The Fine Wines of the Sick Rooster

Sick Chicken WineTrader 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 . . .

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Tagline contest

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 . . .

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Gephyrophobia, again

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 . . .

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CNTRL + refresh

A word to the handful of pitiable souls who have read 12apostrophes, and decided to come back and try reading us again:

If the screen layout looks odd, hold down CNTRL while you click “refresh” on your browsers. In both Internet Explorer and Firefox, that clears the cached style sheet and lets you see the new, tweaked look of 12apostrophes.

I think the caption contests are fun. The idea is that the latest caption contest will now run in a left-hand sidebar, all the time. Yep, that’s it. Only took 674 hours of my life, but I now have a . . .

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