What the hell is this?
Jobless Claims Rise More Then Expected
[italics mine]
Maybe it's because nobody can friggin' READ well enough to fill out their job applications. If the online news sources are hiring writers and editors who don't know the difference between "then" and "than," then I'd sure as hell hate to see the people they turn down.
This, fellow bloggers, is the "journalistic standard" to which people are expecting us to hold ourselves now, based on the utterly hilarious assertion that everybody who can purchase a domain name, load blogging software onto a server, or get a free LiveJournal account is a journalist. Actually, this is great, because it means that when I get in the car and go to Hy-Vee, I'm a racecar driver! And when I take my clothes off prior to showering, I'm a stripper!
Come on, you dipsticks. I distinctly remember being in second grade [I know it was second because we had different classrooms every year] and having a discussion of homophones. This didn't happen in some special gifted class, this happened right in a standard Pennsylvania public elementary school with a standard damn curriculum. Now, I won't go so far as to say that people with poor grammar skills shouldn't blog; I don't believe that [although if you know your spelling and grammar aren't good, there's really no shame in having somebody proofread for you]. But when you have paid professional journalists making the sort of mistake you expect to see on a fourth-grade book report, the whole admonition to "adhere to journalistic standards" just makes me wanna laugh.
You want me to adhere to these standards? Fine, I can do that.
Pope Jon Whatever ii Dies at 56
Frida Peeple, Disassociative Press writer
Pop John Ii who's, real name is John Jacob Jingelhiemershcmitt, kicked the bucket today at teh age of 55. Ppl were wandering y the poope would dye so quikly--I mean, he was only 58!!!!1!--but aperently he had the flue.
It was reporteded that teh poppe have suffered form a long long long long illnes & was not felling well.A spokeman for the Vadikan said 'it was a tragic day 4 all cathlicks and we just prey thatppl will not loose faith in GOd b/c of this tradegy.". and stuff.
nobody no's who will suck suk succc be the next POpe. Ne body who wants 2 be pope has 2 follo a specail screening prosess & a s eries of test.
O wait this artical i linkd 2 says teh poppe isnt really dead atall,he just had a relasp of flooe. Oppsie! lol So neways hes still alive at age 64 tho he probly has a sore but from haveing diaria.
See how easy that was? All you have to do is totally not pay attention to what you're doing! I thought adhering to standards of mechanics, accuracy and coherence would be difficult, but when I discovered there more or less weren't any, the article practically wrote itself.
If you work for the news, please do not write to me with any bleating about libel, journalistic standards, or any of that crap. It's only libel if it ain't true, and you know perfectly sodding well that many of you either can't spell or don't try. And we all know you don't proofread. A quick spin through a few newspapers or news websites is evidence enough of that. And nowhere in your journalism schooling, apparently, were you required to take [and pass] English composition, which would have covered the kind of grammatical niceties that have escaped you, and would have provided you a reference manual to look them up and correct them, if you bothered to keep your damn textbooks. If you did take Comp 101 and 102, and passed them, and kept your handbook [which you should have, if you had any idea you might write for a living], and deigned to refer to it from time to time, then...jeez. I just don't know what to say to that. Get more sleep? [If you do have correct spelling and grammar, and it's one of your colleagues that's the problem, could you please do the English language a favour and try to get them fired?]
As for mistakes in accurate reporting, I have only to dredge up a few articles on paganism to exemplify the sort of side-splittingly inaccurate stories journalists come up with no matter how many facts they have. [The one in which a well-meaning reporter basically said that Wicca and paganism are the same thing, and that Wiccans were "pagan clergy," springs to mind with a chuckle.] If I felt frisky, I could find some news stories reporting the results of scientific studies. You know the ones I'm talking about--the ones where the study shows only a correlation, and you infer, and report, a scientifically un-inferrable direct causation between one factor and the other, because "X causes Y" stories sounds more interesting than "X and Y were found in the same people" stories, and because many people believe the fallacy that correlation and causation are the same thing. You know you do it.
It seems that I'm pointing and laughing every time somebody gets caught with their participles down, but I promise you, for every one of these I actually blog about, there are dozens more that I just roll my eyes at, because what can you do? [I could be a real snob and say things like "at which I roll my eyes," but that just sounds so damn Harvardesque. Also, you're allowed to let prepositions dangle if tucking them in results in mangling the sentence. I checked.]
Bah. I'm done with this. On to something else.
***
Found out that the test I had, which cost $432 and which I thought I was going to have to pay out of pocket because of a deductible...apparently doesn't apply under the deductible and was paid for entirely by the insurance company. For once an HMO did something nice. Thank the gods for small [and not so small] mercies.
Also in the small mercies department was the dental filling that was put in a little over a year ago, which has cracked somewhat [probably due to my constant stress-induced bruxism, of which I'm trying to break myself] and which I thought I was going to have to pay to have redone. The dentist said he'd redo it for free, since it cracked so soon. [This is the same dentist who, while ever so delicately putting finishing touches on my filling--on a day when Dru Sjodin, the 19-year-old Minnesota girl, was still missing and hadn't been found, and was in the news--announced that he'd like to get the kidnapper in the chair and open up his teeth one by one until he said where she was. He kicks ass.]
I still want my tax refund.
And it's already been a long, long week.
same bitch time, same bitch channel...
Quote for the day: "If I jump up and down in my cubicle, am I an astronaut?" --That one guy from Get Your War On
Posted by Frida Peeple at February 24, 2005 09:59 AM