December 14, 2007

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Oxford Commas and Sex Toys? Yes, and Yes

Thanks to a Wikipedia article on one of my favorite grammatical conventions, I learned that the following phrase once appeared in The Times, Britain's paper of record, in a description of a Peter Ustinov documentary:

"[H]ighlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector."

I knew Nelson Mandela was a cool guy, but I had no idea how cool. Well, England, that's what you get for discouraging Oxford commas.

BONUS: "Oxford Comma" is also the title of a delightfully catchy song by the new "it" indie band, Vampire Weekend. They're a bunch of preppy guys (or that is, at least, the image they cultivate) who met at Columbia University, and they keep getting compared to Paul Simon in everything I've ever read about them. I lurve Paul Simon, so obviously, I had to check them out, and their music is really good. So go check them out and listen to "Oxford Comma" on their Myspace page (and then leave Myspace because it's a horrible site for anything other than listening to free tracks).

Posted at December 14, 2007 3:33 AM | Comments (2)


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I love that MySpace finally added alphabetical ordering for friends. It's like they saw the awesomeness of Facebook, thought "Oh, shit, we should make our site useful too!" So they organized things by letter, got drunk, and gave up there.

Thanks for the music tip. I'll check them out when I'm not at work.

Posted by: Jacob at December 14, 2007 9:37 AM


Oh, God I hate Myspace. Horrible, horrible site. From a web design perspective, it's even worse than it is from a user experience perspective. And I still get error messages every ten clicks or so. You'd think they were using Dreamhost or something.

Posted by: Barzelay at December 14, 2007 3:22 PM

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