Teaching your grammar to suck eggs

Still on the theme of the dumbification of American letters (or possibly the illiteratization of written communication), this post about five grammar mistakes “that make you look like a chimp” crossed my email.

Really—I don’t know why you’d stop at five. What about the people who don’t know the difference between a transitive and intransitive verb (and therefore misuse lay/lie in ignorant bliss)?

Or subject/object pronouns—“he gave the tickets to Mark and I”—with particular attention to who/whom. “Give the tickets to whomever can go.”

Number/amount: “the amount of people who got tickets was limited to whomever paid a bribe”. Or, one of my faves: TNT’s “more movie, less commercials.”

Subject/predicate agreement: “anyone can get tickets if they pay a bribe.”

Indiscriminate splattering of their/they’re/there, or its/it’s.

The list goes on—feel free to add your own bêtes noires.

And don’t even get me started on punctuation.

This is what comes of people thinking that anyone can be a writer, without training or talent. They wouldn’t think that anyone could be a cardiothoracic surgeon (at least one they’d let cut into their chest), or even that anyone could play the clarinet, without training or talent. But writing? “Hell, Ah kin rite—jes’ watch me on this here net-thang!”

In your Facebook

I can’t be the first person to have noted that the social networking phenomenon has resulted in the complete trivialization of communication.

I mean, it’s one thing when any buffoon with an Internet connection and the ability to type can spew authoritatively the kind of crack-brained opinions that you used to encounter only on talk radio. Only now with misspellings and a complete absence of understanding of punctuation.

But Facebook has elevated the annoyance of minutiae to Himalayan heights.

It seems that the combination of a guaranteed audience (your “friends”) and the access afforded by the BlackBerry and iPhone (examples of “smart phones”, although they actually seem to bring out the moron in their users) has resulted in the kind of “update” that just boggles my mind.

I’m talking the, “At the pizza parlor”, followed by, “Hard to choose—pepperoni or sausage?” followed by, “Went half-and-half” (with a photo), followed by, “Couldn’t finish it” (with another photo), and finally, “What to have for dessert?”

Or the, “Packing the car for Florida”, “Getting in the car and heading out”, “Just getting to I-95”, ad nauseam for 758 miles. (Special attention to South of the Border.)

So far I haven’t encountered the trips to the loo, but I have no doubt whatsoever they’re on the horizon.

I’ve had to hide two friends’ posts for precisely this reason. (And, interestingly, one of them was a complete Luddite until she got her BlackBerry not long ago.)

Honest to God—can’t people just sign up for Twitter and splash their tiny little updates amongst the crowd that can’t pay attention for longer than 140 characters?

Here come de judge

Word comes that a Federal judge has told the SEC to go back to the drawing board with its paltry $33M slap on Bank of America’s wrist over neglecting to mention to anyone the bonuses they’d agreed to pay Merrill Lynch management when the two firms merged.

This coincides with President Obama’s speech warning the financial sector that they shouldn’t expect to get bailed out & then return to the wild west environment of hot & cold running excess.

My money’s on Jed S. Rakoff’s ruling having more impact than Obama’s injunction. After all, the government’s already shown that it has no spine when it comes to standing up to Wall Street. But Rakoff has a history of demanding actual, you know, justice from perpetrators of corporate malfeasance.

Time, gentlemen

It’ll be interesting to see how this one plays out: the British Medical Association has issued a report calling for a ban on all alcohol advertising, including sports and music event sponsorship.

They’re looking to slow rising consumption with the ban, plus some other government mandates: mandatory minimum pricing scheme, reduction of licensing hours for both on-premise and off-premise sales, reducing the density of alcohol outlets, etc.

The focus is on young people (defined in the report as under 25), even though they admit that the entire nation is essentially in its cups most of the time. And that treating alcohol-related conditions costs the National Health Service up to $5B per year.

While I don’t dispute the social and financial costs associated with the kind of drinking that results in piles of vomit outside pubs every night, I have to wonder what they’re talking about when they refer to how cheap it is there. Unless they’ve lowered the prices considerably in the past three years, drink is definitely not the most cost-effective way of numbing your brain. (That would be reality TV shows.)

Plus—it’s unclear that the linchpin of their plan to dry out Britain, a ban on alcohol advertising, would have much of a positive effect. According to the Australian Association on National Advertisers (admittedly not an unbiased group), multiple studies by apparently legitimate and respected researchers would seem to indicate that advertising bans have little or no effect on actual, you know, consumption of alcohol.

Naturally various trade associations are rushing to the defense of the status quo. I particularly love the Wine and Spirit Trade Association’s dire prediction that a ban would “threaten the livelihoods of thousands of people working in the media, advertising, television” and other industries.

Kind of the argument used to prop up GM and Chrysler.

We the suckers...

In case there was any doubt in your mind, a report by the Congressional Oversight Panel has made it official: we-the-people’s involuntary bail-out of GM and Chrysler was basically billions washed down the drain. It’s a “loan” we’ll never see repaid.

