Dimensional Door - Freeople Thread 35

This one warmed my heart... :) It is getting plenty crowded under that bus. After all the adoring and willfully compliant coverage of their every move it appears TheZero and Chewbacca will reward the MSM for their syncophantic loyalty by throwing them under the bus. LOL

W.H. nixes receiving lines?
By: Amie Parnes, December 7, 2009
For reporters covering President Obama, there’s only one party in town that matters: The White House Holiday Party. It’s a rare opportunity to walk around parts of the White House and meet the president and first lady. In the past, the highlight of the event has been the chance to get your picture taken with the president in the receiving line.
This year, however, the White House seems to be doing things a little differently. The invites went out late – and didn’t include journalists who have been invited in the past. And those who have been invited seem likely to be denied the traditional receiving-line photo.
At a party last week for Democratic political types and some donors, former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers watched Obama speak briefly behind a podium, welcoming party-goers to White House. Then, she looked on as Obama worked the room for a few minutes, shaking hands and posing for candid pictures — not taken by the White House photographer — before leaving the party.
But the party she attended did not have a receiving line, where the photos of the president and guest would normally be taken. And if that format is followed for the upcoming media parties, journalists won’t get their formal presidential pictures either.
It’s not exactly the end of the world. The central worry for average Americans during this holiday season is having the means to buy presents for their loved ones amid a still uncertain economy; meanwhile reporters are fretting about being denied a few seconds of standing next to the Obamas.
But for the White House to do away with the formal line is no small matter to those who work this beat every day: many guests feel it’s the main reason to attend, no matter who’s in office.
“It’s always been a big deal,” said Myers, who served as press secretary to former President Bill Clinton. “It’s exhausting [for the president] but it’s the one time when reporters feel like they’re treated like human beings and not just some guy behind the rope line. It’s the one time they can actually say hello.”
On Monday, the White House said journalists would be able to take photos with the president, but did not confirm that there would be a receiving line at the media holiday parties on Dec. 14 (for print journalists) and Dec. 15 (for television correspondents and producers). And the fact that the White House has eliminated the receiving line at other parties is generating talk.
Presidents typically receive journalists and their guests at a holiday party in the White House Map Room. The exchange of pleasantries and posing for the pictures can mean that the leader of the free world is standing in the same spot for more than four hours. But the good will goes a long way. “Everyone leaves there having been touched by pixie dust,” Myers added.
Another print reporter put it this way: “The White House is magical at Christmas. Even Oprah wants in.”
And that’s certainly true this year. For months, White House staffers have been inundated with calls from reporters asking directly and indirectly if they had scored an invite. And when some reporters found out that they weren’t invited, they called the White House to ask more pointedly if they could be included.
“I’ve been hearing from a lot of our members who haven’t been invited. They’re very upset and confused because they feel they put the time in covering this job, and the Christmas party was something they looked forward to,” said Julie Mason, a White House reporter for the Washington Examiner and a member of the White House Correspondents Association Board.
Mason said the board has no role in the holiday party planning or deciding who gets an invite. “There’s nothing I can say to help people except sympathize, which I really do,” Mason said.
Myers knows the situation well. When she worked at the White House, she was lobbied for invites to the big party. “We had a ton of people complaining,” she said. But, like any party, Myers said, “You’ve gotta decide who your party is for and you have to have some basis for deciding. You can’t have everybody there.”
It’s unclear how the White House decided who would ultimately get invited to the media party, but some reporters who have received invites under former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton told POLITICO they didn’t understand how they could be scratched off the list. “Did they not invite many regional reporters? That seems to go against their strategy,” surmised one reporter for a national news organization, who had been invited to Bush White House holiday parties but was not invited to the Obama holiday party. “Or did they only invite regional [reporters] in the states they need.”
What has escalated the talk in the press room is that the rookie White House has been slow to send out the invitations to the holiday media party. A White House press aide sent out an e-mail several weeks ago informing the lucky attendees of the dates and times. On Monday, with the formal invitations sent out just days ago, the White House sent out a second e-mail asking reporters to RSVP for the party.
Under the Bush administration, invites went out before Thanksgiving, reporters said. “I’m wondering if they just don’t have their act together on the social stuff,” one print reporter said.
And instead of inviting individuals in past years, the White House is allocating a certain number of invites per news organization and allowing bureau chiefs or managers to pick who gets to attend.
“This year’s process seems so screwed up. It’s one big horrible mess,” said one veteran White House reporter. “The White House knows who covers the beat and they also know who should be attending. A lot of people have their feelings hurt.”
“It makes something that should be nice and happy, depressing and elitist and it creates a system of haves and have-nots among the press corps,” the reporter added.
© 2009 Capitol News Company, LLC

