A dialogue about question marks, intentionally punctuated.

Althouse: "Why are question marks really needed."

Meade: "That's a good question."

Althouse: "What did you say when I said why are question marks really needed."

Meade: "That's a good question."

I find myself omitting the question mark more and more lately. Why is it needed. The question is already in the words. It's absurd silliness, if you think about it — that rococo curlicue.

"Is it surprising that the chief of the criminal division in the U.S. Attorney's office wouldn't know her comments would eventually be traced back to her?"

"With all the emphasis DOJ puts on its cybercrimes task force, and its use of subpoenas and court orders to get social media and email account information about those under investigation, why would federal prosecutors feel secure enough to post under a pseudonym?"

The arrogance... the stupidity... If you're going to be arrogant+stupid, watch out for the idiosyncratic punctuation:

[T]here were multiple instances in which the online comments and Mann's pleadings contained an extra space after a closing quotation mark and before the final punctuation period. Other similarities included the lack of spaces before and after the dots used to designate an ellipse.

A NYT headline: "Mitt Romney Says, 'I Am The Confidence Fairy!''"

But Romney never said "I Am The Confidence Fairy!" There's some other Romney quote — some dull thing about economics — and then Paul Krugman says: "In effect, Romney was saying, 'I am the confidence fairy!'"

Krugman really, really wants Romney to lose. So, presumably, does the NYT. I don't have a problem with an opinion writer paraphrasing somebody's quote like that. It's the use of quotation marks in the headline that's wrong.


And the use of the word "fairy" demands some attention. I understand that Krugman is using the word in the sense of the tooth fairy — a magical creature. But the word is also a homophobic epithet. If a Republican had used equivalent language against a Democrat, we would hear criticism, so let me provide the criticism in this turnabout.

And by the way, creating confidence isn't like changing a tooth into money. The supposedly fairy-like power Romney claimed was to inspire optimism about the economy. Compare that to Obama's "this was the moment" speech, given at the point of accepting his party's nomination in 2008. At that moment, he proclaimed, "the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal... we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth... we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals."

If we're going to ridicule presidential candidates asserting magical — godlike — powers, that was the ultimate.

And that was 4 years ago. Many moments ago. How are we doing with "our highest ideals"? How did Obama do remaking this great nation? Is this the reflection of our very best selves? These are the real questions, not some inconsequential remark Romney made about optimism at a fundraiser.

Now, Krugman thinks he has a very funny point about economics, which is that the stock market is up, even though Romney's looking less likely to win according to Intrade. And what Romney said — what that "quote" in the headline paraphrased —was:

If it looks like I’m going to win, the markets will be happy. If it looks like the president’s going to win, the markets should not be terribly happy. It depends of course which markets you’re talking about, which types of commodities and so forth, but my own view is that if we win on November 6th, there will be a great deal of optimism about the future of this country. We’ll see capital come back and we’ll see — without actually doing anything — we’ll actually get a boost in the economy.

We're deprived of the text of the question he's responding to. But we can see that Romney inserts a qualification about "which markets you’re talking about, which types of commodities," before moving on to a generic statement about "optimism about the future" and "a boost in the economy." I'm not a Nobel-prize winning economist, but I can see that Romney is making a decision not to get into saying something complicated, and that there are different types of markets and some go up when others go down. But if you want to talk about the stock market, isn't that where people put extra money that they aren't investing in expanding their own businesses in a way that might produce more commodities and increase employment?

Fairy forbid that the economics expert would actually explain some economics now and then. Why bother when there's one more thing about Romney that's supposedly soooo hilarious? It seems we've all turned into idiots.... here in this remade great nation that reflects our very best selves.

Is this your very best self, Mr. Krugman? Is this your very best newspaper, New York Times?

"Here is a lesson in creative writing."

That's the heading for a short bit of text by Kurt Vonnegut in "A Man Without a Country," which I just downloaded in Kindle because we were talking about punctuation in the comments to the "phony balance" post and I half-remembered something he said about semi-colons. The short bit under the heading goes like this:

First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.

