Exercise

Dot Dot Dot (Also: 4.7 miles!)

September 18, 2009
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Back in the day, the San Francisco Chronicle had a columnist named Herb Caen. With the exception of eight years or so in the 50′s when he jumped ship for the Examiner, he wrote a daily column for the Chronicle from the 30′s until he died in 1997. He’s the one that invented the word beatnik. He called what he did “3 dot journalism.” As you know, because you followed the convenient link provided above, he called it that because his column was usually just a long series of short comments or news items or intimations of coming news items, broken up by a series of ellipses. (Good extra credit question: “What is the punctuation we usually refer to as dotdotdot really called?” ) It finally dawned on me today that that is where Twitter stole their idea from. (D’oh! Sentence ending with a preposition!) Good Tweeters (it’s really difficult for me to even type that “word”) are channeling the spirit of Herb Caen. I haven’t done any research, (I did use to read his column fairly regularly), but I would bet that in at least one or more columns he wrote about what he had for lunch. Also where

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Oh Raffle King, Oh Raffle King…

(Sung — way off key, and sort of warbley — to the tune of “Oh Christmas Tree.”) I guess we need to talk about the King. On Wednesdays, after we go over the vocabulary homework, and discuss the words, I give them a vocabulary pretest. If they ace it (100%), they are exempt from the vocabulary portion of the Friday test. I used to have one of them flip a coin to decide whether or not I let them use their “cheat sheet” — the homework page we just went over and corrected — on the pretest. What they don’t believe when I tell them — even though it’s true — is that, on average, their scores on the pretest are lower when they use the cheat sheets, and fewer of them get an exemption. But they like to think it’s a security blanket, so I play along. Then I discovered the King. I would give you the URL of his creator’s web site, but he has some other, shall we say, inappropriate shtuff. (You can do a Google search if you really want to check it out.) So I took the liberty of “cloning” the King. If you click [...]

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Mr. Coward has been teaching on the beautiful central coast of California since 1989.

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