This is a test of SmartyPants module, which should (like my old WordPress blog) convert two minuses into dashes -- allowing me to make my much-beloved paranthetical insertions like this -- as well as doing "curly quotes" and other such punctuation...

Yep. Works. Also added tags.

This may be nerd-prejudice talking, but in my years of experience, if you want to publish yourself online, you should become HTML literate in the basics like bold, blockquote, link, etc. These basic tools plus smart ASCII conversion like SmartyPants or even wiki-like Textile (which does bulleted lists, etc) are going to continue outperforming javascript-based markup toolbars for some time, and will be much more portable.

All that changes if/when Google releases the toolbar they use in Gmail and their web 2.0 office apps for public consumption, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.