Sometimes, on this wild ride into “interesting times” – complete with accompanying time warp – I think it helps that there are little things that add some structure, that add some predictability to this wild ride. At midnight you get the new Wordle. At 7 pm you get the new Waffle. On Sundays at 7 pm, you get the Deluxe Waffle. On (most) Friday evenings, we get the Q & A with (the other) Jack Smith.
Tonight’s Q & A was especially fun. He’s sensible, and clearly he’s knowledgable and doesn’t get his information only from the public domain. He’s certainly not the real Jack Smith, but I find helpful anyway.
I was surprised to hear that the 8 false electors were given immunity without having to admit that they had done anything wrong. At first blush, I’m thinking “Huh?” But I read his answer to the question below, and I think that makes total sense. She’s going after the architects, the ones who talked them into being on the false slate of electors, and pulled them into this illegal act.
They’re not getting immunity for nothing. When/who/how they were roped into the fake elector slate corroborates the existence of a coordinated scheme. She’s going after the architects.
— Jack E. Smith ⚖️ (@7Veritas4) May 5, 2023
The answer to this one (below) surprised me. I guess he’s only admitting to “closer”, but it seems like the first time he was willing to even go that far.
Yes.
— Jack E. Smith ⚖️ (@7Veritas4) May 5, 2023
Nice to hear someone (besides us!) say that Roberts should ask him to resign. But I’ll take the Senate investigation and referral to the DOJ. You have to think that a rule follower and protector of institutions like Merrick Garland is horrified by the corruption of the Supreme Court. Pretty sure that the whole “na na na na na, you can’t touch us” routine is not going over well with Garland.
I think Chief Justice Roberts should ask him to resign.
Barring that, a senate judiciary investigation and subsequent referrals to the DOJ.
— Jack E. Smith ⚖️ (@7Veritas4) May 5, 2023
Just want to say I appreciate you doing this. It takes the edge off.
— Qwerty🌞😎 (@phatmoose) May 5, 2023
That’s how I feel about his twitter account, too.
This “Jack E. Smith” appears to have legitimate sources who might indeed by close to the investigation (for real!). But he has been very circumspect about timing, never committing to specific predictions about timing, because of course if he is way off that would give up the game.
Tonight for the first time he has gotten less coy, and more specific, which makes me go hmm!
For instance:
Yes.
— Jack E. Smith ⚖️ (@7Veritas4) May 6, 2023
And this!
It’s fluid. Barring new leads and/or unforeseen events:
MaL docs – May/June
GA – July/August
J6 related indictments – July/September— Jack E. Smith ⚖️ (@7Veritas4) May 5, 2023
From his lips to dog’s ears!
Any other outlets that provide safety valves for you guys? Besides Balloon Juice, of course!
Open thread.
NotMax
Popcorn futures soaring.
//
Dangerman
Summertime
And the thieving isn’t easy
The fiends are jumpin’
And the rotten, the rotten is high
SpaceUnit
So what’s the deal with that green and purple outfit in the picture? Is it some kind of ceremonial garb or does he just have peculiar fashion taste?
la caterina
Those are the robes he wears at the ICC in the Hague.
SpaceUnit
@la caterina:
Huh. I did not know that.
Looks like some kind of costume in a bad 70’s sci-fi movie.
Baud
You don’t mean like OnlyFans, right?
Frankensteinbeck
I have no idea how the election interference laws apply to something as dopey as “What if we claim we have our own electors?” or as mob-boss-vague as “I just need X votes. You know they’re there.” No idea at all. If those are criminal actions, well, it ain’t gonna be hard to prove them.
Among the things I don’t know: If they are criminal actions, what even is the punishment?
WaterGirl
@SpaceUnit: That’s my favorite picture. Not a fan of the purple robes?
Ken
Won’t we all be surprised when the real Jack Smith’s memoirs come out in ten years…
WaterGirl
@SpaceUnit: No beard! My least favorite:
edit: I want the scary looking dude for this job!
WaterGirl
@Baud: You bastard! You made me google. Now google will think I’m interested in sex workers.
SpaceUnit
@WaterGirl:
I dunno. Strikes me as a tad gaudy for judicial attire.
Narya
Jorts the Cat! I’ve been Empty Wheeling, too (I know she’s not to everyone’s taste), especially Brandi B on the PB trial. And fiction. Contemplating picking up fancy needlework again.
ETA: and playoff hockey
WaterGirl
@Narya: Andrew Weissman is probably my go-to legal person on twitter. (Besides Omnes, Imm, and Baud!) Weissman seems pretty sensible, not shouty at all. And he wears very *sharp suits.
Steve in the WTF probably also wears sharp suits when he
mows down the workersgoes to court or mediation.Dangerman
@WaterGirl: OnlyFans is sex workers? Well, I suppose in a Rule 34 kinda way.
