By Beth Quinn

Apparently school is starting up again. I know this because I see mothers arguing with their teenagers at the mall about the relative merits of exposing their belly buttons (in the case of the girls) or their butt cracks (boys).

I also know this because I’m teaching a couple of night classes at OCCC, something I’ve done for the past quarter century or so. I love teaching college freshmen, but I find that I often must repeat the same rules every semester, such as, “You need paper.”

I suspect every teacher in the land has a litany of back-to-school rules that they’ve been repeating since the Ice Age. So do parents. And, speaking on behalf of taxpayers and the general citizenry, there are also a few rules we’d like to suggest.

To that end, I hereby offer a brief course that I call “Back To School 101: A Primer on How to Reduce Everyone’s Irritation With You.”

The highlights are as follows:

The fact that it is your birthday does NOT mean you don’t have to go to school.

When you get off the bus, yes, look both ways twice before crossing. But then could you move your rear end a little faster to get to the other side? I’ve been stuck behind your bus for an hour now.

Better yet, walk to school. If you’re old enough to cross the street by yourself and you live within three miles, walk. It’s good for you, it will help you lose weight, and it gives you times to switch from home-brain to school-brain.

You’re weird, too. Really. So don’t make fun of the weird kids.

If you’re assigned to write a 500-word essay, the length is a requirement, not a suggestion. Don’t write 300 words, don’t write 1,000. Just follow directions.

In fact, following directions is the secret to life, really. Most directions aren’t complicated, and they aren’t meant to trick you. Following them doesn’t mean you’re part of the herd, even though you are. (Just look at how you’re dressed and compare that to how everyone else your age is dressed.)

Speaking of clothes, buy off the sales rack. Your parents are broker than they were last year.

While you’re at it, buy clothes that are a) comfortable and b) won’t get you sent home to change into something decent.

Spelling counts.

So do apostrophes.

Piercing your tongue interferes with diction. If you don’t know what diction is, look it up. You can find the word diction in the diction-ary.

Don’t crack your gum, don’t roll your eyes at your teacher, bring a pen, take notes, pick up your feet when you walk, don’t blame someone else, smile, sit up straight, raise your hand before you talk, don’t run in the hall, consider the carrot sticks instead of the chips.

AND TURN OFF THAT CELL PHONE!

OK, that’s almost it. This is a short list because you’re still in your summer torpor (look it up), and I don’t want to give you brain shock.

But there is one further bit of advice I’d like to pass on. It’s something that my old health/gym teacher, Harriet Borg, instructed my health class when I was in 9th grade at Washingtonville High School. I must confess it stunned me when I heard her say these words out loud:

Leave yourself plenty of time in the morning for a bowel movement.

It’s true that I failed to appreciate Miss Borg’s wisdom when I was 14. But now, at the age of 60, I consider it among the most sensible and sound pieces of advice I’ve ever been offered.

I realize that today’s teenagers might well be inclined to ignore me just as I ignored Miss Borg, but I suspect it would vastly improve the atmosphere in the building if everyone took a crap before going to school in the morning.

Beth can be reached at beth@zestoforange.com.

By Beth Quinn

We are Gammy and Gamps, my husband and I.

It was up to our second grandchild to so name us. Our first grandchild, Sam, doesn’t speak. At the age of six, he’s never said Mommy or Daddy. He’s never called me  anything. It’s more than possible he never will.

Lest you think this is a sad tale, however, I hasten to assure you otherwise. Yes, autism is bear to wrestle with. And yes, Sam’s parents – my son Sean and his wife Melissa – have  known despair. I am no Pollyanna, and there’s no such thing as sugar-coating in our family.

Even so, this is not a sad tale.

I first wrote about Sam when he was three years old and had just been diagnosed with an extremely rare disorder called Bannayan Riley Ruvalcaba Syndrome. What a name, huh? It took three researchers to discover it, and they all put their names to it.

Sam is like a unicorn. He’s one of only a handful of people in the United States to have this particular batch of missing chromosomal material. As a result, he has an issue or two:

Skeletal abnormalities (club feet, which must be periodically casted to keep them on the straight and narrow – Sam doesn’t mind the casts); a tendency toward polyps so that he must have a colonoscopy at regular intervals (he does mind this); low muscle tone (he has no idea he works harder than others to overcome gravity); some mild retardation (maybe – we’re not sure); food allergies (he can’t eat Ritz Bits, his very favorite food, along with a host of other foods that he doesn’t care for anyway); and the autism.

That’s a summary of what he – and his parents – cope with, but it is not a summary of who he is. Who they are. There are so many stories I could tell to let you know the real Sam and Sean and Melissa. I will tell just one.

Last fall Sean told me he planned to teach Sam how to ski. They live in the Berkshires, near Jiminy Peak, and Sean has been an avid skier all of his life. Teaching a child of his own to ski has long been part of his life plan.

