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.
Posted on April 16th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Sports.
Seattle Mariners Venezuelan phenom Felix Hernandez is much celebrated at USS Mariner; in fact, they gave him the nickname King Felix by which he is nationally known. Every day he pitches is "Happy Felix Day" at USS Mariner. Today limericks broke out. I contributed two:
All hail the young King from Caracas.
His eminence never should shock us.
When he mixes his pitches
He leaves batters in twitches
And our cheers can be heard in Secaucus.
But then I discovered he's actually from Valencia. You can't rhyme much with Valencia (or Venezuela) in English, so I came at it from a different angle:
A Valencian monarch named Felix
Has an extra-high-powered double helix.
Hitters flail at his flings
And their once-mighty swings
Are reduced to limp, impotent wee licks.
Happy Felix Day!
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".
Posted on April 1st, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Stock Phrases.
Jason Crock's review of the new Raconteurs album in today's Pitchfork. (In this instance "even" substitutes for "perhaps".)
Posted on March 28th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Pedantry.
If you object to the use of "literally" as a metaphor intensifier, shouldn't you object to "veritable" as well? And "absolutely"? And "truly"?
Posted on March 9th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Pedantry.
Not "mixed tape". Where did that come from, anyway? I only started seeing it recently, but now I'm seeing it more often. Maybe someone decided that "mix tape" was ungrammatical. But "mixed tape" is just silly. It is not a tape that has been mixed. It is a tape of a mix. Everyone says "mix tape", and everyone understands what it means; the idiomatic use goes back thirty years or more, and has survived into the cd and mp3 era. It's neat and natural and useful, and should not be replaced with something awkward and nonsensical. Stomp out "mixed tape"!
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"
Posted on February 12th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Words.
We forgive the things we liked as children, and maybe even still enjoy them, because we didn't know any better and there's an innocent joy in returning to that total open-mindedness. But we often can't forgive the things we enjoyed as adolescents, because we were beginning to try to be adults, often self-importantly, and it can be excruciatingly embarrassing to be reminded of what we thought was deep and mature then.
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.
Posted on February 3rd, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Stuff, Comedy.
We have only watched the first two episodes, and it's not unusual for a comedy series to take even a full season to get its legs. So I'm certainly not writing off the series with these remarks. But for a purchase that seemed like a can't-miss -- Jeeves and Wooster played by Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie! adapted from the actual stories! -- I'm getting an uneasy feeling that I may end up watching more from duty than enjoyment.
Overfamiliarity with the original material is never a good recipe for enjoying stories transfered to television or cinema, and I'm obsessively fond of the Jeeves and Wooster stories. I knew from the start that one key element in the humor -- Bertie's narrative voice -- was unlilkely to translate, so I was prepared to let that go. All I really want is a reasonable approximation of the tone. And they've largely managed that. But they've managed it far better in the sequences when they're lifting dialogue whole from the original; rewritten scenes tend to miss a little, and the scenes created entirely new have been weak. And unfortunately, this means the best scenes have been the ones where I already knew all the jokes and incidents. (Not their fault.)
Some of the portrayals are better than others. I gather one of the odd features of the series is that the actors playing the supporting characters change from season to season; but in these first two episodes, at least, Bingo Little is perfect, and Roberta Wickham, Sir Roderick Glossop, Aunt Agatha, Honoria Glossop, and Claude and Eustace are all good enough. The imbecility of the Drones Club is perhaps played a bit broadly. Aunt Dahlia is badly underplayed, which is too bad, since she's my favorite supporting character in the series, and ought to be the most loudly and enthusiastically played. Hugh Laurie is a fine Bertie.
Which brings us to the huge problem that may well ruin the series for me: Stephen Fry's Jeeves. Fry is a very funny man, and I've always enjoyed him before. And I don't doubt that what he's doing here is funny. But it's not Jeeves, and I'm going to have a lot of trouble moving past that. Fry's Jeeves is smug. He wears a perpetual smirk, and radiates an air of superiority. Now, Jeeves as written would be hard to play for a funny man. Jeeves is largely expressionless and unreacting; the humor proceeds from the barest variations in his manner and tone. His verbal humor is as bone-dry as humor gets. Instead, Fry (and the writers) have turned up the volume, making Jeeves both more obvious and less likeable. He strikes me as more of a stand-in for a modern audience's class sensibilities than a real attempt to portray Jeeves as written, a failure of interpretation which unfortunately doesn't just affect Jeeves but the tone of the whole enterprise. Orwell noted that Americans who read a class critique in the Jeeves and Wooster stories were missing the point, but in this case they wouldn't be far off. Worst of all for the tone, they have made Jeeves sarcastic. Fry's Jeeves scores points with cutting remarks off Bertie's stupidity -- and that of his friends -- in a way that is simply cruder -- lower -- than Jeeves would ever stoop to. All of these smartass remarks are original to the television series, and, alas, none of them (so far) have been especially clever or funny: conventional put-down humor that sails over the head of the target. The literary Jeeves's dry remarks may contain implications, but he is not so baldly disrespectful, ever.