And I realize some of you may be having trouble deciding whether I am kidding or not. So from now on I will tell you when I’m kidding. For instance, join the National Guard or the Marines and teach democracy. I’m kidding.

We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I’m kidding.

If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

Is he kidding?

Here a list of worst college majors for making a living.  All the art ones are in there. You don't have to work.

Here's where we were talking the other day about the teacherspeak word "creative."

And here's last night's reminder that Theodore Sturgeon said "90% of everything is crud," which (I say) teaches respect for bad art — even/especially when it stirs al Qaeda attacks (in reality or in the minds of flag wavers).

And here's something about what dancing is doing to us right now.

"Nothing of importance happened today."

Wrote King George III in his diary, July 4, 1776. Not. He didn't even keep a diary.

From a list of "10 Things You Didn't Know About the Fourth of July."

Happy 4th!

Also, a Meadhouse dialogue:

MEADE (singing): We carried you in our arms...

ME: Why are you singing "Tears of Rage"?

MEADE (talk singing): ... on Independence Day...

ME: Oh....

And here I was thinking he was reading about the Katie Holmes/Tom Cruise divorce, within which there's the topic of Suri getting carried everywhere. I'd just read: "Kids as young as five can be sent to the military like Sea Org. I’m guessing she can’t bring her child-heels or get carried everywhere, which is something Katie would not approve of."

Oh what dear daughter ’neath the sun
Would treat a father so
To wait upon him hand and foot
And always tell him, “No?”

That's what Bob asked, mysteriously. Who is this daughter who always says "no," but waits upon him hand and foot? She sounds pretty devoted. The opposite of a daughter who says "yes," but does nothing. I'm assuming the official Bob Dylan website erroneously placed the question mark inside the quotation mark.

Perhaps the song really is about Independence Day, and the daughter is the United States, carried in the arms of England....

Disparaging Obama's SOTU because it "was written at an eighth-grade level."

Eric Ostermeier relies on the Flesch-Kincaid test, which calculates the readability of written text, based upon the length of sentences and words. He notes the prevalence of sentences like:

"There are plenty of ways to get this done. So let's agree right here, right now: No side issues. No drama. Pass the payroll tax cut without delay."

Hey, it would be on an even lower grade level if it weren't for that colon. You see my point? The punctuation says nothing about the difficulty or ease of the material in a text written for oral delivery. It's a signal to the speaker, indicating the length of pauses, the degree of flow. But I could just as well have written the previous 2 sentences as one sentence, with a colon in the middle, so quite aside from the oral/written distinction, the Flesch-Kincaid test is a pretty simplistic device to leverage an argument that a text is simplistic.

10 things wrong with the Freedom From Religion Foundation's atheist nativity scene.

(Here's my video showing the details of the creche, which is on the first floor of the Wisconsin Capitol, near some other holiday displays. You should watch the video to understand this list.)

1. Of the many figures in the display, only one is naked, ans it is a woman. This is the "clothed male, naked female" fantasy — promoted, presumably unwittingly.

2. The naked woman is Venus (the famous Botticelli Venus), and Venus is a goddess, a supernatural religious character, and therefore inconsistent with the overall theme of the display, which is that there is only the natural world and it's all we need.

3. The baby in the manger is huge in relation to the Venus figure, who is ostensibly the mother, so that is some scary cephalopelvic disproproportion, and yet naked Venus shows no signs of the C-section she would have needed to avoid death, unless we're to assume that baby got out of her body in some miraculous way, which is inconsistent with the theme of the display.

4. Atheism is promoted through a set of quotes from prominent figures — Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Emma Goldman, and Mark Twain — in other words, by reference to the revered words of authority figures, which is the same method of arriving at beliefs used by religionists — whom we're invited to disrespect for thinking like that.

5. A sign says "may reason prevail" and ends: "Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds," which is not even a remotely credible belief, because it is falsified by every example of a person who is moved to altruism and charity by religion. Reason doesn't prevail on the very sign that says "may reason prevail."

