Sunday, June 05, 2011

Whither The Wondering Show?

Someone was telling me I should do a "wonderful" show since there "must be a lot of songs using the word 'wonderful' shouldn't there?" (Incidentally, I'm not sure those were the person's exact words, but it seemed to be more forceful if not more believable to put the statement in quotes.) It's true, I found approximately four million songs with the title "wonderful" alone. (The Allmusic Guide lists over eight hundred but compared with the amazing set-up we have around here, they're amateurs.) (Amateurs that make more money than we do.) (I shouldn't feel bad about that because Self Help Radio is a labor of love.) (Also a labor of self-loathing.)

I have just received a telegram from Grammar Control that says I have already used up my June allotment of parenthetical expressions. That seems unfair. I am appealing the decision & I have something interesting to add but if I put it in a sentence right next to the interesting statement it wouldn't make any sense but I have no more parentheses left. I also wish I had invested in Emoticons. But I chose not to click that box when I signed up for the blog.

Being a contrary sort - to get back to what I was saying - I decided against a "wonderful" show but was intrigued by the idea of wondering. I wondered what a show about wondering would be like - & I also figured out that if you use dashes instead of parentheses, you can still have grammatical structures that resembled parenthetical expressions but weren't - I guess Emily Dickinson used a lot of dashes - instead of parentheses - & there are some people that have called that genius - so I recall something my mother never said to me, which wasn't, "If you can't be a genius, stand close to a genius & hope for osmosis."

Grammar Central has ordered me to cease & also desist from overuse of the dashes until they can make a formal ruling. Which is a shame because they don't meet for formal rulings until the fall. I wonder if I'll get in trouble if I don't cease & desist? What if I just cease but don't desist? Or vice-versa?

Best not fuck with Grammar Central. They could recall my accent collection.

But there's nothing wrong with wondering.

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