Month: August 2008

For the record:

"I use semicolons and I never really enforced a hard-and-fast rule," Kinsley responded recently by e-mail … "But if abuse is going to be common," he continued, "it’s simpler and safer to have a flat-out rule. It’s like drug regulation. Drugs are banned sometimes because a minority of users will have negative side effects, or because taking them correctly is complicated, although many people could get it right and would find them helpful. Actually, I’m opposed to that kind of thinking re drugs, but I am OK with it regarding punctuation. Punctuation can’t save your life."

You know who the Clintons want to win this election as well as MoDo does. In Pennsylvania, the alliance is getting personal:

A brother of New York Sen. Hillary Clinton and local Democrats who backed her unsuccessful presidential campaign socialized privately Monday with a top surrogate of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain.

The private gathering featured Carly Fiorina, Mr. McCain’s top economic adviser, and took place at the Dunmore home of political consultant Jamie Brazil, a longtime friend of Mrs. Clinton’s family who has signed on as paid national director of Mr. McCain’s Citizens for McCain Coalition.

The attendees included Tony Rodham, Mrs. Clinton’s youngest sibling, his wife, Megan, and their two children; attorney Kathleen Granahan Kane, who coordinated Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign in Northeast Pennsylvania during the primary election; and Virginia McGregor, sister of Scranton Mayor Chris Doherty.

Semi-colons are gay?:

Kurt Vonnegut called the marks "transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing." Hemingway and Chandler and Stephen King, said [Ben] McIntyre, "wouldn’t be seen dead in a ditch with a semi-colon (though Truman Capote might). Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don’t use semi-colons."

As I recall, Mike Kinsley hated them with a passion. At TNR in the old days, he fashioned a key on his computer that would, in one stroke, remove all semi-colons and replace them with a period and a capital letter for the next word; or maybe I remember that wrong. There’s more:

Paul Collins, in a recent Slate article, cited a study showing "a stunning drop in semicolon usage between the 18th and 19th centuries, from 68.1 semicolons per thousand words to just 17.7."

You’d think a victory like that would satisfy the anti-semicolon crowd. But no, they keep worrying that those girly, prissy, hermaphroditic punctuation marks will somehow infect their sturdy prose. If semicolons are masculine enough for Melville and Irving, why should they unsettle Barthelme and Vonnegut? Are today’s male writers just more insecure than yesterday’s about the manliness of their vocation?

Pushkin with an eternal lament:

Dark falls upon the hills of Georgia,
        I hear Aragva’s roar.
I’m sad and light, my grief – transparent,
        My sorrow is suffused with you,
With you, with you alone…My melancholy
        Remains untouched and undisturbed,
And once again my heart ignites and loves
        Because it can’t do otherwise.

(Photo: Georgians escape from a house set on fire by South Ossetian militia on August 18 in the Georgian village Kvemo-Achebeti, some 5 km from Tskhinvali. By Dmitry Kostyukov/AFP/Getty.)

Sarah Sliwa takes on Kittiwat Unarrom’s grotesque bread sculptures.

Is his "gates-of-hell" rhetoric an unnecessary gift to the Jihadists?

"Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn. Biological imperatives trump laws. American government cannot fight against marriage and hope to endure. If the Constitution is defined in such a way as to destroy the privileged position of marriage, it is that insane Constitution, not marriage, that will die," – Orson Scott Card, Mormon Times.

Introducing the geekiest heat-map ever.

John Schwenkler reports on the milk pasteurization wars:

Mark McAfee, who is Hall’s boss at Organic Pastures, makes no secret of his disdain for the FDA and what he calls its “oppression” of his business, claiming that the government’s investigation amounts to malicious prosecution. McAfee is brash, self-confident, and unwavering in his commitment to what he sells. He’s got to be: His farm, which is equipped with its own airplane landing strip and has recently been courting investments from venture capitalists, brings in millions of dollars a year from a product the FDA calls “inherently dangerous” and pegs as “a source of foodborne illness and even a cause of death within the United States.” McAfee has gotten under the government’s skin, it seems, by circumventing federal laws that ban interstate commerce in this product in forms intended “for direct human consumption” by slapping a “PET FOOD” label on the side, handing it off to UPS, and shipping it all over the world to the tune of $20,000 a week, intrastate sales not included.