OK, so I can't get that last post to be in the right font. Dagblasted computers.
The good news is, I was meaning to say a little something about writing on the internet. When you've got a pen and paper or I guess a printing press—even your very own word processor—you've got some control over what winds up on the page. And if you stick with the basic characters, I suppose it makes no difference. But I am someone who, OK, yes, has been known to use italics in e-mails. Like, all the time. How the hell else are you supposed to write the title of a book or a movie? I'm not going to put them in quotes. Maybe if I worked at The New Yorker I'd reevaluate...excuse me, reëvaluate... But even, hey, lookee there: if I were sending you an e-mail and wanted to make fun of The New Yorker for its use of the diaeresis (more like diarrhea, HAW), I'd not know not only whether you'd see the italics, but also whether "reëvaluate" would come out looking right or would have some fuckin' Wing-Ding bullshit in the middle of it. This is my greatest fear: Wing-Ding bullshit.
So I wind up writing crap like "the Latin fanum [with a line over the a]" instead of actually producing the appropriate character, for fear of, you know...the Wing-Dings. I'm reasonably confident that here on Blogger you'll be able to see em-dashes and italics and accents like aigu or cereal-corn-flakes ("Allô!")...but there's that nagging fear...
Please contact the president about this important issue.
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