National Punctuation Day is “a celebration of the lowly comma, correctly used quotation marks, and other proper uses of periods, semicolons, and the ever-mysterious ellipsis,” says a description on the National Punctuation Day website. Founder Jeff Rubin has a haiku contest to commemorate the marks that make the meaning of our words clear to everyone. [...]
July 5, 2010
The Bulwer-Lytton award is given annually for the worst first sentence of a novel. Contestants craft deliberately bad opening lines. Molly Ringle took the 2010 prize with this gem: For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss — a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and [...]
June 26, 2010
The summer’s blockbuster films keep coming every weekend, assailing us with men of iron, ogres, toy cowboys and Cheshire cats. But somecinephiles are already looking ahead to next summer, especially with the recent release of the very short trailer for “The Smurfs.” Those famous blue cartoon characters (and their memorable theme song) sparked a thought: What the smurf is a [...]
June 21, 2010
A study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association says that smokers with greater amounts of Vitamin B6 may be less likely to develop lung cancer. The findings are preliminary, but have caused a lot of excitement. Behind the promising health news is a great question: Why are vitamins named with various letters and numbers? Does the letter match the name of [...]
June 16, 2010
CALGARY — It had all the makings of a perfect crime. The culprits hid their valuables, from jewelry to electronics, smashed windows and even made faux bad-guy footprints before calling police. Unfortunately, for those who hoped to foil authorities, Const. Charanjit Meharu was among those to arrive at the alleged break-and-enter scene. When the purported [...]
May 28, 2010
Web search engines make our lives easier: They connect us with what we’re searching for in a matter of seconds, and sometimes they bring us to places we didn’t even know we were looking for. But they can also teach us a lot about ourselves, as more than half of adult internet users already know. [...]
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September 25, 2010
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