Happy ninth anniversary to Emdashes! I could go on, but there’s so much to attend to in these waning hours of the year that I’ll just refer you to this five-year-anniversary hurrah, which pretty much says it all. Plus, may I recommend this punctuation-themed post with a headline dear to our hearts? Yes, it’s “The Singular Beauty of the Em-Dash,” with a plum quote from our scholarly pal Ben Yagoda.
Thank you, dear people, for being here–especially since other projects have kept the Emdashers from posting often. We’re also working behind the scenes to freshen things up, so if you see a bug or two, our trusty back-end compatriot is on it. (Block that metaphor!)
A very happy new year to you all, and we have lots of new plans for the big ten. Not the football Big Ten. Our very own.

This site turned _eight_ at the new year, which is almost a million in internet years. What have we been doing with ourselves? After a couple of years in Chicago writing theater reviews, I’m back in New York, getting to work with longtime hero Jen Bekman at 20×200 and living in hilly and historic Peekskill with wonder duo Todd Londagin, on the trombone, and Merideth Harte, on the Wacom tablet. (Todd has a new album out, by the way, and you gotta hear it. _Look Out for Love_!)
How about my friends and co-conspirators? Emdasher Martin Schneider is writing Box Office Boffo. Paul Morris (a.k.a. Pollux) is, as usual, a whirlwind of visual productivity, from Art-o-Mat to, well, everything. And the erudite Jonathan Taylor is grad-schooling and writing.
Probably because my 20×200 bio links here, I’ve gotten a few emails asking when I’m going to start posting again, already. In 2012, I made a goal to get to Gmail Draft Zero. So how about getting to Blog Draft Zero in 2013? Look for posts we saved and forgot to finish, essays just missing that one copyright-free image, and cartoons that want only tender loving formatting. Our unofficial motto, after all, is “Old news is good news.” And, of course, there’s a whole world of symbols and punctuation and hieroglyphs and pictograms and semaphores to attend to.
Happy new year. And thanks for visiting, as always!

Emily Gordon writes:
Via our friends at UnBeige:

With his moncole at the ready and a butterfly his constant companion, Eustace Tilley has been The New Yorker‘s dapper mascot since founding art director Rea Irvin sketched him into being in 1925. The magazine recently invited readers to put their own twist on the discerning dandy in its fourth Eustace Tilley design contest. And this year’s competition came with a bookish bonus: the grand-prize winner’s design printed on a Strand Bookstore tote bag (an icon for an icon!) and a $1,000 Strand shopping spree. After sifting through roughly 600 entries, New Yorker art editor Françoise Mouly has selected a dozen winners, now featured in a slideshow on the magazine’s web site. The victorious Eustaces range from Seattle-based Dave Hoerlein‘s cartographic version (“A Dandy Map of New York”) to a Facebook-ready Tilley created by Nick McDowell of Mamaroneck, New York. Savannah-dwelling William Joca‘s “Cubist Tilley” was inspired by the work of Picasso (with a sprinkling of Ben-Day dots for good measure), while Pixo Hammer of Toronto channeled Joan Miro. As for the big winner, keep guessing (Grecian Eustace? Symbolic Eustace? Eustace through the years?). The champion and the tote bag will be revealed this spring.

My favorite of the examples UnBeige selected is by San Francisco illustrator and comic and storyboard artist Gary Amaro, whose other beautiful and emotionally charged work (including some remarkably fine nudes and figure drawings) you should look at here.

In other, or you could even say similar, passionate-niche news, I really like these nerd cakes.

