Tuesday, November 29, 2005

The problem with asterisks.

Every so often I read someething, and at the bottom will be a footnote after an asterisk, and it's basically the punchline to a joke, but I didn't seen the asterisk in the text. So what is this footnote talking about? I don't have the context, so I don't get the joke. I can scan the text again to find that little splat that introduced the joke, but frequently I don't want to take the trouble. The joke is just lost.

This is why I won't be using asterisks here.*

* Except to annoy you.

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