One: Welcome back, Big Red. Haven’t seen heard you in awhile.  Still not clear on the indoor voice concept, I see hear. Someday you’ll get the attention you need, I hope, for all our ears’ sakes. And as for your choice of Halloween garb, God, it literally killed me to keep my mouth shut. But I’m pretty sure I don’t want to ever register on your radar screen as anything more than background clutter.

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Two. *In best gravelly Charleton-Heston-Planet-of-the-Apes voice* Damn you Chicago Style Manual! Damn you all to Hell!

*resuming normal voice* Actually I have nothing against the Chicago Style; style is often nothing but a matter of arbitrary choice, but a necessary one for the sake of consistency across a publication. It is just that every pub I’ve ever wrote and/or edited for, until now, used AP Style. Damn, it sure is hard to get used to after two decades of AP Style … serial commas … argh.

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P.S. Not sure why I bothered to Technorati tag serial commas. Surely no one would ever blog abut serial commas but journalism nerds, and we’re a fairly rare breed, in these Internet End Times.

Post P.S. How cool is WordPress that it knows the < in the above text is supposed to be just that, and not a code tag? I thought I was going to have to code that by hand, but I previewed it and viola! I should have upgraded a long time ago.

Technorati Tags: Chicago Style Manual, serial commas