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I don't know. As someone who was taught penmanship, there's a fine, squiggly, indecipherable line between "able to write by hand" and "able to write legibly by hand." They might squeak through.

Some of the "embedded with" jokes have been pretty good as well.

Well, that's a fair point. But even then it may not be visible at night, when most of the marauding is due.

Well, so did I, but you'd have to go pretty far to find someone incapable of replicating my squiggle.

As a sidenote, that entire piece is probably going to double as a friendly invitation to identity thieves. Please don't! My doberman and rifle!

Calligraphy? More like kakography, am I right?

...I'll show myself out.

Oh man, I tried to learn calligraphy. I could, at one point, do a terrible impression of a monk and make those big Gothic characters, but I could never manage more than a word before the pen died.

But see, you made it pretty far without any difficulty!

The only people I worry about, job-wise, are those people who do the beautiful lettering on the signs of coffee shops to tell me about the Intimidating New Mochas.

My favorite dying possibly-spurious art is the art of handwriting analysis, from which I learned that Ted Bundy's handwriting looked much friendlier than Ted Kaczynski's. So, there's that.

Someone over at Foreign Policy did a round-up of What People Who Can't Spell Petraeus Think About This Scandal. It makes for eye-opening reading.

(Once I ordered something called General Toe's Chicken.)

That's a good question! I AM INVINCIBLE! MY CHATS SUCCEED WHILE OTHERS DROP LIKE FLIES! NOTHING CAN TOUCH ME! SEND ME A BIOGRAPHER!

Ha! +5!

And don't forget the people who read them for access to the hidden treasure!

Election? What election?

My golly, it seems decades ago already. Sad Teddy Roosevelt didn't pull through.

No, but seriously. I'm glad Key and Peele are here for this term, because they have figured out an Obama parody that legitimately makes me laugh, something that SNL still struggles with. But now I am starting to remember what life was like when we didn't know what Mitt Romney ate for breakfast. Not sure I like it. Now, if we follow Mitt Romney from place to place asking him to tell us jokes and humanizing anecdotes, WE'RE suddenly the weirdos.

I am going to miss a lot of the zany and not-so-zany characters who were culled in this Quadrennial Quell. But there are always others where they came from.

Wow. Sister Perfecta. That does sound nightmarish. Nothing like a dash of parental disappointment to make any scenario worse.

On the other hand, nightmares about penmanship could be visually interesting?

That's true. I have an autograph from Mark Hamill, and I can tell what all the letters are.

Well, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Ah, the classic Pass The Buck To The Middle School Teachers wheeze. You only fall for that once.

I think the former might just be another case of geese saving civilization. They did that for the Romans! This event with the Irish was just later in the goose process.

And of course I have to inflict my favorite Noah Webster apocryphal anecdote on you.

The writer of the dictionary was discovered by his wife in flagrante delicto with one of the chambermaids.

"Noah!" she exclaimed. "I'm surprised!"
"No my dear," he said, "you are amazed. It is we who are surprised."

Ah, but the trouble with having bad spelling and good penmanship is that people can tell.

The rest of us squeak by under the stern tuition of the little red line.

No, I concur. I'm all for rote learning, and there have been studies suggesting that the effort of learning the shape of letters by hand may actually be tremendously helpful, not to mention the motor skills component. As with looking things up in a dictionary, there is, it turns out, a certain value in putting in seemingly boring, redundant effort to obtain knowledge. The duration of your attachment is proportional to the original resistance of the information. At least in some cases.

Yeah!

I always thought the point of signings was the brief interaction, not the actual signature, although the actual signature is cool too. Anyway, I've been squiggling through for all these years, I'm sure I could pull something together.

Ha! Ah, the Simpsons.

Ha!

I was once a big proponent of Garamond. I still think it's beautiful, but we don't move in the same circles any more.

Now I just use the default in Word, which is either Times New Roman or Cambria, which I like less, but not enough to do anything about it.

Wow, every follow-up sentence I could think of about golf just slid below the dress code. No wonder they don't permit shouting during golf. It's not politeness. It's that literally everything you might shout sounds pretty suggestive. Except "Use the 9 Iron."

(nods thoughtfully)

I mean, what WON'T be replaced with holograms, when you get right down to it?

Hmm, younger? That really narrows the field.

Uh, Nicholas Hoult? Gosh, I'm only saying that because I can remember his name off the top of my head.

No, wait.

Justin Bieber. Not because I find him attractive, but because I read his dang biography, including the page that was just the word "GIRLS" over and over again, and I want him to suffer over mine.

Ah, but the difference between "cursive" and "cursive font" is the difference between bacon and Canadian bacon.

Well done!

Never bet around Nate Silver.

Children have great handwriting, though. It is illegible in a totally different and unexpected way. Mine looked like fat sheep moving through a bouncy landscape.

Oh, snap! +5

Aw, thanks!

I'm starting a farm for Throwaway Lines. They don't eat much, and they so appreciate the attention.

Case in point.

Sorry, I think you're stuck. But if we run out of scandal by then, I'm sure we'll have a big run-up to it anyway.

I think the great Chat Malfunction that has enveloped everyone else is now lumbering towards me. I'll post a link next week if I can come up with an excerpt I like.