There’s a famous anecdote about Oscar Wilde (working from memory, and not having any graduate students to check my facts) who was asked what he’d been doing all morning. Going over some writing, and adding a comma, was the celebrated wit’s reply. The afternoon was spent in equally devoted fashion – taking the comma away again. Many works of literature play with punctuation, spelling and typography. e e cummings didn’t use capitals; Iain M. Banks and Anthony Burgess have written passages or even whole books in invented argot; in The Wonderful O, James Thurber wrote about a man’s hatred for the letter ‘o’ and its subsequent banishment; and I’ve heard tell that when President Clinton had to leave the White House to make way for George W Bush, his staff systematically removed all the ‘W’s from all the keyboards in the building. All this is good and fine – but what does Nature Network have against paragraph breaks? Barbara Axt noticed it in her blog – and I’ve looked back at a few of mine, and the breaks have all been excised. I’ve written this blog entry without any paragraph breaks or line breaks (well, nearly) just to fool them and if prompted will continue without punctuation either or indeed capitalization diacritical marks or typographical modifiers of any kind until i either expire completely or otherwise run out of breath and ive just had an idea if you can get away without paragraph breaks whynotabolishallbreaksaltogetherandhavewordsrunnin
gtogetherinanundeingstreamlikednaorevengetallthewo
rdsyouvetypedandrearrangeallthelettersinalphebatic
alordernothingliketakingthingstotheirlogicalconclu
saaaaabbcdeeeeeeeeeeeefggghiiiiiiiilmnoooooprrrsss
tttttttuuuuuwyyz
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The End Of The Pier Show
Described by Carl Zimmer as "one of my favorite wastes of time", The End Of The Pier Show is the online scratching post of Nature Editor, Norfolk resident and sometime "garage-band monster" Henry Gee and his amazing unicycling girrafes.
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Breaking Up Is Hard To Do
- Date:
- Tuesday, 25 Mar ch 2008 - 17:30 GMT
Last updated: Tuesday, 25 Mar 2008 - 17:30 GMT
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Comments
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It’s not intentional, Henry. A little gremlin got into the code of our latest release. We should have it fixed in the next few hours. In the meantime, go look at our attractive new logged-in homepage instead.
Thge best recipe for excising gremlins is to soak them in iron filings mixed with cold tea. You probably know of the remedy that involves flagellation with a wetsuit full of lumpy custard, but it doesn’t work. I should know, I tried it, and it voided the warranty.
Henry, if you were running short, you could have asked. Here are a few spares I had hanging around: ” ”,
“
“
Aaagh! They be stealing my spaces! OK, here are a few more: ” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “
Try nicking those, fiends!
Thanks, Bob. I might have need of these, someday. Incidentally, all of this reminds me of a probably very un-PC joke from those far-off days when Yugoslavia was falling apart (and I apologise for any offence…) The entire region was struck by a sever vowel shortage. “Please, President Clinton, airdrop us some vowels!” pleaded Mr Grg Hmphrs, “so I can become George Humphreys again”.
“whynotabolishallbreaksaltogetherandhavewordsrunnin
gtogetherinanundeingstreamlikednaorevengetallthewo
rdsyouvetypedandrearrangeallthelettersinalphebatic
alordernothingliketakingthingstotheirlogicalconclu
s”
This must have been painful to type. My motor cortex really has those spaces hardwired.
Hah hah. I should tell you my theory about the lack of ‘u’s in the dialect of English written by our trans-Atlantic cousins.
I am convinced that the Nu Zillundurs nicked thum all, ay, and hid the buggers in their iksent.