The Fredösphere

Sometimes I worry that my humor is too oblique for you people.  Today, I offer a hint that I hope will clear up at least some of the confusion.  It involves my use of exclamation points.  If you see me using an exclamation point for, you know, exclamations, you can bet my intention is relatively sincere and straightforward:

Gadzooks!  Zounds!

However, if the exclamation point comes at the end of a sentence far too long to be an exclamation, and especially if the sentence lacks a certain compactness and rhythmic discipline characteristic of good, punchy prose, then you are free to suspect that my intent is ironical:

Terry Teachout and Alex Ross are the Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin of the blogösphere, except without the genocide!

Finally, you can be sure that pretty much anything Umie the Umlaut says is a lie:

Umie says, "Fred is right; everything I say is a lie."

There.  All clear? Via Instapundit, we learn of a book that claims Americans got all the goofball genes:

America has an extraordinarily high number of hypomanics -- grandiose types who leap on every wacky idea that occurs to them, utterly convinced it will change the world.

Did an American come up with this idea? Finally, in the news, an early music group has resurrected an opera by John Blow that features three dogs, which brings to mind Peter Schickele's joke about "Fido and Anaeas."  Meanwhile, VocalEssence of Minneapolis got a discouraging review (registration required) from the Pioneer Press for a tribute concert to composer/renaissance man Gordon Parks:

But then the VocalEssence Chorus took over and the sense of swing evaporated quickly. Granted, "Take the 'A' Train" and "Stompin' at the Savoy" don't lend themselves well to arrangements for a large chorus, but the soul seemed sapped from them. The disconnect between the choir's classical training and the street smarts that inform jazz and R&B was never more glaring than on a cringe-inducing excerpt from Isaac Hayes' "Theme from 'Shaft'." (Parks directed the film.)

Yikes.  Maybe swapping the sopranos and altos would have loosened them up.