“But Sam hates the cold,” I reminded him. “And he won’t wear mittens or a hat. And – remember? – he hates new things.”

“Um hmm,” said Sean. “That’s true. We’ll see.”

Sean’s goals were modest. On the first day out, his plan was to help Sam get into his gear (anyone who has ever skied knows how much trouble THAT is for an adult, let alone an autistic five-year-old who isn’t much of a communicator), then take his gear off, have a snack (he was still eating Ritz Bits last winter), then go home.

Melissa found mittens online that went all the way up to his armpits in hopes he would keep them on. Sean had him practice wearing a helmet in preparation for the big day of going to the ski lodge to have a snack.

And so they did. Only thing is, that first day didn’t turn out at all like Sean expected. It happens that Jiminy Peak hosts a program called Stride – a group of volunteers who show up to help handicapped kids and adults enjoy sports. In this case, skiing.

One of the Stride volunteers saw Sam eating his Ritz Bits in the lodge and suggested they go outside. Sean got Sam geared up again. Then Sean and the volunteer walked Sam up a small hill. At the top, they each took hold of the end of a pole and they draped Sam’s arms over it.

And Sam skied down the little hill between his dad and the volunteer. And he smiled, then he grinned, then he laughed. And then he did it again. And again. And again. He was outside, in the cold air that he hates, for 2½ hours that day.

Sean and Sam between runs at Jiminy Peak last winter.

My son took Sam skiing three times a week all last winter. Sam learned how to get on and off the chair lift on his own, with just a bit of help. He learned how to snowplow. He learned how to stop. He learned not to run into people and to stay out of other skiers’ way.

Sam learned how to ski. He skied when it was freezing cold. He skied in the rain. He skied until there was no more snow left on the hill.

Sam learns how to snowplow.

Good thing, too. Sean always wanted his son to be a skier. And when the Stride program was featured on the Albany news station in March, it was Sam and Sean who represented them.

Meantime, while Sam and Sean were off skiing, Melissa was home trying to figure out how to make some hypo-allergenic food for Sam and disguise it as Chicken and Stars, which is pretty much the only food besides Ritz Bits that Sam actually enjoys.

Oh yeah, and did I mention she was also taking care of two new additions to

Melissa with twins Austin and Bryce at 5 weeks old - and barely 2 pounds.

the family – extremely premature twin boys who were born in the one-pound range last August? Do these two people know how to have fun or what??!

I’m happy to report that the twins are coming along just fine. And I’m equally happy to report that Sam often pats them on the head and smiles sweetly at them. Beyond that, he’s just happy to get the heck out of the house with his dad for this season’s sport, which is swimming.

He’s now doggie paddling all over the place. If Mom and the twins happen to go along and are in the water too, he paddles over to pat each of the babies on the head and smile his sweet smile at them.

Bryce, left, and Austin at 10 months.

Melissa told me a few weeks ago that she’s a different person because of Sam. “I’m not the person I expected to be when Sean and I first got married,” she said. “We aren’t living happily ever after, but we’re living happily. I like who I am better than the person I might have been, and a lot of it is because of Sam.”

When I worked for the newspaper, I occasionally heard from a reader who talked about his daughter and autistic grandchild. His daughter was his hero, he told me. He said it often, and his voice always held pride and happiness when he spoke of her.

I now know how he felt. The world doesn’t offer the mentally challenged a lot of breaks, but Sam has caught the two most important breaks any child could hope for – his parents.

As for those long mittens, well, Sam never did develop a liking for them and wouldn’t keep them on, so Sean bought a roll of duct tape. When it’s time to gear up, Sam hands Sean the mittens and holds out his arms while Sean puts them on him.

Then Sam hands his father the duct tape and holds out his arms to let Sean tape the mittens to his jacket.

Sam’s a little quirky, but they work things out.

Beth can be reached at beth@zestoforange.com.

By Beth Quinn

Those of you under the age of 30 might have never heard the word “layaway” before. It means “pay for something before you bring it home.”

Weird, huh.

Layaway went the way of the dinosaur with the advent of credit cards, but I’ve come to find out that it’s now making a comeback. Our nouveau poverty is making the idea of layaway cool again.

Let me explain how it works. When you want to buy something but don’t have enough money to pay for it, the store helps out by holding your purchase while you gradually pay it off. Once it’s all paid for, you can have it.

I first realized that layaway has now been re-invented when I saw a big banner in the window of Michael’s Appliance Center in Middletown last week:

LAYAWAY

it said.

“Are you kidding me?” I said to my husband. “They’re offering layaway! I haven’t seen layaway since Playtogs closed.”

More catch-up needed, I think, for those of you under the age of 30 and those who weren’t born here. Playtogs was Middletown’s first discount center, located out on 17M. It’s been closed for years, but that doesn’t mean it’s forgotten.

To this day, when someone asks one of us home-growns for directions, we often begin by saying, “Well, you know where Playtogs used to be, right? So you go past there heading toward Goshen and then you ….”

