The Albatross of Miscommunication

File this under the topic parallelogrammar, because clear and elegantly balanced writing calls for what is termed parallel construction, wherein you stay consistent with grammatical structures.

So, if you start one part of a sentence with the present tense of a verb, don't shift tenses -- just to cite one pretty freaking vague example.

Well, maybe this is best illustrated by the practice of not observing parallel construction.

On the front page of The Post-Standard of Syracuse, New York, on July 24, 2008, we find this sentence:

"Corn was flattened by wind and soybeans shredded by hail in the Cato-Meridian area of Cayuga County."

I did a little extra chewing on my Special K Protein Plus cornflakes when I read that.

The wind and the soybeans shredded by hail conspired to flatten corn? Some soybeans!

This former copyeditor of that journal would have insisted on:

"Corn was flattened by wind and soybeans were shredded by hail . . . "

That's just me.

Also, alarmingly, the same newspaper has taken to using ME in headlines, for Medical Examiner. Poor. Poor. Poor.

The Albatross of Statistics and Vocabulary

You may be shocked to hear this:


According to the latest data from The New York Times, via the Bureau of Economic Analysis, via Haver Analytics, fuel is a smaller part of personal budgets (4.2 percent) than it was in 1980 (6 percent).

Incidentally, speaking of the psychology of recession and depression, which Phil Gramm just got crushed for, can't newsreaders and writers find any alternative than soar or soaring to describe fuel prices?

RFK, Remembered

Speaking of wealth, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. had it but chose not to sit along the Riviera drinking highballs, as Pete Hamill put it today on NRP's Fresh Air with Terry Gross.

Bobby Kennedy was shot 40 years ago today.

I was a college student. And as I reflect back, I think I experienced violence fatigue, some kind of withdrawal, some kind of escapism.

Months before, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assaasinated; nearly five years before it was JFK.

I didn't follow the RFK funeral much or the eulogies or the media coverage, any of that.

Enough already.

Maybe it was sophomoric escapism or solipsistic narrowness, but looking back I think it was depressing, defeating, a killer of idealism, a dreary enterprise. I couldn't take it.

Somewhere around this time Malcolm Muggeridge wrote in Esquire magazine that Americans had entered into a kind of collective psychosis. We couldn't tell the difference between ketchup or blood, from a TV program's fictional violence and reality. (Forty years later, I remember that essay in Esquire.)

Maybe so.

And we have not been yet lifted from that psychosis.

What is the medication you would prescribe for us?

I pray a dose of Obama does some wonders.

But alas it may be irrational to pin so much hope on one flawed human.

The Albatross of Entitlement

According to the Wall Street Journal of May 28, 2008, here's the price of gas of a gallon of gasoline in May in select countries, and the percentage of increase from a year ago:

U.S. -- $3.72 -- 20%

U.K. -- $8.42 -- 17%

Austria -- $7.66 -- 15%

Ireland -- $7.43 -- 13%

Greece -- $7.01 -- 13%

France -- $8.44 -- 8%

Germany -- $8.38 -- 4%

What can one conclude?

I'll let the numbers speak for themselves.

They say a lot.

A wealth of policy is behind those numbers.

Labor's Love Lost

 just finished reading Joshua Ferris's

Then We Came to the End, 

a fine debut novel -- and hugely entertaining website, linked above.

I albatrossingly doubt many novels have captured the flavor, angst, tragedy, and insane humor of today's office workplace

with humanity too

read it and weep

and laugh

Berlin

Speaking of metaphors of reinvention, to Berlin.

Land there on Saint Patrick's Day, casting out the snakes in me pants.

Will be searching for runes amidst the ruin of ruins rebuilt.

The Mothers of (Re)invention

The grace is this: I am forced to reinvent myself. All those Gaulloise-smoking existentialists merely talk of creating themselves; this is life. Life.

This "joblessnessness" makes me:

• define "work"
• label myself with new tags
• surrender
• accept
• ferret out possibility
• expect surprise
• welcome change
• create opportunity
• insert verbs
• shake hands with gerunds
• dangle participles
• delight in expletives
• pronounce ejaculations
• foment accord in tune with discord
• denounce resentment
• nurture gratitude

Such is The Proletarian Litany of Lost and Found Dreams.