Dangerman
Duplicate.
WaterGirl
@Dangerman: Well, in my very brief visit to the google page that came up, those are the first words I saw.
I doubt that the first thing they would put on a search result would be “this has nothing to do with sex workers.”
WaterGirl
@WaterGirl: Also, can I just say that I hate the whole “punctuation goes inside the quotation marks thing?” I was schooled by nuns and they told us that was WRONG WRONG WRONG and that stuck.
I will often re-word a sentence so as not to have to do that. Or I use italics instead.
The person who made that new rule about the quotes? That’s just dead wrong and fucked up.
Matt M
Didn’t we get enough of these “anonymous insider” Twitter grifts in the Trump years?
Redshift
Teri Kanefeld is someone I’m enjoying quite a lot lately. She’s on Mastodon also has a blog (imagine that!)
I believe it was from her that I got the info about the cooperators being the reason the Georgia indictments became less “imminent.” Apparently her office made a motion for one of the lawyers for the fake electors to be disqualified. The reason is that Willis had extended an offer for cooperation to the defendants through their lawyers, and asked that it be transmitted to all of them in order not to tip her hand about which ones they were more interested in trying (or something like that.) And this lawyer didn’t tell them. It appears to be another lawyer paid for by a Trump-affiliated organization (the campaign, maybe) working for the interests of their paymaster instead of their client, which is a serious offense. So when the DA’s office found out about this, in addition to moving to kick out the lawyer, they had to restart cooperator negotiations, and that’s what turned “imminent” into “sometime this summer.”
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
We’re away aways from a classified document indictment. they’re still investigating the missing gaps in the video and the Saudi connection.
japa21
@WaterGirl: And the rule that each quotation needs two sets of quotation marks, one at the beginning and one at the end. But I agree with you. If the whole sentence is the quotation, that’s one thing, but when it is part of a larger sentence, then no.
WaterGirl
@Matt M: When he writes a full-page Op Ed in the NYT, warning us of the apocalypse, but won’t say who he is, then I’ll be pissed.
Otherwise, no. I have no problem with this.
Did the folks you are referring to fake-pretend to be someone else?
*I liked that Devin Nunes cow guy.
WaterGirl
@Redshift:
Who is “her” in that sentence? Kanefield or Willis?
Redshift
@WaterGirl: Yeah, I’ve always hated that rule, but I still do it most of the time.
Most of the rules we were taught for “proper English” were made up and imposed on the language in the middle of the last century (or something like that, someone who remembers better can correct me.) They have nothing to do with how people spoke and wrote before that.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@WaterGirl:
I pretend to be me
Redshift
@WaterGirl: Sorry, Willis.
Narya
@WaterGirl: oh I like him too. And popehat. And Strict Scrutiny.
Redshift
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch:
You’re not fooling anyone.
NotMax
@WaterGirl
American English grammarians: 1, Nuns: 0.
IMHO punctuation trailing the quotation mark looks awkward and clumsy.
Redshift
@Redshift: Case in point — Some years ago, I was playing a character in a roleplaying game set in the 1930s, and I had to write some letters in character, so I looked up examples of how people wrote back then. And it was run-on sentences all over the place! And you know what? That really works quite well, and can be much more readable than our “you must break this up into multiple sentences, preferably with a mix of lengths.”
WaterGirl
I also think the fake Jack Smith is funny and clever. DO YOU THINK HE’S REALLY BAUD????
Q: “What do you think of Trump’s lawyer, Tapioca?”
A:” I hope he tries all their cases.”
Q: “When can we hope to see the Senate and House miscreants go through some things?”
A: “Forecast calls for a hot summer.”
Redshift
@NotMax:
It often does to me, too, at least for a period, because I was taught that way. But logically, it makes no sense, though maybe that’s because of my programming background. Putting a question mark inside the quotes when the quote isn’t a question looks weird. And a comma being inside the quote rubs me the wrong way (even though, again, I always do it.)
NotMax
@WaterGirl
There are times I think Baud isn’t really Baud.
:)
El Muneco
@WaterGirl: Not to harsh everyone’s buzz, but that picture is totally Ron DeSantis.
WaterGirl
@NotMax: Baud is only not-Baud when he’s away on a long trip.
(Q: Is Baud actually on a trip then, or is he just taking some space?)
Mallard Filmore
@WaterGirl:
If I ever make a WEB page, this goes at the top.
WaterGirl
@El Muneco: You take that back! :-)
edit: please?
NotMax
@Redshift
Yeah. Outside the ending quotation mark the punctuation comes across as an afterthought.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
Nominated!
Baud
@NotMax:
@WaterGirl:
Famous mathematical theorem: B = NB.
CaseyL
I think there was a time I put the quotation mark inside the period – possibly back in school, so a VERY long time ago!
Now, when I see that, it’s incredibly distracting. Like, record scratch distracting.