If the driver seeking directions doesn’t know where Playtogs used to be, oh well. He just has to stay lost, or seek help from someone who also doesn’t know where Playtogs used to be and can give directions from someplace that still exists.

But anyone who ever shopped at Playtogs knows why it comes to mind when you think of the word “layaway.” If you bought something there and couldn’t pay for it all at once, they’d hoist it up to the ceiling where it would endlessly circle the store on revolving racks until you came back with the money to rescue it from retail limbo.

On any given day, you could look up at the ceiling and see hundreds of items hanging on hooks: dresses, tennis rackets, shoes, hair dryers, underwear, jewelry boxes, tires, nighties.

I once had a pair of suede dress boots up there for six weeks. I’d go in once a week to make a payment and wave to them as they swung by. I can’t tell you how exciting it was to see them come down once they were all mine, paid for in full.

Layaway gradually went out of style to be replaced by credit cards, instant credit, store credit – buy now, pay later. The fun of anticipation was replaced with the temporary thrill of instant gratification – take home now, no payments for 12 months. The thing’s worn out by the time you have to pony up for it.

But now, layaway is making a comeback. Frank Dragone, sales manager for Michael’s Appliance Center, said they started offering a layaway plan this year for the first time. The store holds your purchase for you until you can pay it off. No fee. No interest.

And the concept is a hit. “A lot of people come in and say, wow, we haven’t seen a layaway sign in years, and they think it’s great,” said Dragone. “Some people are starting to accept the idea that they can’t always have what they want right away.”

He said the store has about a dozen customers gradually paying off layaway items right now. “But others, no,” he said. “They want it now, so they take out a charge card. And of course there are sometimes emergencies. If you need a new washer, well, sometimes that can’t wait.”

Some of the big box stores are offering layaway, too, although sometimes there’s a fee for the service, which is not exactly in the Playtogs spirit. Online stores are starting to catch on, too. There’s now E-Zlayaway.com, elayawaymall.com, elayaway.com – you get the picture.

Layaway gives people a cooling off period to figure out the difference between what they need and what they want. Sometimes, when you walk away from a layaway item, you realize you didn’t need it after all. You can always change your mind if you haven’t already taken something home and folded, spindled, mutilated or otherwise ripped, dented or ruined it before the first payment is even made.

In today’s economy, losers are the ones running up credit cards. The cool kids know that instant gratification just isn’t fashionable anymore. They’re waiting for something until they know they really need it – and they know they can pay for it.

As for those elephant bell bottoms I thought I so desperately needed decades ago, well … I changed my mind after I left the store. I think they were still circling the ceiling years later when Playtogs closed its doors for the last time.

Beth can be reached at beth@zestoforange.com.

By Beth Quinn

I continue to be astonished by imbeciles who think they have something of value to contribute to the national dialogue.

Why, I don’t know. I should be used to them by now. George Bush, the former imbecile-in-chief, gave this crowd a sense of legitimacy and now they won’t shut up. Anyone with a computer and a set of falsehoods upon which to base a wrong-headed opinion can clutter up our e-mail inboxes with LOUD STUPID STUFF.

I’ve recently been informed by e-mail that:

• Our president is working to make laws against blogging. It would be a felony.
• Our president wasn’t born in the good old US of A.
• Our president wants to send the terrorists in Gitmo to live in Kansas. (Note to terrorists: Don’t go to Kansas! It’s a very flat state and you will be recognized a mile away. My Italian cousins live in Kansas, and one of them won her school’s minority scholarship, so if Italians are that much of a minority in Kansas, you would definitely stand out like a sore thumb!)

This week, though, I’ve received the lengthiest and most comprehensive bit of lunacy yet. It’s a page-by-page “analysis” of the 1,000-page House health-care reform bill, which proves that Our President can’t wait to get the US of A turned into a Socialist State fast enough, taking away our freedoms in the process, including our freedom to blog and giving free health-care to immigrants!

It’s hard to say who originated this “analysis,” but Fox News is partially responsible for giving birth to most of the nation’s misinformation. After all, when a “news” announcement is followed with a question mark (Will the government determine who will be euthanized and when?), it kind of passes for the truth.

For some reason, these anti-health-care reform folks are suddenly real taken with our current system of health care, which is something most of them used to complain about. Now that the not-born-in-the-good-old-US-of-A-president wants to change it, they want to hang onto it – and with some strange reasoning.

They think this foolish president of ours suddenly wants us to pay for health-care for the poor. (Note to the stupid people: We already do, just not terribly efficiently).

They are suddenly big fans of private health insurance companies, which have our best interest at heart. (Another note to the stupid people: No they don’t, but any fairness you experience is due to government regulation).

And they want the government to stay away from their Medicare. (This is getting tedious, but another note to the stupid people: Medicare IS a government insurance program and it’s actually run very well except for the prescription drug part that Bush messed with to the great advantage of the pharmaceutical companies.)

