Not everything can or should be about the reptiles or the ongoing depressing genocide. Occasionally the pond likes to open with a different touch.
Cue comma queen Mary Norris's story for The New Yorker A Musical for—and About—Grammar Sticklers.
Sorry, its' a paywall, so let the pond via Norris quote just a a little of the action:
...The action starts as the hero, Greg (Benjamin Behrend), complains bitterly, in song, about something he’s editing (“How have you been so dumb?”), and his boss offers him his own column—a position that has opened up because a Miss Manners-style columnist was fired for bad behavior. (She got drunk and crashed a children’s birthday party.) For the irascible Greg, a column about grammar is a no-brainer. His friend Web, the aptly named tech editor (Nina Vitek, who has an incredible voice), comes up with a title for it, and The Angry Grammarian is born.
Barg had plenty of material to draw on for “The Angry Grammarian.” He started writing a grammar column in 2007, when he was a copy editor for Philadelphia Weekly, an alternative newspaper, and The Angry Grammarian appeared biweekly in the Inquirer beginning in 2018 and is now on Substack. There’s a song about double spacers who are stuck in a time warp circa the typewriter era (“The Right Space”) and an ode to dictionaries (“Bring in Da Funk, Bring in Da Wagnalls”), sung by the ingénue, Lisa (Chelsea Cylinder), a self-described sapiosexual who is new in town and wants to get out and meet brainy people, and her sister, Miriam (Erin Coffman), a self-effacing lawyer who prefers to stay home and play Scrabble. Inevitably, boy meets girl. They perform an agreeable duet (“Like Subject and Verb”) and bond over an ambiguous apostrophe on a restaurant sign. Is it Bojangle’s or Bojangles’? The big love song, “Lie with Me and Lay Me,” invokes Bob Dylan to educational effect (not affect—there’s a song about that, too). There’s a production number with zombies (“Grammar-Pocalypse!”) and one with a chorus line (“They’re There”). The staging involves clever, restrained use of a screen to spell things out, as if for a PowerPoint presentation.
The first-act curtain (O.K., there is no literal curtain) falls, ingeniously, shortly after “The Comma with Too Many Names,” as in Oxford and serial. Boy risks losing girl as Greg comes down on the wrong side. He is against the serial comma and makes a big, obnoxious deal about it, alienating Lisa. This sent the audience into the lobby at intermission grumbling. One woman said the show was good, paused, and added, “But he’s just wrong.” Under her cardigan was a T-shirt that read “The Oxford Comma Society—In Defense and Preservation of Tradition, Form, and Clarity.” Another woman brought up the case of the dairy-truck drivers in Maine who won millions of dollars in overtime because their contract lacked a serial comma.
As Chekhov (or was it Ibsen?) never said, if a bad apostrophe appears in Act I, it has to explode in Act II. But before we get to that there is a hilarious number called “Whom Cares?,” in which the two exasperated supporting characters, Miriam and Web (get it? Merriam-Webster?), express their disbelief that the grammar lovebirds are letting a little thing like a comma come between them, and simultaneously offer up a catalogue of egregious errors—“most importantly,” “intensive purposes,” “irregardless,” “mute” point, “honed in,” “expresso,” “most uniquer”—which are corrected on the screen by that great red pen in the sky. Letters from fans of the Angry Grammarian, read by members of the ensemble (Madeline Snyder, Abrham Bogale, Niamh Sherlock, and Joshua Gold), give Greg material for his column. Incidentally, an inveterate letter writer is a crucial character in this year’s other candidate for Best Musical Featuring a Copy Editor in a Major Role, “The Connector,” which is just ending its run Off Broadway.
