Tag Archives: smoking ducks

Post 500

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Hey, this is my 500th post on this stupid blog!  At first I was trying to do a post a day, but I’ve slowed down to two or three times a week since I began a new novel.  

Thanks to WordPress’s comprehensive statistics, I can tell you that my most popular post ever (by a wide margin) was, oddly enough, this one about my visit to the real Mystic Pizza.  In second place was my post on organic plots.  And the bronze medal goes to this silly post on the Higgs Boson and smoking ducks.  Do you see a trend here?  No, neither do I.  Wordpress doesn’t track “likes”, but I’m pretty sure I got my most likes for this little post passing along a letter to the editor about the Middle East.  I put a lot of effort into that one!

Given the reaction to my last couple of posts, I probably should be doing a lot more Jane Austen blogging.  Maybe I should be writing Jane Austen novels.  If only I could.

The Higgs Boson and smoking ducks

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The excitement over the discovery of the Higgs Boson appears to have been too much for the English language as we know it to cope with:

“If I were a betting man, I would bet that it is the Higgs. But we can’t say that definitely yet. It is very much a smoking duck that walks and quacks like the Higgs. But we now have to open it up and look inside before we can say that it is indeed the Higgs.”

This is the kind of event that changes the language, for better or worse. As Language Log says, who knows what will happen when you open up a smoking duck?