Happily, a reader named Sandy Holtz, who also received this chain e-mail analysis of the health-care bill, sent me a link to a site called politifact.com. This site, which is run by the St. Petersburg Times, is non-partisan and is intended to sort out fact vs. fiction in Washington. It’s a good site to bookmark because it does responsible things like keep a report card on Obama’s campaign promises.

It also sorts out fact vs. fiction in chain e-mail like the health-care “analysis.” You might find politifact’s analysis of the “analysis” interesting. (Bottom line: Most of it falls into the category of “Liar, liar, pants on fire!”)

In case you missed it, though, the following are some of the “facts” about health-care reform efforts that are being e-mailed around by Americans who are proud of their ignorance:

• Health insurance will be provided to all non-citizens including illegals.
• No lawsuits allowed.
• Special needs people will be restricted. Off to the glue factory.
• Government sets doctor salaries.
• All illegals are exempt from taxes.
• Government determines what will be in wills and durable powers of attorney.
• All marriage and family counseling will be provided by government.

(On that last point? I’d like to recommend that the government tests IQ before allowing people to breed, too.)

Beth can be reached at beth@zestoforange.com

By Beth Quinn

Welcome back to Nunville.

We’re talking about nuns for the second week in a row here because it seems there’s some enduring interest in Catholic nuns (mostly positive) and a shared anger on their behalf.

I learned this through my e-mail after last week’s column about the fact that the Vatican has ordered an investigation of American nuns, many of whom have joined the real world in the past few decades, since the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. The intention of this modern-day inquisition appears to be to reel the nuns in and force them back into a more cloistered existence to serve as slave labor for the Church.

Get thee back to the nunnery, women!

Despite my own bad childhood experience with a nun who told me my dead dog wouldn’t get into heaven, I have since grown to love and respect most of the nuns I’ve come to know. I also feel like starting an uprising on their behalf now that the good ole boys in Rome are gunning for them.

A number of readers have strong feelings of their own on the issue. Read on.

Hi Beth.
Boy, did this column about nuns hit home. Until the death of the older one, I had two sisters in the convent.

The other one was fired. You read that  right – fired after more than 50 years as a woman religious by a Bishop who felt they didn’t “share the same vision” for the diocese.
 
Her family and fellow nuns rallied round and today she is busier than ever, but it must have been a real test of her faith. It remains the only time I ever heard her choke up.
 
You are right to place your money on the “good sisters.” The changes wrought by Vatican II are like a bell that no one can un-ring. There’s a greater chance that the Pope will take a bride than that these educated, resourceful women will march single file back into the cloister. – Kathy Garvey
 
Beth.
I’m also a recovering Catholic (and it’s a lifelong recovery), and I’d like to see those women drag that increasingly irrelevant institution into the 21st century. – Larry Byrne

Beth.
While I too, am generally not in the habit (no pun intended, but it works) of commenting about the life of nuns, I found your piece it be thought-provoking.

If it is accurate that the population of these sometimes gentle, often well meaning and always delusional ladies has decreased by two thirds in modern times then, I submit, there is cause for hope. Only when there are only a few dozen remaining will I feel comfortable. These women can do all of their good works without being betrothed to God, and the drunken, pedophile priests should do their own housekeeping.
 
But no dogs in heaven??? Was she serious? In my opinion, if there is a heaven it is run by dogs, and only those who treat them and their kindred spirits here on earth with the decency and respect that is their due are permitted in.

A fine reason to leave the church! As good as any other that I have ever heard. Would that Galileo had thought of it. – Howard
 
Beth.
Love your piece. I am an anti-religious who was married to a liberal Roman Catholic who, after confession, would lean into her confessor and demand to know why the Church did not permit women to be priests and why they could not marry, etc. etc.

One Saturday she returned from confession, smoke coming from her ears. The priest had told her, “I will pray for your conversion.” – Fred of Ithaca

Note to Fred:
Love your story about your wife’s confession. I had some terrible moments in confession myself, but the one that stands out was my own fault. As a young teenager, I was not allowed to shave my legs, so I used Nair on my legs – a product that removes hair and stinks to high heaven. Literally. (To this day, I don’t understand why putting a chemical on my legs was OK, but I couldn’t touch a razor to my skin. Be that as it may …)

One day, I used it directly before going to confession and must not have washed it off thoroughly. The smell of it filled the booth and must have surely wafted over to the priest’s side, for he interrupted my confession and said, “Say 10 Hail Mary’s and 3 Our Father’s. Go now.” – Beth

Beth.
I am not Catholic, but in many ways, what you said applies to all religions including my own. (Think Kyriat Joel.) You said something that was needed and essential. – David

Hi Beth.
Thanks for that column on nuns. My aunt is a gym teacher/nun in Queens. She has given her life to the community for 35 years.

She and other sisters help run an undisclosed women’s shelter for New York City. The women and their children live there. My aunt and her fellow sisters watch their children while the women attend high school/college, allowing them to pursue a career that will help them support their families.

