I hate journalistic writing

[Jonathon]

Yes.

[BlackBlade]

Interesting. That's good to know.

[Porter]

It makes sense.  You can fit a lot more motorcycles than automobiles into a given stretch of highway.

[Jonathon]

I think it has more to do with low emissions in the case of motorcycles.

[Porter]

Huh.  I've always been under the impression that their purpose is to increase the throughput of congested roadways, with lower pollution being an added bonus.

I suppose that for some people, those could easily be reversed.

[Jonathon]

And this is why I hate the HOV lanes. I think they're trying to do several things at once and not doing any of them terribly well. I'm really not sure if the main purpose is to

• reduce congestion
• reduce emissions (often but not always the same thing)
• generate revenue (because it's also a toll lane)
  
• be an express lane (without a higher speed limit) (and only for those who are doing one of the above)

Tonight we were on our way to a concert, and some idiot in a huge SUV decided to jump in front of us in the HOV lane to get out of a slowdown in the other lanes. I think they ignored the double white lines, and they certainly didn't think of the potentially dangerous speed differential between them and us.

[Nighthawk]

Chicago Tribune makes the best Internet mistake of the day

ETA: There's also a Q&A weith the editors responsible

[Jonathon]

"Let's make all of the homepages this, just for a day. It'd make things better."

 

[pooka]

I was going to post it in the fluffy kittens and rainbows thread, but I forgot. 

[Brinestone]

This isn't horribly written, but the ambiguity is funny:

"Anderson also said he would focus on paying down the city debt without raising taxes, maintaining services, listening to residents, and working with neighboring city leaders and state legislators to promote the best interests of the local community."

[Jonathon]

Awesome. Where's that from?

[Brinestone]

That community newspaper thing we got in the mail yesterday. It had a section introducing the candidates for the mayoral and city council races in Holladay and Cottonwood Heights (this one was for a mayoral candidate for Holladay).

[Jonathon]

Check out this overwrought opening paragraph from Newsweek:

The sun in Bangkok doesn’t shine, it hates. High noon in the world’s hottest city hits like a trashcan lid in the face as heaving, pollution spewing traffic slaughters your breath. Money stays home, and people with just sense find shade. But men like Bung – a Thai street merchant with six children, overdue school payments, and one darkly mounting debt to a Thai loan shark – press into this withering heat, day after day. Driving a precariously strapped, bolted, taped, and jury-rigged motorcycle/café through Bangkok’s labyrinth of soot-covered souls, he sells coffee to survive. Most coffee sellers here worry about being hit by swerving taxis. Bung worries about being crushed by a lawsuit from Starbucks.

[rivka]

The whole article is  -worthy. For instance, the author clearly does not understand that any company that fails to defend its copyright risks losing it. Also, just because he's a "peasant" doesn't make it ok for him to use whatever intellectual property he wants.

I feel for him, but he's still in the wrong.

[Jonathon]

I hadn't read the whole thing, but yeah, it's awful throughout. Where do these people learn to write?

When Bung’s response didn’t exist, . . .

When it didn't exist? When exactly was that? Did it exist at some point, and then it didn't anymore? How about "When Bung didn't respond"?

Maybe it feels a little unfair for a big, faceless corporation to go after a little street vendor, but it's not like Starbucks did anything wrong.

[rivka]

Maybe it feels a little unfair for a big, faceless corporation to go after a little street vendor, but it's not like Starbucks did anything wrong.

Yup. And I agree with you on his serious mechanical flaws as well.

[Annie Subjunctive]

Man, I'm glad my last name isn't Bung.

[Jonathon]

Hear, hear. Even if I drank coffee, I don't think I'd drink it from a place called Starbungs.

[Annie Subjunctive]

The labyrinthine cemetery complex stretching for kilometers (miles) underneath northern Rome is known as the "Queen of the catacombs" …

Really? An unspecified length of kilometers is the same as an unspecified length of miles?

[rivka]

Well, yes, actually. Not that x and y are equal, but it doesn't say they are.

In the case of both units, they are being provided for scale (not meters but km; not feet or yards but miles).

[Jonathon]

I think journalists often run a macro to find instances of "x kilometers", do a conversion, and insert "(y miles)". But obviously it wasn't written to ignore instances where "kilometers" isn't preceded by a number.

[Annie Subjunctive]

I think journalists often run a macro to find instances of "x kilometers", do a conversion, and insert "(y miles)". But obviously it wasn't written to ignore instances where "kilometers" isn't preceded by a number.

That's what I was thinking. No way a conscious person went in and was like "Oh, the Americans aren't going to understand what kilometers are."

[Jonathon]

No way a conscious person went in and was like "Oh, the Americans aren't going to understand what kilometers are."

But a journalist might have.

zing!

[BlackBlade]

[Jonathon]

I usually make fun of journalists, but the first sentence of this article is pretty great.

In the Wasatch County town of Wallsburg, the city employee responsible for oversight of elections brought new meaning to the job description by overlooking the election altogether.