NotMax
@Baud
Sex amateurs don’t get no respect.
//
WaterGirl
@Baud: But can it be proven?
El Muneco
@Redshift: My rule is that the question mark goes inside the quotes if the quote was a question, and outside if my sentence is a question but the quote wasn’t.
WaterGirl
@CaseyL: That’s how I feel, only the opposite!
Mallard Filmore
@WaterGirl:
I lean the other way. The question mark goes with the quoted text, not as if the quote is in doubt.
This controversy must be like if you pass GO and then on the same die roll have to zip directly to jail, do you still collect the $200?
El Muneco
@WaterGirl: I hate to say it, but once you see it, you can never unsee it… He really needs to keep the beard.
NotMax
@WaterGirl
“The proof is in the pudding.”
– Ron DeSantis
//
WaterGirl
@El Muneco: Yes! Sometimes the sentence – when viewed as a whole – is actually a question inside of a statement. Then it’s double-wrong to have the question inside, as if the point of the whole sentence is a question.
So many things wrong with this new rule. I don’t know where it came from, but who made them boss, anyway?
WaterGirl
I find it very disappointing that my Steve in the WTF reference did not conjure up either Steve in the ATL or Omnes.
Can’t a girl count on anything anymore?
WaterGirl
@NotMax: Ha!
Betsy
@SpaceUnit: I don’t have a television.
But I’ve heard of this show called Game of Thrones, and when I saw the picture at the top, I thought “oh, that must be the face of some proud, just, righteous, vengeance-bringing character in Game of Thrones. And that must be his purple jacket of majesty, or whatever, in the show.”’ I thought this was a comparison being drawn.
I don’t know what Jack Smith looks like. Is that actually his face?
Alison Rose
Okay, I decided to watch this Biden interview with Stephanie Ruhle and like…it’s already over. Apparently the actual interview is only 15 minutes, and now she’s gonna “discuss” it with a panel (not sure who yet) for the next hour and 45 minutes. And she irritated me the whole time, doing that “I’m a journalist asking TEH HARD QUESTIONS” shit but coming across as someone looking for gotcha soundbites and shit.
Any time I watch most TV news people, I remember why I can’t stand most TV news people
zhena gogolia
@El Muneco: That is correct.
zhena gogolia
@Betsy: Yes, the purple robe picture is the actual Jack Smith.
zhena gogolia
@Alison Rose: Oh, that’s too bad. I thought she was better than the usual. I guess I was wrong.
CaseyL
@Alison Rose: I have come to the conclusion that 99% of pundits should be shot into the sun.
People need to figure out what shit means themselves, not rely on “analysis” (which isn’t) to tell them what it means.
NotMax
@Alison Rose
Ruhle is one of those who feels naked without carrying around a preconceived agenda.
Alison Rose
@zhena gogolia: She was all “companies don’t want 82 year old CEOs” and now is insisting she wasn’t being ageist.
WaterGirl
@Betsy: It is! I included a no-beard version of his face in the comments. I prefer the beard!
He looks so ordinary without the beard.
prostratedragon
@WaterGirl: People never seem to check those eyes.
WaterGirl
@zhena gogolia: That is correct-correct? Or that is what you think should be correct?
Ken
As I recall, possibly from Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, the rules were originally established by printers, who had to deal with fiddly bits of lead type. We don’t have to deal with that any more; many printers just work from PDF files.
WaterGirl
@prostratedragon: Imagine if that’s your dad and you are in trouble? Yikes.
Baud
@Alison Rose:
If a company’s CEO was as successful as Biden has been, they wouldn’t care about his age.
WaterGirl
@Ken: But half the .pdf files are surely wrong!
Alison Rose
@Baud: Every time he pointed out a good thing about his presidency, her response was “Oh yeah but what about THIS thing that people talk about HMMMMM????”
WaterGirl
@Baud: I’m sorry, but if you care that Biden in great shape but he’s 80, and Trump is let’s-just-say-not-great-shape is 77, then fuck you.
You are full of shit. Which they are, and everyone knows it.
The media is complicit in everything that is wrong.
edit: the only thing I am sorry about in this conversation is that the media is mostly worthless and the disingenuous fucks have any sway over anyone.
edit: the YOU is not Baud. The “you” is the people who are hawking this age stuff. Do they really want Trump again as president???
NotMax
@Alison Rose
a) He’s not running for CEO.
b) :cough: Murdoch, Koch, Buffett :cough:
Elizabelle
@Alison Rose: Warren Buffett on line 3. Aged 92; Chair and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway.
I think these fools harp on Biden’s age so much because it is one thing he truly cannot change.
WaterGirl
@WaterGirl: Am I the only one who tends to make typos or errors in grammar or punctuation when I am feeling emotional about something? Or does everyone do that?
