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Lately I have been considering ampersands. There's something soothing about the curls and whorls of typography, especially in something designed to replace an entire word. Why use and when you have & at your disposal?

In another life I could have been a typesetter. Arrange the little blocks in the right order, line up the paper, press. Rearrange, repeat.

It's the last day of the semester. The grades go in today. Again I find myself feeling strange and disconnected. There's no pomp or circumstance here--not even a final "submit grades" button to choose from a menu. I'd much prefer it if the screen changed colors and asked me if I was sure, really sure, that these were the final grades. Then a little monkey would appear in my office doorway, and present me with a scroll that reads HAVE A GREAT SUMMER! But it doesn't, and there is no monkey in a tiny red vest, and anyway, I have been down this road before.

Instead, consider this: the ampersand nearly disappeared in formal printed writing during the twentieth century. But then it experienced a resurgence in part due to its use in computer programming languages. So Logo may have helped save the little logogram. There's a poem in there somewhere, yes?

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