parlando

ex matters

Posted on May 11th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness.

ESPN's website has a headline on their front page right now that reads:

Ex-O.J. friend: Simpson admitted killing his wife

Leaving aside the small matter that the source would be better described as "O.J. ex-friend":

It is irritating that ESPN regularly refers to "his wife" rather than "his ex-wife". The distinction isn't trivial, and muddying that distinction has been one of the ways that some of Simpson's more repellent defenders have sought to manipulate emotional response to the case.

But it is doubly irritating when ESPN takes care to refer to the source as an ex-friend, yet still refers to Simpson's victim as his wife.

1 comment.

r. kelly: creepier than you think

Posted on April 18th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians, Badness.

Bill Wyman -- the music journalist, not the musician -- has been doing a lot of good work at his weblog Hitsville. The most important and disturbing piece he's written, one that ought to be more widely disseminated, is his extraordinary compilation of facts and allegations concerning R. Kelly's sexual history with minors leading up to his trial on one of the allegations.

I knew that he was in trouble for taping himself having sex with a minor. I knew that he married Aaliyah when she was fifteen. But I hadn't any notion of the documented extent of Kelly's history with teenagers. Eleven separate allegations of sex with minors have been reported. Some of the details, as Wyman notes, are "a little bit barfy". For example, a year after he'd settled out of court for $250,000 with a fifteen year old girl, the first sex tape emerged:

...showing Kelly having sex with a young girl. The girl’s aunt identified her, and Kelly. In the tape, the singer called her by her first name; she called him “Daddy.” Besides a variety of sex acts, the girl urinates on the floor at “Daddy’s” direction. “Daddy” then urinates into her mouth.

The girl was fourteen at the time. In the reporting surrounding the case, it emerged that Kelly had settled out of court with two other teenage girls.

Th details surrounding the marriage to fifteen year old Aaliyah are creepy, too:

...she was a singer and a protege of Kelly’s with whom, associates have said, he was having an affair. Without telling her what was going on, Kelly arranged an impromptu wedding at a suburban Chicago hotel and then swept her toward a plane. Fortunately, the girl called her parents. They came and got her and, articles have said, the pair never saw each other again. As rumors surfaced about the union, Kelly lied about it. But then Vibe magazine found a marriage certificate, on which Haughton’s age was listed as 18. The union was annulled a short time later.

There are several more allegations. I'll just mention one more:

Many of Kelly’s associates have been quoted saying they thought he was sick, or had an uncontrollable compulsion to have sex with young girls. Perhaps the strongest evidence of this is that, while already under indictment for filming himself having sex with a child, he was found to have in one of his houses a digital camera with new photos of him having sex with an underaged girl. ... The search that produced the camera was later disallowed by a judge, so Kelly was never prosecuted for those photos.

R. Kelly has been subject to a certain amount of mockery for what has been generally seen, so far as I can tell, as celebrity peccadilloes, maybe a little further over the line than most. I think the record Wyman has compiled makes a compelling case that Kelly is a genuine sociopath. Why he has not been held more accountable by the media and the entertainment industry, I don't understand. Read the whole thing and see if you don't agree.

0 comments.

speaking the same language

Posted on April 10th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness.

In an mild argument at another web site I've been told I'm "kind of mincing words in the sense".

0 comments.

exterminate (a continuing series)

Posted on March 3rd, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness.

A couple more rhetorical bugs that signal the brief sleep of the conscious mind:

"Despite ... or perhaps even because of"

"That's not to say ... far from it"

0 comments.

what, a bus? a truck? a helicopter? i think we should be told.

Posted on February 9th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness.

A headline right now on ESPN's front page:

Did Stewart hit Busch with more than car Friday?

Hitting him with a car by itself merits a suspension, I think.

0 comments.

advisory note for blades of grass

Posted on February 5th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Badness, Stuff.

If you're going to leave political propaganda in my weblog, have the courtesy to sign your name and the sense to link it properly.

3 comments.

i'll bet it was about making a statement. yeah.

Posted on January 24th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians, Badness, Quotes.

Quoted from Idolator:

The Spice Girls are walking away with "£50 million between them" for their sold-out 17-night stand at London's 02 Arena. "The truth of the matter is, to put on this tour has cost £18.6 million," Ginger sez. "This is not a money-making expedition...Hopefully we will break even but it has never been about that."

I'm soliciting theories on what the Spice Girls reunions shows were really about, since they were never about making money (or breaking even), as pretty much everyone on the planet who isn't a Spice Girl might naturally assume.

1 comment.

excuse me?

Posted on January 15th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Words, Badness.

"The announcement was a surprise (if not an unexpected one)"

--John Bush at Allmusic, reviewing Orbital's Blue Album

0 comments.

another riff well past its pull date

Posted on December 14th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness, Comedy.

"I, for one, welcome our new [variable] overlords."

0 comments.

forty funny pictures, one awful artist

Posted on November 29th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Badness, Stuff, Cartoons.

(via Making Light, via Yendi at LJ)

Progresive Boink's Forty Worst Rob Liefeld Drawings is a hilarious demolition job, leveling a target both deserving and inexplicably successful, allowing guilt-free pleasure in the invective:

The most important thing you need to know before reading about all the terrible things Rob Liefeld has drawn is that he has never seen or talked to a woman in his life and has no idea what they look like or how their bodies operate. If you asked Rob Liefeld to draw a diagram of the uterus he'd put on a pair of gauntlets and punch the shit out of your chalkboard. This is how the man operates, and though I know it sounds like a lot, you have to believe me. I don't want you looking at the stuff he's drawing and think he's a conscious adult male with a creative job who can and has influenced the minds of young artists. The man is a pair of blue jeans with a face. He has on a backwards cap, and when he turns it around, it's still backwards.