Baud
@WaterGirl:
To be honest, I don’t think Biden would have the stamina to handle all the lawsuits that Trump is facing.
Steeplejack
@WaterGirl:
It should be:
Also, can I just say I hate the whole “punctuation goes inside the quotation marks” thing?
Punctuation doesn’t always go inside the quotation marks. Example: Did you call me a “clueless, uninformed idiot”? (The quoted part was not a question.)
Ohio Mom
Jack Smith looks a lot younger in the beardless photo than he does in the purple and green? — looks black to me shirt.
I just hope he lives up to all the hype I’ve heard about him.
Baud
@NotMax:
Bloomberg.
WaterGirl
@Baud: Yeah, but that’s because Biden would know how fucked he is, and Trump (mostly) thinks he can skate like he always seems to have been able to do before.
mrmoshpotato
@SpaceUnit:
You mean an awesomely bad 70’s sci-fi movie that Svengoolie would show.
Ken
@Steeplejack: Sometimes the quote might need its own punctuation, like: Did you just scream “You clueless, uninformed idiot!”?
WaterGirl
@Steeplejack: Really? That’s one of the instances where it makes me crazy to put the punctuation inside the quote.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@WaterGirl: you mean, LIkE THISSS?!!1!
WaterGirl
@Ohio Mom: You can’t already tell that this is not your father’s Special Counsel?
Steeplejack
Never mind.
WaterGirl
@Ken: Yes!
But is that legal?But is the considered correct?WaterGirl
@Steeplejack: Now I want to know what you wrote!
NotMax
@Steeplejack
Bzzt. But thanks for playing.
Ken
But he’s President, so legally he can pardon himself for all these lawsuits, then have the people who brought them arrested for lèse-majesté. Or at least, so Bill Barr assured us.
WaterGirl
This is one of the questions I wish he had answered.
please please please
Steeplejack
@Ken:
I said “not always.” There are many times when the punctuation goes inside the quotes.
I was right there when she said, “Could you repeat the question?”
NotMax
@Ken
Yoo, too.
Alison Rose
@Steeplejack: I haaaaaate the American rule of putting punctuation inside a quote when the quote isn’t a full separate sentence. I always put it outside the quotes and I don’t care if teachers here would get upset about it
ETA and if it’s something like examples above where the punctuation, say a question mark, is part of the quote but the quote isn’t the full sentence……I will REWRITE WHATEVER I’M TRYING TO SAY TO AVOID IT.
WaterGirl
@Ken:
As long as we discussing pedantry, I believe the correct spelling of that is “Fucking Bill Barr”.
*Should the period after Barr really be inside the quotes? That looks so wrong, and the nuns would not approve.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
In the US, inside. In UK, outside.
Baud
@Alison Rose:
Only the period is inside. Other punctuation is outside.
WaterGirl
@Baud: Hmm. Little known fact. WaterGirl actually lives in the UK.
Problem solved!
Ken
@WaterGirl: By me, yes. But if you want to get into an area where I’m uncertain, consider italicization of quoted text. Should the final punctuation be italicized too? How about the quote marks?
There is of course at least one related XKCD.
Steeplejack
@WaterGirl:
It’s correct-correct.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@WaterGirl:
I think Ted Cruz would among those that need a good defense lawyer
NotMax
@Alison Rose
Like serving up a grilled cheese sandwich with the cheese on the outside.
;)
Steeplejack
@Ken:
This is vastly oversimplified bullshit.
WaterGirl
@Baud: I am more confused about this than ever. I may just say fuck it and do it according to my personal preference.
Q: How many people on this thread would think less of someone for doing that?
Eolirin
@Steeplejack: Clearly that should be “I was right there when she said, “Could you repeat the question?”.”. :P
//
Alison Rose
Also, here’s the thing with the interview: I am not saying journalists should softball Biden or anything, but I am so fucking tired of them thinking that in order for an interview to be “good” it had to be combative. If you can’t think of a way to interview someone without sounding like you’re a college libertarian bro whose favorite hobby is playing Devil’s advocate whenever anything related to feminism comes up, then you’re not a good interviewer and you should go back to copyediting or whatever.
mvr
I’m against spelling myself, so I tend to advert to this kind of thing when people disagree.
Baud
@Alison Rose:
Agreed. Most really aren’t that good at their jobs.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@WaterGirl:
Pip pip cheerio! 🧐
WaterGirl
@Baud:
Also, if the VP were a white male, even an older white male, they wouldn’t care about Biden’s age.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
.I personally like to put my punctuation at the beginning of sentences
Steeplejack
@WaterGirl:
I just wrote that it was Willis, not Kanefeld. The latter has no official standing in the investigation. But somebody already said it.
NotMax
@WaterGirl
Not necessarily less, although might think fewer.
