I’m not sure such a word, gravatarium, exists, but I’d like to think it’s a type of moratorium that has nothing to do with money or payments.  A moment for reflection on gravatars?

I have a gravatar on WordPress.com and it is finally showing up on my account next to my username, but it doesn’t show up on my list of blogs next to this blog.  It shows up next to my WordPress. COM blogs, not next to my WordPress.ORG main blog.  And it doesn’t matter at all in the grand scheme of things, but for some reason I’m completely irritated by it.

People (like me) get hung up on these totally insignificant technical details.  We see this is writing courses a lot with small, fairly insignificant mechanical details when we really want students to attend to something bigger, like critical thinking.  It’s no different, really.  Writing is just an older technology.

The pleasure I feel when I solve a minor tech issue like this is no different than getting the punctuation correct in an MLA bibliography.

Jimmy Fallon posted a Facebook snippet about his dog with the tag, “I will always love you, Gary.”  People were confused because they thought perhaps the dog in the picture had passed away.  I wasn’t sure, either.  A few hours later, Fallon clarified that the dog was alive.  A fan posted a concern about the intellectual status of the fans who had thought the dog was dead based on the position of the comma after you.  She claimed that if the comma had been omitted, it would have meant the dog was dead, but since the comma was there, it was absolutely clear that the dog was alive.  She then lamented the state of public education.

I don’t get it, either.

If the dog was named Gary, then he could had been dead or alive, comma or not.  If the sentence was the dog talking to the baby in the picture, then well whatevah, comma or not, it still doesn’t really matter, right?

There should be a comma whether or not the dog is alive!

If you really want to lament the state of public education for a silly reason, get upset over the fact that dogs don’t use speech, and therefore, we cannot know what they are saying…then the problem is Jimmy Fallon’s lack of schooling, since education is all about curbing that out-of-control imagination that allows one to pretend dogs have speech. Obviously, that’s a problem….not.

And, if your mind is yet unblown…Jimmy Fallon’s Gary is a she-dog!