _really_ want to type that all in? Or should I look into OCR apps . . .