On 11/30/05, Howard Brazee <howard at brazee.net> wrote: > Davdi Silverrock wrote: > > >Speaking of "should be"s, well, there *should be* some way of > >signalling facetiousness and humor. > > > > I'm not sure I agree. Well, we have our Internet equivalences of > winking, but I loved it when I read my first Hiaasen book. I started > off reading, then saying to my self, "is this funny?", for a while > before deciding "yes, it is very funny indeed". > > Do you want Steve to tell us all of his jokes? Or do you want to > discover some of them during one read, more in another? > I think that sometimes it would help if he would drop the poker face, once in a while, when confusion has in point of fact resulted rather than amusement, and just say that he was joking. For example, there's the whole "Tsalmoth are giant land snails (or turtles)" debacle. Come to think of it, there are still things that I'm not entirely certain whether or not he (or one of his characters) was serious about. Such as norska only eating dragons that they have killed themselves, to offer one example.