Carrtoones

Fun fact: Chaucer is the only class I ever dropped in college. I didn't declare my English major until halfway through my junior year so I had three semester to read approximately 7,004 books, and Chaucer had to be painfully translated from Hobbit language to real language before you could read it and it took TOO MUCH TIME and everyone who tells you it's worth it because it rewards you with stories of saucy Medieval sexiness has obviously never read a way-sexier-than-Chaucer leaflet about chlamydia. I mean chlayemeadiaeaeaea. Translate THAT, Chaucer-lovers!

But English is three languages stacked in a trench coat, so who are we to make snarquerie?

#EnglishMajorHumor

#IambicPentameter4Evah

Poor Deplorable Diane

She’s neither almost halfway to understanding math nor almost halfway to writing sentences that represent rudimentary American English. She should really go back to her country so we can build a wall to keep her kind out.

I'm OK

"The Iowa Public Radio fall fund drive is over."

The nine most beautiful words in the English language.

I just had a conversation with someone—unfortunately, I can’t remember whom—about Chaucer—I’m not a fan; he is—but this cartoon is for you, mystyrie Chaucer lyker, whoevre you arre:

Cake I like

1. I just left the 150th anniversary celebration/reunion of alumni of the University of Iowa’s Daily Iowan newspaper

2. Which has been and continues to be one of the country’s foremost influential and innovation-vanguard college newspapers
3. With AP accreditation and everything
4. As you might have inferred from my use of the word alumni in point 1, I worked there when I attended the University of Iowa
5. First as a copy editor
6. Which means proofreading and fact-checking nerd
7. Then as copy desk editor
8. Which means head proofreading and fact-checking nerd
9. I got paid to correct people’s grammar
10. And brutally curtail their garish use of excessive, showy punctuation
11. Grammar. Nerd. Power. Trip.
12. Though this probably explains why I’m single and living in my parents’ basement at the age of 50
13. And destined to die alone
14. I also wrote a weekly grammar column for the Daily Iowan
15. Seriously
16. It was called "That Grammar Guy"
17. The name was inspired by the TV show That Girl
18. I am not making this up
19. It used bizarre humor, recurring characters—including a cat named Xanthippe—and my own—hopefully funny—mnemonic devices to explain English grammar
20. Xanthippe was Socrates’ wife
21. But I used the name because I thought it was funny and not for its ties to any concept of learning
22. Mnemonic means "memory-aiding"
23. The m is silent
24. The first one, I mean
25. You’re welcome
26. Anyway ...
27. "That Grammar Guy" ran in the Daily Iowan every Monday for two years
28. I got fan mail
29. Mostly from foreign students who were struggling to learn our crazy-ass melting-pot language
30. I also reviewed theater, music and dance for the Daily Iowan
31. So my work there was both nerdy and gay
32. In my capacity as copy desk editor, I hired my brilliant and delightful friend Annette
33. I got to sit next to her at tonight’s dinner
34. Where it occurred to me that everyone in the room—and every career path we represented—was there based on an intricate genealogy of hiring decisions
35. Mind. Blown.
36. I also sat by my friend Tad, who is at least four years younger than I am
37. We didn’t work together at the DI, so I have no proof that he wasn’t at tonight’s dinner just for the pork and the really delicious ranch dressing
38. Speaking of, I didn’t notice until after I sat at our table that each seat had been pre-assigned a random dessert selection
39. I’m glad I accidentally sat in front of the chocolate cake, because it was insanely delicious
40. I noticed early on that Annette probably wasn’t going to finish hers, and I will go to my grave regretting that I did not ask her if I could have it if she was done ignoring its insane deliciousness
41. My running buddy Rob was also at our table but he left before the evening’s program was over so I barred him from being in our post-program group selfie
42. Long-lost friend Jamie wasn’t at our table but he came over to say hi after the program so he’s my new selfie buddy in place of Leavin’ Rob
43. The keynote speaker for the program was a man who hadn’t given me a job right after I’d graduated from college
44. EVEN THOUGH WE WERE BOTH IN THE ETERNAL BROTHERHOOD OF THE IOWAN THAT IS DAILY
45. But he told a story about marketing tampons to young Russian women tonight, so I guess it’s time I forgave and forgot
46. Tampons
47. Russian women
48. Yes, THAT old cliché
49. So there was this one guy who wrote editorials at the DI when I was there
50. Dark hair, lean, handsome, smart, old-money patrician air
51. Did I mention handsome?
52. This might surprise you given the dearth of hints I’ve provided leading up to this bombshell, but I had a huge crush on him
53. Especially on the days when he wore shorts
54. The crush was so eternal and all-consuming that I’ve completely forgotten his name by now
55. But obviously not his legs
56. This did not stop me, however, from hoping he’d be there tonight
57. And that we’d flirt awkwardly
58. Which is the only way I know how to
59. And then we’d totally make out
60. Oops. Did I just say that?
61. And then instead of sitting here typing this endless post, I’d be marrying him in the DI newsroom
62. With everyone at the reunion cheering for us
63. And fighting each other for exclusive coverage of our wedding
64. (We are all newspaper people, of course)
65. And, of course, in this scenario I’d also get Annette’s leftover cake
66. Plus everyone else’s
67. Because I’m one of the grooms and DON’T RUIN MY BIG DAY BY EATING ALL MY CAKE, PEOPLE
68. Sheesh
69. Journalism people, amirite?
70. Anyway, I didn’t see anyone there tonight who looked like him
71. But none of the guys had any legs out for inspection
72. So here I sit, writing this long-ass post instead
73. Which I’d kinda hoped would stretch to 150 points
74. Because it’s the 150th anniversary of the paper
75. But no