Every year we attend a dinner and fundraiser helping support this shelter. A woman always attends to tell her success story. Sadly, the nuns are now elderly and will soon pass this women-only project over to the city.

I was offended to see the New York Times article about the Church’s investigation of nuns (still a good ole boys party).Thank you for writing your opinion. I just wanted to write one story that needed to be told. – Mary

From Beth.
I love these stories. Thank you. I’d like to end with one more nun story of my own.

When I was a health writer for the local newspaper, I grew to depend on the medical expertise of Dr. Jerry Quint, who was then a surgeon at St. Anthony Community Hospital in Warwick. He made himself available to answer any questions I might have – any time I might have them. He became my great, good friend.

The only problem was, I could rarely quote him accurately in the newspaper because his colorful language wasn’t deemed appropriate for print. But the Internet rules are different. Actually, I don’t think there are any rules, so I can quote him accurately here.

I was writing a story about Catholic hospitals, and I called Quint and asked him whether he or other doctors felt restricted by working in a Catholic institution and having to follow some of the Church’s rules.

He didn’t exactly answer the question. What he did say, though, was this:

“You know what I love about the nuns here? They are not full of shit.”

Believe me, there is no higher praise.

Beth can be reached at beth@zestoforange.com.

By Beth Quinn

Let me begin by saying that nuns are really none of my business.

I know that.

Anything the Catholic Church does is none of my business because I left it years ago. Over a dog, of all things. When I was 12, a Sunday school nun told me my dead dog couldn’t go to heaven. I decided she could take her heaven and shove it where the sun don’t shine.

I didn’t like that particular nun and formed my opinion of them all, and their Church, and their priests (most of whom were drunks, at least in our parish) based on a very few bad apples.

I’m still not too partial to the Catholic Church in general, for reasons that go far beyond canine afterlife. The Church, I am certain, is not too keen about me, either. Even so, as you might have surmised by now in this lengthy introduction, I’m going to say a few words about nuns today.

And my words are those of praise and righteous anger on their behalf.

Why, you may ask?

Because the Vatican is gunning for them. Rome has ordered an investigation of American nuns, many of whom have joined the real world in the past few decades, since the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Many nuns stopped wearing religious habits and left the convents to live independently. They went into new lines of work: academia and other professions; social and political advocacy; and grass-roots organizations that serve the poor and promote spirituality.

What gall those nuns have!

In case you missed it, the New York Times carried a story earlier this month about the Vatican undertaking a modern-day inquisition of these wild and crazy nuns. The  intention, it seems, is to reel them in from the real world and force them back into a more cloistered existence.

Full recommendations will be issued in 2011, when the investigation of these terrible Church outlaws is completed. It is expected by many that they will be ordered back into their convents and religious garb so that they may better serve in their historical role as unpaid laborers for the Church’s male hierarchy.

Speaking as a fellow woman (is that a contradiction in terms?), this is both preposterous and counterproductive. The Catholic Church has been hemorrhaging good nuns (and priests, for that matter) over the last several decades. In 1965, there were 180,000 American nuns. Today, there are 60,000.
 
To be honest, my own vision of good nuns is based on Whoopi Goldberg’s “Sister Act” – they are kind, smart, generous, fearless, slightly rebellious women out on the streets in inner-city neighborhoods. They help save people with humor and grace, with hard work and common sense, with love and piety (the good kind of piety, not the kind practiced by the holier-than-thou members of Congress who keep getting caught with their pants down).

They are, in short, of this world and full-fledged participants in the lives of those they labor to educate, serve and save.

My vision of good nuns also comes from those who teach at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh – Sister Catherine, Sister Peggy, Sister Ann, to name but a few. They challenge students to think well and to form their own conclusions. They guide their charges through the terrible confusion of adolescence.

And they teach them the proper use of the apostrophe, by God.

My favorite nuns like dogs, too. Labrador retrievers have been known to

One of the burning theological questions of our time: Will this dog get into heaven?

make their home at the sisters’ house on the Mount college campus, where there is a fine choice of  bed linens and couches for napping. Those dogs are already in heaven.

I don’t speak for such nuns – they are all perfectly capable of speaking for themselves, thank you very much – but I will tell you this. Those folks at the Vatican are picking on the wrong crowd.

I’m happy to report that some of the nation’s nuns are fomenting rebellion. They’re urging their sisters not to cooperate with the Vatican inquisition. “The investigators should be treated as uninvited guests who should be received in the parlor, not given the run of the house,” urged Sister Sandra Schneiders, a professor emerita of New Testament and spirituality in Berkeley.

In some cases, nuns are responding by growing more vocal in their call for changes that would help bring the entire Church into the modern world and strengthen its foundation, such as – gasp! – ordaining women and married men as priests.

This ought to be interesting to watch. My money is on the nuns, and I’ll be cheering them on from the sidelines. So will my dogs.