Barg had plenty of material to draw on for “The Angry Grammarian.” He started writing a grammar column in 2007, when he was a copy editor for Philadelphia Weekly, an alternative newspaper, and The Angry Grammarian appeared biweekly in the Inquirer beginning in 2018 and is now on Substack. There’s a song about double spacers who are stuck in a time warp circa the typewriter era (“The Right Space”) and an ode to dictionaries (“Bring in Da Funk, Bring in Da Wagnalls”), sung by the ingénue, Lisa (Chelsea Cylinder), a self-described sapiosexual who is new in town and wants to get out and meet brainy people, and her sister, Miriam (Erin Coffman), a self-effacing lawyer who prefers to stay home and play Scrabble. Inevitably, boy meets girl. They perform an agreeable duet (“Like Subject and Verb”) and bond over an ambiguous apostrophe on a restaurant sign. Is it Bojangle’s or Bojangles’? The big love song, “Lie with Me and Lay Me,” invokes Bob Dylan to educational effect (not affect—there’s a song about that, too). There’s a production number with zombies (“Grammar-Pocalypse!”) and one with a chorus line (“They’re There”). The staging involves clever, restrained use of a screen to spell things out, as if for a PowerPoint presentation.
The first-act curtain (O.K., there is no literal curtain) falls, ingeniously, shortly after “The Comma with Too Many Names,” as in Oxford and serial. Boy risks losing girl as Greg comes down on the wrong side. He is against the serial comma and makes a big, obnoxious deal about it, alienating Lisa. This sent the audience into the lobby at intermission grumbling. One woman said the show was good, paused, and added, “But he’s just wrong.” Under her cardigan was a T-shirt that read “The Oxford Comma Society—In Defense and Preservation of Tradition, Form, and Clarity.” Another woman brought up the case of the dairy-truck drivers in Maine who won millions of dollars in overtime because their contract lacked a serial comma.
As Chekhov (or was it Ibsen?) never said, if a bad apostrophe appears in Act I, it has to explode in Act II. But before we get to that there is a hilarious number called “Whom Cares?,” in which the two exasperated supporting characters, Miriam and Web (get it? Merriam-Webster?), express their disbelief that the grammar lovebirds are letting a little thing like a comma come between them, and simultaneously offer up a catalogue of egregious errors—“most importantly,” “intensive purposes,” “irregardless,” “mute” point, “honed in,” “expresso,” “most uniquer”—which are corrected on the screen by that great red pen in the sky. Letters from fans of the Angry Grammarian, read by members of the ensemble (Madeline Snyder, Abrham Bogale, Niamh Sherlock, and Joshua Gold), give Greg material for his column. Incidentally, an inveterate letter writer is a crucial character in this year’s other candidate for Best Musical Featuring a Copy Editor in a Major Role, “The Connector,” which is just ending its run Off Broadway.
These days the woke Glocks go off in every act, but forget those bloody double spacers, it was that totally unique talk of the "most uniquer" that had the pond, and the pond wont let it's readership off without a fully unique spoiler:
Whoever mentioned the Maine court case at intermission proved to be clairvoyant. The bad apostrophe reappears when the Angry Grammarian, in an act of Lynne Truss-like guerrilla copy editing, defaces the Bojangles sign and ends up in a courtroom presided over by one Judge Sapphire (no relation to William Safire, the late Times language columnist—or is she?). The restaurant owner makes a great flourish of announcing that he is Québécois and his name is pronounced Bojanglé. Lisa and Miriam come to Greg’s defense, arguing that the statute in question contains a dangling modifier. Judge Sapphire releases Greg, sentencing him to copy-edit restaurant menus. Boy gets girl back, and prescriptivist and descriptivist live happily ever after, mostly.
Defense? Bloody Americans always putting the pond in a bad humor and so now it's back to the reptile salt mines ...but what a relief to have a little joy in the dour gray life before duties call ...with the pond in its usual state of terrified panic at the thought of petulant Peta being awarded the highly esteemed, much desired, top of the world ma, extreme far right perch in the digital edition ...
Phew, that's a relief, the pond has an automatic red card for reptiles doing transphobia, so petulant Peta was off the menu ... and as creepy Cameron in the centrefold, with triptych illustration, talking of placating the mango Mussolini, is it possible ever to placate a sociopathic narcissist? Should we also placate Vlad the impaler? It sounded like a case for Killer, and so it turned out ...
As for the bromancer, the pond can spot AI at work a mile off.
Clearly some bot had been installed in place of the bro to pound out some praise of Wong, and while the bot was to hand, to do an impression of that trio of reptiles blathering about a Wong show of mettle. There's a simple rule the pond was taught long ago. In reptile la la land Wong is never right ...as befits reptiles trained in the liar from the Shire school of diplomacy ...
