I remember, waaaaaay back in grade school, being discouraged from ending a story with the words "The End". Why?! Unless I'm planning on writing a sequel, those two words give perfect closure to a story. "What happens next?" nothing! It's The End.

We were told that it's "not professional" – by the same people that taught us not to start a sentence with the words "and" or "but". Ever. And you know what? I hate that "rule" too. But, I do it all the time anyway. And it's accepted. It's acceptable.

I recently read the book "The Road", and was frustrated at first by the lack of punctuation. The dialogue was mixed in with the story with no quotation marks. A couple of times I had to reread a section of dialogue to figure out whether the even or odd lines of dialogue were "the boy" or "the man", as their was no other indication.

Did Cormac McCarthy miss these "rules", or did he just say "fuck it all – I'm going to write the way I want"? Granted, even Cormac didn't end the book with "The End", but he could have, and they still would have made a movie out of it.

The End

You know what's more fun than rubber bands? (And even purple rubber bands!) …. Orange rubber bands!

I feel like I should be collecting these things!

If you're not subscribed (or regularly checking) The Oatmeal…. why not?

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Check out "Five Reasons Pigs Are More Awesome Than You"

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Are you wondering how to say "2010"?

Since I've declared myself an authority on everything related to 2010 and the new decade, I feel that it's important to clear this thing up once and for all.

The correct way is to say "Twenty Ten". The incorrect way is "Two-thousand Ten" or anything else.

The "Two-thousand" format was only useful for the years 2000-2009 when the socially standardized "Twenty" format was awkward within the constraints of our language. To refer to 2010 as "Two-thousand Ten" is the equivalent of pronouncing "1918" as "One-thousand Nine-hundred Eighteen" rather than "Nineteen Eighteen". No one does that. Don't be that guy.

"Does the new decade start at the beginning or at the end of 2010?"
"When does the new decade start?"
"When does *this* decade end?"

I've seen the question posed a few different ways, and I've seen it given two different answers.

The first answer: "the decade begins at beginning of 2010" – the reasoning being that the "Twenty-Tens" or "Tens" decade needs to include to year 2010. This makes sense.

The second answer: "because there was no 'year 0' the next decade doesn't start until the end of the year 2010" – the reasoning being… wait… what?! "Year 0" has nothing to do with this! Are there really people that think that 1990 was part of "the 80s"?! This answer makes as much sense as "it doesn't start until the end of 2010… because pizzas are round."

Besides just being a "10 year period", there is another definition of the word "decade" which specifically addresses this question: a decade is "a period of ten years beginning with a year whose last digit is zero: the decade of the 1980s."

So there you have it. According to me, common sense, and the dictionary, the "new decade" began on January 1, 2010.
(Anyone that claims otherwise, and tries to give you "answer 2" above, either has no clue and is trying to look smarter than they are, or were convinced by such a person.)

Greetings fellow time travelers!

Some of you may have noticed that I haven't been posting much (nothing) lately… so, it's EXCUSES TIME! 1) holidays! 2) vacation! 3) new laptop! 4) LAAAAZY!

With that out of the way, I hope everyone had a great 2009, and has an EVEN BETTER 2010! (I think people are going to use exclamation points MORE in 2010! YES!)

Also, a reminder – please don't waste too much time thinking up new year's resolutions. 97% of people don't stick to them anyway. (If you were so determined to go to the gym, why did you have to wait for an arbitrary event like a calendar roll-over?)

To make things easier, here is a "New Year's Resolution Generator"!

I'm totally going to stick with the resolution it gave me…

sing out of tune