Temblor

This word has bothered me for years.   It seems like every reporter writing up an earthquake feels compelled to use it, even though no one else in the world (for the most part) ever does.   I always chalked it up to news editors and their seemingly insanely over-the-top desire for "snappy" writing.   Finally, someone has run the numbers:

"A quick search on Mark Davies’ Corpus of Contemporary American English shows that temblor occurs just over twice as often in newspaper writing as in magazine writing, and more than three times as frequently in newspaper writing as in fiction."

Full article...

Walking across Lake Erie

One guy's account of walking across Lake Erie in the winter (which is apparently a thing some people do):

"A half mile north of the island, I passed a cluster of ice fishing shacks which could probably have incorporated as a city. Snowmobile tracks were everywhere, and I could make out a few old cars sitting by themselves out on the ice, perhaps waiting for a watery spring burial. A jeep with four people in it pulled up alongside me, and the driver asked me if I'd seen Fred. 'I don't even know Fred,' I said, and off he drove."

Full article ...

The most important thing.

"Foreign policy is the art of establishing priorities."

— Henry Kissinger

Protip:  you can replace "foreign policy" with "dealing with others".

In Spots

"What do you make of [life]?  Pretty odd in spots, don't you think?"

 -- P.G. Wodehouse