Thursday, July 26, 2007

Harry Potter and the Missing 300-Fucking-Pages

Today at work we got to talking about the Harvard/Oxford/Serial comma, as opposed to the Serial coma, I guess. Which would be the suck.

A Harvard Comma is when a comma is used before a grammatical conjuction, which is 99% and, but it can also be or. It's used to disambiguate, which would be like "I'm going to the store today to pick up basil, beer, and soda" as opposed to "I'm going to the store today to pick up basil, beer and soda".

Nine out of ten style guides agree that when you don't use the Harvard comma, God kills a kitten.
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I've picked up Harry Pooter again because apparently in the middle of the book somewhere (in some copies) there's about 300 pages missing. It's a toss-up between worrying that I'll have to read these off of ED and wondering if I have a collectable- the good news though, is that there are prolly too many to really match up to, say, an upside down stamp print.
But while I'm still un-drugged and elephant tranq'd, I'm trying to get through The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.

I'm on Part 2 now, when Yambo has gone to his childhood home away from Milan, to collect himself. Comics and articles from his childhood are making him remember these flashes of memory, or "flames" to go back to the title, and he's starting to recognize more than just common knowledge.

The book is brutally practical sometimes, especially when Yambo talks about shitting in the vineyard, but it really keeps the dreamy style of writing from getting boring.
It reads like a mystery, and yeah, I'm absolutely ga-ga over it.

Wish me luck tomorrow!

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