Yearly Archives 2006

Holiday reminder

No shopping is required (unless you still need to buy your aluminum pole), but you should know that just ten days remain before Festivus. In the spirit of the holidays, I have made a donation in my readers’ names to the Human Fund.

Incomplete reporting

The Associated Press Stylebook says: obscenities, profanities, vulgarities Do not use them in stories unless they are part of direct quotations and there is a compelling reason for them. Try to find a way to give the reader a sense of what was said without using the specific word or phrase. What silliness! If a [...]

More athletes should write

I don’t follow basketball, but — starting today — I do read basketballers’ blogs. I gather that Gilbert Arenas is something of a character; his weblog is priceless (this post is timestamped December 29, 2006 — three weeks in the future): I brang out the hibachi against Dallas. That’s when I first started saying it, [...]

For Your Consideration

I saw For Your Consideration last night, and I consider it awful. Not relatively awful, in a “Christopher Guest is off his game, but this is still better than most movies” kind of way. It’s just a bad, bad, bad, bad movie. No one involved with it should have agreed to its release. The degree [...]

Thank you, Mark Harris

Way back in May, I wrote that Pennsylvania’s Primary Election Day had been “a good day for right-wing bedwetters in my parents’ neighborhood,” thanks to child candidate Mark Harris’ victory over an incumbent Republican state representative. Not surprisingly, especially in Democrat-friendly 2006 and extra-especially in a district that has been trending Democratic for years, young [...]