Pluto is a Tomato

Pluto’s demotion from planet to dwarf planet yesterday is making all the news. As a follow-up to my comment on Jeb’s post, Boortz’s complaint was even less valid when he said it took 3,000 astronomers to decide on Pluto’s status, since only 300 actually voted on the issue.

Anyway, whether Pluto is a planet or not is like whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable. Ultimately it doesn’t really affect anything. But just so you know, I looked up the definition of vegetable in my Microsoft Bookshelf dictionary, which says that any plant product grown to be eaten is a vegetable. That includes lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, and I guess wheat. So tomatoes are clearly a vegetable.

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Names

I decided to do some research on names for the new dog. For instance, if I was going to name him “Kevin” then I wanted to make sure that there wasn’t a belief that naming a dog Kevin was bad luck, or that dogs named Kevin are considered a delicacy in Burma. I didn’t find anything like that, but I did find out that Kevin is Irish and means handsome and/or beloved (I think the dog looks kind of like Kevin Costner who is both handsome and beloved).

I also found a neat site run by the Social Security Administration where they rank the popularity of different names by year. I guess they know everyone’s name and date of birth. If a name falls in the top 1000, then it will be listed. You can also pull up the popularity of names over time. For instance, in the year I was born, Michael, John, and David were the most popular boy names (Lisa, Mary, and Karen were the most popular for girls). That year Kevin was number 13, about the highest it ever got. In 2005, Jacob, Michael, and Joshua were the most popular names for boys and Emily, Emma, and Madison were the most popular for girls. Meanwhile, Edward has gone from 29th to 134th, putting it behind even Trevor at 112th.

http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/

New Dog

Yesterday I went to the Paws Atlanta shelter with Katie to look for dogs. We wound up taking home a near twin of Katie, except he is male.

He is part pit bull, I’m sure (he has a big head), but he has a very sweet disposition despite some unsolicited advances on Katie yesterday. I don’t think he has barked yet. He is extremely skinny right now, but has been eating a lot, so he should be fine. Though I formally adopted him, I consider him to be on a working test for the first week or so. The shelter named him Austin, which is okay, but I’m thinking about Buddy, Buster, or Trevor. Any suggestions are welcome. Katie seems largely indifferent towards him. They don’t play, but they don’t growl at each other. He is very affectionate towards me though.

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Kitty Corner

I remember as a kid that we would say something was catercorner if it was diagonally opposite of something. We must have gotten that from mom and dad, because that doesn’t seem like a word that you learn in school. I think now I probably say cattycorner (apparently a southern thing), but I’ve heard people say kittycorner as well (maybe a black thing). It turns out all of these can be used.

Catercorner is the original version of the word and is apparently not based on cats, but on the French word for four, “quatre,” an old form of which was “cater.” This link says that the word is an example of folk etymology, which happens when people change a word to make it more like words they are familiar with. Other examples are “piggyback,” based on “pick-a-back” and “wheelbarrow” from “wheel bearwe.”

News From the Gulf

Today I was talking to someone I work with and she told me a neat story about her daughter. She said she was going to visit her on the Gulf Coast, so I asked if she had been affected by Katrina or did she move down later? She said that her daughter had been a reporter for a major newspaper (she gave me specifics, but I thought I would leave everything vague) and was sent to cover the aftermath of Katrina. She really loved the place and now she lives there. But the neat part is how it all came about.

While she was covering the story she was talking to a lot of different people, people who needed services, stores that were open, people who needed money and had services to offer, and so forth. So she wrote up a list of local contacts and was giving them out to people. She gave out hundreds of copies. So the next week she added to the list and handed the longer two-page list out. There wasn’t a local newspaper so it was a good way of getting information out. Again, she wound up making hundreds of copies and giving them all out in no time. And it led to more people giving her names, so she started adding some stories and pretty soon people wanted to pay to advertise. It became more of a newsletter, then a long newsletter, and now it is printed on newsprint, and it has become the local newspaper. She found a photographer so she could add pictures and someone with some newspaper experience to help out. It’s about 20 pages long. So she doesn’t work at the big paper anymore.

This lady was so proud of her daughter. She said that the last time she went to visit they went to a “restaurant.” She said it wasn’t really a restaurant, it was the slab of the restaurant that used to be there and the owners had brought in a trailer to cook out of and set up tables and lights on the slab. While they were sitting there her daughter pointed out that people at every table were reading her newspaper.