So, well. I'll continue watching, and at the very least look for my favorite segments. The singing of "Sonny Boy" was well done; I'm eager to see what they do with Gussie Fink-Nottle's address to the graduates. But I no longer have much hope that I'm going to love this series, and that's too bad, because my hopes were very high.
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.
Posted on January 20th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Sports.
A gem from the always poorly copy edited espn.com:
Carmelo Anthony saddled up to Allen Iverson late in the fourth quarter and told him they needed to put an end to this game.
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
Posted on January 5th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Oracles.
I wish I'd had my camera when I passed the garbage-type truck that had, emblazoned on its side:
EMPIRE DISMANTLING
Posted on January 3rd, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Comedy, Books.
I can't remember why Gavin loaned me Donald Westlake's Jimmy the Kid. He probably thought I would find it funny, but there may have been more detailed reasons. Anyway, it was hilarious, and though it's taken me a couple years to get round to reading more of the Dortmunder novels, I am now obsessive about having all of them (there are thirteen so far, plus a novella), and, ideally, reading them in order.
Unfortunately, several of the early ones are incomprehensibly out of print (including Jimmy the Kid, the third one). I gather they're popular books; five of them have been made into movies, although only one of them appears to be good (The Hot Rock, made in 1972 from the first Dortmunder novel and starring Robert Redford. Among the apparently bad ones, alas, is Jimmy the Kid, which starred Gary Coleman).
Anyway, I've now read The Hot Rock, and it was nearly as funny as Jimmy the Kid. Like many first novels in series, it deviates a bit from the model that would later be established. For one thing, Dortmunder more or less wins in the end (by implication, anyway) -- though for all I know that's turned around at the beginning of the second book, Bank Shot (which was made into a movie starring George C. Scott). I may have to skip directly to the fifth book, Why Me? (made into a movie starring Christopher Lambert and Christopher Lloyd), because at least I've been able to find that one.
They're everything-falls-apart capers, a genre I love, and the plots are funny, but the best part is the dialogue. Westlake has perfect rhythm, perfect timing. The action is funny, but the scenes between the action are funnier. Westlake even uses a narrative device I dislike, changing points of view whenever it's convenient for him, and gets away with it because each point of view is eccentric and amusing and still human.
Thanks, Gavin!
Posted on December 31st, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Comedy, Quotes.
Gilbert Sorrentino, Mulligan Stew:
As far as noting "what my work and my life as a writer mean" -- how shall I speak of that? As I compose, I think sometimes of the lovely and yet terrifying phenomena of all the world: immense waterfalls falling, gigantic gales from the four corners of the earth carrying in their gritty teeth chunks of rough-hewn farmers' tables and beloved credenzas, dust and excreta from Iowa barns, the sweet simplicity of the voices of both Cohens and Kellys, laughter from gay, come-what-may places, girls with braces (glistening with their tears) on youthful teeth . . . how to speak of these things? How to speak of what the tiny, yet handsome vase from Java, the dew-touched day's eye trembling in it, means to me? Of a half-frozen sparrow, beak worrying a Carnation condensed-milk-can wrapper? Of the masculine rhythms of Dostoevski's anger and comedy and compassion? Of the memory of the memory of first love? How . . . ? How can one explain what it means to think continually of those who were truly great? Of the rough expertise of the air-conditioner repairman? Of American cities, wrapped in local mystery -- Natchez and Mobile, Memphis and St. Joe: raw towns that we believe and die in? Of The Last Supper and the wine on the table on that evening of mystery? How is it possible to articulate the surging emotions felt watching children in the playground, running, playing, gleeful on their divine seesaws? The images crowd together, mix with the emotions, judgment is suspended, one is drunk as one is drunk on wine, and laughter. One writes ceaselessly, one writes -- everything. The notebooks fill, the black ink of the recording pen sets down the rhythms of life itself, rich nuggets of symbol, image, both clear and mysterious, deep, lie buried, waiting for the moment when they will be rescued from their temporary home. Meaning is held in an almost unbearable tension on the dizzying edge of the meaningless, and there! There lies the quicksilvery truth that makes one's life as a writer meaningful and endlessly rich. The wearisome hours of staring at the white paper, the lonely white paper, the clock ticking inexorably on -- all of it is worth it as the haunting image of the emotion is wrenched free from the mulchy notebooks and transformed into sheerest beauty! But how does one explain . . . ? To recast one's life as purest art -- that is the program. That is what my life and work "mean". One would like to achieve full expression of one's inchoate and sinewy self. In one's self, in the dark shed of the untameable mind, lies the truth, waiting to be released into the line, the sentence, the story or novel. I strive for it continually.
Posted on December 17th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians, Quotes.
As unfathomable as it seems from the distance of over 30 years, for a few months, Gerry and the Pacemakers were the Beatles' nearest competitors in Britain. --Richie Unterberger, Allmusic
For a very brief time in 1964, it seemed that the biggest challenger to the Beatles' phenomenon was the Dave Clark Five. --Rick Clark and Richie Unterberger, Allmusic
Posted on December 14th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness, Comedy.
"I, for one, welcome our new [variable] overlords."
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)