Heaven's Choice

"I ain't riding off into the sunset, ever.  I'm a real believer in the Lord's will, and He's got something else He wants me to do," former Lt. Governor David Dewhurst recently told the Houston Chronicle.  Dewhurst said he's thinking of running for mayor  or starting up a large public venture. The article is accompanied by a picture of the newly made-over 69-year-old--smooth forehead, clipped hair, rejuvenated face and all.

You can tell Dewhurst is campaigning in Texas because he's using backwoods grammar and claiming he's one of God's chosen.  But Fio thinks that, while God can forgive bad grammar, there's a special place in hell for false prophets.

Adventure in Vacuuming

Fiorella and Husband had an adventure, and it started at the community fair where Fio was peddling her friend Jeanell's book.  A woman at the next booth expressed interest in WHAT THE HEART WANTS and said she would buy it if she could give a fifteen-minute presentation to Fiorella and her husband at home about her own product, which Fiorella understood was some kind of air freshener.

Fay showed up at the right time, but with Angela, her niece, in tow.  Angela, forty-one, was a new grandmother.  Fay, seventy-three, told us she has ten children, twenty-three grandchildren, and numerous great-grand-children.   Both were dressed in tight clothes with plunging necklines and lots of sparkles.  Angela's hoop earrings had  a four-inch diameter, and her hair was piled up six inches above her head in front and dyed/bleached three different colors. Both of them were plastered with make-up and spoke an interesting patois which called for "was" to be used as a plural and "no" to be substituted for "any." Fiorella suspects they were gypsies.

The women carried in a couple of big boxes which turned out to be a Rainbow vacuum cleaner and its attachments, The demonstration and spiel took a full hour.

Husband and Fio were polite, but, to the surprise of the well-rehearsed ladies, they didn't bite or buy. "Why?" Fay asked.  Husband said the vacuum was too expensive ($3500), and Fiorella said she was not a gadget person. After making an immediate price reduction and a final attempt, Fay and Angela packed up and departed, but not before asking Fio and Husband to recommend them to friends and family.

No way.

The experience was interesting--an old-fashioned, fast-talking, door-to-door salesman kind of pitch-- but Fiorella already has a very good vacuum cleaner, a Miele, and she isn't interested in one with an attachment for unclogging toilets.  Besides, she researched Rainbow on the Internet afterwards and learned that it's schlock.

P.S.:  Fiorella never got a last name or a business card from either woman, and Fay never said a word about buying Fiorella's book.

Run On

Fio's on the rampage again, a grammatical rampage. Every long sentence is not a run-on sentence. Long sentences are perfectly acceptable as--uh--long as they are grammatically correct.

Thus, the longest sentence in the world is grammatically correct: "I saw Harry kiss Mary, Jane, Susan, Linda, Chloe, Zoe . . . . " , with every girl's name in the world listed ad infinitum. It's a simple construction of subject+verb+multiple direct objects.

A run-on sentence is when two sentences are joined together without benefit of clergy: "Harry kissed lots of girls his lips are chapped" or "Harry kissed lots of girls, his lips are chapped." (The latter is often called a "comma splice.") The grammatically correct punctuation would be: "Harry kissed lots of girls. His lips are chapped."

Thank you, dear reader, for putting up with the wrath of Fio. She's steaming because a contest judge accused her of writing run-on sentences and gave her a "3" on spelling, grammar, and punctuation. What a nudnik.