Humor and Puns: I Must Have Bad Comma

Every once in a while,  I feel the need to write something that's just purely pun--er, fun.  Recently I had a death in my family.  According to our family tradition, tragedy goes hand in hand with comedy.  When someone close to us dies, we use humor to help us deal with it.

So I thought for a break I'd post this piece that my husband and I worked on together.  Last year, we sent it in to the Reader's Digest black hole that is their submission pool and it got sucked in, never to return.

So here it is, for the enjoyment of writers and editors everywhere.  If you know somebody who would appreciate our rather silly style of humor, send them a link to this page.

The Curious Toddler: Teething With Emotion

Because of myriad circumstances, which I'll simply summarize as your-everyday-work-allergies-computer woes-parental exhaustion-procrastinatory issues, it's been a while since I've given an update on Junior. Not that he hasn't been update-worthy. He has. Junior was a preemie--he came weeks early and pounds smaller than his peers. He's pulled through some amazing struggles in his first year and beyond. Small but hearty, he doesn't seem impressed by the oohing and aahing of his parents over his developmental triumphs.

"Oh, darling, he just showed stubbornness! Our baby's learned stubbornness!"

Plagiarized! The Triumphant Story of One Writer's Recovery from Intellectual Property Theft, Kinda-Sorta

I'd been looking forward to this day ever since I wrote and published tons of eHow articles on the Web. But I didn't expect it to come so soon.

Mind you, I'm no raw chicken. I've been plagiarized before...as part of an en masse plagiarism extravaganza. Not till now, though, was I singled out. They could have linked to my article. They could have asked permission. But instead they snuck into my eHow page, saw my article, fell in love with it, snatched it and fled.

Vagueness: A Technique of Rhetoric--And Journalism?

"There's something wrong with this sentence," a certain person said to me. "Listen."

"'Concerns about falling employment, incomes and wealth have overshadowed relief from lower energy prices'"

He was reading an article in today's Seattle Times online, Fallout from financial crisis hammers housing.

"Aaargh," I said. "I can't stand sentences like that. You know what the problem is?"