First, the invitations went out late which apparently caused an incredible amount of fretting and hand wringing. Next, there are no individual, personal invitations suitable for framing alongside the coveted "official" photograph of a warm greeting in the receiving line. None of that is happening this year cause ... well... its just too darned tedious and time consuming for TheZero and the gargoyle.

Porridghead took a brain dump today when someone mentioned "verbification".

As we strode away from the management conference, I caught the stranger beside me mutter, “We all should ‘calendar’ the meeting? ‘Calendar’ it? God, I can’t stand the verbification of perfectly good nouns!”

I reached over and stopped him. “There you go, oxymoroning off at the mouth. Don’t you realize that the current trend of ‘verbification’ is merely the most recent skirmish in the long-standing Anglo-Colloquy war? It doesn’t even compare to the lingual travesties that took place in the Latin Wars. I could give you examples of tortured language and word crimes that would make Tennyson blanche.”

The stranger fixed his very best withering gaze upon me. I knew he was hooked. “Colic what?” he queried.

“Surely you know that ever since the first noun was pluralized, the verbs have been on the offensive. While the verbs provide all the action, there is but a single action in any given sentence. Nouns, on the other hand, can get away not only with plurals but multiple plurals. This outraged the verbs to no end, as they wanted equal billing and thus began the first border dispute of the AC war.”

“Ooookay. Look, I’ve really got to…” my acquaintance interjected.

“Then, when Socrates uttered ‘To do is to be,’ and thereby nounified two of the verbs that are at the very core of all Latin based languages, well, it was game on.”

“Wait, ‘Nounified’? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Oh, I had him snared. “See, ‘be’ and ‘do’ are two of the most rudimentary concept verbs in existence. In fact, they define existence. Socrates went and took those verbal high priests, as it were, and turned them into the object and subject of a sentence. In essence, they became nouns! Of course, nowadays we call them gerunds, but back then it was literal hijacking.”

“Well, yeah, so…”

I soldiered on unabated. “When Socrates did that, the verbs could not let such a bold territorial theft go unanswered so they declared outright war. Their first counter-strike was to establish compound verbs in a direct response to plural nouns.”

My speech-mate merely looked confused. “Wait… Socrates? Wasn’t that Descartes? I think he was French…”

Sensing vacillation, I pressed on. “See, compound verbs function as time keepers. ‘Betty will go. The seeds were planted. John has been stupefied.’ So by setting time constraints upon the action, the verbs were suddenly able to sneak multiples into a sentence that required only one noun!”

He glanced around in alarmed distress. I was not about to let up. “That victory was short-lived. The nouns scoffed at compound verbs as being nothing but helper verbs and then they pointed out that even the word ‘verb’ was a noun. Not content with mere insult, the nouns became possessive and thus compounded themselves.”

“Huh? What now?” my involuntary grammar victim warbled.

“By creating a possessive case, the nouns could modify themselves. ‘A child’s laughter. The dog’s dinner. A coal-miner’s daughter.’ Multiple nouns were able to compound together to form a descriptive phrase. The verbs saw that this was much more powerful than the so-called ‘helper’ verbs and so they, in turn, created linking verbs which made human existence describable.

By now my friend had found a seat and slumped into it, acknowledging and accepting his fate. “Great. How do you figure that?”

“Linking verbs are verbs of sensation or existence. ‘Seem, smell, sound, taste, be, act, grow’ and the like.”

“Errrr… aren’t some of those nouns too?”

”PRECISELY! Throughout all this, poaching on a massive scale was taking place by the nouns and the verbs. So much so, we can’t even begin to tell where a word originated today. Fly, walk, talk, smell… who knows if they were originally verbs or nouns? Now you’re starting to understand just how deeply this goes! Of course, then nouns escalated everything by creating verbals.”

