We had an overwhelming response for possible taglines in our tagline contest. 12apostrophes got all teared up. Really. Here are the winners, currently in tagline rotation:

the Flying Hamster of Doom will rain coconuts on your pitiful city

signs of the apocalypse

the most overused and underappreciated punctuation mark in the English language

has nothing to do with your father

like a mixture of sugar and clarified butter in your mouth

from your keyboard straight to god’s ears

11 infinitives splitting, 10 commas splicing, 9 future tenses, 8 passive periods, 7 subjunctive subjects . . . and a semicolon solving syntax

Present Perfect, but Future Tense

Enjoy! If you have more taglines, just comment randomly on someone’s post. They won’t mind.

Since the Flying Hamster of Doom made it into the tagline rotation, we have to bring him (or her) back.

Come up with a caption for this picture.

Artwork, and live hamster model, courtesy of Kirsten.

Had to post this video; just for the madness of typing that title.

I think this post breaks many of the rules set up for the wine section. I’m not even quite sure how to post this in the wine section. But I’d like to alert 12apostrophe readers to a new type and style of wine Dbay and I discovered last night. Since I can’t find an official name for them, I’m going to the name the type of wine ”The Volcanics.” Named so if only because it sounds better than ‘grapes of origin grown in high mineral content soil, such as those found near volcanic eruptions.’

The first and only experience I’ve had with such a wine came last night with a wine from the Campania region of Italy, located near the famous blast of Mount Vesuvius. Lacryma Christi del Vesuvio is a moderately expensive wine, which the waitress warned, has “a hint of sulfur in the nose.” On most occasions that would probably be enough to scare most off (it nearly did us), but we ventured forward. And I’m glad we did.

Wine Spectator says wines of this type are: “Dry and balanced on the palate with a persistent mineral finish.” I don’t know about that, but I certainly liked it. A lot.

Also, a little interesting tidbit: Lacryma Christi del Vesuvio is so named for the legend of Christ’s ascension into heaven and his emotion upon seeing the beauty of the Bay of Naples beneath him. The grape, Coda di Volpe, refers to the foxtail shape of the grape bunches.

Sometimes you come away from a nice glass of wine, hoping for a better tomorrow, a prouder moment, a less stressful day etc. I came away last night with one more specific hope: more volcanic eruptions in wine growing areas!

Trader Joe’s grocery store sells wines on the cheap. For the same price as a bottle of “Mad Dog” 20/20, or the dreaded Night Train Express, you can get wine made from real grapes, that won’t even make you go blind.

The most well-known is the Charles Shaw vineyard, called “two-buck-chuck” (or in Minneapolis, “three-buck-chuck,” since a bottle sells for $2.99 here). Chuck is actually made by Mr. Franzia, a California vintner-type person, well-known, at least to my college friends, as the man who brought us fine varietals like “Chillable Red,” sold by the box (the key to box-drinking, my friend Eric taught me, was, when you think it’s tapped, crack open the cardboard, take the silver-looking plastic skein out, and squeeze a whole nother 3/4 of a glass of goodness right into your mouth).

But Franzia’s two-buck-Chuck’s a winner. The 2005 Chardonnay took home the gold medal in the 2007 California State Fair Commercial Wine Competition. And better yet, Trader Joe’s in general has enabled, in every sense, Pulao, me, and many of our friends to afford to drink a lot of wine. Like a lot.

So 12apostrophes has a Wine on the cheap page now, with a snazzy logo, where folks will post reviews of wine, on the cheap, using very few French words, and misunderstanding those that we do.

I’ll start:

“Sick Chicken” Wine
La Ferme Julien
Blanc 2006
$5.99 @ Trader Joe’s

For years, I drank whites like Pinot Grigios and Sauvignon Blancs, tried my best to rehydrate my mouth afterwards, and thought I didn’t really like white wine. But for six bucks, La Ferme Julien’s white blend is light, fruity, not dry (what’s the opposite of dry in oenophile-speak? fruity? wet?), and not-too-sweet. If I was to get poetical about it, I’d say bright. It’s a bright, refreshing wine.

It’s a blend of Bourboulenc, Grenache Blanc, Ugni Blanc, and Roussanne grapes. Separately, I never heard of them. Together, they make a beautiful wine.

We’ve enjoyed Le Ferme Julien equally well at a summer picnic with cous cous and pasta salad; watching a movie at home with a supreme pizza; and at a party where La Ferme Julien was a nice change after some heavy reds.

The first time we drank it, some of our friends saw the rooster on the bottle, consulted their shaky knowledge of French, and decided La Ferme Julien probably meant “the sick chicken.” I can see it; “la ferme,” like infirmary, infirm. And then there was that chicken on the bottle . . . But it really means “Julien’s Farm.”

If I ever see a bottle called Le Poulet Malade, I’m buying the hell out of it.

As you may have noticed, 12apostrophes now has a tagline. Actually, more than one. Click the logo and refresh the page. Go ahead. See? Random, rotating taglines.

You may have seen this before, on other blogs, on lots of blogs, including blogs that are actually very popular. Blogs, perhaps, that we link to from our own blog. That’s OK. We don’t care about that right now.

What we are interested in is getting more witty taglines for our rotation.

So far we have three:

the most overused and underappreciated punctuation mark in the English language

the Flying Hamster of Doom will rain coconuts on your pitiful city

signs of the apocalypse

Plus one more that’s waiting to make the cut:

fuzzy in all the wrong places

OK, now comment with more, new, witty taglines. Or few, old, dull taglines. Whatever you like. Few will enter, many will win!

Since the I-35W bridge crossing the Mississippi collapsed here in Minneapolis last Wednesday, with (at this writing) five dead and eight missing, my gephyrophobia is back, going strong.

That’s JEFF-i-ro-FO-bee-uh. Or fear of bridges.

I never got gephyrophobic on the 1900-foot-long I-35W bridge. (Turns out I should have been, but I wasn’t.) I’d get nervous on the bridge across Lake Ponchartrain into New Orleans, which is 28,145 feet long, as my four-cylinder Toyota got buffeted but the highway wind, and I’d see the choppy surf waaaay below me.

In the wake of the disaster, ABC news dusted out the psychiatric dictionary and talked to an expert about more people suffering from gephyrophobia:

“Their fear is not that the bridge is going to collapse; their fear is that they will get halfway across and freeze or drive off the bridge,” says Jerilyn Ross, president of the Anxiety Disorder Association of America.

Their fear used to be that they would freeze up on the bridge; now, I think, people are going right ahead and being frightened of a bridge collapse itself.

Jerilyn went on: “A true phobia is fear of fear itself — a threat of danger that’s not really dangerous.”

Since, according to the Federal Highway Administration last year, nearly 1 out of every 8 bridges in the United States is (like the former I-35W bridge) “structurally deficient,” I guess gephyrophobia isn’t a phobia after all anymore; it’s just common sense.

What’s the treatment for gephyrophobia?

For those who have an intense fear of crossing a bridge, for example, treatment may begin with them sitting in the passenger seat of a car while crossing a very short bridge. Gradually, the intensity of the experience would be increased until the person has learned to deal with their fearful impulses.

. . . Or until one of the 73,533 of the nation’s structurally deficient bridges they are driving over collapses; whichever comes first.