Had drinks last night in Manhattan with Sheila, Bill, and Jim Moran at Bellevue on 40th St.- which is a legitimate heavy-metal dive bar where the tattoos and cowboy hats are worn unironically- don’t give me any of this Coyote Ugly/Village Idiot “wacker” crap.
It’s the sort of bar where, as Sheila relayed, the two TVs once simultaneously played a “Ron Jeremy-era” hardcore porn film, and a biopic of Evel Knievel. But really, any time in the last 20 years could safely be called “the Ron Jeremy era”; this would be like referring to a baseball game as being from “the Rickey Henderson Era.”
Anyway, great to hang out with some friends and fellow bloggers; we of course spent four hours discussing sports, politics, movies, and whether the bar had anything to do with Allen Ginsburg’s “from park to pad to bar to Bellevue.”
Posted by Stephen Silver at April 30, 2004 11:46 AMYou're so right about the "unironic" cowboy hats. Such a breath of fresh air.
Posted by: red at April 30, 2004 12:26 PMCaptain Rewrite and the Shhhh Brigade
Capt: GET ME REWRITE!!! Semicolons are nice. Don’t get us wrong, we like them well enough. They are, however, like professional drunks: one or two can be fun, but too many in too small a space and you’re cleaning vomit out of the drapes for weeks.
I digress.
So far this month, you’ve managed to pepper half your posts with semicolons. Through the first Pat Tillman entry you’ve used 43 semicolons in 86* posts. That’s a lot of compound sentences.
And this is no new phenomenon. For the year, you’ve used 199 semicolons in the space of 453 posts for a batting average of .439. Four thirty nine!
Shhh: Captain? Captain? You still with us? Last time you started in on semicolons it took four firemen and half a bottle of Lithium to get you out of the tree. Just calm down, fix yourself a drink, and this will all be over soon enough.
Look, in the handful of posts we actually managed to read all the way through, the semicolons seem to be used correctly, if not without airs. Remember, as Strunk and White said in the fourth edition of The Elements of Style , “A comma is preferable when…the tone of the sentence is easy and conversational.”
It’s a little known fact, but that sentence is not in the earlier editions of The Elements, as nothing prior to 1979 was “easy,” and conversation had only been invented three years prior, on a farm somewhere near Joliet.
We also digress.
So, just ask yourself: is this weblog a conversation or a dissertation?
----
*The brigade, although cantankerous at times and long-winded at others, is a whiz with the computers. While compiling the semicolon statistics, they were kind enough to run the last few months of the weblog through the auto-summary wringer. Here’s what came out: — The Capt.
Right?
The Carmela Show
News 4. “If Not For You”
News Item
Big Game
News Item
NEWS ITEM: “UPN Show Is
QUOTE OF THE DAY: "If
BASEBALL: Michael
It's only matter of time, right?
IF YOU TEACH A MAN
ALL-TIME GREAT NEW YORK POST
11. Star Wars (1977)
23. 12 Angry Men (1957)
77. Ran (1985)
79. Modern Times (1936)
8-0: "The Sports Guy" Bill
DIRTY OLD MAN: Howard Stern
(Times story).
—Auto summary idea stolen brazenly from Guy.
i think i speak for all of us when i ask: WTF?!
Posted by: LilB at May 1, 2004 01:27 AMUm, do I know you? 'Cause if not, it's a bit creepy of you to be going through my two years of posts and counting the semi-colons. At any rate, you've been banned, so have a nice life.
Posted by: Stephen Silver at May 2, 2004 11:27 PM