You can kiss the initial $23B flung out by the Bush administration goodbye. And even though some chick at Treasury says there’s a “reasonably high probability” that we’ll get some of the nearly $40B back the two failed behemoths cadged from this administration, I don’t see her betting her own McMansion on that probability.

All in all, we’d have been better off investing in amusement parks or chinchilla farms.

Learning from history's mistakes (not)

Ah, the grand old days of black-is-white socialist realism are not entirely behind us. In the revisionist Russian regime of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin & President Dmitri Medvedev that old blackguard Josef Stalin is on his way to rehabilitation. & the latest step in that process is a libel suit being brought by the Man of Steel’s grandson against a historian who wrote a journal article that would not qualify as hagiography.

Seems that Stalin never made policy of the destruction of whole classes of Soviet citizenry (in their tens of millions); didn’t really make a deal with Adolf Hitler & refuse to believe that his fascist friend would actually breach the pact by, you know invading the Soviet Union; didn’t eviscerate the Red Army with the show trials of the 30s; didn’t order the murder of 21,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest; & blah, blah, blah.

This is an example of the cyclical nature of both historiography & national development. Were it not a desecration of every soul starved, shot, drowned, frozen, tortured & overworked to death in the service of Stalin’s ambition & by his direct mandate it would be rather farcical.

I mean, really—suing for libel instead of just eviscerating the offender in the bowels of the Lubyanka & sending his family to Siberia? Somewhere Stalin is whirling like a dreydel.

Any road—it doesn’t bode well for Russians today or the nations that interact with them.

Losing fizz

Sad news for those of us who love bubbly: reacting to lowered sales, Champagne houses are acting like OPEC & cutting production.

Seems like an odd response: consumers have cut back on buying the stuff because of straitened circumstances—clearly a statement about price sensitivity; but rather than lower their prices the producers are moving to uphold them artificially.

Zut alors!

Number one with a Bullitt

Well, I don’t quite know what to think.

McQueen.

Back.

Inspiring multiple lines of menswear.

The WSJ reports that manufacturers from Dolce & Gabbana to J. Crew are filling retail shops with clothing “inspired” by Steve McQueen’s film attire. Evidently the marketing pitch is along the lines of, “Steve was cool. Wear what he did & you’ll be just as cool.”

Oh, as if.

Still, just thinking about it is a bit of a blast from the past. These people are right—there can’t ever have been anyone as cool as McQueen. That guy grabbed attention just walking into the shot. Put him in The Magnificent Seven, up against Yul Brynner, Charles Bronson, Eli Wallach, James Coburn, a lot of horses & the Mexican countryside—he still ate up the screen. One pink shirt throughout the whole movie.

Or The Great Escape—German uniform or cut-off-sleeved sweatshirt, tossing that baseball against the cooler wall or making moonshine for Independence Day, he delivered his lines with the quintessential American brash insouciance. ("You're crazy, you know that? You oughta be locked up!")

The Thomas Crown Affair, Le Mans, Love with the Proper Stranger, Bullitt, Sand Pebbles…it didn’t matter what clothes he sported, the coolness came from within. It was being the star who gave producers the jim-jams by doing his own stunts with fast vehicles. It was drinking too much but still making morning makeup.

I know this is nothing new, but I’m going to get a really good giggle out of seeing today’s metrosexuals thinking they’ll take on some of McQueen’s persona by wearing a bomber jacket or a pair of chinos or a watch.

It ain’t the clothes on the man, silly; it’s the man in the clothes.

Madoff update

In case you were wondering, it seems the SEC inspectors—who investigated Bernie Madoff no fewer than six times (in response to complaints) over the course of 16 years—weren't on the take; they were merely extraordinarily incompetent.

That’s according to a report by the SEC’s inspector general released yesterday. It sounds like these investigators were not only dullards of incredible density, but they weren’t capable of following a lead if it was playing Sousa & displaying eight-by-ten color glossy photos with circles & arrows & a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one is.

& Madoff managed to turn this ineptitude to his advantage by essentially assuring investors that his operations had been cleared multiple times by the Feds, so of course their money was safe…

Frankly, I don’t know which is worse—having oversight people who are smart but on the take, or just plain too stupid to detect their way out of a paper bag. Either way, we get screwed.

Civic amenities

Over the weekend I had to go to my local branch of the Seattle Public Library to return four books & pick up one I had on hold. The forcing function was that as of Monday, 31 August, the entire library system is closed tighter than a tavern under Prohibition. It doesn't reopen until 8 September.

They’ve been announcing it on the local public radio stations (the assumption being, I guess, that if you listen to NPR, you may also read, you know, books). Not only the libraries, but the book drops are sealed. That’s because there’ll be no one there to empty them for eight days.

(They’ve assured us that you won’t be charged a fine for any book due during this period. Yeah, right.)

Even the website & book catalog are dead—just this placeholder announcing the closure in 15 languages.

The culprit is budget cuts.

At least the King County Library System is open. &, from what I’ve seen so far, that system holds more volumes & is better organized than Seattle’s.

Still, for a city that touts itself as the intellectual vortex of the universe, this is a pretty piss-poor state of affairs.