It’s November, of course, and while that means turkey, football and marathon shopping for some, it’s a month of being hunched over at a laptop slurping cup after cup of caffeine for others. Yep - it’s NaNoWriMo, AKA National Novel Writing Month. People who are crazy ambitious enough to accept the challenge aim to write 50,000 words in the 30 days of November, which is about 1,667 words every day. While no one expects masterpieces to be written in such a short time span - the goal is to force... READ ON

( )Parentheses (the single one is called a parenthesis), also known as curved brackets, have plenty of uses in everyday written language. Their most common use, as I’ve demonstrated already, is segregating subordinate material or asides. Usually, this is stuff that could be left out of the text or skipped over during reading without altering the flow or meaning of the surrounding sentence. You can do the same thing with commas, like I did in the last sentence and am doing now, but, if you’ve got a... READ ON

Happy belated birthday to Mikhail Gorbachev, who turned 81 yesterday. After seeing his stint as a Pizza Hut spokesman, we have to wonder if he’s celebrating with a couple of pies: If you’re wondering what the former Soviet leader is doing hawking fast food, well, you’re not alone. The unorthodox 1997 career move raised the eyebrows of many who wondered why Gorbachev had turned to shilling subpar pizza. “The next step will be to advertise Tampax,” one Russian told CNN at the time. The... READ ON

Don’t live anywhere near New York City, but still desperate to see something - anything - drop during a countdown to 2012 on New Year’s Eve? We can help. (Well, we can help some of you. You might have to go on a road trip.) Check out these places that have put their own twists on the rather odd tradition of hoisting a random, giant object up in the air to celebrate the beginning of a new... READ ON