:)
Steeplejack
@NotMax:
Which part do you (mistakenly) think I am wrong about?
kalakal
@Baud: Thank you for that, I’ve never heard of putting periods inside quotation marks. Then again I’m from the UK and I’ve always used the term full stop.
As for the first time an automated phone asked me to “press the pound sign”. That really threw me, nowhere on my phone keypad could I see £
mvr
@El Muneco: Yay! That is how I would make the rules if I got to make them – inside is what I’m quoting or talking about, quotation marks themselves are me as is what is outside of them. (Elipses sort of violate the rule but we know what they’re doing, so no harm, no foul.)
WaterGirl
@Baud: I laughed. I might start doing that as sort-of a protest vote when it’s particularly galling to have the punctuation inside the sentence.
Eolirin
@Alison Rose: Sometimes it’s that they’re being dumbly combative, sometimes they’re not even pushing back on outrageous nonsense.
The problem is that they’re all fundamentally ignorant of the topics they’re talking about and don’t know how to ask meaningful questions as a result. They’re all celebrity gossip columnists.
Mallard Filmore
@Steeplejack: For all you experts, what is the correct way to type this out?
Alison Rose
@kalakal: LOL, for guests or delivery people to get into my apartment building, they have to enter a code that starts with #, and if I’m telling them over the phone, I feel like I need to ask how old they are so I can determine if I call it the pound sign, the number sign, or the hashtag.
Steeplejack
@WaterGirl:
The period should be inside the quotes, and your nuns were full of shit, as I’m sure they were on a lot of other topics, too.
Baud
@kalakal:
Do you call commas quarter stops and semicolons half stops?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Alison Rose:
@Baud:
Isn’t it curious though how they’re always bad at their jobs in a way that carries water for Republicans? It’s a probably a combination of personal political bias, coming from the same elite circles, and their editors/media owners. All of these connected journalists come from the same handful of J-Schools, don’t they?
Alison Rose
@Eolirin: Yep, very much. And often it’s just regurgitating GOP talking points in the form of “some people would say” type questions. Lazy bullshit.
WaterGirl
@Steeplejack: I knew that Kanefield didn’t have standing in the investigation. But it almost seemed like the person who wrote the original comment was saying that Kanefield had somehow broken the news about that, and that didn’t make sense to me because that information was everywhere, so that didn’t seem to fit.
NotMax
@Ken
I wax nostalgic over indenting paragraphs. And double spacing after the punctation at the end of a sentence.
WaterGirl
@NotMax: Ha!
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Eolirin:
Makes you wonder what they teach at these J-Schools
kalakal
@Baud: nope, quavers and semi- quavers
WaterGirl
@Steeplejack: Food fight!
Baud
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
They know Republicans have their own media and don’t need them. Very few Dems want our politicians to be aggressive with the media. We’re the outliers.
WaterGirl
@kalakal:
hahahahahaha
Baud
@kalakal:
Isn’t that also what you call quarter notes and half notes in music?
mvr
@WaterGirl:
This reminded me of finding my Dad’s reel to reel recording of Nixon’s resignation after he died. It was a happy day in my family and he wanted to memorialize it.
Eolirin
@Alison Rose: The scary thing is I don’t think they’re repeating GOP talking points per se, at least not unless they’re part of the GOP funnel, which some of them are. I think they’re mostly repeating what they’re all saying to each other. As if that’s somehow important outside of their dinner parties.
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl:
I have a life for fuck’s sake.
rikyrah
James Brown and Pavarotti🤔🤔
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRwnpvqJ/
WaterGirl
@Steeplejack: No, grammar and punctuation and diagramming of sentences was the only place where they were absolutely correct. :-)
kalakal
@NotMax: I still indent paragraphs.
I will also defend the Oxford comma to the death.
Alison Rose
@Eolirin: Probably true, sadly.
WaterGirl
@mvr: Nice “Dad” memory.
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: Well that’s hardly fair to us!
edit: selfish bastard!
NotMax
@Mallard Filmore
Single quotes when included within quoted text, so
“Did you ask ‘Where are you?'”
Steeplejack
@Mallard Filmore:
The lawyer queried him, “Did you ask, ‘Where are you?’”
WaterGirl
@kalakal:
So does Almost Retired!
Ken
There is definitely an XKCD for that. And read the mouseover text.
Omnes Omnibus
@kalakal: As one should.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Baud:
I guess it makes sense when you put it like that
Timill
@Alison Rose: Just call it an octothorpe and flummox the lot of them…
Steeplejack
@WaterGirl:
“Apparently her office made a motion” was what you asked about, not breaking any news. I read it as Willis’s office.
Not “Willis’ office,” by the way.
Repatriated
¿Por qué no los dos?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Omnes Omnibus:
@kalakal:
Indented paragraphs just look right
prostratedragon
@WaterGirl: Thoughts would suddenly turn in search of atonement.
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl:
Meh.
WaterGirl
@Ken: Funny!
