Fish rots from the head down, as Cor likes to quote. Brilliant people are getting dumber too.

I just had a terminal-degreed author in her 40s who used abbreviations for her terms--for example, the Drudge Factor would be (DQ), the Politico Factor would be (PQ).

I asked why she was using Q, and wouldn't it be better if the abbreviation was actually consistent with the term it was abbreviating? (God forbid; everyone has an angle.)

She said it was like IQ, but no one really knows that the Q stands for quotient.

?????WTAF?????

Authors are the bane of the publishing industry. Like tech people in the theatre say: If you could just get rid of the ------- actors, this place would run okay.

Everyone can write a book. Whether they expect to be paid for their efforts is another story. Many legit authors these days are self-publishing in addition to their royalty presses. But working with some self-publishers has reminded me of Joe Stalin's "Paper tolerates anything written on it." Kinda like the webz.

Publishers are no better or worse authors than most. And this isn't pimping my line of work, but the best authors and writers always seek out good copyediting. I work mostly for publishing houses or university presses, so my direct contact with authors is limited. Publishers who are authors would generally be already published authors.

I worked for years for a magazine publisher and syndicated political columnist who would send me his columns twice a week, back in the 1990s-late 2000s. I initially returned my markup by fax. We rarely spoke on the phone. He called me out of the blue once to give me a hard time for not marking his columns up enough. Good author.

A neighbor for years was a contractor. Told me one time, "I could never do what you do."

I said, "Bubba, I'd rather read a book you edited than try to live in a house I built."

9. Current neuroscience and lab interest in brain plasticity are all over it.

Film at 11.

Thoughts and prayers for rats and guinea pigs, human and otherwise.

11. I once heard that a truly stupid actor could never play a smart character.

Never read the phrase before about 15 years ago, and then it was about some very local politics. "We're never going to improve until we stop electing people who peaked in junior high school."

Printed in the local paper.