Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Happy Birthday Dad. In honor of your acute understanding of the English language and your persistent adherence to its syntactical rules, I hope you enjoy your gift: the NYT bestseller, Eats, Shoots & Leaves. The back of the book sells it nicely (and a big hint from TLM helped too):
A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires teo shots into the air.
"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."
The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds and explanation.
"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
So, punctuation really does matter, even if it only occasionally a matter of life and death.
