How I Confused My Literate Blogfriend. Or Not.

I have some. Literate blogfriends, I mean. Jim is way the fuck smarter than me, at least in his oeuvre and some nontrivial number of others, so I mostly just look at his pictures and skim over the stuff with the alphabets because it just gives me sads.

I discovered this thing today called the Flesch-Kinkaid Readability Index. It's pretty cool and utterly fucking meaningless. It calculates, in theory, the grade level at which you write, and the ease of readability of a given passage of text. I found it in some story about how congresscritters speak, on average, at a 10th-grade level, which was meant to be an insult. I shoved some work-related writing samples into this online calculator thing and discovered that I write at a 12th-grade level with a readability index of 41 (the lower the index, the more dense and incomprehensible the writing). A sample of recent Minions posts yielded scores of 10/50 (the Moog post), 12/47 (the hockey coaching post), 12/45 (the Mothers Day rant) and, stunningly, 10/54 (the Bam-Bam post, which earned me a cookie from Jim, and thanks for that, Jim). Jim's most recent prose post (other recent work has consisted of pictures and quotations), about Mittens' gay-hatin' garnered a 14/32. This makes Jim measurably smarter than me, so STFU, QED.

Yeah, it's a toy, and a pretty stupid one, at that. A Slate article I read about it called it "reductionist," and that's pretty spot on. Actually, I think it was a Weigel piece, so it probably couldn't decide whether it scored an infinity/infinity or a 6/smartass. But I had fun reductionizing myself.

So anyway, I lit into Himself, lovingly and a little bit, because the day had reached the point where I was no longer fit to do the things people pay me to do, and the peasants would've thought ill of me if I'd had the sedan chair brought around as early as 4:45. A little cruise led me to a brief mention of DCU midfielder Branko Boskovic, beloved by Himself because he's from one of those Balkan places, and Himself is also a 'Vic/'Vich, great-grandma from Buda and great-grandpa from Pest, or some such trifle, and he's all prejumidiced and suchlike. He claimed it's because he likes tens.

And I ranted, in the comments therein, about Tennism. You can poke over there for the rant, if you care, or not. Jim did, and I'm suspecting he regrets it, which is a shame because he's never done anything bad to me.

A ten is an center attacking midfielder, a playmaker who can also score. We're talking about footy here, by the way. Famous tens include Johan Cruyff, Zinedine Zidane, and others I'm too lazy to remember, but knock yourselves out in the comments. Less famous tens--who are pretty significant here because they significantly contributed to BFF's and my conversion to Tennism (by playing for DC United), would be Marco Etcheverry and Christian Gomez (first tour of duty, pre-obesity). Less famous tens who made us wish for Marco Etcheverry and Christian Gomez, mostly because they weren't tens or were sucky or washed-up tens, would be Marcello Gallardo, the Ginger Fucking Midget (who may well have been shorter than Gallardo, who was nicknamed El Muneco--The Doll), Freddy Adu, Matias Donnet, Rod Dyachenko, Justin Mapp, Justin Moose, Santino Quaranta, Jamil Walker, Rodney Wallace, and Christian Gomez II (The Fattening). Some of those guys had value as footy players, but they all sure sucked balls as center attacking midfielders.

We really, really want Branko to be a ten. That's because he could be, although he prefers to play out left, because his right foot sucks every bit as much as the noodle dangling from the end of the late and lamented Marc Burch's right leg. And even though he's slower than Databoy trying to eat asparagus, and not a whole lot more enthusiastic about the team's preferred pace (to Branko's credit, he's shown more energy in the last two games, which he has started). It's also because we really like Dwayne DeRosario, who is probably more of a natural ten, and Hamdi Salihi, who is also probably something of a natural ten, up top.

Of course, in BFF's case, he also wants Branko to be a ten because of the fucking Balkan connection. But that's neither here nor there.

By the way, the other half of his ancestry is German, so he's not all bad. And he can't help that wrong side of Pennsylvania thing, so it's unfair to mock him for it, even though it is pretty tragifunny.

A point, a point, there was a point...right, how I confused Jim. I didn't. That was a lie. He pretended to be confused, and placed his cultural origins in...uhm...well, exactly the same generational spot as me and BFF, which really isn't very surprising at all, now, is it?

But the whole thing left me troubled and vaguely confused, and not because of Jim, because of the demons in my own shadows. Leaving only one place to turn:

These bunnies stripped Mary Ann and left her in the creek.

This bunny is enjoying itself just a little too much.

You can't fool me. This bunny is a motherfucking space alien.

 

These bunnies are creeping me the fuck out, but I'm guessing Sasha digs them.

Okay, I was wrong. These bunnies are creeping me the fuck out.

 Fucking rubes. You fall for the bunny trick every fucking time.