Whatever Happened to John Candy? Oh, He's Dead? I See . . .

Just kidding!  Seriously, we're not going to talk about John Candy.  I can't even recall watching any of his movies, except vaguely Uncle Buck for some reason.  Also, I suffered some moderate heart palpitations when I realized that he's been dead since 1994.

What we are going to talk about is whether in my previous web log I managed to rip a hole in the fabric of spacetime with my use of the sentence "Clinton will be being fellated by angels in heaven" or whether I just suck at the English language.

For those of you, the most of you, who think that I give no thought to this stuff, let me assure you that I spent a good five minutes staring at that sentence before hitting the "Publish Post" button.  From what I can tell from the internet, the source of almost all knowledge in the world, the sentence is of the future continuous passive variety.  I think.  I don't quite know what all those things mean.

You see, I know enough about the English language to look at this and wince -

But that's about it.

(Hey, Twitter - why don't you just make people select a gender and then display "This person has protected her tweets" or "This person has protected his tweets" or, hell, if somebody can't make up HIS OR HER (see how I used words correctly there, Twitter?- and that's actually an example where some people would argue that "their" is acceptable because of the indeterminate "somebody" - your use of "This person" would be very, very determinate) mind - "This person has protected its tweets."  Or how about just "This person's tweets are protected?")

Anyway,

"Clinton will be being fellated by angels in heaven"

Something about the "be" and "being" being right next to each other is grating, though not ungrammatical from what I can glean from the internet.  The obvious fix is to switch it to the active voice, which is the voice the future continuous tense is usually.  This gives us:  "Angels will be fellating Clinton in heaven."  Great.  Awesome.  But taken together with the first part of the sentence, it doesn't seem to work -

In thirty years you will still be somebody who nobody has ever heard of and angels will be fellating Clinton in heaven.

I feel like the emphasis of the second part of the sentence should be "Clinton" since the emphasis in the first part is "you."

So this would work -

In thirty years you will still be somebody who nobody has ever heard of and Clinton will be fellating angels in heaven.

But we can't have Clinton fellating angels for chrissake.  That's just absurd.  Sure, that might be some sort of heaven for the angels, but certainly not for Clinton [Editor's Note: What?].  So we're stuck.

Or are we?

Yes, we are.