Blame the Messenger

I particularly love the second paragraph of this ode to the semicolon.  It's from the Financial Times (excerpted by Amygdala):

I saw the documentary "Winged Migration" on DVD, and it got me to thinking a lot about magic and how breathtaking, uplifting miracles can become so disappointing (and worse than that -- actually negative, or an experience of spiritual diminishment) when one discovers the secret of how the trick works.  If you've seen the film, you know what truly magical moments were caught on camera.  Most of the scenes seem "impossible," so extraordinary are they.  I wasn't so much asking "how did they do it?" (because I knew they must have been in airplanes and holding cameras!), but more "how could they possibly have captured so many rare, once-in-a-lifetime occurrences?")  It was one of the most striking movie experiences of my life, and I have seen a lot of films (well-over three thousand films over the last decade alone).  Alas, I began watching the "making of" featurette on the DVD, and I was totally devastated.  The "secret" of the filmmakers was far more diabolical than I could have possibly imagined.  All of the magic drained away, and I was left feeling tricked (the bad kind of tricked -- as in swindled by con-men).  When a magician does something miraculous on stage, you've paid to be entertained and you delight in being fooled.  When a documentary filmmaker dupes you, it's a whole different story.  I found myself feeling outraged over and over again as I learned about the astonishingly elaborate methods the filmmakers employed to secure their footage (though they didn't put strings on the birds' claws and fly them like kites, such a method wasn't beneath them).  I actually had to shut off the DVD player after the worst revelation -- they crated up the pelicans and flew them in an airplane to Africa so as to record that leg of the birds' migratory "journey."  I would have far more enjoyed watching a cartoon about birds, or a LucasArts digital rendering of birds, because neither would have pretended to be a legitimate documentary.  Of course, it all boils down to packaging, doesn't it?  Had the sham-documentary filmmakers stated upfront that this film was an artistic depiction of how birds fly, and explained that all the birds in the film were actors (which is actually quite true, as the birds had been raised and imprinted by the filmmakers from eggs, then trained to fly on cue alongside the aircraft and to follow the sound of the squeeze horn), then I probably would have been quite amazed and delighted by so elaborate an endeavor!  As it was, they presented a fantastic illusion, then turned around and showed how they did it, leaving the viewer feeling gullible.  Had they been real wonder-workers instead of con-artists, they would have left the viewer feeling amazed, not duped.

SONG: Dime at a Time
ARTIST: Norma Jean

ORIGINAL LYRIC:

Two dollars in the jukebox...
And I'll put in the jukebox a dime at a time

ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION:

Two dollars in the jukebox...
With each song on the jukebox I'm a quarter shorter

Big Three Gambit

I dreamed I was a comma (after having corrective surgery to remove my period half).  At last I indicated a slight pause separating two related but distinct terms!

Then I dreamed of a small stall advertising "The Wonders of Punctuation and Spelling," with a sign that said "The Mystery of the Semicolon Revealed!!!" and "See the Ampersand! (Small Extra Charge)," just as in THE WEE FREE MEN by Terry Pratchett.

Saint Flauntus
Patron of Blatant Disregard.

Abundant evidence of risk?  Light a candle to Saint Flauntus, so the tradition goes, and blaze forward!  Flauntus oversees gross recklessness, wanton desires, insubordination, willful misconduct, criminal negligence, off-road escapades, and pop art.

"Are you looking for trouble?"  Yes, because the philosopher Hegel said that with the end of conflict will come the end of history.

Believing One’s Own Press

Gregory proposes the establishment of a semicolon appreciation day.  He confesses:

I was walking through a college campus when I realized that I was late for a class (I believe it was Philosophy) that I had totally forgotten about.  I vowed then and there to totally drop the class, as I couldn't muster up the energy to deal with it, and I decided to spend the hour taking a very long walk around the perimeter of the campus.  Not long into my walk, I spotted a young woman up ahead doing a little dance by herself in a wide expanse of walkway.  She was dressed in a vaguely Middle Eastern hooded cape, with the hood a lighter shade (perhaps light blue) than the rest of the cape.  I stood several yards away (while typing this, I initially wrote "years" instead of "yards"... perhaps a Freudian typo) and watched her do an Arabesque dance with a sword.  At one point she thrust the sword forward and it flew through the air toward me, but in slow motion.  I easily dodged it and said, "You almost hit me!" to which she merely gave a Mona Lisa smile.  Then she thrust another sword toward me, and as it finally skidded to the ground (again in slow motion) I saw that the blade was covered in clear plastic, as if it were factory sealed.

SONG: Dime Piece
ARTIST: Nick Cannon (feat. Izzy)

ORIGINAL LYRIC:

are you a dime?
(it's drivin me outta my mind)

ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION:

be a quarter?
(that's what I say when I court her)

There's a very funny piece entitled "The Punctuation Hunter" on the "Unremitting Failure" blog.  It concerns some people being cornered by a 48-point semicolon:


In other semicolon news, James J. Kilpatrick recently wrote a funny diatribe against the "obnoxious" semicolon, calling it "sissy" punctuation:

"Do I look like I'm made of money?"  Yes.  If money can mean assets, then your organs alone look like tens of thousands of dollars.

I dreamed I was a "semicolon butterfly" (polygonia interrogationis).  My wings were mottled with various shades of red and brown, and their tips were violet.  I floated off the page and lighted on an inkwell.  I uncurled my tongue and dipped it into the blue-black nectar.

Later that night, I dreamed I was listening to a financial report on the radio: "Prices of semicolons, plot devices, prologues and inciting incidents continued to fall yesterday, lopping twenty-eight points off the TomJones Index."  It was uncannily like something out of THE WELL OF LOST PLOTS by Jasper Fforde.

Belief that Another is Being Fooled

Examples of Automotive Haiku from Car Talk:

Pardon me for yawning.  I’m just so bored with this trivial charade that I forgot what we were talking about.  And thank god for that, because I don’t think I could stay awake through another moment of such mindless droning.  Now if you’ll excuse me, whatever you said your name was, I have some comparatively challenging things to do with my life, like watching Wheel of Fortune.

SONG: Homeboy
ARTIST: Coolio

ORIGINAL LYRIC:

If I got a quarter then you got a dime
And you can call me up no matter what the time

ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION:

If I got a dollar then you got a quarter
And you can leave a message on my tape recorder