get; your! #punctuation-- right.,. %

Someone recently asked my favorite joke, and here's my reply:

I don't know that I have a favorite joke, but this has always been a standby:
"A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.
'Why?' asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
'Well, I'm a panda', he says, at the door. 'Look it up.'
The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. 'Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.'"

And I looked that joke up to make sure I didn't miss anything, and found it on this page, which includes this sentence about a book on grammar: "There is one chapter each on apostrophes and on commas; one on semicolons and colons; one on exclamation marks, question marks, and quotation marks, italic type, dashes, brackets, ellipses, and emoticons; and one on hyphens." W... T... H. It. would kill. the author to, know, that this badly; punctuated. sentence! is used, to describe her-- book. And if it's not weird enough that someone wrote a book with each punctuation mark getting a whole chapter, THERE'S A WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE ABOUT EACH ONE. Do people seriously not have better things to do? I mean, Wikipedia is updated by anyone in the general public. So it goes like this:

"Hi hon, what'd you do today?"

"Oh, cleaned up breakfast, got things ready for our trip this weekend, and spent the majority of the day clearing up any mental confusion anyone might have about semicolons. I mean, did you hear Mr. Whither's use of the semicolon at dinner last night? Scary, isn't it? I've still got goosebumps. I'm feeling overworked and the kicker is that Wikipedia doesn't even pay. And I've got the pieces about question marks, ellipses, and italic type only in unpublished rough draft form... you're gonna have to drive tomorrow, love, since it's looking like another all-nighter. And I invented a game we can play while driving-- let's play right now sweetie, try to put one of each of the punctuation marks into the fewest sentences. Get 'em all into one sentence, you win. Yes, smarty, an English sentence."

I re-read that, and why did I say mental confusion? As opposed to what? Extremity confusion? "My foot's been kinda confused, doc. I try to put my foot down on an issue that I believe strongly in, and end up being very agreeable. And don't even get me started on the process of walking."

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That took so much time, I have to share it on my blog. And yes, I have nothing better to do than sit around and mock those with nothing better to do. Shmucks. Maybe that's what haves/have-nots refers to-- those who have something better to do and those who have not something better to do.

And no, I'm not an odd duck, but I play one on TV.