6. In 2 places, the display invokes the solstice as an occasion for contemplating the natural world as the totality of what is. We're told it's "the reason for the season." Reason is a buzz word for these atheists, but what reason is there for a reason-fixated atheist to pay any special attention to the solstice? It seems they've gotten their atheism mixed up with paganism, which betrays the religious component of their thought structure.

7. There's a sign saying "Thou shalt not steal" — a quote from God, as reported in the Bible.

8. Right behind the "Thou shalt not steal" sign, there's an array of brochures titled "About FFR's Natural Nativity," which I think they want you to take, but I didn't take one because of the intimidating God quote about stealing.

9. There's a sign that says "Heathen's Greetings," but "heathen" is a religious designation. "Heathenism" is Germanic neopaganism.

10. Unless only one heathen is greeting us, they've got the apostrophe in the wrong place in "Heathen's."

"I’d take it easy on the exclamation points."

"They’re downing jello shots to get the courage to hit on that martini-sipping ellipse at the bar."

"I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences."

"I suppose other things may be more exciting to others when they are at school but to me undoubtedly when I was at school the really completely exciting thing was diagramming sentences and that has been to me ever since the one thing that has been completely exciting and completely completing."

Diagram that! is the implicit challenge from Gertrude Stein – whose sentences are devilishly devoid of commas.

Stein hates commas passionately. I wish she were just a little more fond of them, LOL. Even I have a nagging desire to insert commas in her prose!

Commas are servile and have no life of their own... what does a comma do, a comma does nothing but make easy a thing that if you like it enough is easy enough without the comma.

She uses them instead of question marks, though, because she hates them even more! She says the question mark looks like "a brand on cattle."

Writing with dashes.

Do you like dashes? I do. There are certain ways of using dashes that I particularly admire. Rather than try to explain what I like so much, I'll give you an example. This is from the Charles Dickens novel, "Bleak House." The narrator is encountering the mother of a child who has just fallen down a flight of stairs.

Mrs. Jellyby, whose face reflected none of the uneasiness which we could not help showing in our own faces as the dear child's head recorded its passage with a bump on every stair — Richard afterwards said he counted seven, besides one for the landing — received us with perfect equanimity.

Doesn't that sentence make you feel like diagramming it... just for fun?

I like sentences like that — I think — because I like conversational side roads especially when they get you back to the main road. That relates to the way I feel about blogging. For example, the reason I was out there in Project Gutenberg searching for "Africa" on a webpage that contained the entire text of what is — in paperback — a 544-page book is that — like everyone else who checked Memeorandum today — I got waylaid by a NY Post story titled "Florida banker's wife left family to join Wall Street protesters."

A married mother of four from Florida ditched her family to become part of the raggedy mob in Zuccotti Park -- keeping the park clean by day and keeping herself warm at night with the help of a young waiter from Brooklyn.

“I’m not planning on going home,” an unapologetic Stacey Hessler, 38, told The Post yesterday.

“I have no idea what the future holds, but I’m here indefinitely. Forever,” said Hessler, whose home in DeLand sits 911 miles from the tarp she’s been sleeping under.

Hessler — who ironically is married to a banker — arrived 12 days ago and planned to stay for a week, but changed her plans after cozying up to some like-minded radicals, including Rami Shamir, 30, a waiter at a French bistro in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.

Hey, check the dashes: "— who ironically is married to a banker —." Ironic? Or not ironic at all? It's just what you'd expect if you were reading a novel about a woman married to a banker. Stacey Hessler immediately called to mind Mrs. Jellyby. Remember Mrs. Jellyby? She's a minor character in "Bleak House." Here's a summary/spoiler:

[Mrs. Jellyby] resolutely devotes every waking hour to the “Borrioboola-Gha venture.” The reader never discovers the details of the endeavor except that it involves the settlement of impoverished Britons among African natives with the goal of supporting themselves through coffee growing.

