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

Husbands and Knives:
Twenty Shocking Parallels in the Lives of
Yukio Mishima and Woody Allen

1. Residents of Westernized islands.
2. Short male persons.
3. Directors shunned by Hollywood.
4. Existentialists.
5. Commited public "suicide."
6. Expressed nostalgic yearning.
7. Avidly absorbed the culture of the East (or the Upper East Side).
8. Withstood vulgar curiosity about biographical anecdotes.
9. Obsessed with social disgrace.
10. Strong feelings about raw fish.
11. Involved with Asian women.
12. Interested in masks and disguises to express facets of their personality.
13. Fascinated by their own celebrity.
14. Recounted traumatic episodes from youth.
15. Attended tea ceremonies (or at least the Russian Tea Room).
16. Brandished phallic symbol representative of their art (sword/clarinet).
17. Forged in the smithy of their souls the uncreated conscience of their race.
18. Resisted fulfilling the role of son, husband, and father, yet desired to preserve ancestral tradition.
19. Wore costumes of period which they believed themselves to personify (Samurai robe/trenchcoat).
20. Died in their thoughts every morning.

Being What People Need You to Be

I dreamed I was late for class and couldn't find the room.

Later that night, I dreamed of having tea with Lewis Thomas again.  He said the most lovely things: "Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath."

"Is that a fact?"  That is not a fact, but is either a pronoun or an adjective.

Saint Widerwille
Patron of Irrational Aversions.

Saint Widerwille preached that "In the eyes of God, there is nothing irrational in an aversion to (fill in the blank) provided that one is prepared to accept the consequences."  Saint Widerwille himself was said to suffer irrational aversions to untoasted bread, gypsies, politicians, snakes, polystyrene cups, and people from New Jersey.  In his memoirs, he confessed that his greatest recurring nightmare involved taking communion from a wandering former Jersey statesman named Copperhead: "The moment he thrusts that unbaked wafer and plastic cup of wine toward me, I wake up screaming."

Beautiful Woman

Last night I fried an egg for dinner, and I dreamed about it that night.  In the dream, I intended to send my brother a picture of that egg with the caption "This is not god, nor the priesthood.  I will send you articles on it."

Ben Macintyre of The Times is against the bid to flush semicolons out of our prose — what he calls "semi-colonic irrigation."  He makes the following lovely point: