word police update, death in the mail, and good intentions

Today I learned that either Alaska is a terrible place, or people were misusing 'enormity' all the way back in 1993, which I regard as the Stone Age, when word usage was so basic as to be hard to screw up.

Alaska has long been a magnet for unbalanced souls, often outfitted with little more than innocence and desire, who hope to find their footing in the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier.

In other news:

• Postal workers are developing respiratory problems, potentially from all the paper dust they're exposed to. I don't know if it's dust or not -- I would suspect ink-contaminated dust over straight paper dust -- but mail is the most contaminated thing I have to deal with, and that is exactly why we go to the little outdoor portable post office instead of an indoor office. There are exhaust fumes from the parking lot, and the guy who mans the little trailer wears cologne, but the air quality is a whole lot better there than it could possibly be indoors.
• Mormons can posthumously baptize people. They've been baptizing Holocaust victims so they'll go to Heaven, which is a lovely sentiment if you ignore the fact that the people they're baptizing died specifically because they were Jewish.