I feel duty bound, as a grammar nazi wannabe, that "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" is itself riddled with grammatical errors.

I've got Phil Stanford's book on Portland's seemy past on my bedside table. Reports when available...

Is it riddled with errors from an American point of view (to those who haven't read it, the author is a wonderfully condescending Brit). I enjoyed reading it and saw a couple things that made me scratch my head, but just chalked it up to the whole across the pond thing.

And, speaking of book reviews, The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge : A Desk Reference for the Curious Mind is amazing! Anything that covers everything from ancient architecture to parts of speech in uder 1000 pages is impressive. I'll probably never complete it but, hey, it is a desk reference.

Well, I'm shamelessly parroting what I read in the New Yorker. I, of course, wouldn't know a gerund from a pile of participles. All I really know is what I read in Garner's book.

I have the time to ponder reading it, just not the time to actually read it. And the only reason I have time to ponder reading it it because I am on vacation. My job dispells any potential notions of such nonsense (just because I stay so busy).

I've forgotten what snarky fun that review is. Listen:

"I am not a grammarian," Truss says. No quarrel there. Although she has dug up information about things like the history of the colon, Truss is so uninterested in the actual rules of punctuation that she even names the ones she flouts—for example, the rule that semicolons cannot be used to set off dependent clauses.... That is the rule, she explains, but she violates it frequently. She thinks this makes her sound like Virginia Woolf. And she admits that her editors are continually removing the commas that she tends to place before conjunctions.

For pure snark, you won't find a more entertaining review. Which is, I suppose, the best reason to read the book, too--comparison. Enjoy.

I actually went and bought "Faithful" today. The most amazing part is that I actually noticed the cover today -- which is the picture of Veritek shoving A-Rod at the aforementioned game.

I politics they say timing is everything. The same seems to be true in ski conditions. Last week when I was at Heavenly they had less than two feet of snow at the base. This week it snowed 8 feet! I guess my timing was off by a week. Ah well.