Rain in the gutters this early Wednesday on California’s north coast — NWS reports ‘Heavy Rain’ today with three-quarters to one inch expected.
After just waking up sometime this morning between one and two o’clock, I was sing-songed back to sleep just at the rainstorm’s arrival — an orchestrated musical, lightly starting with a single, soft ‘plop,’ a pause for a beat or two, then another ‘plop,’ then another, suddenly a series of ‘plops,’ until the rat-tat single sound of multiple ‘plops.’
One of the way-best, and all organic, methods to induce sleep in the entire universe.

(Illustration found here).

Exactly one year ago today, I wrote this:

Today is National Punctuation Day, a yearly homage to those little somethings we use all the time, but really don’t think about — and usually mess up.
These little somethings are the period, comma, question mark, exclamation mark, colon, semicolon, hyphen, dash, parentheses, brackets, apostrophe, quotation marks, and sometimes, the slash.
And my favorite — the ellipsis, a set of three evenly-spaced dots, which usually signifies some words have been omitted.

And National Punctuation Day 2014 is more of the same, but with a techno-falsetto touch, some punctuation marks fading away.
From Time magazine this morning:

Social media analytics firm Brandwatch scoured Twitter for trends in 2013 and found that the top five “grammatical errors” were: im, wont, cant, dont and id.
Meanwhile, corporations like British super-bookstore Waterstones (neé Waterstone’s) have seen fit to erase those marks from their names.
Cities are dropping them from street signs.
And while some grammarians may cry most foul, others are calling for the apostrophe’s dumb round head.
The advocates behind the “Kill the Apostrophe” website have been joined by author James Harbeck in asserting that, in most cases, rules about apostrophe usage only serve to irritate those people who know the rules and confuse those who do not.
“The great question with a lot of punctuation is, Do you really need it?” says Ammon Shea, author of hilarious grammar-police-takedown Bad English.
And, he says, there’s often little risk of confusion when theyre absent.

A lot of this is due to the new social platforms, like Twitter.
Twitter?