My friend Paul bought a Kindle from Amazon, and he dropped it one day, and it sort of broke but not entirely, and Amazon wanted $200 to replace it. Paul is generally speaking a very smart cookie, plus he went to law school, so he sent them a very strongly worded letter noting that Amazon falsely indicated the device's durability, and he would be willing to settle the matter for a payment of $400 ($200 to cover his replacement fee and $200 for incidental mucketymuck). He told Amazon they had 30 days to agree to his settlement offer, after which point he would file suit. Twenty days later, Amazon sent him a $400 check.
I am so impressed right now.
The intrepid Nadarine has done what I have only dreamed of doing, where by "dreamed of doing" I mean "saw a picture on Flickr, emailed the photographer for instructions, he said he was just the photographer and didn't know how it was done, googled like a mofo, looked into buying industrial-grade food coloring, talked about it incessantly with various friends, and never actually got off my ass to do." Specifically, she has made the rainbow cake, and she has done a kick-ass job:
Plus her post is headed with a Raffi lyric, which is win.
It's not so much that I'm gleeful when I catch a typo in the New York Times. It's a big paper, it publishes daily, spelling errors are bound to slip through the cracks. But if you are verbally in-the-know enough to be familiar with the verb to grok (a sci-fi neologism coined by author Robert Heinlein to mean something on the order of "comprehending something so intimately that it is a part of you," here used quite aptly in Cintra Wilson's critical shopper review of Comme des Garçons, a label requiring sci-fi verbs if there ever was one) then I would imagine you should realize that its past tense formation is grokked.
It's not as if the Times doesn't know what it's doing. If you double-click on any word in any article you are directed to a definition page, and "grocked" turns up nothing. Grok, meanwhile, is defined as "To understand profoundly through intuition or empathy," and we are given its tense-dependent variants: "grok·ked, grok·king, groks." If you're going to use grok, Times, please attempt to grok it first.
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