7 thoughts on “A box of links for the weekend”

1. Detroit really bothers me. There’s a video game series called Fallout. The premise is that there was a nuclear war between China & the US and you are the second or third generation of survivors born inside a bunker community. You have to venture outside into the post-apocalyptic wasteland, etc. The point is that those photos are indistinguishable from the areas in that game. But no bomb ever went off in Detroit.

   And it’s not anyone cherry-picking areas, as if the rest of the city is totally fine except for the few snapshots. Someone posted at the other site, several years ago, a video of someone driving around Detroit neighborhoods in their car. Everything was just as shit as the areas in those pictures and the video went on for something obscene like thirty minutes. That was around the same time when community organizing groups were protesting the last supermarket chain pulling out of inner-city Detroit neighborhoods. Because they faced getting robbed either from the locals or their own employees thieving while on the job. Couldn’t afford to stay open.

   However, I’m sure it’s all much better now that Obama has saved Detroit. You know he cares so much about the folks out there.

   • I know Detroit. Spent a lot of time there. It’s a disgusting collapse, not a tragedy.

2. I thought the story about dogs was interesting & mysterious until I got to the explanation: “…because evolution has conditioned them…”

   Ta-daaa! Not so mysterious after all. Glad we solved that one.

   Seriously, though, that was interesting. Thanks. Oh and the bit about dogs not eating your food unless you turn your back? Absolutely true. Trust me.

   PS: you are the first person I know who has pointed out the curious X-gen-and-younger habit of being unafraid to, for example, drop f-bombs in writing like they’re punctuation yet steadfastly refuse to call someone a pussy because of wymyn’s rights or something. Cracked.com is a perfect example of this, attempting to sound erudite but unable to finish a paragraph without a poop joke or referencing jerking off. Why? Afraid of losing the attention span of the audience?

   • Yeah I debated including a crude language warning. Should have.

     And I’ve been thinking for months about an observation you made at IP that I didn’t take seriously enough at the time because I’d seen it to some degree all my life.

     One that actually bothers me more than the f bombs.

     The various objective constructions (“between you and I,” “to she and I,” “he informed my wife and I,” “from my sponsors and I,” blah blah blah) that demonstrate almost everyone in the word or acting business is illiterate. It’s spread like a cancer. My parents used to laugh at nouveau riche who thought it made them sound intelligent. Why I didn’t pay enough attention to what you were alerting me to.

     You were right. It enrages me. Scripts contain it, even ones purported to be characterizing intellectuals. TV journalists are prime culprits. It’s absolutely fucking everywhere (just to drive home my point).

     The worst thing about it — it’s the easiest grammatical error in the world to avoid. Just take out the intervening pronoun and you’re left with “to I,” “from I,” “with I,” shit. Shit that’s obviously worse than what the quality hates about Kentucky and Arkansas. And as The missus just reminded me, the Brits are doing it too, at almost the same rate we are. Yecch (as Mad Magazine used to comment).

     Sorry. Didn’t mean to change the subject. Just wanted to acknowledge an observation I should have paid more attention to. But I still don’t have the slightest idea what to do about it because it’s so appallingly pervasive.

     Between you and I.

3. Well, thanks. Sorry to be right about this one.

   “It’s absolutely fucking everywhere.”

   The new, possibly even more disturbing, cancer is tacking on an apostrophe + s to plural words. If you want to talk about something that’s absolutely fucking everywhere, start looking for that. This may have reached its nadir today in an article I read where the author put the apostrophe out for a plural word but, in the same paragraph, had no apostrophe for a possessive word.

   Don’t know what to do about that one, either. If you try to correct anyone they will roll their eyes, say, “You know what I mean, grammar Nazi.” And go on making the same mistake.

   • Understood. But I had my tantrum about the “it’s” “its” problem a long time ago. I actually emailed Jonah Goldberg about his own transgressions and he apologized. Haven’t seen him err again.

     But there’s lots of writing stuff gone wrong. The real genocide no one has noticed is copy editors. They were the silent stars. Made indifferent journalists and writers look good. All riffed, retired or dead now.

     I met one of the real ones. The assigned copy editor for The Boomer Bible was in her seventies (they’d hired her special for the job), had worked on William Faulkner’s fiction, and when I met her the first time she said, “This is a first for me. I simply cannot find any way to copy edit this book. All kinds of things I could quarrel with but they’re all so deliberate I accept they’re part of your conception. I feel like if I change anything I might change everything.” She was right. When I breathed my first sigh of relief about the publishing process.

     I was still hung up on the name drop of Faulkner. Then she said, and I’m still so stunned all these years later that I couldn’t remember what she cited until after I’d written a draft of this comment: “I didn’t know you were a genius until I got to the Book of Ed.” Holy shit.

     We agreed to let her nitpick the spellings of historical names, which I did to humor her. I thought the varied spellings were part of the book. But I enjoyed being with her. She liked asking me what I had in mind about this and that, and periodically she’d dispute a comma. She was also ferocious about verse errors within chapters, which were more common than I’d thought. But she understood the ICR too, more than most men half her age have since. And she was clever about fixing them without screwing up the ICR. Yeah. The oldest person to comprehend the structure and totality and importance of the ICR. Go figure.

     She also made me rename my fictional versions of Rita Moreno and James T. Kirk. In one case she thought I could do better, in the other my spontaneous choice had touched on a scandal I hadn’t known about. She was a wonder. A Copy Editor.

     Noblest profession in the world. Making writers look better than they are.

     They’re gone. It’s actually how I’d like to end my professional days. All the conservative blogs need a copy editor in the worst way. Hotair is sloppy. Breitbart is a disgrace.

     But they’re all already so arrogant, there’s no way even to volunteer. They’re all the NYT in waiting. New chrome voice of truth.

     • When you say that they’re gone, do you mean the ones still around are no good anymore or the entire profession has been deemed to be “obsolete” now?

       You’ve mentioned before about the quality of writing being lower on the right than on the left and I generally agree. There are a few standouts but a lot of boring or sloppy ones.

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