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Once upon a time, from 2004 to about 2010, Emdashes was a New Yorker fan blog. But now that The New Yorker has so many blogs of its own for people to follow and be-fan, we’ve slowly started morphing back into what we intended to be in the first place: a punctuation blog.
Fortunately, sometimes our first love, The New Yorker, venntersects with our second love, punctuation. Today marks one such occasion. You probably already know that the magazine sponsors a weekly Twitter contest, Questioningly, in which people tweet entries (along with the hashtag #tnyquestion) in response to editor Ben Greenman’s inspired and loopy challenges. Greenman just posted the results of the most recent contest: Invent a new punctuation mark. Some of the winners: (continued)
Ancient bones suggest cavemen wore boots
Neanderthal Shell Discovery Shows Cavemen Wore Makeup
Cavemen wore jewelry 19,000 years before Earth was created
How To Make a Caveman or Cavewoman Costume (“To top the costume off, make sure to make your hair frizzy and messy much like how cavemen wore it back in the day. Finally, you can opt to carry a wooden club or crude stone axe. Don’t forget to act like a caveman by walking funny and by speaking gibberish.”)
“It is possible, the article opined, that cavemen wore mullets out of sheer practicality.”
Sexy Neanderthals Wore Feathers
Susan Sarandon Wears Teeth Bracelet!
—Emily Gordon
(continued)Martin Schneider writes:
As Pollux noted recently—and our friend Ben Bass posted too—there is a mind-blowing trick in the special four-Eustace 85th anniversary cover of last month. If you place the four covers in the proper two-by-two configuration, the outlines of the original classic Eustace cover can be discerned.
Now we have Adam Kempa's excellent slider application, which allows you to find it without spreading (multiple copies of) the issue all over your living room floor.
I am endlessly impressed by such cleverness! Françoise Mouly, hats off to you! (A top hat, of course.)
(continued)Martin Schneider writes:
User @alexbarkett (for that is the convention) tweets: "For everyone who was wondering, the audio prelude to all New Yorker podcasts is a song by Isolée called Schrapnell." I checked it out: it does sound right! (Compare.) A back and forth with Mr. Barkett confirmed that he knows the full song and that it only applies to the "Out Loud" podcasts.
Note that when I tried to confirm this fact on Google, I came up bupkes.
(continued)