Author: Matthew Westphal

The Mysterious Origins Of Punctuation

“The comma, colon, semicolon and their siblings are integral parts of writing, pointing out grammatical structures and helping us transform letters into spoken words or mental images. We would be lost without them (or, at the very least, extremely confused), and yet the earliest readers and writers managed without it for thousands of years. What changed their minds?”

Where Do Zombies Come From? (Not From ‘Night Of The Living Dead’)

Actually, they come from Haitian vodou – specifically, “the belief that a bokor or witch-doctor can render their victim apparently dead … and then revive them as their personal slaves, since their soul or will has been captured. The zombie, in effect, is the logical outcome of being a slave: without will, without name, and trapped in a living death of unending labour.”

Black America, Please Stop Appropriating African Clothing And Tribal Marks

Zipporah Gene: “Black Twitter is littered with countless examples of the uproar that ensues when White people appropriate Black culture. Words such as fancy dress, mockery and profiteering are thrown around quite freely, but no one seems to realize that this selfsame violation is committed against us Africans  –  all under the guise of tribal fashion and connecting to The Motherland.”

Judy Carne, ‘Sock It To Me’ Girl On ‘Laugh-In’, Dead At 76

“A fairly successful television actress when she joined the cast of Laugh-In in 1968, as the Sock It To Me girl Judy Carne became the most popular person on the show for her zany, daffy, mini-skirted comic persona, continually getting doused with a bucket of water, or subjected to some other humiliation, every time she uttered the words ‘Sock it to me!'”