[passing the cafeteria] Something smells tasty. I think it smells like Frank’s Red Hot.
Ooh, Mom’s recipe for chicken wings features a bottle of Frank’s Red Hot and is super yummy.
I should make chicken wings.
Tim and I probably can’t eat a whole batch. Maybe there’s an occasion for which I could make them.
I think the Superbowl must be coming up soon; I remember seeing that the first-year auditorium was reserved for that purpose while I was scheduling CPR training. Wings are a good Superbowl food.
But if I went to a Superbowl party, then I would have to watch the Superbowl. It’s not worth it.
Maybe I could throw a non-Superbowl party, in which we eat chicken wings and other messy and unhealthy foods but do NOT watch the Superbowl or think about football at all! This sounds awesome.
The set of my friends who like messy and unhealthy foods, and the set of my friends who would want to skip watching the Superbowl, may have an extremely small intersection. Tim and I may be back to eating chicken wings on our own.
We’ve been having some boring lectures lately so I’ve done some upkeep on my website. I finally got a spam filter set up for my email address at this domain, and went through some 6000 spam emails with maybe 50 real ones. I think I caught all the real ones, anyway, and I apologize for the ones I didn’t answer. Now that I have the filter I should be able to catch emails people send; if you’re trying to reach me and I don’t respond, leave a comment here and tell me to look for your email.
I finally got around to backing up my old Case web site; it’s now here. At first I thought a lot of it had been lost, because it turns out the old student-run hosting service is now defunct, but after some poking around I discovered that the new service had migrated all of my files! It was exciting to see my old stuff again, though some of it appears unopenable. And one or two of the section pages I made when I was a TA are missing; I think I might not have backed them up at the time, which is sad. I need to find a monitor so I can get into my old computer and see what’s there.
And all the meta links to the left should work. (Links to other people’s blogs, maybe not.)
After repeated remarks from Tim, I spent some time investigating the correctness of the construction “needs doing.” It looks like I might have conflated it with “needs done” as a regionalism. According to the Columbia Guide to Standard American English (at Bartleby.com), “needs”:
… can combine with the preposition to plus an infinitive or a passive infinitive, as in She needs to see [to be seen by] a dentist, or it can be followed by a gerund as direct object, as in The lamp needs fixing. The past participle in a somewhat similar construction is dialectal and Nonstandard: This lamp needs fixed.
I haven’t found any other sources that look respectable, though I’d be interested to hear more. It looks like, despite the strangeness of “needs doing” to my ear, it is probably standard.