Kate Flora: I’m in the throes of packing for a trip where, according to the weather, the temps will be around 85 to 90. I wilt at those temperatures but the trip is long planned and I am hoping for the best. Still, it means I have everything in my closet strewn around in piles as I try to figure out what I can possibly wear that will be appropriate in a stylish city and walking into churches and still be something like cool and comfortable. Never mind the challenge of what to wear to the Captain’s Dinner on a ship. Argh!

That being the case, and I being maximally distracted by this challenge, my mind is rather blank when it comes to finding something interesting to blog about. My latest rejection letter? Hey, that’s no fun. The way rain has flattened my lovingly tended gardens? Nope. That’s no fun either. So instead, I share below some bits of wit or wisdom gleaned from posts by my FB friends this week. Hope you will find them as entertaining/and or thought provoking as I did.

First this little tidbit about fonts:

Second, a series of little sentences about grammar. I used to have my grammar hard-wired, having had both a great teacher in high school and a mom who was a sticker for grammar who went on to teach seventh grade language arts. (Have I ever told you how my mom packed her bags when I was a junior in high school and went back to college for a year to finish her degree so she could put her kids through college? She was an amazing woman.) Lately, I’ve come to believe that I must have a suffered a small stroke in the grammar center, as I’m constantly having to look things up.

An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.

• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.
• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.
• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.
• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”
• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.
• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.
• A question mark walks into a bar?
• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.
• Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, “Get out — we don’t serve your type.”
• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.
• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.
• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.
• A synonym strolls into a tavern.
• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar — fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.
• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.
• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.
• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.
• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.
• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.
• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.
• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.
• A dyslexic walks into a bra.
• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.
• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.
• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.
• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony

– Jill Thomas Doyle

And for all of you, but especially for my brother, John Clark, who cannot stop punning: