On semicolons.

From the Financial Times, September 17, 2005, archived at the author's website:

Pause Celebre

Carlyle's sumptuous prose was rich with them; Evelyn Waugh's fluid reveries depended on them.
The semicolon can be as subtle as a breath - so why do Americans hate it so much?

By Trevor Butterworth

http://www.trevorbutterworth.com/pause_celebre.htm

Full disclosure: I like semicolons and use them a bit more than I ought to, perhaps.

Thinking aloud about Idiot Plots.

"James Blish has said that much of sci-fi relies on Idiot Plots, defined as stories 'kept in motion solely by virtue of the fact that everybody involved is an idiot.'"

(Gregg Easterbrook, two-thirds of the way down the very long page http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/060425)

It occurs to me that it might be more plausible to have characters do unfathomably dumb things because they're crazy.

But maybe it's hard to write fictional characters who are both sympathetic and insane? Wait, I guess that's Bridget Jones.

Okay, maybe the readers and viewers of SF don't identify very well with people who act irrationally? Or at least not as well as the readers of some other genres?