Things have clearly changed since 1992. The Princeton Review has rated Virginia Tech as having the best campus food, based on student evaluations. When I was at Tech, notions such as a taco bar were seen as radical and about the best we could expect — after all, the campus catering service’s primary customers were state prisons.
The picture frame was a freebie gift at Blizzcon. I imagine they’ll start selling them on Blizzard’s online store at some point, if they haven’t already.
On the Media had a good piece this weekend on the dissolution of TimesSelect. The argument given on the show is that Google News and the like can’t see firewalled content, meaning fewer readers and thus fewer eyeballs for ads. At the end of the day, ad revenue outweighed subscription revenue. I still see a value in requiring registration, but I hope that the NYT’s experience (and the rumored end of the Wall Street Journal’s pay-only content) influences every other news site out there.
This is what the Internet is for: Making fun of unnecessary quotation marks.
From the AP:
Isn’t it “funny” how something can “really annoy” you for ages and then you discover via “the Internet” that the same thing “really annoys” thousands of “other people,” too?
Yes, AP writer, it is “funny!”
The blight that Bethany Keeley exposes on her “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks (http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com ) is of a benign sort, of course, nothing like global warming or endangered wildlife.
But it bothers people mightily just the same, as this 24-year-old grad student and language-lover has discovered from the hundreds, occasionally thousands of visitors she gets daily. And nary a day goes by when she doesn’t receive a bunch of e-mails with photographic evidence of quote abuse, misuse or overuse.
As in:
-The sign in Fletcher, Okla., which advertised a tractor club’s ANNUAL SHOW — “Labor Day Weekend.”
-The restaurant billboard in Madison, Wis., which felt the need to put quotes around “Lunch” and “Dinners.”
-The bathroom sign that asked visitors to Leave the Light “On” during business hours. (“On” was also underlined. Twice.)
-The currently featured “Good Luck Amy” cake, which not only wastes frosting on those quote marks, but also adds parentheses around the whole message.
There’s also a regular stop sign with a handwritten “Stop” beneath it, for good measure apparently. Then there’s the security guard at a rest area in Mississippi, a “SECURITY GUARD” sign beneath him that unwittingly casts doubt on the whole enterprise.
It’s official: Rain or shine, the Hesperia Days parade is on. Look for me, Peter and Sharon doing our best beauty queen waves tomorrow morning as we roll down Main Street.
