Origin of Snouts Up (:)

Faithful reader David Allgood writes to ask where the snout concept comes from, so I answer:

It comes from the fact that I used to be obsessed with pigs and a lot of my old friends know that. I wanted to do something other than thumbs or stars, and thought snouts conveyed the level of self-mockery I needed to get away with a review, period–then I discovered that you could easily make a snout with a couple of parens and a colon and voila!

Don’t you just love picturing the huge pigs underneath with their snouts pointed up to the stars?