Even though it’s none of our business, of course.

Beth can be reached at beth@zestoforange.com.

By Beth Quinn

Well, fellow fussbudgets, here we are together again.

You may recall that, back in 2004 (Holy Hyphenator! – Was it really that long ago?), I formed the Hudson Valley Chapter of the Apostrophe Preservation Society. Membership was open to anyone who sent me an apostrophe error spied in a public place, and I occasionally compiled the submissions for the edification of the uneducated who, no doubt, didn’t care a whit.

But WE did. WE cared. The Apostrophe Posse grew to be 150 members strong (a good number for such a thankless task, really), and we gradually branched out. A Spelling Sub-Committee was formed and ran wild, pointing out spelling errors on signs all over the mid-Hudson. (Frute for Sale was among the most memorable.)

Another loosely organized crowd concentrated on finding random acts of quoteness, such as this one, which appeared at the entrance of a Middletown restaurant: Restrooms for customer “use” only. (One shudders to think what the customers were actually doing in there.)

This was a tough crowd, whose members often had to turn on their own loved ones to rid the world of unnecessary quotation marks. I’ve done so myself, with the result of losing a friendly correspondent who always began her letters to me by writing Dear “Beth.” I asked her what she thought my real name was, and I never heard from her again.

Well, somebody has to maintain standards by losing friends, and the Apostrophe Posse has never shirked its duty. Therefore, today I renew the call to arms for my fellow picky punctuators. Come one, come all – the depostrifizers and the repostrifizers, the dequotifiers and the … well, I don’t know … shall we call them the spellies?

We are needed now more than ever. While we were all looking the other way this past year (on account of my being laid off – or, more formally, lain off), terrible things have been happening over in England where, as you might recall, we obtained all of our words (until lately when we got hola from Mexico).

First, there has been a major assault on the apostrophe in the city of Birmingham, England’s second largest city, where the queen’s English is now the queens English because the decision has been made to drop all apostrophes from street signs.

City officials claim that the apostrophes are confusing and old-fashioned, and they have been quietly removing them for decades, really. But it’s now official – no more apostrophes.

Said Councilor Martin Mullaney, who heads the city’s transport scrutiny committee, “Apostrophes confuse people. If I want to go to a restaurant, I don’t want to need an A-level (high school diploma) in English to find it.”

What a champion of morons! While it’s true that even the ignorant deserve to eat a meal in a restaurant, it just doesn’t seem fair to blame the

The sad result of de-apostrification.

apostrophe for its misuse. I suppose if some drivers got confused about the speed limit, we’d just get rid of it?

Worse, educators in England are now jumping on the anti-rules bandwagon. Last month, it was announced that the entire United Kingdom is going to get rid of the “i before e except after c” rule because there are too many exceptions to it.

With this opening of Pandora’s box, people are practically pouring into the streets of London to throw their spelling books onto large bonfires. There are those who want to overhaul the entire English spelling system to get rid of its difficulties. Before you know it, text messaging will be setting the new standard in spelling, and we’ll be c-ing the last of tough homonyms, such as see and sea.

As you might expect, this has caused near apoplexy for traditionalists – myself among them – who fear we’ll soon be reading books with titles like 4 Hoom the Bell Toles.

So please, help me in this entirely futile endeavor of saving our punctuation and spelling rules, however confusing those rules may be. If we wanted things to be simple, we’d all be speaking French. (They hardly have any words in France but communicate, instead, through tone of voice and murmurs.)

If you spy an error, send it to me at beth@zestoforange.com. If you can, take a picture and send that to me, too. There’s lots of room on the Internet for pictures.

And if you care to risk arrest, take along a magic marker wherever you may roam in order to fix offending punctuation, spelling and grammar. (You might consider keeping an extension ladder handy, too, for tall signs and billboards.) After your arrest, keep your eyes open for errors at the police station – and let me know how the officer takes it when you try to straighten him out. What fun we’ll have!
 
One last thought for today. The following poem will, no doubt, cause all purists to wonder what IS the world coming to, anyway, with the apparent and inexorable extinction of grammar rules. The poem first appeared in the British newspaper, The Guardian.

Windows Is Shutting Down

Windows is shutting down, and grammar are
On their last leg. So what am we to do?
A letter of complaint go just so far,
Proving the only one in step are you.

Better, perhaps, to simply let it goes.
A sentence have to be screwed pretty bad
Before they gets to where you doesnt knows
The meaning what it must of meant to had.

The meteor have hit. Extinction spread,
But evolution do not stop for that.
A mutant languages rise from the dead
And all them rules is suddenly old hat.

Too bad for we, us what has had so long
The best seat from the only game in town.
But there it am, and whom can say its wrong?
Those are the break. Windows is shutting down.

Beth can be reached at beth@zestoforange.com.

By Beth Quinn

Barack Obama proved, finally, that anyone can grow up to be president. Sarah Palin, however, proved him wrong. Happily, lunatics are still not able to win the White House.
 