I know it makes Steeplejack crazy, and possibly other people, too, but I find text much more readable with 2 spaces between sentences. So you will have to pry that second space out of my cold, dead hands.
*but hopefully not for a long, long while.
Steeplejack
@NotMax:
I’m with you on indented paragraphs, without a blank line between. Double spaces after a sentence are an artifact of the typewriter age.
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: Which one? The paragraph indents? Or the oxford comma?
Eolirin
@WaterGirl: Yes.
WaterGirl
@Eolirin: Huh. I wonder if paragraph indents a legal thing?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
I remember in college and HS/middle school, my English teachers always wanted double spacing for essays. I always liked it because it made documents easier to read
Eolirin
@Steeplejack: Non-idented paragraphs work better in certain contexts I think. Like comment threads. Also fiction with lots of dialog.
kalakal
Heh, my keyboard is so old it has a thorn key
Ken
@WaterGirl: One odd thing about these fights is that it would be relatively simple to create a browser plugin to re-format spaces and quotes as the reader prefers —
Excuse me, I have to get my suit cleaned for Shark Tank.
Steeplejack
@Repatriated:
It’s ¿Por qué no los dos?, you nitwit! //
Amir Khalid
It’s really very simple, you all: if the punctuation is part of the quote, it goes inside the quote marks. But if the punctuation is part of the sentence in which the quote is embedded, it goes outside the quote marks. The aesthetics of punctuation-inside-quote-marks vs. punctuation-outside-quote-marks is irrelevant.
Eolirin
@WaterGirl: Sorry, I was making a joke. It was definitely one (or both) of those two. :P
Eolirin
@Amir Khalid: As a logical rule that leads to weirdness like, “I was really excited when I heard him say, ‘Did you hear Trump got indicted?’!”
With or without a trailing period.
Steeplejack
@Eolirin:
Non-indented paragraphs work in contexts like user’s manuals and on-line blogs, etc. In book publishing, including fiction with a lot of dialogue, indented paragraphs with no extra space between paragraphs are much better.
NotMax
@kalakal
Is it set to Reykjavik Bold?
;)
Also too, no ethel and yogh?
Omnes Omnibus
@Amir Khalid:
Go home, Amir. You’re drunk.
WaterGirl
@Eolirin: Ha!
Ken
@WaterGirl: Huh. I finally clicked through to Jack Smith’s twitter feed to see the Q&A, and right below it is a retweet of a C-SPAN interview with fucking Bill Barr throwing Trump under the bus.
“He does not have the ability for strategic thinking and linear thinking, or setting priorities, or how to get things done in the system. It is a horror show.”
I have to think this means the Republican establishment wants to get rid of Trump. I don’t know if they’ll be able to do it.
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: And two spaces after a period, if you must know.
Eolirin
@Steeplejack: Does the dialog itself not count as paragraphs? I was taught that they did. Fiction uses a mix of both if we’re counting those no?
Repatriated
Tough audience tonight. I thought getting the accent right would suffice, but nooooo…. :)
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
All this talk about typewriters made me curious if they’re still made. Apparently they are, but in China. They’re not very good according to the few articles and posts online I’ve read.
ETA: One has to go used to find something quality and authentic.
SLR cameras are pretty much the same way. Even digital SLRs are being phased out in favor of mirrorless digital cameras. I actually own a film SLR. I had to buy it for photography class in HS. Promaster 2500PK
Amir Khalid
@Eolirin:
I say, logic not aesthetics. No exceptions.
kalakal
@NotMax: Heh, that’s only the deluxe model. That one also has a vowel shift key
sdhays
@Alison Rose: Watching real prestigious reporters interviewing powerful people is often pretty disappointing and sad. Daily Show alums often would be better interviewers than actual national journalists.
Eolirin
@Amir Khalid: Definitely the trailing period then too. :P
kalakal
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): We have a couple in the library, still get the occasional request for them.
Steeplejack
@Eolirin:
A separate line of dialogue is a paragraph, and it should be indented. Your first comment said that “non-idented paragraphs work better in certain contexts [including] fiction with lots of dialog.” So you want to end up with non-indented paragraphs for the non-dialogue parts, too? Makes no sense.
kalakal
A propos of nothing I’d just like to say that the election results from England today have cheered me up immensely. It’s the first time in far too long that I have not been embarrassed by news of UK political events
Steeplejack
@Repatriated:
I saw it before you corrected it, when it was just “que.”
ETA: I used italics just to avoid extra quotation marks (if that’s what you were referring to).
WaterGirl
@kalakal: Happy for you!
Ken
@kalakal: Many printers nowadays add pigment microdots to each page, to allow law enforcement to identify where a sheet was printed. I wonder if your library patrons are worried about that?
NotMax
@kalakal
Ethel and Yogh always struck me as near perfect for the name of a vaudeville act eternally relegated to the deuce spot (see here).
