The inimitable Alexander McCall Smith is as we speak in the South Australian outback mining town of Coober Pedy. At this very moment -- and since he's getting a signal I guess he's come up out of his underground motel -- he's tweeting about the town and the opal miners he's meeting there:
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Loyalty trumps everything – what we know about the 47th president-elect’s
cabinet
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There are some surprising and controversial choices, but all Trump’s
cabinet picks have made their allegiances very clear.
1 hour ago
10 comments:
I love punctuation. As such, I admire anyone who can build a sentence with a colon, comma, semi-colon, colon, full stop.
Those who say you cannot use two colons in one sentence just aren't trying hard enough.
One of my mates' fathers worked on the Snowy River Project as a dynamiter after he emigrated. Apparently he used to think about solving lots of problems with dynamite: stump you can't clear? A stick should do it. Blocked drain? Shock wave!
I have some problems I'm often tempted to solve with dynamite but I think it might be against the law.
I really should read those McCall Smith books I got some years ago as a present.
That quote is lovely but it inadvertently reminds me of some of the weaknesses of twitter - it's impossible to encapsulate such a quote in just one tweet. And if you do it in consecutive tweets, readers will read the last sentence first - and the first last!
TimT -- they work well as separate tweets, a fact I've obscured by writing them down together like that.
Dammit, Tony said what I wanted to say, but I'll say it anyway: that semicolon rocks.
And the sentiment is fabulous too.
Reminds me of a commenter at/on the ABC, recalling how, as a naive and bumptious young man driving from Darwin to Adelaide, he stopped at Coober Pedy to get petrol.
"This place must be the arse end of the world," he said to the attendant, who took it in his stride.
"Just passing through, are you?" he politely responded.
Heh heh heh.
dynamite? remember 'Gelignite Jack' Murray roaring across SA in Redex car trials? he flung lit sticks as he left each town. The Good Old Days.
and Frances above? everone I know who has been to Coober Pedy thought it was wonderful.
Norm Geras in the UK, one of my regular blogreads on Dr McCall-Smith.
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