Lovely qoute from John Perry Barlow, regarding his personal notions of an Iraq exit strategy:

“Whether it would be an effective move in the War on Terror, I can’t say. I’ve never known how one should go about defeating a common noun.”

Very nice. Probably has a special ring to those of us learning grammar for the first time because they are also trying to learn, say, Spanish, but discovering that they have never been taught, in any language, the fundamentals of grammatical theory which most Spanish instructional aids take as a given. Not that I have ever regretted my lack of grammar schooling before, except for a few fleeting moments in the english course I took in university. Strange how lack of the theory of speaking has had no discernible impact on my ability to speak my own language. But, yes, it’s coming back to haunt me now.

And no, it’s not because I didn’t previously know what a posessive pronoun was that I write run-on, comma rich sentences. That’s just bad style.

In completley unrelated news, I have just noticed that the speedometer in the van I drive responds truly linearly: when I reverse the needle goes below zero. Not sure why that suprised me.