Grammar Rants, Weight Loss Drugs & McGwire In The Hall of Fame: Listening To Local Voices

1. What drives you crazier: people with bad grammar or people who correct your grammar?

, a retired English teacher, can't abide by the former.

Each instance of "we was" and every extraneous "like" drives him farther up the tree. (Or is it further?)

Stephan's thoughts on grammar have led to an interesting conversation on grammar and its purpose in communication.

2. Feeling crafty?

Retired engineer and handmade artisan Jane Skoch is always working on a new creative project.

This week she tried her hand at making nautical rope bracelets.

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3. I cringe when anyone suggests Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa or Mark McGwire should be in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

(In my mind, Pete Rose deserves the honor more than any of them.)

However, Patrick Giusto has written a thoughtful post on why they should be admitted. Specifically, he argues that you can't punish players for breaking nonexistent rules.

He writes:

At some point, it has been revealed that Bonds, Sosa, and McGwire either tested positive, or admitted to using, steroids.  But the problem—and the reason why none of them were ever suspended, disciplined, or put on that Ineligible List—is because baseball didn’t begin testing for steroids punitively until 2004, and didn’t strengthen their policy until the 2006 season. All of their alleged abuse took place before that.  Bonds alleged and admitted positive tests were from 2000-03, McGwire admitted to using in the 90s, and Sosa allegedly tested positive in 2003. So, like it or not, what they did was within the rules of the game at the time.

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4. Dr. Barbara Berkeley, the medical director of obesity programs for LakeHealth, has written about the newly FDA-approved weight-loss drugs Belviq and Qsymia before.

In her most recent post, she notes that there hasn't been much of an outcry for these drugs.

She muses:

Perhaps we have come to the point where we have observed weight loss drugs long enough to know that they are not solutions. Maybe we've finally figured out that a drug that caused real, lasting weight loss would be leading the world's headlines by now. I think that maybe these new drugs are damned by faint praise.

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5. Check out Stray Catz -- .