Every once in a while the New York Times runs an article just to see how many jokes it can slip under the radar; today is just such a day.
How else do you explain the most revered newspaper in America dedicating valuable paper (ca. $1,200 a column inch, if I’m not mistaken) to news about the punctuation on a city train? Siccing their reporters on the likes of Louis Menand and the woman who wrote “Eats, Shoots, and Leaves” (never mind Menand’s arch New Yorker review of ES&L, which was far more haughty than a mere pan; here, they agree)? Digging up a Kurt Vonnegut quote that includes both Hemingway and his second-most despised punctuation mark? Someone even drew out the perfect quote from Noam Chomsky, giving Bush detractors and Chomsky haters alike something to laugh about.
And the coup de grace – was this the brilliant late addition of an overworked copyeditor? – bringing a mass murderer into the story; it’s just a setup for a groaner at the end of the sentence.
One of the school system’s most notorious graduates, David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam serial killer who taunted police and the press with rambling handwritten notes, was, as the columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote, the only murderer he ever encountered who could wield a semicolon just as well as a revolver. (Mr. Berkowitz, by the way, is now serving an even longer sentence.)
(Thanks: C.A.H.)
(Image: semicolon subway commuters; Scribble Images)
surf.bird.scribble. 
Over here in the UK, I don’t know if you are affected by it too, I’ve found that reporters whose work I have to sub edit, are so unsure of correct punctuation that they sprinkle commas through everything, often at, random, it drives me nuts.
As for semicolons; I don’t use them.
Maybe we should start a movement to get all the people who misuse apostrophe;s to start typing semicolon;s in they;re place! As long as their adding something extraneou;s it might as well be a semicolon since it;s proper usage is becoming a lost art. Best of all, the switch would require less exertion in the pinky finger!