The examples truly need to be seen to fully comprehend the stupendous awfulness that for a time made Liefeld not just the most popular artist in comics but a pop culture celebrity. I am providing just a piece of a few panels here -- each of them is cut from a larger panel in the actual piece -- concentrating on amazing anatomical monstrosities. Comments in quotes are from the original piece; comments in italics are mine.

"Also of note: the fingers of Stryfe’s left hand here all taper down in size from index to pinkie, you know, as fingers do."	Because manly superheroes wear their pants extra tight.
"Check out Spider-Man swinging in on a jungle vine.  Jesus Christ Liefeld drew a dog’s hindquarters on him.  Just straight-up a dog’s ass and legs."	Not actually supposed to be an emaciated calf.
"I'm not an expert on anthropomorphism and I'm the last person to consult when it comes to sexualizing an animal lady, but is the tail supposed to come out of the middle of the butt cheek like that?"	Not actually supposed to be an amputated leg (despite the sword).
"How many teeth are in a mouth? Like a billion, right? I’ll just draw a billion, all the same size and shape."	Not actually supposed to be a free-floating thigh... wait, I think it is supposed to be a thigh. How long is that thing??

And much more.

4 comments.

crooned with no irony whatsoever

Posted on November 29th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Badness, Lyrics.

"Thanks for taking me on a one-way trip to the sun."

--Englebert Humperdinck, "After the Lovin'" (written by Richie Adams and Alan Bernstein)

2 comments.

thinking about what you say

Posted on November 17th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness, Editing.

I proofread ad copy yesterday -- copy I was not allowed to edit -- that said their product supplied "one of the most sought-after needs".

I think one of the dangers of ad copy writing -- apart from the fact that this copy appeared to have been written by a tech person without assistance from someone learned in grammar and punctuation -- is that it is so full of exaggeration and stock phrasery that it's easy, when in a hurry, to overlook that you have said nothing at all, or, worse, said something ludicrous.

1 comment.

i confess, you're an idiot

Posted on October 11th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness.

A reviewer at rateyourmusic.com:

i confess ... I just can't love something just 'cause I'm supposed to ... the most overrated album on RYM.

This isn't confessing, of course, it's bragging. "Oh, I know I'm terribly picky. It's one of my worst character flaws." And what a lame brag. "I think for myself! You can't make me like it! You herd-following hype-slaves!" It's condescension preemption, a transparent bid for the Cool High Ground. It's a dumb game, even when it's played better than this, but there sure are a lot of people who never outgrow it.

3 comments.

enough already

Posted on August 24th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Words, Badness.

Cutesy citing of example is played out. Or at least come up with your own clever phrase and let last years' threadbare favorites die. ("I'm looking at you" says hi!)

8 comments.

jargon rejection pile

Posted on June 12th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness.

Today's wretched neologism in my work email: webinar.

7 comments.

bad rhymes

Posted on March 9th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Lists, Badness.

The Wombat File is asking for everyone's worst song couplets of all time. Help out this worthy cause.

I would also like to collect here rhymes that are forbidden until further notice. At the top of my list is "use/abuse". Any word where you have a good shot at guessing the rhyme word before the next line starts is a possible contender. Hall of fame entry: "museum/see 'em".

15 comments.

varieties of cultural ignorance

Posted on March 2nd, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness, Music Criticism.

Colin Harper, the writer of the liner notes for the reissue of Bert and John by Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, begins with:

From the strangely compelling cover shot, of two young men playing some now unfathomable board game in a half darkened room on a sunny day, oblivious to the camera, to the total idiosyncrasy of the music inside, Bert and John is an album with an atmosphere all its own.

The now-unfathomable board game in the cover shot is Go.

7 comments.

self-awareness is not sufficient. you have to want to change.

Posted on January 31st, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness.

I know that my overuse of the m-dash bracketed parenthetical phrase is no longer just a tic and has become a full-fledged flaw in my style. Yet I can't stop -- if anything, the problem only worsens as I age -- as discursiveness seems increasingly to become an end in itself, an aesthetic choice to be pursued regardless of meaning, a crotchet, a crutch, a mere mannerism. At least I'm no longer in imminent danger of succumbing to semicolon poisoning.

5 comments.

bad actor

Posted on January 31st, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Badness, Stuff, Media.

I don't watch television if I can help it, especially serial drama, which is so calcified as a form -- even Joss Whedon, yes -- that exposure to its predictable plot arcs and hammy acting and stunted dialogue is like sandpaper on my brain. (I have tried over the years to not sound like a snot about this. Just for the record, I am not trying to pretend this is an objective judgment, or to say anything about anyone else's appreciation of televised serial drama. I just can't fucking stand it, and the less I see of it the worse it is when I see it.)

Even by the standards of my completely negative attitude toward the whole form, though, I was surprised last night, while watching Law & Order: Criminal Intent at the bar (a series of shows I gather has a good reputation, which confirms my feelings about the form, because it was cringingly badly written and its plot was simple-minded when it wasn't absurd) at what a laughably bad actor Vincent D'Onofrio is. He has William Shatner's vocal delivery, only even more parodically; there really is no syntactic or emotional sense to when he pauses in a phrase. But in addition, he is ludicrously physical, twitching, swaying, making pointless finger movements, again at seemingly random intervals, like he's reached into a grab bag of gestures and sprinkled them through his acting for extra flavor. The swaying in particular was making me crack up. He was a relief, so bad that he made the ordinary badness of the show almost bearable.

I suppose I'm going to find out he's an Emmy winner.

13 comments.

gah

Posted on January 22nd, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness, Music Criticism.

Today I read a review of an album that the writer praised as "nigh on worthy of rejoicing over".

6 comments.

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