Breathing room

The last few days have been quite busy and stressful, with back-to-back presentations in both of my grad school classes. I think they both went well, and now I'll be catching up on the last few days.

I had the odd feeling of having missed a lot when I heard the news this morning about Castro stepping down (by letter) and Kosovo declaring its independence (and having it recognized by the US and the major EU countries). The news from Cuba has a lot of symbolic significance, but considering that the transfer of power actually took place a year and half ago, it doesn't look like much will change. It would be nice to be able to legally visit Havana in the near future, but I won't hold my breath.

The situation in Kosovo looks much more complicated than it might seem, and I hope that we don't end up with a situation in which Russia decides to flex its muscles while the US is distracted by the election. It does strike me as very interesting that this most recent result of Milosovic's attempts to create a strong nationalist Serbia out of Yugoslavia is that an independent Kosovo has received immediate international recognition that would have been unthinkable if they'd made the same declaration twenty years ago.

* * *

When I saw this story in the New York Times about the use a semicolon in a subway placard, my initial reaction was to be pleased that it was used well in such an unexpected situation, but I ended up feeling discouraged that it became such a big deal. I also can't help feeling dubious when the story makes the following claim without providing any examples:

People have lost fortunes and even been put to death because of imprecise punctuation involving semicolons in legal papers.

I'd rather have a newspaper screw up a semicolon than to make huge unsupported claims about people being executed because of a punctuation mark.