Emily Gordon writes:
A sausage chain of inky links:
Friend Laura Miller wrote about this at (on? for? I tried all three, and this has been driving me crazy for years, but I’m going to stick with “at,” I guess) Salon: Hideous fonts may boost reading comprehension.
At Slate, Jon Lackman asks the overdue question, “Why do Tea Partiers uppercase so many of their nouns?” Is it anyone else’s observation, especially those, like me, who have taught college English, that a lot of Americans capitalize a lot of nouns? I wonder if English is using the people who do this as a psychic medium to contact its former incarnations. Lackman alludes to this: “In the century prior to 1765, nouns were generally capitalized. (The reason for this is now obscure; Benjamin Franklin hypothesized that earlier writers ‘imitated our Mother Tongue, the German.’)”
Leila Cohan-Miccio wrote this at Splitsider, the site in the invincible trio of already extremely funny sites that’s specifically about the field/world/pathology of comedy: “In Defense of Judd Apatow’s Female Characters,” which reminds me of the rousing debate about contemporary “romantic” comedies we titled Are We Doomed, David Denby? But since I posted that in 2007, I found that repeated exposure to Seth Rogen eventually begat a fondness for Seth Rogen, which surprises me as much as anyone. I saw and liked Zack and Miri Make a Porno (I have cable now). He seems so happy to be engaged, and so humble about it. I saw him on the Today (or similar) show riding an exercise bicycle, gamely and humbly. I suddenly want him to be in more movies. And marriage will do a lot for him–maybe even make him all sensitive to the issue of trying to make better female characters, as Judd Apatow honestly is. I like a man who can admit he’s learning, and listens to the ladies.
Speaking of The Hairpin, which is referenced in one of the links above, I can’t say enough about Bonnie Downing’s column Outdated Beauty Advice, which is as timeless as, and is a visually rich and devastatingly deadpan complement to, the classic-internet classic (and, later, Broadway show, which I trust is also in Downing’s future) Miss Abigail’s Time Warp Advice. But it’s so late. I will return to this subject. TK. Just read every entry on both of these sites, laugh yourself thin, and follow 100% the advice therein at your own risk.

That’s our fervent hope, anyway. In the meantime, we’re sifting the nearly 150 entries into our write a letter to a punctuation mark contest. Mail call brought gladness to the ampersand, the grawlix, the Oxford comma, the underline, and everything (everyone? the marks have all been so brilliantly personified that we can no longer think of them as mere shapes on a page) in between. We’ll pick five top finalists this week and list them here, and we’ll want to hear what you think about it. Got a favorite entry? Have a beef to hoist? Tell us here!
As you know, the final finalist will get a signed and hand-punctuated copy of Ben Greenman’s new collection of stories, What He’s Poised to Do. Mr. Greenman will choose the top letter himself. May the best mark win! –Emily Gordon

Aristophanes of Byzantium, head of the Great Library of Alexandria in the 2nd century B.C., is considered by scholars to be the inventor of punctuation. Aristophanes created a scheme for notating texts that that included a proto-period, proto-comma, and proto-semicolon.
Aristophanes: this new recount of our “punctuation contest”:http://emdashes.com/2010/07/so-you-love-punctuation-write.php, to win Ben Greenman’s new book, _What He’s Poised to Do_, is for you.
We have received many wonderful, creative, funny, sad, and inspiring letters. Ellipsis remains the leader with 16 letters of love… People love it a lot. Semicolon follows close behind with 12; semicolon is second but not secondary. The exclamation point is third!
**The current high rankings:**
Ellipsis: 16
Semicolon: 12
Exclamation Point: 9
Apostrophe: 8
Comma: 7
Period/Full stop: 7
Question Mark: 5
Quotation Marks: 5
Ampersand: 4
Asterisk: 4
Parentheses: 4
At sign: 3
Colon: 3
Interrobang: 3
Tilde: 3
Grawlixes: 3
Em dash: 2
Manicule: 2
En Dash: 2
Copyright symbol: 2
Hyphen: 2
All punctuation marks: 2
Number sign: 2
Brackets: 2
**From the “At Least I Got One Letter Department”**:
accent aigu, air quotes, at-the-price-of, bullet, caret, curly quotes, dieresis, dollar sign, exclaquestion mark, interpunct, macron, obelisk (dagger), Oxford comma, percent sign, pilcrow, pound sign, smart quotes, snark, space, underline.
**From the “No One Loves Me Department”**:
asterism, backslash, degree, ditto mark, double hyphen, inverted exclamation point, guillemets, lozenge, the “therefore” and “because” signs, slash, solidus, tie, prime, registered trademark, section sign, service mark, sound recording copyright symbol, trademark, underscore/understrike, vertical bar, pipe, tee, falsum, index/fist, lozenge.

_Pollux writes_:
“In the country of Westphalia… lived a youth whom Nature had endowed with a most sweet disposition. His face was the true index of his mind. He had a solid judgment joined to the most unaffected simplicity; and hence, I presume, he had his name of Candide.”
With these words, Voltaire pays tribute to his creation. The New York Public Library is now featuring an online “exhibition”:http://candide.nypl.org/?hpfeature=3 for Voltaire’s _Candide_ in which you can pay your own tribute to this 18th century work.
It’s not just any online gallery. This exhibition is calling all artists and readers to contribute their own visions, tributes, and adaptations of _Candide_. “Here”:http://candide.nypl.org/content/do-it-yourself-emcandideem is the link for Do-It-Yourself-Candide. Have fun!