Cake I like

When your 50 and your a writer and you’re mom was an English teacher, she of course orders you a chalkboard birthday cake framed in homonyms and conjugations:

When your April birthday is in the middle of winter, your mom of course makes both tulip cookies and snowman cookies:

My mom—along with the rest of my family—totally gets me.

#HowToTurn50

I read Flesh and Blood by Michael Cunningham years ago in a book club in Chicago

Even though I was an English major in college I'd pretty much lost all interest in reading fiction by then -- and still to this day -- preferring instead to bury myself in books about social science and American and European history. But I DEVOURED this book for our book club. Then a couple years later I devoured it again. And for some reason, something reminded me of it a couple weeks ago. Then I had an opportunity to bring it up in a conversation soon afterward. And now I want to devour it a third time. If I still own my original copy, it's currently filed away in one of more boxes than I can count in my climate-controlled storage locker across town. So I ordered another copy and it arrived last week. And I can't wait to devour it again -- and since I've decided to forgo being in shows all summer so I can focus on training for all the Running Away From Being 50 races I want to do, I'm also going to attack the piles of books I've purchased over the last few years but have yet to even alphabetize by author on my shelves. Because that's how I roll.

Anyway, in Flesh and Blood Cunningham crafts a richly complex family narrative that germinates literally from the imagination of an eight-year-old boy as he plays in his father's garden in pre-war Greece. That boy -- mightily named Constantine Stassos -- eventually emigrates to America, marries an Italian immigrant, and becomes the imperious and by degrees powerless patriarch of an expanding family dynasty whose story is told both as a beautifully messy, eminently human drama and as a faceted metaphor for the American Dream filtered through a prism of post-war immigration, the uncertain but dogged progress of cultural assimilation, and the inconstantly evolving boundaries of familial love and obligation. It's as engrossing as it is complex, and as beautiful as it is essentially American.

Suck it, business majors!

You will LEARN YOUR GRAMMAR!

My mom grew up in an era where apparently grammar was a blood sport, brutal playground violence was passively dismissed as "having things done to us" teachable moments and multiple pronouns led inevitably to multiple concussions. Naturally, she became an English teacher.

Her childhood "Grammar Can Be Fun" death treatise eventually landed in my impressionable autodidactic orbit, where I couldn't tear my eyes away from dead cockroach-ogres named Ain't and racist caricatures of Chinamen named Ing and inkblotty little spider-people who were doomed page after page to suffer horrifyingly violent deaths at the hands of invisible sharp-shooting hitmen who beaned them into broken, disfigured blots of catastrophic medical trauma using blood-red balls the size of their heads, or what was eventually left of them.

The book filled my young, sponge-like mind simultaneously with nightmarish horror; a lack of inspiration to draw any better than an alcoholic third-grader; and a damn-the-infidels, take-no-prisoners zealotry for parallel verbs, drafty kerning and horribly racist gerunds.

But it made me the man I am today: a needless-punctuation-eschewing, shameless-vocabulary-flaunting, always-silently-judging, endlessly-trump-mocking lapsed grammar columnist and grammatically conscientious tweeter who obsessively re-edits Facebook posts and who can't bring himself to forward even the most brilliant of memes if they contain negligible punctuation errors.

Oh -- and I also write stuff for a living.