But with so many red cards, what to do, how to fill in the day ...only for relief to arrive below the fold ...
Riddster of the IPA! And with reassuring news for everyone ...
Splendid stuff. Please, give the Riddster a hand and a free watch ...
What a relief to turn away from the petty anxieties that routinely turn up in the lizard Oz, and instead enjoy a bout of science with Riddster of the IPA ... (feel free to smoke or vape while reading, and why not drink to excess at breakfast?)
Hmm, in the olden times scare quotes used to mean something.
Eek, they still do ...Scare quotes are quotation marks placed around a word or phrase from which you, the writer, wish to distance yourself because you consider that word or phrase to be odd or inappropriate for some reason. (here)
So Three Mile Island wasn't a plain old disaster, it was a "disaster", which gives "disaster" a whole new "meaning".
What a relief it is to have an expert IPA scientist on tap ... though the pond is somewhat troubled that the Riddster, who has on occasion mocked climate science, should suddenly see an urgent need to nuke the country to save the planet. Never mind, if there's a mention of Uncle Joe, Mao and Adolf the pond's day will be compleat ...
The reptiles interrupted the rambling with a huge snap of a Satanic figure designed to terrify the Riddster and the readership ...
Ah, there we go, "a gently warming climate". So why do we need to nuke the country to save a splendidly warm planet? Only Riddster of the IPA knows ...
Also below the fold the reptiles produced another treat ... a visit from a Lord.
The pond learned early how to do a curtesy in the presence of nobility, and this Lord's attempt to do a Vespey was inspirational ...
Naturally the pond wanted the Lord claiming kinship to feel right at home ...
He's strutted the world stage in an astonishing return to form in Amritsar...
After all, it's not every day you get a visit from a Brexit pioneer ... especially with splendid news about the progress of the Rwanda bill and everyone keen as mustard about their Garrick club membership ...
For some reason the pond felt the need to do a Venn diagram ...
And so to a final gobbet from His Lordship, with the pond 'umbly tugging forelock, muh lud ...
Say what? Aren't the Tories in a death spiral? Now we should join them in the spiral?
No thanks, the pond would rather finish off with a short Killer burst from Killer, still fresh from his mask-fearing killing field days, always ready to worship at the feet of the tangerine tyrant ...
Remarkably Killer is perfect for a story which has sent the cartoonists into a feeding frenzy ...
At this point the reptiles slipped in a snap of the former chairman ...
... but the pond sill had oodles of cartoons to go ...
And what a great excuse to return to The New Yorker to sample Susan B. Glasser's I Listened to Trump’s Rambling, Unhinged, Vituperative Georgia Rally—and So Should You, The ex-President is building a whole new edifice of lies for 2024.
It's only a few weeks old and it never gets stale, and it offers a perspective on Killer's talk of the orange Jesus 2.0:
There's one link worth making hot, even if it's to what used to be known as Twitter, just to see that compilation ... (yes, it's still called Twitter in the link, hey, what would Uncle Elon know?)
In the meantime, the pond still has a glut of cartoons to deal with ...
Now back to Killer normalising the deeply weird ...
If the mango Mussolini manages to avoid bankruptcy and make it back into office, the world will have more to worry about than former Chairman Rudd featuring on the man child wanna be king enemies list ... and the pond was still dealing with its cartoon glut ...
Sheesh, there simply had be some space between the immortal Rowe and the infallible Pope.
Perhaps another serve of Glasser ...
And now the pond can wrap up the day's entertainment with an infallible. Pope and the promise of a new star for the franchise ...
Lord Nagging Knagg.
ReplyDeleteJust a peg to hang a dogma.
"keen as mustard about their Garrick club membership".
Cameron wouldn't pass the Garrick club's "...secret vote on membership.[3][4][5]. According to the club website, the original assurance of the committee is "that it would be better that ten unobjectionable men should be excluded than one terrible bore should be admitted".[6]
"...His Lordship, with the pond 'umbly tugging forelock, muh lud ..."
... his lordship's forelock tugs mainly at his hip pocket and visage perception.