;)
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@kalakal:
That sounds pretty cool. I wish my local library had typewriters to borrow. Are they mechanical or electrical?
Redshift
@mvr:
After the advent of dictionaries is when English switched from spelling words the way they sound to pronouncing words the way they are spelled. So you’re on solid ground with “traditional” English speakers.
kalakal
@Ken: Don’t think so, I think it’s more an age thing. It’s down to about 1 pretty old guy who uses it every couple of weeks.
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): They’re
electric and pretty elderly
@WaterGirl: Thank you :)
Redshift
@WaterGirl:
Sorry if I was unclear. The information about the trumpist lawyer trying to screw clients about cooperating is publicly available, but I don’t see it “everywhere,” and a lot of people are still remarking on the difference between “imminent” indictments vs. summer, which indicates to me that they don’t know something happened that affected the schedule after the “imminent” statement.
Redshift
@Baud:
Which just demonstrates that the rule makes no sense.
(And the rule says that commas also go inside if it’s not at the end of the sentence.)
Redshift
@WaterGirl:
Absolutely this. What they’re afraid of is Kamala becoming president without an election where they can vote against her for totally non-racist, non-misogynistic reasons. That would be cheating for some reason.
Omnes Omnibus
@Redshift: It’s English. The rules don’t have to make sense.
scribbler
BA in English. MA in English. 2 spaces between sentences. Fight me.
mrmoshpotato
@CaseyL:
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
kalakal
@scribbler: Keyboards at 30 paces
lee
My thought on the entire bribing SCOTUS issue is: find the laws they broke (e.g. tax laws) and go after them for that. Don’t wait for Congress. Start going after them for their crimes.
Steeplejack
@scribbler:
You lost what little credibility you had by starting a sentence with a numeral.
Editing for publication is an endeavor related to but different from “scribbling.”
Amir Khalid
@scribbler:
Newspaper guy here. One space between sentences.
scribbler
@Steeplejack: I didn’t realize I had little credibility, but OK. The lowly scribbler yields to the editor for publication.
scribbler
@Amir Khalid: If you say so. But two spaces “looks” better.
Elizabelle
Balloon Juice. Your home for Pedants After Dark.
Steeplejack
@scribbler:
If you ever wrote for publication, as for an academic or literary journal, which I presume you did, did you never notice that your two spaces after sentences were fixed in the final publication? The typescript was a draft, that’s all. But feel free to double-space your ass off here. It’s casual.
And you invited a (humorously) combative attitude with “Fight me.”
SectionH
scribbler: I used to have this argument with Mr. S, and well, I’m the graphic designer in the family, and proportional type looks Just Fine when there’s one space between the period and the next sentence. It was 2 spaces on typewriters. It’s a completely different medium to me. He finally got used to it afaict. The eye room is what’s important. Not how it’s created.
PS, I’m not sure I have credibility here either. And completely from left field, were you by any chance a poster on FT years ago? Because there was a poster there yclept “scribbler” or maybe “the scribbler” – lower case either way I think… I rather liked the guy.
Princess
I enjoy the fake Jack Smith feed but the idea that he has any kind of sources at all is ludicrous. He’s a guy in a basement and he does take the edge off. That’s it.
Steeplejack
@Princess:
👍
Elizabelle
@Steeplejack: Could you tell me again how to search for something on an older BJ thread? I know you had some marvelous system, maybe with a : or something …. Thanks.
NotMax
@Baud
Tain’t so, McGee. All sentence ending punctuation other than ellipsis and dash goes inside in American English.
NotMax
@Elizabelle
term(s) you are searching for, then a space, then site:balloon-juice.com
Example:
mustard site:balloon-juice.com
Gvg
@Amir Khalid: Person who reads, and has some vision issues from age and cataracts, 2 spaces between sentences. I bet there are many not the majority, but just people who need a little more clarity to make reading easier. Always go for the clearest view please.
In addition, after decades typing one way, I can’t really remember to change. My typing was to get work done as was everyone else’s. No one bothered to come around and say, hey, conventions have changed, you only need to do 1 space until probably more than a decade after they taught the young ones differently. Then it got mentioned, but frankly, no one really cares for day to day work. For outside letters, there are programs that remind us.
Brit in Chicago
@WaterGirl:Also, can I just say that I hate the whole “punctuation goes inside the quotation marks thing”? —fixed it for you.
Bugboy
Rude Pundit was my go-to escape from my rage-filled Bush/Cheney years. Right now, it’s The Onion, although who can tell satire any more? Stranger than fiction and all that…
ETA: I keep looking at that “real” Jack Smith picture (straight outta casting!) and I have to think The Defendant is shitting (fool’s) gold bricks right about now.
WaterGirl
@Redshift: I definitely think that’s true of most people.
