Teed Off in Kelowna

Day Three of our Okanagan odyssey saw us going for a family mini-golf excursion, and what a predictably hapless foursome we present. Kim is about as deftly-coordinated as an arthritic moose. Young Abby's approach to golf is to stickhandle toward the hole like Phil Esposito on a breakaway. As for me, I am by turns astonishingly lucky (hole-in-one on the 17th thanks to a five-foot rebound off a curb) and pathetically inept (my approach on this hole

saw me suffering the effects of more strokes than Dick Clark).

Two-year-old Sam, pictured here sitting smugly by the Deadwood-inspired facade on the 16th green,

 

carried the day by scoring a consistent two strokes on every single hole, owing to his strategy of picking up his ball after each tee-off, walking it to the cup and dropping it in. I'm actually kind of proud of him for figuring out so swiftly the pointless futility of golf.

Oh, right...the point of this blog entry? It was this sign, introducing us to the 6th hole:

Speaking of hit-and-miss (or, I suppose, miss-and-miss in this case), we have here both absent and superfluous punctuation. There should, of course, be an apostrophe in NATURES to indicate who that gardener is in service to. And when will sign-writers learn that quotation marks are not for slapping around a phrase to give emphasis? In fact, because the scare claws are often employed to indicate irony, the play can backfire like a florescent green golf ball ricocheting off a windmill fan. Although now that I look at that mangy patch of moonscape depicted here, perhaps the claim of "quality service" is indeed meant to be ironic.

Physician, Heel Thyself

The garrulous and avuncular (not to mention ubiquitous) Dr. Art Hister, Vancouver's medic-in-the-media, has a feature story in the latest edition of People First, the freebie mag distributed by Peoples Drug Mart. The good doctor begins his piece with this roller-coaster of a sentence:

My wife would say that I got really interested in the increasingly important medical issue of preventing falls in the elderly because, as she won't let me forget, "you're no spring chicken, my dear, more like a bruised old capon," (to be fair she's dead on, but I wish she weren't so brutally honest), but the truth is that I've been quite interested in the issue for a long time now, ever since, in fact, my wife and I took one of our annual hiking holidays, which as is too often the case, turned out to be anything but a "holiday" or what my wife calls "fun".

 Now, I have no problem with long sentences when they're artfully constructed and under control (Norman Mailer and David Foster Wallace, to name just two dead men, used to cast enthrallingly epic sentences) but that opener is not just a run-on, it's a runaway freight train. Here's fifty cents, doc--go buy yourself a period.

And speaking of periods, when the sentence finally does roll to a halt, after those Borscht Belt-style "take my wife" digressions, the final punctuation falls outside the quotation marks. Personally, that seems logical to me (and to the British, God love 'em) but the American (and Canadian) convention is to tuck the punctuation inside.