Comma

CITING THE second comma of the 2nd Amendment, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled March 9 that district residents may keep guns ready to shoot in their homes. Plaintiffs in Shelly Parker et al vs. District of Columbia were challenging laws that strictly limited who could own handguns and how they must be stored.

When Comma to the Top arrives at Churchill Downs in May for the Kentucky Derby, he will be a horse with great promise. Also, a horse with quite a story line. The story line unfolded Saturday at Hollywood Park during the $750,000 CashCall Futurity. Actually, before the rich horse for 2-year-olds. Comma to the Top, a Florida-bred trained by Peter Miller and ridden by Corey Nakatani, was the 5-2 favorite and was seeking his fifth consecutive victory. All seemed normal as the 10 horses gathered in the paddock.

Comma to the Top will come in with an impressive streak and Gourmet Dinner with an impressive wallet in Saturday's $750,000 CashCall Futurity at Hollywood Park, a Grade I race over 1 1/16 miles for 2-year-olds. Last year's CashCall provided another springboard for Bob Baffert's 2-year-old star Lookin at Lucky, who went on to win the Preakness in May. Comma to the Top, trained by Peter Miller, will seek his fifth straight victory, which would put him high up in the Kentucky Derby conversation, along with Uncle Mo and Boys of Tosconova, the 1-2 finishers in the Breeders' Cup Juvenile this year.

Comma to the Top will come in with an impressive streak and Gourmet Dinner with an impressive wallet in Saturday's $750,000 CashCall Futurity at Hollywood Park, a Grade I race over 1 1/16 miles for 2-year-olds. Last year's CashCall provided another springboard for Bob Baffert's 2-year-old star Lookin at Lucky, who went on to win the Preakness in May. Comma to the Top, trained by Peter Miller, will seek his fifth straight victory, which would put him high up in the Kentucky Derby conversation, along with Uncle Mo and Boys of Tosconova, the 1-2 finishers in the Breeders' Cup Juvenile this year.

When Comma to the Top arrives at Churchill Downs in May for the Kentucky Derby, he will be a horse with great promise. Also, a horse with quite a story line. The story line unfolded Saturday at Hollywood Park during the $750,000 CashCall Futurity. Actually, before the rich horse for 2-year-olds. Comma to the Top, a Florida-bred trained by Peter Miller and ridden by Corey Nakatani, was the 5-2 favorite and was seeking his fifth consecutive victory. All seemed normal as the 10 horses gathered in the paddock.

Michael Harrison's "Revelation" is a caressing, cataclysmic, monumentally over-the-top ode to a comma. It lasts 90 nonstop minutes. It is played on a piano curiously tuned. The piece was finished this year, and Joshua Pierce's astounding performance of it at Los Angeles Pierce College (no relation) on Saturday night as part of this year's MicroFest was a local premiere. No, no, no, this is not some kind of whimsical musical evocation of the latest flimsy bestseller about grammar.

"Your sentences are so long," said a friend who teaches English at a local college, and I could tell she didn't quite mean it as a compliment. The copy editor who painstakingly went through my most recent book often put yellow dashes on-screen around my multiplying clauses, to ask if I didn't want to break up my sentences or put less material in every one. Both responses couldn't have been kinder or more considered, but what my friend and my colleague may...

Lockheed Martin Corp. said it lost an unspecified amount of money as a result of a misplaced comma in a contract to sell C-130J Hercules military-transport aircraft to an international customer. The mistake was made in an equation adjusting the sales price for inflation-rate changes, and the unidentified purchaser insisted on sticking to the terms when inflation turned out to be less than expected, the Financial Times reported Friday.

Maybe you're a little bit like me. Maybe, that is, when you heard Dan Fogelberg had died recently, you waited for somebody to come up with a description that felt right to you, that didn't trivialize him, that didn't condescend, that didn't overpraise or underestimate. If you were touched by his music -- the lilting voice, the earnest delivery, the haunting sweetness -- you didn't much care that it could be repetitious.

Marathon negotiations have moved Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization closer to the opening stage of limited Palestinian self-rule. This is that vital first phase of a planned five-year process during which a final settlement of the generations-long conflict between two peoples contesting the same small plot of land is supposed to be negotiated.

They arrive nearly every day, these sad, strange e-mails from Iraq. They are unsentimental and hard, gathered by stringers scattered across a country at war. They're often tough to follow, terse poems with broken rhythms and words landing in wrong places. But there's an unadorned power that speaks to things beyond style and grammar. "An IP source said that some gunmen assassinated yesterday evening staff brigadier general in the Iraqi army and his wife in Tobchi (west Baghdad)

Maybe you're a little bit like me. Maybe, that is, when you heard Dan Fogelberg had died recently, you waited for somebody to come up with a description that felt right to you, that didn't trivialize him, that didn't condescend, that didn't overpraise or underestimate. If you were touched by his music -- the lilting voice, the earnest delivery, the haunting sweetness -- you didn't much care that it could be repetitious.

Andrew Wagner options Lisa Glatt's "A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That," a novel about a Long Beach woman who moves in with her dying mother and plunges into affairs with one man after another, desperately battling the uncertainties in her life. Glatt, whose novel was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times fiction award, is represented by Andrew Blauner on literary rights and by CAA for film rights; Wagner, who directed and co-wrote "Starting Out in the Evening," negotiates his own option deal.

CITING THE second comma of the 2nd Amendment, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled March 9 that district residents may keep guns ready to shoot in their homes. Plaintiffs in Shelly Parker et al vs. District of Columbia were challenging laws that strictly limited who could own handguns and how they must be stored.

Michael Harrison's "Revelation" is a caressing, cataclysmic, monumentally over-the-top ode to a comma. It lasts 90 nonstop minutes. It is played on a piano curiously tuned. The piece was finished this year, and Joshua Pierce's astounding performance of it at Los Angeles Pierce College (no relation) on Saturday night as part of this year's MicroFest was a local premiere. No, no, no, this is not some kind of whimsical musical evocation of the latest flimsy bestseller about grammar.

Not everything has gone haywire in a world that converts this haughtily subtitled book -- "The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" -- into a bestseller. (I'll leave it to the reader to discover the meaning of the title, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves.") First in England, now in America, it has perched, proud and aloof, atop massive tomes about war, spies and lying presidents. Witty, smart, passionate, it gives long-overdue attention to "the traffic signals of language."

In regard to the tag line for the movie "High Crimes" ("Everything you trust. Everything you know. May be a lie."): Like the rules for punctuation. Taught to you by. Your high school English teachers. RICHARD SHOWSTACK Newport Beach

Rick Santorum's near-miss in Iowa provides a reminder that, for many Republican voters (and not a few candidates), religion and politics overlap. If you need another reminder, though, consider this: recently, the Smithsonian has restored and put on display a weird and fantastic 19th century book known as "The Jefferson Bible. " That's Jefferson as in Thomas, and this private, personal document offers a useful case study in how politics and Christianity have mixed it up in American history, right up to today.

In regard to the tag line for the movie "High Crimes" ("Everything you trust. Everything you know. May be a lie."): Like the rules for punctuation. Taught to you by. Your high school English teachers. RICHARD SHOWSTACK Newport Beach

Lockheed Martin Corp. said it lost an unspecified amount of money as a result of a misplaced comma in a contract to sell C-130J Hercules military-transport aircraft to an international customer. The mistake was made in an equation adjusting the sales price for inflation-rate changes, and the unidentified purchaser insisted on sticking to the terms when inflation turned out to be less than expected, the Financial Times reported Friday.