Mrs. Jellyby is convinced that no other undertaking in life is so worthwhile, or would solve so many problems at a stroke. Dickens’s interest is not in the project, however, but rather in Mrs. Jellyby, who is so wedded to her work that she has no time for her several children, with the exception of Caddy, a daughter she has conscripted as her secretary. Ink-spattered Caddy puts in nearly as many hours as her mother in the daily task of answering letters and sending out literature about Borrioboola-Gha.

Caddy, however, has come to hate the very word “Africa” or any word that has the remotest suggestion of causes. For her, causes simply mean the ruin of family life. Mrs. Jellyby’s husband eventually becomes suicidal and, though surviving despair, is last seen in the book with his head resting despondently on a wall.

In the book’s postscript, we discover that the Borrioboola-Gha project failed after the local king sold the project’s volunteers into slavery in order to buy rum. Mrs. Jellyby quickly found another cause to occupy her time, “a mission with more correspondence than the old one,” thus providing a happy ending for a permanent campaigner.

Like a sentence with well-deployed dashes, it all comes together in the end.

"Sorry We're Closed!"

Something about that exclamation point makes me feel that they're not sorry at all.

Enlarge to read:

No Pets
Shoes, Shirt
Required

Well, then! Let's go in topless and barefoot. If and when they're open.

Just another sign in Leadville, Colorado. Photographed on August 4th.

You can talk about anything you damn well like in the comments.

Lueders responds to my post about him, saying "We absolutely did not have information about an alternative version that we purposely withheld."

"When we became aware of this alternative version. we included it. We further updated the piece to reflect that Justice Bradley has refuted this alternative version as 'spin.'"

I respond in an update at the original post. The point of this post is: 1. To direct you there, 2. To give you a fresh place to comment, and 3. To pull that particular quote for the purpose of highlighting its passivity and lack of curiosity.

"When we became aware of this alternative version. we included it." Is that investigative journalism? Aren't you supposed to think critically, generate questions, and probe — not sit back and wait for further information to arrive and then let us know when you "become aware" of it? You should seek awareness.  The story you passed on was bizarre on its face. You don't even need to be an investigative journalist to have a lot of questions about it.

Me, I'm always suspicious about things that don't look right... even that period after "alternative version."

ADDED: Rereading Lueders's vague comment the next morning makes me want to be especially clear about what we know about the questions I asked in my original post. The key question that framed the post was: How many sources, total, spoke to Lueders and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel? Both spoke of having 3 sources, but since all were unnamed, we never knew whether there was overlap, and so there could have been as many as 6 or as few as 3. With Bradley later making a statement by name, we may now have 7 sources, but the total number may still be as few as 3. I still don't know whether the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel got more detail from individuals to whom Lueders spoke or whether it turned up sources that Lueders couldn't get a response from, and Lueders does not say.

Lueders wrote in his comment on my post:

We had as reported "at least three" sources for the statement that Prosser allegedly put his hands around Bradley's neck. We also spoke to others who declined to give any information about what occurred. No one said or suggested in any way, shape or form that Bradley was the aggressor, a charge that Prosser himself has not made. 

No one said... but did Lueders probe with questions? What was the political affiliation of the sources? Did they have a motivation to present incomplete facts? Did Lueders share that motivation? That would explain the failure to probe with the obvious questions that spring immediately to the ordinary reader's mind. Lueders just says that they didn't come forward spontaneously with any allegations that made Bradley look bad, they didn't suggest anything, and that was good enough for Lueders, the supposed investigative reporter.

Lueders notes that Prosser has refrained from making a specific allegation about Bradley, but Prosser did say the charge against him would be shown false. It's true, as Lueders says that Prosser hasn't specifically alleged that Bradley was the aggressor, but if you look closely at Lueders's comment, you can see that he doesn't have Bradley specifically denying that she charged at him with fists raised. He only says that she "ridiculed the contention that this was somehow her fault" and that the story was "spin." The word "spin" reflects an opinion about how people are characterizing the facts. It's not an apt way to deny the facts. Calling something spin is itself spin. And ridiculing the idea that one is at fault is also a characterization of the facts rather than an assertion of facts. That is, it's spin.

