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A couple years ago, I read and thoroughly enjoyed Lynne Truss‘ book Eats, Shoots & Leaves. It had a very entertaining section about the interrobang, which is the combination of a question mark and exclamation point. How exciting is that!?

A few weeks ago, I read The Word Snoop. The Word Snoop is a quick, easy read. It is about the English language and written by an Australian and intended for children (elementary/primary school), but I, as an American many years removed from school, was able to read it.

I don’t know exactly what I was expecting. Since I had just read an actual mystery/crime novel, perhaps my expectations were skewed. It was mostly a review of things – if you already know what anagrams, palindromes, and pangrams are then you might not be that excited about this book. But the part with the history of letters and English was interesting.

The Word Snoop revisited the interrobang, and also introduced me to the question-comma and exclamation-comma. The best way to explain those is with examples.

It’s about time,! and what took them so long?

or the other way around:

What took them so long,? and it’s about time!

After that, I started wondering what other punctuation could be invented. Other languages already have the upside-down question mark. And someone already proposed a backwards question mark (the irony mark). I contemplated proposing the backwards exclamation point, but I fear that the untrained eye would not be able to distinguish it from a normal exclamation point.

My first new punctuation mark is the semi-semi. We have the existing progression of period (full-stop for you Brits), comma, colon, and semi-colon. The semi-colon is a period above a comma. The next logical step in that sequence would be a comma above a comma. I thought about calling it the comma-comma, but that left me thinking about Culture Club, so I decided against it.

The semi-semi doesn’t fill a need, so it is wandering aimlessly right now. If necessity is the mother of invention, then I have an orphan.

My other new punctuation mark is the colon-semi. It is, of course, a comma above a period. I have found this to be a useful defense against the onslaught of full-stop abuse. Placing periods in between words is bad.

The . Worst . Punctuation . Ever!

A period is a full stop. Placing it between words makes it a pause, not a full stop. For this reason, the colon-semi could also be called “partial stop”. It’s a comma and a period together! It means both a pause and a stop! Hmm, there’s not enough distinction there… It means both full stop and continue! Okay, maybe the advertising needs more work, but you get the point.

The Best Punctuation Ever!

My new punctuation marks are impossible to type right now, as no font files (to my knowledge) include them, nor do they have a reserved spot in Unicode. Feel free to hand-write them until they are supported – not that I have any plans to spend any time lobbying for their inclusion or promoting them to the masses.

I took Beta to a hockey game – just him, no other kids. I had given him a choice of games – football (would have been a college game) or hockey (was a minor league (OHL) game). He chose hockey, so hockey we saw.

We were right on the glass, near the corner where the players make their grand entrance and where the crew (cleanup, ice maintenance, car to be given away, etc.) enter and exit. The first thing we noticed, after we sat down, was that the mascot was standing in the entryway to the ice and was a mere several feet from us.

For most kids that might not be a problem, but Beta is intensely distrustful of mascots, clowns, Santa Clauses, Halloween costumes, etc. So I was very impressed when Beta actually waved to the mascot. I think it helped that there was a significant barrier protecting us from the mascot.

Partway through the first period, a deflected pass went up into the nets that surround the ends of the rink. Since our seats were on the corner and were also the first row, we were under the netting somewhat. The netting was attached to the back of the glass so that if a puck hit the net and rolled down, it would end up in the first row of seats.

And that’s exactly what happened. The guy sitting next to us caught the puck. He was there with his family, so they enjoyed that. Then, a period later, the same thing happened again. The man was so very nice and gracious and offered that puck to Beta, who quickly accepted it. So he got an official game puck and made sure he knew where it was at all times (answer: in my pocket so we wouldn’t lose it).

When we walked into the rink, we had to go past all the vendors. I pointed them out to Beta – “here’s ice cream, do you want any?“, “there’s the food“, “here are roasted almonds, or you can have chocolate-covered pretzels“. Each time, I would ask him if he wanted anything. And each time, he would decline.

After the first period, I asked him again if he wanted anything. And again, he declined. I asked why he didn’t want anything, any dessert here at the game. He said he wanted to wait until we got home so he could have a Tootsie Roll. So I bought myself some roasted almonds. He wouldn’t even try one.

I thought seats on the glass would be fun, and they were. At least for me they were. Beta did not like the checking into the glass. I don’t know if he didn’t trust the Plexiglas-brand acrylic glass or if the noise was too loud, but each time something happened against the boards in front of us, Beta would lean as far back as he could.

Eventually, at his insistence, we moved back a row. That was for the third period. That, coupled with the fact the I couldn’t see much of anything that happened at the other end of the ice, means that when I go back, I want seats at least halfway up. Beta quite enjoyed the game. He said he wants to come back with Alpha next time, but not with Momma.

One last thing to note about the game: they were not just power plays, they were Air Force power plays. Apparently you can sponsor the power plays. At least the face-offs were anonymous.

