I went to church a couple of months ago, and I didn’t burst into flames or anything like that, contrary to my expectations.

I was born and raised Catholic, and went to Catholic grade school and high school, but I’m not a practicing Catholic. I’m about as Catholic as Martin Luther.

My mom and dad came into town and I thought they might want to go to church on a Sunday, being Catholics in the non-nominal, actual practical practicing way.

“I’m touched that you’d take us to church,” my mom said. “I’m shocked,” my dad said. “I mean, I’m not . . .

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about wine made out of — tent caterpillars.   A guy in Northland, MN, makes it, and it actually tastes pretty decent, reviewers said.  An excerpt from http://www.walterreeves.com/insects_animals/article.phtml?cat=21&id=469:

In a blind taste test — the reviewers were not informed what ingredients went into it before the tasting —

four local wine connoisseurs invited to taste the wine described it as dry, pale and crisp. They compared it to a pinot grigio or white bordeaux.

The comparison came before they were told exactly what went into the wine. Afterward, they joked that it was the best insect wine they’ve ever tasted. It’s . . .

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There is much to be said for grammatical parsings. Since 12 Apostrophes is full of PhD and MFA types in all things english, I thought I would whet you appetite with a relatively simple one from my place of employment:

Please schedule the committee meeting the month prior to the second monthly board meeting after quarter end.

Nice. One sentence reads half high-school algebra problem, half Orwellian mind transplant. But if you thought that was impressive, let’s move to a graduated example:

Remember that due to 2009 Open Enrollment completing at weeks end for medical and dental insurance and . . .

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Ever heard that expression, cuter than a box full of puppies? No? I just made it up? I challenge you to find anything cuter than the Shiba Inu Puppy cam, live feed of, well . . . you guessed it: www.ustream.tv/channel/shiba-inu-puppy-cam

In fact, the only thing cuter than a box full of puppies might be a room full of kittens? Check it out:mythicbells.camstreams.com

There is a lot of sleeping going on in both, but they help refresh the eyes, when you’ve spent your day staring at computer screens of neither puppies nor kittens.

The next step . . .

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12apostrophes looked a little funky yesterday.

As the blog is wont to do whenever I change anything, all the posts (temporarily) disappeared, and we had to run the site in the WordPress “Classic” theme.

I was updating to the latest version of WordPress to address a security flaw. An article I read pointed out that spammers had been hacking WordPress blogs and using them for nefarious spamming activities.

Ha, I thought. Well, I don’t think that’s happening, but I should upgrade anyway.

When I opened up my header.php file, I found hundreds of lines of text full of links to . . .

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