At this point, Bradley and Prosser have done the same thing: claimed innocence with respect to facts that unnamed sources have supplied.

"How about never? Is never good for you?"

About moving the period outside of the quotation marks.

ADDED: People in the comments are talking about what makes sense. I say:

It's not about making sense. It's about aesthetics. What feels right? We are accustomed to the quotation mark holding and containing the period and if the period is exiled from that embrace, we will have the uneasy feeling that it might roll away.

"I am a local artist, who has created sculptings made up Duct-Tape.. 100% no wires, or fillers."

Dennis Gervasio has "created the illusion of pewter." His opposition to "fillers" may explain his shortening of the term "outsider art" to "outside art" and his penchant for the 2-dot ellipsis.



His sign appears in the window of the Albany café called The Daily Grind — a locale also pictured in  "Man in green sneakers reads Sartre. Dog arrives."

The sculptings look like this, seen from inside the restaurant...



... and this, seen through window static...

"I knew I could count on you!!! You’re my hero!!!! My knight in shining armor!!! My private porn star!!!!!"

Everyone's laughing at the email idiots at Cornell. No one can wring out a drop of sympathy, because the "private porn star" and the woman who types exclamation marks are each married to somebody else.

(Via Instapundit.)

ADDED: Love that sex talk:



Now, get back on that horse.

The Givhan of HuffPo is pretty sure her Women's Studies professor vomits whenever she sees Sarah Palin.

Karin Tanabe, who seems to be the Givhan of HuffPo -- which is nothing like the Mull of Kintyre -- takes a 2-week old Robin Givhan column -- which she quotes but doesn't link to -- and trashes of Sarah Palin's style.

Because it wasn't enough for Givhan to credit Palin with showing that "a woman can step onto the national political stage without having to manipulate her wardrobe into some torturous costume calibrated to make her look authoritative but not threatening, feminine but not sexy, serious but not dour."

Palin must be mocked.

Tanabe writes:

The point is, Sarah Palin and her hockey mom's, grandpa's and second cousins, don't want her to be authoritative.

It's funny when the Givhan of HuffPo falls prey to the grocer's apostrophe, is it not? Modeling haughtiness, she takes a pratfall.

Her bad highlights and her layers of puffy bangs scream "don't mind me, I've been filing my nails in a log cabin for the last decade and didn't know the bouffant was now reserved for burlesque dancers and women who think Vogue is a devilish jig invented by Madonna (cue giggle)." I'm pretty sure my college feminist literature professor is vomiting every time she sees bouffant Barbie. Don't worry Professor Hart, I am too.

Is that that what Women's Studies teaches these days -- inane snobbery? And when did throwing up become the preferred form of elite expression?

Spewing.

"I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis..."

"... which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago."

Writes Kurt Vonnegut, in an excellent and short essay on writing style. He's got 7 rules:

1. Find a subject you care about

2. Do not ramble, though

3. Keep it simple

4. Have guts to cut

5. Sound like yourself

6. Say what you mean

7. Pity the readers

Great rules for bloggers, obviously. In fact, these are rules that seem to say: A great way to write is to blog.

Via Metafilter, where the commenters keep it simple, and somebody links to this cool article on semicolons, which includes the Vonnegut quote:

If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

Anyway, as Hazel Crosby once said: "Nobody has to be ashamed of being a Hoosier... Hoosiers do all right. Lowe and I have been around the world twice, and everywhere we went we found Hoosiers in charge of everything.... Lincoln was a Hoosier, too. He grew up in Spencer County.... I don't know what it is about Hoosiers... but they've sure got something. If somebody was to make a list, they'd be amazed... We Hoosiers got to stick together... Whenever I meet a young Hoosier, I tell them, 'You call me Mom.'"

Our Football Obelisk.

