Flavorwire brings us 10 obscure punctuation marks that, they say, deserve more play. I’ve always been a fan of the interrobang, but the acclamation point (pictured above) sure feels like a stretch to me: It looks like the surprised expression of some 1960s underground comic character.

I do, however, really like the exclamation comma and the question comma — they seem genuinely useful and, to the point of the article, really do deserve to be accepted into general use. It’ll never happen, of course; imagine all the rework of fonts and keyboards that would need to happen to accommodate a popular new punctuation mark, much less two of them.

Dexter Gordon was born this day in 1923. Here he is in 1964 performing “Loose Walk” in Holland. If those opening bars sound familiar, you probably own the Lyle Lovett and His Large Band album.

… whatcha gonna do when they follow you?

Shut up, evidently.

The other day I was curious about Lance Armstrong. Specifically, I wondered: Did people unfollow him on Twitter when the whole doping thing broke wide open and he confessed on Oprah?

To the contrary: According to Twitter Counter, Armstrong gained about 100,000 followers in the week surrounding the doping revelations (on Friday, January 18 alone he netted a one-day increase of 25,230 followers).

That top line in the chart tracks Armstrong’s followers over the last three months. That bottom line tracks his tweets.

Yep: Just before the wristband hit the fan, Lance pretty much shut down his Twitter feed — with the exception of one tweet on January 9 that linked to this article.

I would have thought he’d have lost rather than gained followers, and I would have expected him to speak out a bit more. Maybe Oprah demanded he save everything for her.

Last week, The Dish published this item about the Harlem Shake … and while the Best Of video was interesting enough, I was fascinated by this tidbit:

Past viral hits on YouTube have generated big paydays for content owners. “Gangnam Style,” the viral sensation of 2012, earned Korean pop star Psy and his handlers a reported $870,000 from YouTube ad revenue alone.

That number — $870,000 — is astonishing to me … mainly because I don’t  know of anyone — anyone! — who has ever clicked on a YouTube ad. The percentage of people who do is probably in the same approaching-zero realm as people who click on ads in games they’ve downloaded to their cell phones.

I would love to see some analysis someday that demonstrates what sort of ROI that $870,000 generated. I mean, are billboard-style impressions really all that valuable? Sure, lots of ads are being delivered, but are any of them actually registering or being clicked on?

Sheesh.

So there’s this manner of speaking, right? And it’s getting really annoying — more annoying than uptalk, I think. It seems to be very common among political pundits and tech podcasters, right? And it’s becoming more  pervasive all the time. Chris Hayes on MSNBC is a particularly frequent user of this verbal tic, and it might be even more irritating than his relentless fast-talking, right? Because once you’re aware of it, it seems to be everywhere and it’s profoundly annoying, and it takes the listener’s focus away from the point being made and toward a level of annoyance that just gets greater and greater all the time.

So, yes: right. We get it. Just stop asking us, drop the word from your vocabulary and move on.

Am I wrong, Dude?