by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/03/22 03:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/03/22/8330579.aspx
Content of Michael Kaplan's personal blog not approved by Microsoft (see disclaimer)!
I decided to go out tonight1,2,3.
Originally I wasn't going to.
It was a long day, I was tired.
Then I got a call. The call was at 7:52pm4.
Who called? A friend.
A friend who wanted to know about the umlaut, but not that. You know, like the other word for that.
Confused by someone calling me at night to talk about umlauts but temporarily distracted by the fact that I knew the answer, I briefly explained the whole diaeresis/umlaut thing I described in Every character has a story #24: U+0308 (COMBINING DIAERESIS), ending on the fact that another name for the diaeresis is the trema.
It turns out that the word she was looking for....
I mentioned she could have looked it up here in the Blog5, but she mentioned that she wasn't on the computer just then6.
She began to thank me but then there was noise in the background. People had showed up and they were going out so she had to go.
She briefly stopped and I think realized how old and pathetic this quick "call and hang up" might make me feel, and apologized for being such a terrible person. But I shooed her off to go have fun.
And then I called some people7,8 in order to make sure that I wasn't actually going to in fact be pathetic....
I somehow feel a strong need to not end up feeling pathetic due to actions of my blog's ex-girlfriend!
In fact, I am leaving in a few minutes, so maybe some time over the weekend I'll blog again to let you all know how it turned out.
They are here now and I could not think of a pun for the title so use your imagination on that bit!
1 - When I say tonight, I mean the night in which I am typing this blog, and since it won't go live until 12:01am, it means it will technically be tomorrow or later when you read it.
2 - And the date on the blog will not match the date that I typed it.
3 - Plus if you read it quickly enough after it goes live, I'll still be out.
4 - I know because I just looked at the "recent calls" log.
5 - She used to be in love with this blog, as luck would have it.
6 - I was about to ask how the hell a trema came up outside of a work context, but I decided I would rather not know just then....
7 - Who had talked to me earlier to ask if I wanted to go out.
8 - They are the ones behind the large number of bottles of Mike's Hard Lemonade and Limeaid in my fridge, which I have not touched since it was left there from the last time they were here. :-)
This blog brought to you by ¹²³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸ (U+00b9, U+00b2, U+00b3, U+2074-U+2078, aka SUPERSCRIPT ONE - SUPERSCRIPT EIGHT, aka The Footnote Brothers)
John Cowan on 22 Mar 2008 7:47 PM:
I propose "Tremas and Aftershocks".
Michael S. Kaplan on 22 Mar 2008 9:38 PM:
Perfect!