Fosco Lives! News

Some titbits of news that relate to this blog...

First, Fosco wants to announce the winners of his Grammar Challenge. In a recent post on split verbs, Fosco intentionally buried six split verbs in the post. Two regular readers attempted some portion of the extra credit: The BeeMaster and Fosco's boyfriend Ozias "Oz" Midwinter. The BeeMaster sent his guesses via email; Oz posted his in the Comments. Oz got all six correct:

• "to slightly spoil"
  
• "would otherwise be played"
  
• "to subtly draw"
  
• "to strictly adhere"
  
• "to adequately express"
  
• "will happily split"

The BeeMaster correctly identified four of these, but also did the "Extra Extra Credit" assignment: to find a split verb in another Fosco Lives! post. He identified this one: "Unfortunately, workers are removing the stickers as we speak. However, maybe this will spur the city government to permanently change the street name. Wouldn't that be cool?"

What do The BeeMaster and Oz win? Well, for one thing, they get their pictures displayed as "Grammar Superstars" (over there, on the right). I'm not sure what else they win. Well, Oz wins a kiss. I guess The BeeMaster can have one too, but I don't think he'll take me up on it...

Second, Fosco is pleased to report that last week Fosco Lives! received its first two visitors from China. On the same day, the site received a visit from an IP address in Beijing and one from Shanghai. This is very pleasing to Fosco; usually, he gets most of his Asian traffic from South Korea (apparently, the search "playboy shave pubic" is popular in Korea--and that search inevitably leads here. Sorry, you pervy Koreans... I don't think Fosco Lives! is quite what you're looking for.).

Hey, I bet I could make it so that Fosco Lives! never gets another visit from China:

Tibet. Human rights. Tiananmen Square Massacre.

There, that should be enough to get Fosco Lives! blocked. Wait, why would I do that?

Third, you may have missed the news (as it was buried in a post on torture, and not even Fosco's boyfriend reads his posts on torture) that Fosco Lives! will be cutting down on politics for a bit. Which is not to say that I won't run the occasional funny picture... But for a bit, Fosco doesn't feel like getting too earnest about politics.

Fourth, Fosco has some exciting new features planned for the blog. You saw "Saturday Story Hour" yesterday. Stay tuned this week for several new weekday features.

And, as always, thanks for reading.