According to a recent “news” article, the actress who plays the T-X in the movie Terminator 3 enjoys kissing women and has in fact done so on more than one occasion.

I used to think news.com.au had some credibility, due to its association with The Australian, and I was even prepared to overlook its offers of “Dating” and “Horoscopes”, and its tendency to group morbid or black humour articles into their own category.

However, I can’t help but cringe whenever the page offers me another non-fact about some one-dimensional celebrity, such as the one above. I mean, come on. This is the 21st century—girls kissing girls is so old, the candles don’t fit on the birthday cake.

The trouble, of course, with news.com.au is that it is a mixture of all the newspapers News Corporation owns. A lot of these newspapers aren’t very good. So, I think I’ll stop going there and just go to The Australian. I’ll suggest James does the same, if he can manage.

As far as mainstream news sources go, I recommend Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, CNN.com, Google News, and Ananova.

I’m well aware of the irony of talking about this un-newsworthy article and spreading it further by doing so.

我喜欢中国人民

1. The hyphen ( - ) is to be used in compound words only. The em dash ( — ) is used where two clauses are joined mid-sentence, where a clarification occurs, or where the speaker has changed the subject abruptly. The en dash ( – ) is used to denote a numerical range, or to adjective a pair of nouns (“I caught the Christchurch–Auckland flight at 1:30pm”).
2. It is generally accepted that em dashes are not to have spaces on either side where they are used. However there are narrower spaces, such as the hair space, which may be used to surround em dashes. Should it be necessary to enclose the dash in normal spaces for some reason, or as a matter of preference, the en dash should be used instead.
3. Writing “One, two, and three” is more desirable than writing “One, two and three”. This convention is commonly known as the Oxford comma.
4. When quoting multiple paragraphs, opening quotes go before each paragraph; closing quotes go after the last paragraph only.
5. The ellipsis ( … ) is used to indicate a pause, or where the speaker trails off. This may occur at the end of a sentence instead of a full stop. The ellipsis is also used to indicate some missing words in quoted speech. In this case, if the ellipsis replaces the last words of sentence, the ellipsis is followed by a full stop. However, if several sentences are being omitted, then the full stop must come before the ellipsis.
6. Where one is citing another’s writing, rather than speech, any ellipses added to indicate gaps in the citation should be enclosed in brackets ( [ … ] ) to clarify that the ellipsis is not part of the original author’s text.
7. The ‘less than’ and ‘greater than’ characters ( < > ) provided by the keyboard are not technically angle brackets. Angle brackets are used in scientific formulae and the like, and are much larger. There are smaller angle bracket–style marks ( « » ) used in French as we use quotation marks in English; these are called guillemets.
8. It is good practise to use a space instead of a comma to separate positive powers of a thousand in numbers ( “Give me 1 000 potatoes” ). Some languages use the comma as a decimal place. If you were to request 1,000 pommes de terre in Paris, you would receive one.
9. The colon ( : ) is used to introduce a clause which directly clarifies the previous one. The semicolon ( ; ) is used to indicate a casual relation between two clauses which could otherwise stand on their own as complete sentences. Furthermore, it is used instead of the comma where the use of a comma would introduce ambiguity to the sentence: for example, to separate a list of items which contain commas already.
   And finally…
10. The possessive singular of a noun is created by adding “’s” to the end of it; this holds true for words ending in ‘s’ as well. There are a very small number of exceptions where we can form the possessive by adding an apostrophe only; for more information see page 1 of The Elements of Style .

So, the upgrade is complete.

WordPress is the successor to b2, with more features and a slightly better management interface. One notable new feature is that it converts typed quotes into “6” and “9” quotes, and facilitates the proper use of “em” and “en” dashes, instead of having to use the hyphen for everything like a caveman. Thus, web journals can now approach the typographical correctness of a Word document.

Mortified, I quickly corrected all of the incorrect dashes in my journal so far, and swore an oath never to abuse the dash again, on penalty of torture.

The latest post to the b2 web site mentioned that there was a new security update for b2, for those people too chicken to upgrade to WordPress.

I had a chuckle at this, because I had never even seen WordPress mentioned on the b2 site before.

However, I’ve decided to make the great leap into the 21st century, and I’ll be making the new script look and feel like my old site again over the course of the evening.