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did he just say something sacrilitigious?

FACE­BOOK GETS MY AT­TEN­TION in the early morning hours as I sip my coffee and wait for that part of my brain/mind that ra­ti­o­ci­nates to kick into gear. I scroll through my time­line and when an in­ter­esting image catches my at­ten­tion, I read it, and some­times chime in. I try to be pos­i­tive and hu­morous: yes­terday I made a some­what silly com­ment on someone’s Face­book page and I coined a word that somehow re­lated in some way to the orig­inal post: ‘sac­ril­iti­gious.’ [Read more] “did he just say something sacrilitigious?”

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hermits cranks pseudoscience and martin gardner

MARTIN GARDNER WAS A SKEPTIC. He was oné of the first ‘modern skep­tics’ and one of the most im­por­tant. He made his liveli­hood as a math­e­matics and sci­ence writer. He is per­haps best known for cre­ating and sus­taining gen­eral in­terest in recre­ational math­e­matics for a large part of the 20th cen­tury through his “Math­e­mat­ical Games” column in Sci­en­tific Amer­ican mag­a­zine (1956–1981). [Read more] “hermits cranks pseudoscience and martin gardner”

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where does the comma go with quotation marks?

WHERE DOES THE COMMA GO when it’s within a pair of quo­ta­tion mark? Some­times it’s within the quo­ta­tion marks, some­times it’s out­side those same quote marks! Same with pe­riods! And where do colons and semi-colons go? And en-dashes and em-dashes? And what about quotes within quotes? As the old man in Moon­struck says at the end of the movie, “I’m a-confused.” [Read more] “where does the comma go with quotation marks?”

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“shazam” with a small “s” and no exclamation mark

FIRST THERE IS A MOUN­TAIN then there is no moun­tain then there is. I had made this walk a hun­dred times be­fore today but today was ex­tra­or­di­nary, but then every day is extraordinary.

So, I walked as I al­ways do and al­ways did.

So, I walked past the many tele­phone poles on 112th Av­enue NE. [Read more] ““shazam” with a small “s” and no exclamation mark”

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ornithomimus in dinosaur provincial park sounds trippy

LIKE MANY BOYS of my gen­er­a­tion, I went through a di­nosaur phase in the early 1960s when I was 10-12 years old. I was fas­ci­nated by these huge beasts and my par­ents in­dulged my in­terest by buying me most of the better books on the sub­ject. And there were also those few movies that had been made up till then that had some­thing ‘di­nosaurish’ about them. [Read more] “ornithomimus in dinosaur provincial park sounds trippy”