Class, I taught it. Twenty more topics on Associated Press Style and things we think your English brainwashed you into thinking.
They take it very well. Every time I teach this class I expect someone to stand up and hurl a book across the room. “I am PRO Oxford comma!”
But it never happens. They are good little note takers. I point out the different styles is all, and I’ll leave it to you to decide what you really feel about the great comma debate. And then I tell the story of an English major friend of mine who I managed to get so worked up he was willing to fight. Over a comma. (But not sentence fragments, as it turned out.)
One of my students seized on the question about three slides before I was ready today. “What about that comma?” I was so proud.
I gave a quiz, which everyone took with that second week of class spirit. Let’s see how they feel about that in November!
Met with the online editor. Met with the editor-in-chief. Did a little extra work on class stuff and on a paper. I finished all of the early-semester administrative stuff that I can think of.
I called again about getting my new phone. Did I mention this? We received new phones over a period of the summer when I wasn’t here. So they installed it in a copy room that belongs to another department. Someone passed this information along. I retrieved my phone. The old 1973 model in my office no longer worked. It was as if a storm had cut the line, or perhaps a bad person.
So I plugged the new one in sometime last week. Nothing. A different bad person had come along and severed this connection to the outside world. Dramatic music plays.
Finally got in touch with someone that had an answer. Turns out you can’t just plug these in and go. This phone, dig this, needs the Internet. And it seems the outlet in my office wall was installed in some bygone pre-Internet era. A guy will come by.
I never saw this person — but to be fair, I move around on campus a lot. So I called today, to hear that someone had been assigned the chore of plugging in my phone and souping up the phone jack. The person I talked to today said that guy had left me a message.
On my phone.
Which does not work.
Other technology news: I discovered a missing keyboard. But that’s getting ahead of the story. I discovered our newsroom had a missing keyboard. Naturally I asked around. Someone had stuffed it into a desk drawer. Let’s not even ask why.
Meanwhile, I managed to discover that a second keyboard was possessed. Remember the scene in Ghost — of course you do — where Sam types his name on the bad person’s keyboard and Jerry Zucker wants to evoke Shakespeare and Poe, but not have you realize how those guys did it so much better? Just the word Sam, over and over in that green monochrome?
I have an Apple keyboard doing that. Only my ghost thinks his name is either 9999999 or ———. Perhaps there are two of them.
The other keyboard, the one that was in a desk drawer, is just dead. Maybe that is why it was stored away. I plug both of these keyboards into other machines and I get the same response. 9999999 or nothing at all. So, tomorrow, I get to visit with the nice Tech Services people again.
In a shocking bit of news I visited Walmart. And it was not an unpleasant experience at all. I do not know what to make of this. They have a little fruit package, red apples, green apples, grapes and cheddar cheese, that I enjoy. Pre-cut, cheaper than anything else and a nice snack.
How should I interpret this? Walmart as a quick and painless shopping destination?
A cashier was wearing feathers as earrings, like the synthetics of the 1980s, so someone was making a statement. But you don’t disqualify for that. These are the reasons you go the big box stores, right?
Finally, videos: Cee lo Green played with Prince. One of them still brags about that to everyone they know:
And this is a strong contender for the title of Why I Love the Internet This Week. I believe it might be the video the Internet created itself for:
On and on and on.