Sometimes presidents turn into lunatics while living in the Booby Hatch Capital of the World (Richard Nixon is a case in point), but Americans are still reluctant to make a national leader of someone who proves herself bonkers before even running.

She certainly appeared to be a certifiable maniac last Friday when she

announced that she was quitting her governor job because … well, basically because she’s not a dead fish:

“And a problem in our country today is apathy,” she explained at her hastily called press conference. “It would be apathetic to just hunker down and go with the flow. Nah, only dead fish go with the flow. No. Productive, fulfilled people determine where to put their efforts, choosing to wisely utilize precious time … to BUILD UP.”

Among the many mysteries as to what she meant by this, I confess I wasn’t aware that dead fish ‘go with the flow.’ I thought they kind of ‘float up to the

Sarah Palin says she's no dead fish, which she claims is why she can't be governor anymore. Or something.

surface and stink.’ But then, I am not a fisherperson. Perhaps it’s common in tackle shops to say, “Only dead fish go with the flow.”

Perhaps there are even little wooden signs with those words carved into them that the rod and reel crowd hang on the wall in their fishing huts. (If any of you are in the know about  this, please tell me. I’d hate to be unfair here.)

But I digress. The speculation, of course, is that Alaska’s rogue maverick diva is stepping down in order to make a full-time job of preparing for a presidential run in 2012. For Tina Fey’s sake, I hope so. She must be devastated.

But on the off chance that anyone who isn’t a comedian thinks electing a President Palin is great idea, a little review of the past eight months might be in order:

She trotted her children, all named after imaginary things or sporting events or math functions, onto the public stage at the Republican Convention, where they sat, glassy-eyed, looking like refuges from the Village of the Damned. And that high school hockey player dude was sitting there, too – Levi Johnston – almost visibly praying the rosary that Sarah the Lunatic would lose the election so he wouldn’t have to marry the very pregnant Bristol and have Sarah for a mother-in-law. Then, of course, the vice presidential hopeful got upset when the press wrote about her kids. Children should be off limits! she screeched. Indeed they should, Mom.

In an interview on CNBC last July she announced her confusion about the duties of the job she was aspiring to: “As for that VP talk all the time, I’ll tell you, I still can’t answer that question until somebody answers for me what is it exactly that the VP does every day?”

Speaking to students in Wasilla last June, she revealed her understanding of God’s role in our invasion of Iraq: “Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending soldiers out on a task that is from God. That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.” She was sort of right about one thing. It would have been useful if there had been a plan.

When asked by Katie Couric during that disastrous interview last September what newspaper or magazine she reads, she was unable to name a single periodical: “All of ’em, any of ’em that have been in front of me over all these years.”

She also revealed to Katie that she has a lot of foreign policy experience due to being able to see Russia on a clear day. And, who knew? She revealed at a fundraiser last fall that Afghanistan is also located pretty close to Alaska: “They are also building schools for the Afghan children so that there is hope and opportunity in our neighboring country of Afghanistan.” (Apparently, she can see bin Laden’s former cave from her house on a clear day, too.)

Then there’s her lack of clarity on the abortion issue. She THINKS she’s against abortion, but in fact she’s pro-choice. At a recent Right to Life fundraiser, she described in great detail the fact that she considered an abortion when she found out she was pregnant at the age of 44, then again when she learned the baby she was carrying had Down syndrome. In the end, she chose to have the baby, not abort it. Bully for her. That was, apparently the right choice for her. But, oh Saaaarah … that’s called Choice. My two kids could be named Choice One and Choice Two. The fact that I chose to have them doesn’t make me anti-abortion, you moron. It just means I chose to have them – just like you.

There is so much more, but I’ll move on now to last Friday when, in her rousing Tour de Force of Incoherence, she further explained her reason for quitting Alaska by announcing: “I choose to work very hard on a path for fruitfulness and productivity. I choose not to tear down and waste precious time, but to build up this state and our country and her industrious, generous, patriotic free people!!!!!”

Evidently, this fruitfulness can only happen if she’s not a governor.

Now that I think of it, perhaps we should encourage her to run for president in 2012. Having Sarah Palin as the Republican candidate might well be the best thing that ever happened to the Democratic party. And it would sure keep Tina Fey happy.

p.s. If you haven’t already done so, read Maureen Dowd’s July 8 column, Sarah’s Secret Diary. Very, very funny. And scary.

Beth can be reached at beth@zestoforange.com.

By Beth Quinn

If there is anyone in the world who was probably thrilled at the news of Michael Jackson’s death last week, it had to be Mark Sanford.

Jacko didn’t quite push Jackass off page 1, but his death did divert the media’s attention from the weepy South Carolina governor for a few minutes.

This is but one of the many thoughts that crossed my mind during the unraveling of the Sanford mystery, taking us from a cover story about a governor who had to get away from it all by hiking naked on the Appalachian Trail to the truth of the matter, which was actually more boring – an affair in Argentina with the lovely Maria.

