quasigrecian thoughts

It's been mightily hot here for the last week plus. Even without direct evidence, I could tell from the rate at which I'm going through ice cubes, and by the way the cats have been lying like limp rags on the kitchen linoleum. They've also been eating less. One day I was driven sufficiently mad by the heat to conclude against fixing anything hot for human supper, and got takeout Chinese chicken salad instead, as I didn't want to try making that from scratch.

I'm engaged in a tiresome copy-editing struggle against editors who want to make the bibliographic citations inconsistent in the name of consistency, and I'm trying to explain why that doesn't quite work.

Today brought the horrible news of a plane crash at SFO, apparently the work of a pilot who couldn't quite coordinate the event of the wheels touching the ground with the arrival of the beginning of the runway. It includes the first fatalities at an SFO crash in almost 50 years. Naturally this closed the airport for a while, and naturally this discommoded a lot of other schedules, and naturally the newspaper reported some grumbling over this. Some passengers from out of town reported being told to catch a fight out of Oakland but without being told where that airport is or how to get there. I'm surprised at the claim that the airlines didn't pass out that info - getting to Oakland from SFO is actually easy, as long as BART is running, but you have to know about that - but if that claim is true, I don't agree with the condemnation of the grumblers as heartless. Maybe they also expressed sorrow at the crash, and the paper just didn't quote that part, because misleadingly quoting people out of context is what newspapers do. And in any case, no number of dead or injured passengers on the crashed plane are a relevant excuse for not giving directions to other passengers whom you want to go somewhere else.