Not useful for this particular blackout, but for future reference, I saw on LIfehacker that a good way to know if your freezer has thawed is to (before the blackout) take a bottle, fill it halfway with water, tip it on its side, and freeze it. Once frozen, put it back in the freezer upright (so the frozen part is now vertical). If you open the freezer and the water or ice is on the bottom, you know it thawed. My freezer's usually too full of bird food for this trick to really be useful to me.

(Reply) (Thread)

I gather there was a blackout in Cambridge today too!

And Tuesday there was a blackout in my neighborhood of West Philly. Anti–Ivy League conspiracy theory time?

(Reply) (Thread)

i'm always uncomfortable with the effect of the hyphenation that comes from attaching a derivational affix to a space-separated compound. normally, hyphenation indicates a closer attachment than concatenation with a space, so ‘anti-Ivy League’ looks like &lsuqo;anti-Ivy’ is supposed to be a constituent, but of course it isn't a constituent, but English orthography doesn't provide us with a resource to avoid the confusing notation.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

English orthography most definitely does!

That's an en dash, not a hyphen.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

Is that standard? I assumed you'd just taken to using en dashes as hyphens as an aesthetic statement. I've never heard of them being used for morphological linking.

η: well i'll be – it is standard. very nice. will have to remember that one.

Edited at 2012-11-30 02:09 pm (UTC)

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

I was sad that the blackout forced the cancellation of the Inside The Campaigns event at the Kennedy School of Government, at which David Plouffe, David Axelrod, and the two people who ran Romney's campaign were to tell stories about the past two years.

(Reply) (Thread)