For The Record.

Yesterday was National Punctuation Day.

I suppose those of you excited by that might have stated it more emphatically, "yesterday was national punctuation day!"

I stink at punctuation. I have unpaid editors who shall remain nameless (fake sneeze Harlan/Amy) who regularly correct my punctuation errors.

National Punctuation Day has a long history having been established way back in 2004 by the owner of a newsletter called Put It In Writing who became tired of noticing errors found in stuff he read. The idea being to call attention to the proper use of punctuation.

I once took a summer school class in college...a literature class - which by the way is a huge mistake since it requires you to read massive amounts of material and what's worse retain what you read - something I was not particularly good at then or now, but especially then.

Anyway, I wrote my first paper for the class, which was due on the third or fourth day of summer school - after we had read 8 or 9 novels - and I thought it was pretty good for a guy who was quasi-sober. The teacher looked at the first line and scrawled a big red "F" on the paper and handed it back. She never read the content. She said I misplaced a comma.

I've never been good with commas...but I've been even worse with dictatorial, power crazed, ego maniacs and after a very short discussion in which proper grammar grew increasingly less important we came to a mutual agreement that I would no longer be in her class. I came to some other conclusions about her which I recall mentioning to the other students on the way out which also cemented the deal regarding my departure.

On a brighter note, National Punctuation Day did remind me of my favorite Peanuts cartoon and I searched the Internet hoping to find it...what good is this Internet thing if you can't find copyrighted material to steal when you need it?

In the comic strip either Charlie or Linus is writing home from "camp" and it reads something like: Dear Mom? and Dad? Today at camp? was great? We learned how? to use question marks?

Love?
Charlie?

That's all I'm going to say about National Punctuation Day


Yes, I didn't put a period at the end of that last sentence simply to drive a few of you nuts.