Cinema Junkie by Beth Accomando

Who stole all my apostrophes? (Twentieth Century Fox)

REWARD OFFERED FOR RECOVERY OF MISSING APOSTROPHES! If you are holding them hostage, please return them to me. No questions asked.

In an attempt to save my reputation -- and spare me the embarrassment of having my high school English teacher chew me out -- I am making this announcement. Someone has stolen all the apostrophes from my blog! Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration. As you can see (hopefully) there was an apostrophe in that last sentence. But if you look at any reviews prior to the Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend... well, the apostrophes might be M.I.A. To be honest, they weren't stolen. They simply vanished; possibly abducted by apostrophe-starved aliens. One person commented that commas had disappeared as well . What next? Semi-colons take a holiday? The reason for all the punctuation upheaval is that when KPBS moved all my reviews from one server to another, apparently all the apostrophes  (and who knows what else) took a hike. Now we are trying to put them all back. But, as you might guess, it's a slow, painful process with new problems popping up along the way. So please be patient as we go about our repairs. I assure you that I do know what apostrophes are and hope to have them all back in place soon. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Matthew C. Scallon
March 02, 2008 at 05:31 AM
There's probably a simple explanation. It comes down to how the new servers' software handles the "cutsy" apostophes, quotation marks, possibly even commas. I work with Web servers all day; this happens all the time. A simple piece of code (and the originals entries) should fix it.

Beth Accomando
March 02, 2008 at 07:01 AM
If you have a simple piece of code please let our server folks know because it seems to be escaping them. I have been told that they have done all they plan to do and have washed their hands of the matter, so it is now up to me and the overworked web staff to go and fix the problem one apostrophe at a time. If you have any words of wisdom about this, please let me know. I am going in an manually replacing every missing apostrophe, comma and assorted other symbols. It's all becoming a blur. Thanks.

Matt Scallon
March 03, 2008 at 08:54 PM
Dear Beth, I sympathize. I would hate to have you go into all of your old reviews. I'll send you my e-mail address, and, if you can forward it to the Web staff, I'll talk "geek-to-geek" with them.

Beth Accomando from San Diego
March 03, 2008 at 09:12 PM
You said I was thin-skinned in your comments on another post so I'm just checking -- did you mean to sound like it would be painful to go back and read all my reviews or just painful to replace punctuation? I didn't want to jump to any conclusions. Thanks for the offer to help, I have passed it on to one of our geeks. I would not understand anything in "code."

Matt Scallon
March 03, 2008 at 09:36 PM
Dear Beth, Oh, dear. I think you're a better comedianne than you give yourself correct for. No, I don't think it's painful; it's just one of those things where you look at all the work you need to do and say, "don't we use computers to do this? Wait a minute. I am using a computer!"