“Oh dear lord, spare me…”

I ignored my companion’s whining and continued unabated. “By adding an ‘ing’ to verbs, a gerund is created which functions as a noun. ‘Eating is healthy. Frolicking is fun.’”

“Why me? Why did I open my mouth!” sobbed my acquaintance.

“What the nouns didn’t realize was that there was much more to the verbals. That same additional ‘ing’ allowed them to modify or describe a noun. ‘Flying a kite is fun.’ Now the verbs could not only state what a noun was doing but how it was doing it. This simple construct was the springboard that launched the largest offensive in the entire Anglo-Colloquy war: the Advent of the Adjective.”

“Oh for pity’s sake, will you please stop!”

“This is the important part! Once the nouns found they could be modified, they said ‘the heck with you and your modifications, verbs, we want our own modifications that have nothing to do with you at all. And so, the adjective came to be. Even worse, many adjectives were simply formed by modifying an existing noun! Talk about self-serving. ‘Furry, pasty, windy,’ it’s endless! Well, as you can imagine, the verbs decided that what was good for the nouns was good for them, so they created adverbs to describe themselves. In doing so, they grabbed many an adjective and put them to use modifying verbs. Of course, what neither the nouns nor the verbs realized was that, by creating modifiers, they had spawned two independent parts of speech that behaved by their own rules and had their own dreams and goals.”

“Oh goody. So it doesn’t end yet?”

“Not even close. It was at this point that punctuation got caught up in this mess. The comma was dragged into the morass kicking and screaming. The nouns unceremoniously claimed it for their own and stated that it was to be used for clauses and phrases that modified nouns. Verbs responded to this arrogant affront by creating verb phrases and then dragged in the semi colon as a means of adding yet another verb into the sentence structure.”

“Can I go now? Seriously, I’m not feeling well at all.”

“Then the conjunction was brought to the fray and everybody laid claim to the poor thing when all it ever wanted to do was get along with everybody. So it joined pretty much everything it could in one fashion or another and, by doing so, became pretty much subordinate to everything.”

“Aren’t you missing correlative and coordinating conjunctions?”

I smirked, thinking that he wasn’t quite as ignorant as he looked. “It’s all the same. The conjunction simply establishes a relationship exists. It doesn’t say between what or how or even why, although to its credit it does say what the relationship is. Faring much worse in the turf war is the lowly preposition. It establishes relative positions. ‘With, without, at, against….’ It’s like a weakly descriptive conjunction. Left alone it is worse than useless.”

My friend was now staring at me with a look of ill-intent in his eyes. “What is your point in all this, anyway?” he growled at me.

“My point? MY POINT? Haven’t you been listening? The point is this: your whining about ‘verbification’ is simply a means of making you feel superior to that poor fool speaking at the symposium who had the misfortune of having you under his charge! So what if he wants you to ‘calendar’ something! So-freaking-what! That kind of language abuse has been going on for generations! Not only that, but the current war doesn’t even compare to the big one: the Latin War or, as we know it, Word War One! The thing that completely escapes you is that we need to be involved in Word War II because that’s how the language evolves! If you want to impress me, don’t prattle on about verbification. Come and complain to me when somebody has gone and prepositionalized a word! Now THAT would impress me!”

My acquaintance had risen from his seat, his hands clenched and white-knuckled. I could see the sweat on his now-furrowed forehead. He stared at me intently for what seemed an eternity. Finally, he spoke in measured, clipped words. “You forgot one part of speech.”

“Oh, did I? What, pray tell, might that be?”

“The interjection. Like ‘Punch Buggy! or ‘Padiddle!’”

“And the next thing I knew, Officer, I woke up with a black eye, lying on my back in the middle of the corridor, surrounded by a puddle of blood that was flowing from my nose. Honestly, I don’t know his name and I’m not even sure if I could recognize him. All I know is that he got really florid and ugly when he was angry.”

“Well, son,” the officer said as he closed his notebook, “even if we did identify and apprehend the perpetrator, I have to be honest with you, I don’t think we could present an adequate case against him.”

“Why is that, officer?” I gurgled.

“It would seem to me, and anybody prosecuting or judging the case, that he was in his rights to punch you in your nose.”

I looked at him, aghast. “What would give anybody that right?” I asked incredulously.

“Well, by your statements here, it’s obvious.

He had just clause.”

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