Readers may recall that about a month or so ago I expressed my extreme annoyance with those who pretended to have a spectacular fall in supermarkets, breaking gallon jugs of milk and juice and other things, creating a mess, spattering people nearby, and making fools of the people who expressed concern that they might be hurt and tried to help them. They would have an accomplice who recorded the events and posted it on YouTube. [Read more…]
George Orwell’s classic 1946 essay Politics and the English Language makes the case that politics degrades language because when politicians want to look truthful while telling lies they do so by making their language convoluted and using big words so that the listener is not aware of what the speaker is actually saying. Orwell says that users of such language should be viewed warily and recommends that people who want to communicate truthfully and accurately would do well to adopt a straightforward style using simple and common words and vivid and accurate metaphors. [Read more…]
Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is clearly so fed up with the quality of public discourse on budget issues and the kinds of people the media hold up as being authorities that he departs from his usual measured language. This time he unloads on the execrable Alan Simpson, the former senator and co-chair of the Simpson-Bowles deficit cutting commission created by president Obama. [Read more…]
There is perhaps no body of journalists in the US more useless than the White House press corps. These are the people who spend their days in the White House or follow the president on his travels, hoping for some morsel of news to be dropped or to overhear a gaffe or get a deliberate ‘leak’ from an important source. This seems like a soul-killing job to me but apparently these are much sought-after gigs by some reporters because they are high profile. [Read more…]
Although I own a TV, it is used almost exclusively to watch DVDs and I have not watched TV news or any programs in ages, preferring to get both via the radio or the internet. But I can imagine that there must have been wall-to-wall coverage of the shootings at the elementary school last week. My local newspaper the Plain Dealer had massive front-page, above the fold coverage of the news on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday even though the events took place in a distant state and had no local connection. [Read more…]
[Correction: For some reason I replaced the actual name Morris with Brown in places. I have made the correction.]
Phillip Morris is a local columnist for the Plain Dealer who usually writes fairly boring boilerplate local interest stories. I usually read just the first paragraph before moving on. But a couple of days ago my attention was grabbed by the headline to his column that said ‘Rachel Maddow and the gay tax’. [Read more…]
I still have no landline after Hurricane Sandy brought down the tree and with it the phone line. So that means I will not have DSL and will have to follow the election results the old-fashioned way, on TV. I suspect that they will use a lot of gee-whiz technology. [Read more…]
Do you remember the time when you were an adolescent? That was the time when you could roughly split people into three groups: the trendsetters, the trend followers, and those who deliberatively chose to go against prevailing trends, irrespective of whether they were good or bad. Most people fell into the second category, people who would usually look around to see what the ‘correct’ thing was to say or do, for fear of being out on a limb and thus open to scorn from their peers. [Read more…]