In case you're squinting at the graphic in the previous post and wondering about the "Nail's Tails" artist, I thought I'd put up this picture of the sculpture — by Donald Lipski — which stands outside Camp Randall, the Wisconsin Badgers football stadium. I happened to take a picture of it the other day. I used iPhoto to make it black and white and then to "boost color," which gets you to a much richer brown than making it "sepia." The original sculpture — which you can see by the linked article many people hate — is stark white. Click here for a larger version of my picture. It's an obelisk, eroded to reveal a core composed of footballs. Why don't people like it? Is it because of something suggested by naming it after the artist's roommate? Now, the roommate's name was "Nails," so I have a problem with the placement of the apostrophe in the title "Nail's Tails," and I hate the title, but forget the title. Pretend it's called Our Football Obelisk. You'll have to learn to like it.

About that teacher arrested for a blog comment.

BUMPED: Good news: "Washington County District Attorney Todd Martens says he believes the comment left by James Buss was disgusting but is protected under the First Amendment."

ORIGINAL POST:

Here's something more on the Wisconsin teacher — James Buss — who was arrested for a blog comment that some read as recommending that teachers be shot. We discussed this a few days ago here.

In the new story, we see the ACLU and UW polisci professor Donald Downs urging that no charges be filed:

Washington County District Attorney Todd Martens is considering whether to charge Buss with disorderly conduct and unlawful use of computerized communication systems.

"If you look at all the factors in this case, it's pretty clear it would be a mistake to charge," said Larry Dupuis, legal director of The American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin. "At worst, it was somebody expressing admiration for somebody who did something reprehensible. But the more reasonable explanation is this is somebody who is trying to mock the conservative view of teacher salaries."

Police Capt. Toby Netko defended the arrest. He said the teacher who complained was disturbed by the reference to "one shot at a time" and other educators agreed it was a threat.

"What happens when you say bomb in an airport? That's free speech, isn't it?" he said. "And people are taken into custody for that all the time."

Donald Downs, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and expert in free speech, said that "all sorts of unsavory, controversial speech" are protected by the First Amendment.

"It has to be intended to incite violence" to be illegal, Downs said. "If it's tongue-in-cheek, there's virtually no way they can claim that."

Downs added, however, that the school district might have legal grounds to discipline Buss. The teacher has been placed on paid administrative leave while his school district considers what action to take.

Buss tried for sarcasm, but not everyone gets a joke. Oddly enough, he himself was in the category of persons who are threatened, if it's a threat. Why wasn't he more worried about inspiring a troubled student to attack teachers? Probably, like many writers, he assumed people would understand his writing. But not even the other teachers understood it. That's all quite unfortunate.

Now, let me be clear about one thing — sledgehammer clear — so that no one can misread this: The man should not be charged with a crime.

And let no one think I will be coming 'round with a real sledgehammer.

UPDATE: As indicated above, the decision was made not to prosecute. Here, Buss explains himself:

Buss told police he "just wanted to see if the hate towards teachers from other posters was so strong that other posters would endorse my facetious post," the report says....

Buss, who in a statement described himself as politically "moderate," told police he misspelled words and used incorrect grammar and punctuation to enhance his characterization of "Observer" as "a right-wing zealot."

Buss told police that he did not intend his post, which he called "mischievous," as a threat, but he understood how someone could perceive it as "advocating a Columbine-like attack on schools." Buss said he posted comments on the Web site under two other names, "Jeff" and "Ditto."

Let's talk about guns.

The Supreme Court has granted cert. in the Second Amendment case from the D.C. Circuit. This should prove very exciting to those on both sides of the gun control issue and to people like me who are fascinated by constitutional interpretation.

ADDED: From WaPo's Robert Barnes:

For years, legal scholars, historians and grammarians have debated the meaning of the amendment because of its enigmatic wording and odd punctuation:

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Gun rights proponents say the words guarantee the right of an individual to possess firearms. Gun-control supporters say it conveys only a civic or "collective" right to own guns as part of service in an organized military organization....

The court rewrote the question to say it would decide whether the relevant provisions of the city's law "violate the Second Amendment rights of individuals who are not affiliated with any state-regulated militia, but who wish to keep handguns and other firearms for private use in their homes."