Talk about au fait with MRI machines. Good god, I don't mind them, but I'd not do that. For so many reasons.

She had a civil war with her brother and defeated him before she was 21. She had her ambitious, conniving sister killed.

Also married (and killed??) a brother or two, IIRC.

They'll also tell you about the Freemasons and sex. (Two separate topics. Not Freemasons having sex.

Phew.

So clearly I need to spend more time on the History Channel.

Or the Daily Show, which had the author as a guest last week.

I miss cable if only for the late night shows on History about weird conspiracies.

Whoa, you know what's good in [ita font] scrambled eggs? Fresh thyme.

They don't call it the Hitler Channel for nothing.

They also do the Civil War. This is why I call it the Men's History Channel.

I will be accomplishing the onerous task of making a fool out of myself in front of 50 people during onerous task hour. Seriously, y'all, this is bad. I go on in 45 minutes and I haven't even gotten ahold of the deck yet.

I'm afraid I started my onerous task early.

Remember how yesterday I was waiting for the nurse who was supposed to show up while I was at the infusion center to call me back Perkins "Natter 67: Overriding Vetoes" Dec 7, 2010 12:07:10 pm PST ?

She finally did, at 5:56, when I was on the freeway and couldn't answer. She suggested I might need to go back for another treatment today, which is made a little more complicated by the fact that a) the office closes at 6:00, so there was no way I could do anything about it yesterday, and b) neither she or my doctor work today, which means that now I am waiting to see if my doctor answers her page, and if not, the nurse covering for the first nurse is going to have to talk to another doctor who has never seen me about if I need the treatment, and then if I do, I get to see if an appointment is still available, and then I get to disrupt my work day and other people's work days.

I filled at least some of the time I've been waiting for a call back with finding out what the process for switching doctors is.

I had scrambled eggs too this morning. But with pancakes. The SO & I had a rare morning where we were in together. So we slept in and then had a late breakfast. It was tasty. He was all wiped from djing the kids' dance yesterday and today's lessons aren't until afternoon. It was really nice to have a breath's worth of time together quietly.

An article about Midwestern sayings and expressions: [link]

I had no idea "come with" was a Midwestern expression.

Which brings us to "come with," probably the most common example of Midwest speak. "I'm going for coffee. You want to come with?" (Also works for "bring with," "go with" and most verbs indicating movement.)

John Spartz, assistant professor in the department of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth, explored the famous phrase in his PhD dissertation: "Do You Want to Come With?: A Cross-dialectal, Multi-field, Variationist Investigation of With as a Particle Selected By Motion Verbs in The Minnesota Dialect of English."

He says "come with" can be traced to the upper Midwest's heavily German, Norwegian, Swedish and Dutch roots.

"Basically these immigrants landed here, and in learning English took some of the nuances of their languages and mapped them on to English," Spartz says. "There are some super technical linguistic reasons that happened, but essentially the phrase is prevalent in a variety of those languages so it makes sense that it would find its way into English as well."

But is it grammatically correct?

"It's actually completely correct," says Spartz. "Grammar school grammar rules tell you not to end a sentence with a preposition, but it's not a preposition. It's actually a particle as part of a phrasal verb. Just like in 'I kicked over a bucket,' 'kicked' and 'over' are both part of the verb. 'With' is, in fact, part of the verb. The verb moves as a unit."

But it's not an expression I use much....