For me, “everywhere” is all the podcasts and the twitter feeds I pay attention to. I don’t watch any of the news shows.
So my everywhere is nothing that normies would see!
Also, I was super tired yesterday, even too tired to go back up and see whose comment we were talking about! So I may not have been at my sharpest, and I certainly didn’t intend my comment to be critical. Sorry if it came off that way!
WaterGirl
@mrmoshpotato: When I read this:
My mind immediately jumped to “how will we get rid of the other 1%?”
WaterGirl
@Steeplejack:
Come on, man. :-) This is a blog, not a formal paper!
I almost never use semicolons in comments on BJ. We’re having a casual conversation and it looks to formal for chatting on a blog.
evodevo
@sdhays:
Yeah…give me Jordan Klepper any day, over most MSM reporters…
WaterGirl
@Princess: We will just have to disagree about that, which of course is perfectly fine!
fungible
Ugh. Do not listen to “Jack Smith” or post him as any sort of authority on anything. He is a twitter rando who changed his name to that and when people started paying attention to him, decided to roll with it.
Listening to “Jack Smith” for anything other that amusement purposes is analogous to believing in QAnon.
WaterGirl
@Bugboy:
Yes!
UncleEbeneezer
Karen Friedman Agnifilo told a story on the LegalAF podcast about when she was still at the Manhattan DA’s office and she had a troubling case prosecuting a guy who had tried to attack other attorneys. She was 8 months pregnant at the time and not sure if she could handle all of the stress of that trial and in stepped…Jack Smith, the REAL Jack Smith, who offered to take the case off her hands. She said “that’s just the kind of guy he is.” Professional, fearless and generally a good guy.
UncleEbeneezer
@fungible: I don’t know if he has any particular inside info, but his timeline of potential charges basically matches what most former Prosecutors are guessing as well. So I suspect he’s just a guy who follows most of the same people I follow and uses his online persona to spread the word with added humor for clicks. I guess it’s possible he works at DOJ, but I’m skeptical.
Geminid
@UncleEbeneezer: I would also be very surprised if “Jack Smith” works at Justice now. For one thing, he’d be putting his job at risk.
I suspect he’s one of what must be hundreds of former Assistant U.S. Attorneys either in private practice or academia. His familiarity with federal criminal process does not seem affected.
Ruckus
@NotMax:
Ruhle is one of those who feels naked without carrying around a preconceived agenda.
Now that is a sentence that deserves repetition, and it’s a sentence that would be true with any number of names exchanged.
Ruckus
@Baud:
Biden also doesn’t have the stupidity to get into all the trouble that brought on all the lawsuits that SFB has to handle.
scribbler
@SectionH: Sorry I didn’t get back to you in a timely manner, and you will probably never see my reply in this deadest of threads, but I am not that scribbler.
Hob
@Redshift: Most of the rules we were taught for “proper English” were made up and imposed on the language in the middle of the last century … They have nothing to do with how people spoke and wrote before that
When it comes to things like punctuation, that’s not accurate… or at least I think it’s a misleading way to put it. 20th century style guides like MLA were an attempt to sum up and clarify language practices that had already been common in print, but that (like most human activities) had been done pretty inconsistently. So they mostly weren’t “making up” rules, but rather, picking a side in cases where there were already a couple different informal rules in use.
The “comma/period inside quotes” thing is one such case. It’s a side effect of a different usage split that had already happened, where after a period of uncertainty about the difference between single and double quotation marks, US printers had generally settled on “double for quotes/speech, single for any nested quotes/speech inside of a quote” whereas in the UK they chose the opposite. Printers in the US then decided that due to the double quote being wider,
word."
looked a little better thanword".
Some popular explanations of this will claim that it had to do with fixed-width versus proportional type, but that’s wrong— they were using proportional type, they just had opinions about the proper distance between the letters and the period. (Similarly, contrary to zillions of “did you know…” pieces online, the “two spaces after a period” thing was not made up due to typewriters using fixed-width type, it was something many printers had already been doing because they thought it looked a bit better, while other printers thought otherwise, and the latter eventually won out. That’s very easy to verify if you look at anything printed pre-20th-century; it’s pretty common to see double spaces there.)You may say that typesetting-based practices like that are unrelated to “how people spoke and wrote”, but typesetting had been around already for hundreds of years; printed text was what people in the modern era learned to read from, so it’s no surprise that that’s what they thought of as “proper” usage.
(ETA: When it comes to grammar stuff that you find in Strunk & White, your statement is more accurate— there, a lot of the “only this way is correct” statements were more of an arbitrary opinion that no one had thought of as a rule before.)
WaterGirl
@UncleEbeneezer: @Geminid:
That’s pretty much my take. I think he’s someone who used to be “inside” and is now outside, but who has some pretty good contacts.
Similar to Andrew Weissman or Andy McCabe and others.