For some time now, I’ve been trying to pull all of my thoughts about the Sanford affair into a coherent column, completely rendered and held together with an introduction, body and conclusion.  Alas, this has not happened. Instead, I offer you some disparate comments on the matter and trust that some of these very same thoughts have crossed your mind as well.

Sanford’s confession had to be the most tedious public declaration of infidelity I’ve ever heard. It took him 10 minutes of rambling on about his love of nature and his hikes as a young lad to get to the meat of the thing. Presumably, he thought the public felt more miffed about the Appalachian Trail lie than about his being AWOL and having an affair, and he wanted to explain that he really DOES love that darned old trail and wasn’t cheating on IT, anyway.

Or something.

While Conservatives have no corner on the marital infidelity market, it seems that they tend to lean more heavily toward genuine nuttiness. Liberals are more likely to be straight-ahead lyin’, cheatin’ scamps, but at least they aren’t usually booby hatch material. In fact, Sanford provided evidence that he’s a lunatic a few weeks before skipping off to South America when he rejected billions in federal stimulus money on behalf of the good citizens of his state, 12 percent of whom are unemployed and in dire need of some extra cash to put food on the table. His rationale: Well, he hates big government.

But looking at this strictly as an infidelity issue, it’s harder to swallow when a sanctimonious, self-satisfied, two-faced prig cheats on his wife because of all that hypocritical crap he and the rest of the moral vanguard are always screeching about. Sanford was at the forefront back in the day, thumping his Bible and calling for Clinton’s impeachment and carrying on about the sanctity of marriage and the long etcetera list of family values.

Like his fellow prigs – Gingrich, Limbaugh, Ensign, Palin, and the gang – he wants to make standards of behavior for all the rest of us but apparently feels free to ignore his own rules. Until he got caught, anyway. Now he’s all about the Bible once again, using it this time to explain that his fall from grace is like that dude’s in the Old Testament, and now God will holdeth his hand and forgiveth him and he will prayeth that the rest of us may someday see-eth the light as he haseth!

Or something.

Jenny Sanford is the coolest cheated-upon political spouse ever. None of this head-held-high-stand-by-your-man stuff. She told Sanford to kiss off. Publicly. And joked with the press as she did it. As she was leaving to spend some time on her boat, she told a horde of reporters, “I wish we had room on the boat for you all, but we do not.” How cool is THAT!?

Meanwhile, Sanford has described his wife to the press as “absolutely magnanimous and gracious as a wonderful Christian woman.” What a weird thing to say. I wonder what it even means? And what does that make Silda Spitzer?

More evidence that Sanford is actually a lunatic – he now claims he’s a good role model for his four sons. His good role modelhood, he says, is based on the fact that he’s picking himself up by the boot straps and soldiering on instead of being a quitter and resigning like 95 percent of the country thinks he should. What an exemplary example!

He seems to think that this fall from grace is something that happened to him, not something he did. It’s as though he’s one of Mark Madoff’s innocent victims but now he vows that, like Scarlett, he WILL survive and never eat turnips again!

Or something.

Beth can be reached at beth@zestoforange.com.

By Beth Quinn

I fear we are all losing the will to live.

For those of you outside the mid-Hudson, we’ve had six days of sunshine since life began on Earth.

When I look at the National Weather Service map, I see only pictures of Thor throwing tiny little lightning bolts and God bowling in heaven. The sky is black and angry with no stars or moon in the nighttime.

It’s as though the Earth continued to rotate while the atmosphere held still until Orange County arrived under Seattle’s air mass. Then we began spinning again with their gloomy weather above our heads.

I hear it has rained only a half-inch in Washington state this season. I wonder whose weather they have now.

My friend Georgann tells me she has stopped taking all of her lawn chair cushions outside. Between downpours, she said, she brings out a single cushion to sit on so she can carry it in quickly when the rain begins again.

I have begun opening only one window per room. What is the point in opening, closing, opening, closing, opening, closing them all? I don’t want my biceps that well developed.

Fool that I am, I decided this spring would be the right time to buy an umbrella clothesline for the yard. To save energy, I thought. To make the laundry smell sunshiny sweet, I predicted. Ha! What strange optimism I must have been suffering from. I have used it only twice, once in April, then again during that sunny day – you might recall it – two weeks ago.

My new hammock is a sodden mess. I feel so sorry for it. I bought it in May, put it out on its hammock stand and then the skies opened up. I have never used it because it has never been dry enough to lie on. The poor thing seems so dispirited.

But – hark! – Could it be?

I see something rare and beautiful on the weather map three days out – a picture of white, billowy clouds against a blue sky. And there’s that round, yellow sun they told us about when we were school children!

The picture appears under the words “Independence Day.” And there it is again, under the word “Sunday”! It also says: “Mostly sunny.”

Good heavens. What shall I wear?