Archive for February, 2009
Denver will be losing one daily, the Rocky Mountain News, come Friday, according to owner’s group E.W. Scripps. Unable to find a buyer for the paper, Scripps is throwing in the towel on the 150-year-old publication.
Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp. are reportedly eyeing the purchase of the New York Times or even the Los Angeles Times. Good moves if Murdoch can pull them off. Maybe he could fire all the far-left zealots and reality contortionists who run the places and usher in some objective reporting for once.
I got my start in journalism with the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, a Hearst Corporation newspaper noted mainly for its great sports reporting and its lackluster everything else. Hearst shut the money-losing operation down on Nov. 2, 1988 (I’ve still got a copy of the last paper), and now it’s threatening to close down the only remaining daily newspaper in San Francisco.
Hearst announced yesterday that, sans huge cost savings through job eliminations and other initiatives, it will shutter the San Francisco Chronicle in a matter of weeks. This comes on the heels of Sunday’s bankruptcy filing by the owners of the Philadelphia Inquirer and last year’s insolvency court yelp from the Chicago Tribune, which also owns the Los Angeles Times, my local far-left rag.
Hearst bought the Chronicle in 2000 for $660 million and has poured in more than $1 billion since, according to the Wall Street Journal (itself bought out last year by Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp., now flush with red ink itself).
At least when Hearst cast out the Her-Ex, as it was affectionately known, The Times was still around as a Los Angeles daily. This time, San Francisco won’t be so lucky (or unlucky, depending on your perspective).
And the fawning continues.
No doubt historians are already writing future history books in which Barack Obama takes his rightful (their opinion) place beside George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and FDR as the greatest presidents who ever lived. And the Nobel Committee is just waiting for Obama to invite Hamas to Camp David for a photo op to present him with the Nobel Peace Prize. Now, both eventualities will come to pass even if terrorists invade America and subject all of us to dhimmitude, and Hamas gets some tactical nuclear weapons from Iran (or North Korea) and levels Tel Aviv.
Anyway, I’m getting a little bit sidetracked here. More mundanely, let’s look at Obama’s misuse (butchery) of the English language. Now, I’ve read all the liberal media accounts of what a great speaker he is, but whenever I’ve listened to him, all he sounds like is what he is–a lawyer trained in obfuscation and double talk. I’m still waiting for his first loftily constructed sentence in the sense of the Biblical imagery and pithy magic that Lincoln evoked.
I’ll leave you a link here to Obama and "Me" by Benjamin Plotinsky, so you can read about how Obama routinely uses I for the objective case when it should be me–and how reporters at the New York Times are now rewriting the history of grammar to prove that Obama is, well, you guessed it, just dead on right and everyone else is wrong.
And the mythology continues.
I reported on a blog I maintain as part of my official duties about a new guidebook published by the International Longevity Center and Aging Services of California. Media Takes: On Aging offers prescriptions of what words and terms to use–and not to use–when referring in writing to our older population.
As far as sensitivities go, the age of 55 seems to be the turning point. Those below 55, for instance, find "senior citizen" perfectly acceptable. Likewise with "retiree." Don’t call anyone 55 or older a "retiree."
Also, make sure not to use "old" as an adjective, as in "old coot" and "old fart." Those really go beyond the PC pale.
As for me, who qualifies easily above 55, call me anything you like. If it’s in the Comments section, I just won’t print it if I don’t like it. LOL
I got a kick out of reading the Los Angeles Times this morning and its "in-the-tank" piece about Obamulus, the stimulus plan that was just passed without any details being released except by Republicans. There in the first couple of paragraphs, the Times article sang the praises of the so-called stimulus bill, even using the word fatten to describe what would happen to people’s paychecks because of the tax cuts.
First, there are no tax cuts in the legislation. There are tax credits of $400 for each individual and $800 for married couples, along with a bunch of restrictions. Now, a tax credit is not a check anyone will receive in the mail. It’s a deduction against the taxes you owe at the end of the year, and if your’re single, it totals $7.70 a week, and if a couple, it’s about $15 and change. Gee, the economy is really going to go wild with all that extra dough flooding the shopping malls of America.
Second, if this is how Democrats fatten people’s paychecks, why did the same liberal media lambaste Geoge W. Bush for lowering, almost permanently, everyone’s tax liabilities by hundreds if not thousands of dollars a year, calling it a "giveaway to the rich"?
Not hard to answer if you’ve been in journalism as long as I have.
Mark Cuban, outspoken multimillionaire (billionaire?) owner of the Dallas Marvericks, is offering to fund your start-up for 60 to 90 days provided it turns a profit in that time-frame. On his blog, he details the requirements.
What I noticed in reading through the pitches made to him in the comments area are, first, that there are a lot of bad, bad, bad business ideas out there, and second, that Mark Cuban definitely understands business but butchers the English language. Specifically, he never uses hyphens (for instance, he writes wont instead of won’t). Now this just may be his take on CyberLish, but it’s stil ungrammatical
Go read the proposal and pitch your idea if you like.
Those of you who’ve been to Asian restaurants, especially the smallish or fast-food variety but even some major sushi bars, will be given wooden chopsticks that have to be broken apart to use since they’re one piece at the top. What happens when you break them apart and the results are uneven, one top bigger than the other?
According to Chinese legend, this foretells:
1) A death in the family
2) Someone just got pregnant
3) A rocky road in your love life
4) A change in jobs
5) Just some splinters
The answer is #3, a rocky road in your love life. When the break is uneven, it represents an uneven relationship, which we all know is unhealthy and headed for trouble. So, this reminds us all to keep a relationship equal at all costs, or just to be careful when separating our chopsticks.
What this has to do with English, I’m not sure, but I thought it was interesting.
Like me three years ago, you may get laid off during a company layoff, which brings up this curious word formation. The verb is to lay off, the noun is layoff, and the adjective is a compound one, laid-off, as in a laid-off worker.
Anyway, I guess I was the proverbial canary in the mineshaft when I hit the economic skids three years ago, in the heights of boom times (now know to be a credit bubble). I’ve somehow survived, barely, but this year should prove to be an interesting one, borrowing the use of interesting from the Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times."
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