I was thinking yesterday about the verb and noun “pant”. You see, they have nothing to do with each other. When you pant it has nothing to do with pants. Normally this is not the case: when you fish it has something to do with fish, harvesting is an action which produces a harvest, and painting requires at least a small quantity of paint.

Then it struck me: “to pant” is an intransitive verb – it does not take an object (that is to say, you cannot pant someone, or something), and thus its involvement with nouns is limited. But why can there not be a transitive verb “to pant someone/something“? Why indeed.

After some discussion it was decided that this transitive panting is the action of putting pants on something (I’m English, by the way, so we’re talking pants, not pants). This leads to de-panting (the removal of pants from that which was panted) and capital pantifaction (putting pants on someone’s head), an act best performed with the advantage of surprise.

18.36
HP’s business inkjet 2300 printer is sucking some major balls in my estimation. It’s never been quite right, choosing which tray to print from seemingly at random, and sprouting page after page of gibberish on occasion, but today it has excelled itself. It’s printing from full cartridges, but the black is faded, and often blue after the first page. Also, in trying to update the firmware this is found to be impossible unless you have a Windows 2000/XP machine. I’m pretty sure I updated the firmware on this thing from my mac before, so why the more recent update would be windows-only baffles me.

I think I’m going to buy a Canon.
I may shoot my printer with it.