All in all, it was a good game. It had just about everything one could want in a hockey game – checking, 5-on-4 power plays, a couple of 5-on-3 power plays, a hat trick, a throw-off-the-gloves fight (they both got penalties – 5 for fighting), and Canadians.

Beta fell asleep on the way home, holding his free coloring book and the puck. I think we’re off to a good start. Other children may fall asleep holding their blanket or stuffed animal – mine has his hockey puck.

In cooperation with LaanyKidsMom, here is my entry for this week.

Where did I find joy this week?
At home, with my oldest child

Alpha enjoys reading, laughing at, and then telling jokes. After flipping through a few books at the bookstore, I realized that the joke books he likes right now are the “Silly Riddle” type of books. The other joke books aimed at young children were fine, but he appreciates the word play of the riddles.

Here are a few of our favorite riddles:

Q: How do you put a sliced pizza back together?
A: With tomato paste!

Q: What’s a pig’s favorite sport?
A: Pig-pong!

It’s so fun listening to him tell those jokes because he wants to make sure that you get the joke.

Q: If chickens wake up when the rooster crows, when do ducks wake up?
A: At the quack of dawn.
Then he will emphasize it for you: “Quack of dawn.”

Q: Who steals the soap from the bathtub?
A: The robber ducky.
“Robber, instead of rubber.”

Q: What drink has a cold?
A: Coffee. Cough-ee.
And then he coughs and says “ee“, just so you are sure that “cough” replaces “coff”

New Webpage Announcement: You can now follow the weekly progress of football game-outcome formulae at Some Fun Site.

Background information: Tuesday Morning Quarterback is a column by Gregg Easterbrook, and he touts the generic formula that Home Team Wins (HTW) is a better predictor of who will win any given football game – better than most polls and experts.

His readers have contributed the Isaacson-Tarbell Postulate (ITP), which states that Better Record Wins, and that is even better than HTW. ITP uses HTW as plan B if the teams have the same record, so the winner of any given football game will be the team with the better record or, if their records are equal, the home team.

TMQ usually includes the HTW and ITP results (how accurate they were) near the end of the season. Readers who are interested in the current results, without waiting for TMQ, can find them over at Some Fun Site. This is currently setup for the NFL only. Adding the stats for college football results is a possibility. Whether it is near future or far future has not yet been determined.

We had some birthday parties at our house this past weekend. It was for our extended family (wife’s side), so in-laws and cousins also had some birthdays. Anyone who has a birthday in the fall was a guest of honor. And since some people involved were young boys, the theme was pirates (“And I’ve never walked the gang plank and I’ve never owned a parrot and I’ve never had a birthday in the fall“).

My wife prepared for the parties by buying some Lego molds – one for cakes and one for water (AKA an ice-cube tray).

The cake mold was used to make some cakes – one for each of the children whose birthdays we were celebrating. That would be two boys and one girl.

No, there was not a female version of the standard Lego minifigure. My wife just added some extra pieces of cake to the sides. Frosting covers a multitude of sins.

The ice-cube mold (mould for you Brits) was not used for ice at all. We made chocolates – white chocolate with food coloring (that’s colouring for … oh, never mind) added. It resembles the smaller, plastic bricks quite well. Some people just glanced at them and thought they were plastic pieces added for decoration. They were, of course, pleasantly surprised when we told them they were chocolate. The pieces were about an inch and a half long, in case you need a sense of scale.

There was also ice cream and a trifle. No shortage of desserts here. Oh, and we had dinner before that.

A warning in case you get the same or a similar Lego mold (yes, it was official Lego-brand merchandise): the resulting cake is fragile. One guy’s hand fell off (frosting hid that) and the heads broke off all three cakes (frosting again).

I haven’t frosted very many cakes in my life, and these were difficult to frost. The frosting (that’s icing for… okay, okay, no more) was just the standard frosting, but the cakes were too intricate. The hands were the worst – most of the details got lost and there were so many curves and crevices. And the face… the cake had eyes and a mouth, but those stood no chance of showing through the frosting.

But food coloring and gel decorating tubes made up for any deficiencies in the frosting department. Oh, and my wife did the detail work.

Hey all you WordPress users: are you jealous of people on Blogger who get fancy blogrolls that sort the links in chronological order by most recent post? Do you want the little favicon next to your blogroll links too?

Your wait is over – SBS Blogroll is here.

Okay, maybe it’s not that dramatic. I noticed that my WordPress blog had a boring Links section, so I searched for a widget that would make it better.

I found RSS Blogroll, by Mr. Pants On Head. It did basically what I wanted, but it didn’t look quite right to me. I added a favicon option and also set the blog title to be a link.

Anyway, he did all the hard work – I simply modified it slightly so that it would look more like the Blogger or Blogspot format. If you want to see it in action, just look on the right side of this blog until you see “SBS Blogroll”. That section is my widget his modified widget.

You can visit the SBS Blogroll page to read more about it, including how to setup the thingy. Or click on SBS Blogrollsource to download it directly.