The comma is a very useful punctuation mark enabling the writer to make their point much more clearly and avoid confusion. I have read passages where, due to the lack of a comma, the meaning was ambiguous.

I do not have hard-and-fast rules for commas. My guiding principle is to ask myself whether it adds to the clarity or the rhythm of the sentence. Typically I use them to separate ideas or lists of objects or, in the case of a long sentence, insert parenthetical remarks, as I just did.

But there are others who overdo it, as in the passage below. (Ignore the various typos and spacing errors because this looks like it was written in a rush and not proof-read before printing.)

Well,I decided to get up early,at my central London Hotel, and walk,my dog,until breakfast time.

No sooner had I got out the holtels front doors, my dog ,got spooked by the door man,and consequently, I stopped in my stride, causing the young man behind me ,to bump in to me.

Obviously I immediately opologized,and said” sorry my dog got spooked.

The guy bend down,to say hello to her,and she was taken by his kindness.

Most of those commas are unnecessary and make the meaning more obscure. Here is my rewrite, where I have eliminated eleven of the fourteen commas.

Well,I decided to get up early at my central London Hotel and walk my dog until breakfast time.

No sooner had I got out the holtels front doors, my dog got spooked by the door man and consequently I stopped in my stride, causing the young man behind me to bump in to me.

Obviously I immediately opologized and said” sorry my dog got spooked.

The guy bend down to say hello to her and she was taken by his kindness.

Much clearer, no? Definitely a case where less is more.

A pizza delivery man risked his life to save five children from a burning house. He saw the house on fire while driving past and stopped. After entering through a back door and walking four of them out, he learned that another child was still inside so he went back in, broke a second floor window, and climbed out with the child, hurting his arm and getting burns.

In a recent post, I wrote about my dislike of people taking risks with their lives because there exists an audience for it, and how this can lead to tragedy. It is bad enough when this happens to adults who have trained for the act and take precautions. They are taking calculated risks and even making a living from doing so. But the problem is that in an era of social media, we find young people taking dangerous risks and streaming their efforts in return for the remote possibility of becoming famous, however fleetingly, and without thinking things through or having any backup plan if things should go wrong.

The phenomenon of ‘TikTok’ challenges, where someone comes up with some risky action and others take up the challenge and pass it on, have resulted in numerous cases of this, the more famous ones being the ice bucket challenge and the milk crate challenge, the latter leading to some serious injuries.
[Read more…]

A stuntman has died during a performance.

Chris Darnell, 40, was driving the “Shockwave Jet Truck” while racing two planes during the Field of Flight Airshow in Battle Creek. The truck, capable of reaching speeds of up to 300 MPH, crashed during the maneuver and flipped off the runway. Darnell died at the scene.

The Shockwave Jet Truck show is a family-run business that travels the nation performing at airshows and events. Chris’ father, Neal Darnell, is also a driver and pilot. He posted a note on the company’s Facebook page, “We are so sad. Just one month ago Chris turned 40. He was so well-loved by everyone who knew him. Chris so loved the air show business. He was living the dream’.”

There are some jobs that are necessarily dangerous but need to be done. But then there are people (tight rope walkers, trapeze artists, etc.) who enjoy doing things that put their lives at risk just for the entertainment of others. There must be something about risking death that they find exhilarating. There are also people who get vicarious pleasure from watching other people take risks. Hence it is inevitable that given the existence of an audience willing to pay to watch them, the risk takers have an incentive to take it up as a career and do it again and again, sometimes raising the risk level.

I am very risk-averse. I also do not enjoy watching other people take risks just for my enjoyment. Hence I never watch live performances of people who do such things. I did not like circuses as a child because I always worried about people falling from a height or getting attacked by ferocious animals, as sometimes happens. As a child, I wished to avoid the horror of seeing such a thing. As an adult, a new concern has been added. I feel that I would be complicit if such a tragedy should occur because without an audience, some of those people would not have done those things in the first place.

Maybe because of my love of puns and other forms of wordplay, my brain, whenever it encounters any ambiguity in a sentence due to its construction or punctuation, immediately seizes upon the more bizarre meaning, rather than settling on the more reasonable interpretation. Take for example this story about fish falling from the sky.

Fish are falling from the sky in parts of San Francisco, and a boom in coastal anchovy populations is to blame. 

Reddit user sanfrannie posted earlier this month that about a dozen 8-inch silver fish “rained down from the sky” onto their friend’s roof and back deck in the Outer Richmond. Several other users commented with similar experiences — one person said they “heard a whoosh sound behind me and heard a massive splat” before seeing fish scattered on a nearby driveway. Another commented that they “almost got hit by a fish waiting for a bus” in the Castro, and a third person said they assumed “a band of roving kids were doing a Tik Tok sardine-throwing challenge on a roof somewhere” after seeing several fish fall onto an Outer Richmond sidewalk.

Local fishers and researchers are blaming seabirds that, because of an explosion in the anchovy population off the coast of the Bay Area, now have more fish than they know what to do with.

My attention was caught by the line about someone saying that they “almost got hit by a fish waiting for a bus”. My thoughts went along the lines of: Why was the fish waiting for a bus? Was it in order to get back to the ocean? What did this person do to the fish that it tried to hit them? How does a fish hit someone anyway? With its tail? Its fins?

That is the way my brain works. Newspaper headlines are often my biggest source of raw material because their enforced brevity makes them ripe for misinterpretation for warped minds like mine.

Despite its massive population that is second only to China, India has achieved very modest success in international athletics. This documentary from Al Jazeera looks at a program that seeks to identify promising young athletes in remote tribal areas and then groom them for success at the national and international levels. The documentary focuses on two of them Ravikaran and Nayana. Usain Bolt has been the inspiration for them.

But it is more than about athletics. The success of young people brings about larger changes in their communities. Ravikaran is from a small community known as Siddis who are believed to be descended from slaves from Africa brought to India by the Portuguese, something I had not known about before. They suffer from the same racial and color prejudice that the US is familiar with.

Nayana is from a different community that is also underprivileged. Her success (she was selected to attend an elite coaching program in the US) has opened the eyes of her traditional-minded community and made them realize that girls should have equal access to education and athletics.

I returned late Tuesday night from visiting with my grandchildren and I had an absolutely wonderful time. The two boys are 5 and 2 ½ and a lot of fun, curious and energetic. The only downside was that on the morning after my return I threw up and had a slight fever. Naturally, my first thought was that I had got covid but the test turned out to be negative. Then the following day, my temperature was back to normal and a second covid test also showed negative. Since I had no other symptoms at all, I think I had got food poisoning on the trip home.

It was my first flight in over two years thanks to the pandemic and I was reminded once again what a terrible experience flying is.
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I will be spending the next five days with my grandchildren whom I have not seen for over two years because of the pandemic.

Hence blogging will be light or non-existent until my return.

There is something quite irresistible about the Nextdoor app that is meant to be used by people living in a small community to exchange information, seek assistance, provide alerts, and the like. But like all social media, what starts off as a simple post often leads to the discussion going off the rails, with tangents, non sequiturs, pedantic and nitpicking comments, jumping to conclusions, casting aspersions, ascribing unpleasant motives, and sometimes even name calling.

In this clip, actors play out an actual thread where all those elements are visible.

[Read more…]

This video shows the capture of an alligator roaming in the driveway of a home in South Carolina. [I’ve updated the video to one that shows more of how they did it.]

I am assuming that the two women who did this are professionals who work for the animal control department who know what what they are doing and that this is their preferred method. But wrestling and pinning an alligator seems highly dangerous to me, more so than using a trash can the way that a Florida man did.