Frazz by Jef Mallett for April 12, 2013

simsonfan, yeah, and they had the decency to keep their shirts on….

Lest not forget, the period. When I was young, my sister didn’t have hers, my parents went nuts. budda bing!

The Passenger is one of my all time favorite songs, Iggys version and all the covers of it.

He’s got a lust for life!

I had Iggy’s dad for an English teacher. I remember him reminiscing about golfing with Alice Cooper. He kind of just dropped that in casually one day. Wish I had had the guts to ask him if it was true that his son was the inspiration for Bowie’s “Laughing Gnome.” But he wasn’t exactly the open, approachable type. He could have patented the perfect supercilious sneer.

He was a good English teacher if you know how to use “supercilious” in a sentence.

Jeff showing his Michigan roots.Go Blue!!!

Excellent example, Fairportfan2! That one’s going on my favorites list as a subset under “Eats, shoots and leaves.”

I saw Iggy at the Palladium in NYC the late 70’s had Soupy Sales sons in his band. The Ramones where the opening act. $5 for a ticket couldn’t go wrong

@T_Lexi Lynne Truss’s book Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, is one of my all-time favorites. Hilarious! I’m just surprised there’s no hyphen between “Zero” and “Tolerance.” [And I still wish I could italicize here.]

Woops, there should be no comma after “Punctuation” in the above post.

Annie – Check out this site: Citizen Dog, June 26, 2008 – posting tips. To italicize, you type <i>your words</i> or _your words_ , and you get your words. The page I linked to will explain all this and much more.

His dad wants to be dead? (R.I.P. Ron)

Great outfit Ms. Plainwell.

I want to be the Keyboardist for Oingo Boingo.

@Arianne Thank you!

@Meowlin “Strangely white blackboards” are really common these days; maybe even the norm. They’re all over the Denver Public Schools, anyway. I assume they’re dry-erase boards, using those pen thingies, as opposed to chalk.

@bigpuma Oops! I deleted my last post to you in order to edit it, but forgot to copy it first, so I guess it’s lost. I’ll see if I can replicate it, with my error corrected. But if you saw it long enough to digest it. let me know.

@bigpuma "refresher on ‘like’ and ’as ""

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I’ll give it a whirl….The way I learned it is this: “like” is a preposition, so it takes an object – a noun or noun phrase. (“A dog like mine” or “It looks like rain.”) “As” is a conjunction, joining two clauses, so it’s followed by a verb. (“This above all – to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as night follows day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” [Shakespeare. ] “He arrived just as the cows were coming home.” “Do as I do, and not as I say.”)

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Miss Plainwell’s confusion stems from the fact that she heard “guitarist like my dad.” I read “stooges like my dad”!

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A “correct” rephrasing of the kid’s sentence might be “I want to be the guitarist for Iggy and the Stooges, as does my dad.” (Not gonna happen at Bryson Elementary, even by Caulfield!) Or, he might say, “Like my dad, I want to be the guitarist for Iggy and the Stooges.” (More likely, but still unlikely.) Or he could say, “I’m like my dad. I want to be …,etc.”) Both more likely and more touching.

The “like or as” question has been a source of controversy among grammarians for a long time. Makes ’em downright peevish!:))