scottferguson.com

• You snicker when someone’s from Lima, because you think of the state hospital.
• You think all pro football teams are supposed to wear orange.
• Schools close for the state basketball tournament (deer season, too).
• You’re proud of your state fair, but would rather go to Cedar Point.
• You know all the four seasons: winter, still winter, almost winter, and construction.
• You live less than 30 minutes from some college or university.
• You know what a buckeye really is and have a recipe for candy ones.
• You’ve heard of the Great Nickel Beer Night Riot.
• “Toward the lake” means north and “toward the river” means south.
• You know if other Ohioans are from southern or northern Ohio as soon as they open their mouths.
• You root for a college team even though you’ve never taken a class there.
• You can spell words like Cuyahoga, Olentangy, Bellefontaine, Tuscarawas, Wapakoneta and you know which letter is doubled in Cincinnati.
• You carry jumper cables in your car.
• You always visit two amusement parks in one summer.
• You measure distance in minutes.
• You know that Serpent Mounds were not made by snakes.
• You know what game they’re playing when the Mud Hens take on the Clippers.
• “Vacation” means spending a day at Cedar Point or King’s Island.
• “Down south” to you means Kentucky.
• Your school classes were canceled because of cold.
• Your school classes were canceled because of heat.
• You’ve ridden the school bus for an hour each way.
• You’ve had to switch from “heat” to “A/C” in the same day.
• You design your kid’s Halloween costume to fit over a snowsuit.
• You know what should be knee-high by the fourth of July.
• You end your sentences with an unnecessary preposition: “Where’s my coat at?”
• You know what “pop” is.
• Driving is better in the winter because the potholes are filled with snow.
• You install security lights on your house and garage and leave both unlocked.
• The local paper covers national and international headlines on one page, but requires 6 pages for sports.
• You think sexy lingerie is tube socks and a flannel nightie.
• You think deer season is a national holiday.
• You know which leaves make good toilet paper.
• You actually get these jokes and tell them to your Ohio friends.

Read this somewhere… thought it was great.  Dedicated to Mr.D.P.

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They’re old hat.)
4. Employ the vernacular.
5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
8. Contractions aren’t necessary.
9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
10. One should never generalize.
11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
12. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
13. Don’t be redundant; don’t use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
14. Profanity sucks.
15. Be more or less specific.
16. Understatement is always best.
17. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
20. The passive voice is to be avoided.
21. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
22. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
23. Who needs rhetorical questions?
24. Don’t abbrev.
25. Check to see if you any words out.
26. Be carefully to use adjectives and adverbs correct.
27. About sentence fragments.
28. When dangling, don’t use participles.
29. Don’t use no double negatives.
30. Each pronoun agrees with their antecedent.
31. Just between you and I, case is important.
32. Join clauses good, like a conjunction should.
33. Don’t use commas, that aren’t necessary.
34. Its important to use apostrophe’s right.
35. It’s better not to unnecessarily split an infinitive.
36. Never leave a transitive verb just lay there without an object.
37. Only Proper Nouns should be capitalized. also a sentence should begin with a capital and end with a period
38. Use hyphens in compound-words, not just in any two-word phrase.
39. In letters compositions reports and things like that we use commas to keep a string of items apart.
40. Watch out for irregular verbs which have creeped into our language.
41. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
42. Avoid unnecessary redundancy.
43. A writer mustn’t shift your point of view.
44. Don’t write a run-on sentence you’ve got to punctuate it.

Even when you’ve got the right tools and ways to meet, communicating with co-workers from home is still different from working in the office. Use these five tips to improve how you communicate with co-workers from home.

The following is another email forward that I received… I thought it was interesting. I might take the time to validate the statements.

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You think the war in Iraq is costing us too much? Read this:

Boy, was I confused. I have been hammered with the propaganda that it is the Iraq war and the war on terror that is bankrupting us.

I now find that to be RIDICULOUS.

I hope the following 14 reasons are forwarded over and over again until they are read so many times that the reader gets sick of reading them. I also have included the URL’s for verification of all the following facts…

1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year by state governments.
Verify at: http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?pagename=iic_immigrationissuecenters7fd8

2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.HTML

3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.HTML

4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English!
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANscriptS/0604/01/ldt..0.HTML

5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies.
Verify at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANscriptS/0604/01/ldt.01.HTML

6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/%20TRANscriptS/0604/01/ldt.01.HTML

7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://transcripts.CNN.com/TRANscriptS/0604/01/ldt.01.HTML

8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare & social services by the American taxpayers.
Verify at: http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.HTML

9. $200 Billion dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSC%20RI%20PTS/0604/01/ldt.01.HTML

10. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that’s two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US .
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn..com/TRANscriptS/0606/12/ldt..01.HTML < target=_blank>;

11. During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries.. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana, crossed into the US from the Southern border.
Verify at: Homeland Security Report:

12. The National policy Institute, estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period.’
Verify at: http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute..org/PDF/deportation.PDF

13. In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances to their countries of origin.
Verify at: http://rense.com/general75/niht.htm

14. ‘The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One million sex crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States.’
Verify at: http://www.drdsk.com/articleshtml

USA skier Lindsey Vonn was stripped of her gold medal by the Olympic Committee today. The Olympic Committee has announced that it has taken the gold medal from Lindsay Vonn and given it to Barack Obama. Apparently he is going downhill much faster.

The following was forwarded to me in an email, I am not sure it they are actual Ronald Reagan quotes or not, none the less, funny…  enjoy.

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WHAT ADVISE WOULD PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN GIVE IN REGARDS TO THE ISSUES WE FACE TODAY?

 ”Socialism only works in two places: Heaven where they don’t need it and hell where they already have it.” -Ronald Reagan

‘Here’s my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose.’ – Ronald Reagan

‘The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’ -Ronald Reagan

‘The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.’  -Ronald Reagan

‘Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the  U.S. was too strong.’  – Ronald Reagan

‘I have wondered at times about what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the U.S. Congress.’  -Ronald Reagan

‘The taxpayer: That’s someone who works for the federal government but doesn’t have to take the civil service examination.’  – Ronald Reagan

‘Government is like a baby: An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.’  -Ronald Reagan

‘The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth is a government program.’ -Ronald Reagan

‘It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.’  – Ronald Reagan

‘Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it’   - Ronald Reagan

‘Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed, there are many rewards; if you disgrace yourself, you can always write a book.’  – Ronald Reagan

‘No arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is as formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women.’  -Ronald Reagan

‘If we ever forget that we’re one nation under GOD, then we will be a nation gone under.’  -Ronald Reagan