"Cameron often signed off the messages “Love Dc” or with a simple thumbs-up emoji. "In a text message to Scholar on 6 March 2020, when the financial markets were in freefall at the start of the pandemic, Cameron said: “I am riding to the rescue with supply chain finance with my new friend Lex Greensill.”
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/21/my-first-time-in-an-f1-simulation-i-spectacularly-skid-off-the-track-and-crash
Cameron backed a knagg by nagging. Still does. Still is a "knag (plural knags)
- A short spur or stiff projection from the trunk or branch of a tree, such as the stunted dead branch of a fir
- A peg or hook for hanging something on"
Just a big stiff projection knob. Soon to be demoted to the Bar.
And the Pope "Stirred but not shaken" cartoon deserves an award.
Thanks DP.
Hi Dorothy,
ReplyDeleteThe Adjunct Fellow of the IPA is right, stop this fear mongering, we should all embrace radiation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VKzqAefBVY
Apparently there's a lot of it going around, DW. Lots more than I ever knew.
Delete:)∛, very droll. Who knew that the Riddster had actually starred in Repo Man and perhaps was even J Frank Parnell in disguise? Now at last the pond knows ...plus, a very funny scene, ta.
DeleteGreat video, thank you DW. And, yes, there has been a lot of it around. The impressive granite foundations of the South Australian house of Parliament have been known as equally impressive emitters of radiation, and actual radon, since the early days of research into radioactivity at University of Adelaide. If one worked at times in that building, it was wise not to hint in any way at possible effects of that on long-serving members, particularly of the upper house.
DeleteWho let the Riddster out?
DeleteGlasser: "This many years into the Trump phenomenon, they've figured out that the best way to deal with Trump's excesses is simply to pretend they do not exist." Yeah, but that's hardly news, is it. Anyway, that plus pretending that lots of other things - eg "crooked" Biden - do exist. And Spud Dutton has surely completed his apprenticeship in these forms of statesmanship.
ReplyDeleteNoted that the Woman from Wycheproof expresses deep concern about 'wilful blindness to child abuse'. We wonder if that concern might extend beyond gender issues for white Anglo-Saxons, to imminent death by starvation for children of other identities in the lands to the east of the Mediterranean.
ReplyDeleteWho would have told Trump that Rudd is not the brightest bulb might that have been the great mate of Trump the cigar smoker.
ReplyDeleteThe weather does not conduce to working outside this day, so playing with trivia. Sad as the death of Laken Riley was, if the occupants of the land of the free, home of the brave, maintain their rate of gun related deaths (and they are quite good at maintaining that rate) a little over 1600 people will have been murdered by gunshot, in the 28 days since Ms Riley was killed.
ReplyDeleteAs we know, that loss of fundamental freedom - of life - raises little to no comment, because 'rights'.
Streisand effect, anyone?
ReplyDeleteUp till now we have been arguing about cost and timescales, but Ridd has thrown ionising radiation into the mix. So now we can ask if the SMRs are earthquake/tsunami proof (probably not, since they are small), terrorist-proof (probably not, since they are small) etc.
I'm surprised that Ridd didn't mention this gem from Wikipedia "in Germany and Austria, some of the most radiophobic countries, people attend "radon spas" where they voluntarily expose themselves to low-level radiation of radon for its alleged health benefits."
A little comment on Alan Kohler: "Hydrogen power gets a lot of mentions, but it hasn’t been wished into existence by political oratory yet, and even if it was there wouldn’t be much point using hydrogen to generate electricity, because it’s made from electricity, unless you get it straight out of the ground like methane."
ReplyDeleteWell no, you see Alan, hydrogen can be "made" by using the excess electricity generated from many rooftops during the day to extract hydrogen from water (which we already transport via pipes) and then the hydrogen can be either combusted as a flammable gas instead of fossil gas or fed to hydrogen powered engines (either or both of combustion or fuel cells) and thus generate electricity when the sun don't shine and the wind don't blow.
And doing it that way allows us to avoid transporting hydrogen, though probably after first making it into ammonia, all over the place.
And not a single one of them came in a small(ish) boat:
ReplyDeleteMigration rose by one-third last year to lift Australia’s population by a record 659,000
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/mar/21/migration-numbers-australia-2023-rise
What would the Coalition do about that ?