Where’s the Seesaw?

There was a sweet little piece in The New York Times about an MTA ad in the subway remarkable for its impeccably correct use of the semicolon:

It was nearly hidden on a New York City Transit public service placard exhorting subway riders not to leave their newspaper behind when they get off the train.

“Please put it in a trash can,” riders are reminded. After which Neil Neches, an erudite writer in the transit agency’s marketing and service information department, inserted a semicolon. The rest of the sentence reads, “that’s good news for everyone.”

The piece also includes the tragic-but-true sentence “Americans, in particular, prefer shorter sentences without, as style books advise, that distinct division between statements that are closely related but require a separation more prolonged than a conjunction and more emphatic than a comma.”

Alas, the poor semicolon. Seems like serial killers are among the few who use it properly. What? That’s right; the Times also lets us know that “David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam serial killer who taunted police and the press with rambling handwritten notes, was, as the columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote, the only murderer he ever encountered who could wield a semicolon just as well as a revolver.”

At least the next time I am assaulted in the subway by the random capitalization in Dr. Z’s ads (”Now YOU can have beautiful clear Skin!”), I can take small comfort in knowing that Neil Neches is hard at work at the MTA, keeping their ad copy in line.

What I loved most about this story is the correction that ran after the article first appeared:

Correction: February 19, 2008
An article in some editions on Monday about a New York City Transit employee’s deft use of the semicolon in a public service placard was less deft in its punctuation of the title of a book by Lynne Truss, who called the placard a “lovely example” of proper punctuation. The title of the book is “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” — not “Eats Shoots & Leaves.” (The subtitle of Ms. Truss’s book is “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.”)

I’ve been going a little crazy with the baking this season. First I made a batch of Martha Stewart’s cashew-caramel cookies. She nicely drizzled the caramel over the top; I just painted the whole thing with gooey goodness. Yum!

Then I made some Swedish ginger cookies. The secret ingredient? Bacon fat! Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. These were great.

After that it was a batch of Earl Grey cookies (Martha again), then some taralles, an old Italian specialty.

One thing was missing: Swedish coffee bread. It’s a sweet bread, often made this time of the year. My mom made the best, and I followed her recipe a few times, though not with the same success. It was a chore, I’ll tell you. Putting the cardamom pods inside a towel and pounding them with a hammer. Knuckle-busting kneading. The endless wait while it rose.

Sadly, I lost her recipe. So I dug around on that Interwebnet thingy and found another. This one, however, is a lot simpler. (I made a few minor changes to the original.)

¾ cup milk
¼ cup butter
1 egg
1/3 cup sugar
½ teaspoon salt
3 cups flour
1 packet active yeast
1 T. cardamom

1. Heat milk and butter in microwave till butter melts and milk is warm.
2. Meanwhile, fill a mixing bowl with the other ingredients.
3. Add warm milk and melted butter; mix until you have a sort of stiff dough.
4. Divide dough into 3 sections. Roll into equal strips, about 1 foot long. Cover with a clean cloth and let rest for 10-15 minutes
5. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
6. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Place the dough strips on the sheet and braid. Mix 1 egg with 1 T. water. Brush the top of the loaf with this egg wash, then sprinkle generously with granulated sugar. Cover with plastic and let rest in a warm area for 40 minutes to 1 hour.
7. Bake at 350 degrees for 18-20 minutes, until the bottom is brown, the top is golden, and it sound hollowish when thumped with a finger.
8. Remove from oven and let cool on rack. Who am I kidding? Rip a hunk off and eat it while it’s still hot. Try to contain yourself and not wolf down the whole loaf so there’s some left when your S.O. gets home from work.

The result (minus the end hunk I wolfed down):

How many commercials have you seen that use home movies — whether authentic or faked — and classic old music to elicit some kind of emotion from you, in hopes that you’ll buy a product? Lots. In fact, you probably couldn’t even begin to count them.

So let me point you in the direction of some authentic home movies with a cool old song that some guy put up on YouTube. It just might make you feel something real. Go here and watch. Then dig out that old footage your relatives shot.

[via Metafilter]

This video of a baby in a car seat driving through a tunnel is incredibly creepy.

[via a garden of varied delights]

Perhaps this is what Charlie Brown would put up each year if he’d become an English major in college.

[via swissmiss]

Ever wonder what those old buildings on your money look like in real life? Well, here’s the bills and the buildings at the same time:

The photographer who took these writes:

I check in, freshen up, and figure I’ll walk to downtown to get a feel for the city - DC is one of those mythic places - a bit like Vegas, actually - where the thing it’s most famous for is not really representative of the city itself or where ‘real’ people live. So I stroll down Connecticut Ave to Dupont, seeing some of ‘neighborhood’ DC, and eventually make it to the White House.

As I pass one of the buildings on the way, can’t remember which one, I remember something that I read in the “Irreverent Guide To Washington DC” about the Treasury building being the one on the $10 note… I suddenly realize that the building that I’m actually looking at, the White House, is also on a US note… Huh, what’s on the others? I fumble in my pockets and find a $1 - boring - then a $5 and $10 and $20 - gosh, the’re all… here!

Go to his Flickr site to read the rest, and see some other nice photos.

Without a doubt the best Guinness ad you’ll ever see (if not one of the best ads you’ll ever see) can be found here.

The ad basically turned the remote mountain village in Argentina where it was shot into a giant, rattle-trap Rube Goldberg device. It starts with falling dominoes, progresses to knocked-over pieces of furniture, really gets rolling with burning haystacks, and concludes with an ingenious final shot we won’t spoil for you.

Don’t miss it! [via Very Short List]

The other day I ate a sandwich while sitting next to the Irish Hunger Memorial.

Here is the cover to XTC’s second album, titled XTC’s Go 2:

Don’t know if the album is any good, but the cover is great. It was designed by Hipgnosis, a British firm that designed some of the most famous album covers ever. Such as:

and:

and:

Guess they’d had enough of making great images, and decided that if a picture is worth 1,000 words, then they’d come up with a cover worth 450,000 pictures. Oh, the irony.

[via Sleevage, a nice little site that looks at not just classic record covers, but contemporary ones also. What, you don’t download the album cover too when you’re stealing your music? Your iPod is sad.]

There’s some guy named Davey. Davey has an iPod. Davey has a Canon PowerShot. Davey goes somewhere. Davey turns on his iPod. Davey dances. Davey films himself.

In this case Davey is on the Brooklyn Bridge, and the song is Ace Frehley’s “New York Groove.”

Go over to Vimeo and watch the video. Guaranteed to put a smile on your face and a spring in your step. And if, like me, you’re lucky enough to live in New York City, it will remind you that no matter how tired you can get of this place sometimes, there’s really nowhere else you’d rather be.