Flight of Fancy

Hello World,

Well, the thermometer may say that it's still the depths of the summer doldrums, but for anyone who watches television, you know that they've already been playing football, of all things, for the last three weeks in cities all over the country, and campuses far and wide. Here in the local area, we can listen to The FAN, a 24-hour sports radio network, and keep up-to-date on everything sports, from the most popular to the most arcane. As soon as the NFL labor dispute was settled, and teams started making deals for available players, the sports commentators couldn't hurry up fast enough to bury the New York Giants for the upcoming season, and this is without a single game having been played, even in pre-season. It seems that the biggest challenge for the team is not going to be their opponents on the field, but winning over the critics, who have apparently already written off their chances as a lost cause, even before the first official coin toss. I guess the good news for the Giants is that they've got no place to go but up.

And as long as we're all looking up, here's another one of those curious headlines that can't help but make you wonder, and scratch your head, if not worse:

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Westchester-bound jet lands safely

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Now, if this was the brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright taking off from Kitty Hawk for the first time, I can see how landing safely would have been considered newsworthy enough to rate a front-page headline. However, in this day and age, when literally tens of thousands of aircraft take off and land all over the world on a regular basis, this would seem to fall into the "dog-bites-man" example of headline writing, which is to say, it leaves itself wide open, with no indication of what makes this remarkable in any way.

Speaking of the wide open spaces, as much as I hate to pick on our woeful local newspaper, when the blunders come in triplicate, as this bunch did, well, it's just too much to resist. It all started in the TV Section Best Bets, with this review of the FX series, "Rescue Me" -

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Tommy takes the time to write his inner

most thoughts and feeling to his loved ones

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Well, splitting up "inner" and "most" there really tends to suck all of the meaning out of that phrase, which you would think would be impossible after all this time. But at least they got both halves of the word right, which is better than they did in this next synopsis of TNT's "The Mentalist" -

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Patrick Jane and Lisbon learn that the Red

John case has been taken away from them

and reassigned to a straight laced officer

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Talk about sucking all the meaning out of something, I tell you, sometimes you just don't even know where to begin. It was another holiday for the spell-checker, since all of the words were spelled correctly, as far as it went, and since they were lacing up an officer, I suppose it was better to be straight rather than crooked. In an odd coincidence, the exact same problem occurred in the Life & Style section, in an interview with author Andrew Gross, explaining why he introduced a new protagonist in his latest thriller -

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"I didn't want to be straight jacketed

into a particular character or role"

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These people obviously needed more help in navigating the straits of better journalism, rather than taking the straight and narrow homophone shortcut that led them to disaster on the rocky shoals of language abuse in their straight laced straight jackets. And I don't mind saying, that's exactly where they would belong, if only there was such a thing, alas.

Very alert readers may recall our old friend Bob T. Yokl of the Savings Beyond Price Newsletter, whose whimsical "antidotal evidence" is still a classic of the genre. In the latest edition, Bob introduces the largely untapped area of utilization management, which he first describes as "a new supply chain discipline" to promote cost-effectiveness. But later in the same paragraph (our friendly Yokl obviously has a short attention span) he explains how "to receive the full payback of this power cost-control disciple." Here I'm thinking, this would probably come as a big surprise to St. Peter and St. Mark, not to mention, the rest of the disciples, by golly. But my favorite part is when he delves into the safety issues that plagued the company that "grew to become the largest automobile manufacturer in the world."

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Toyota skimped on inspectors and inspections

and compromised their once ridged quality standards

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I can see the problem immediately, because everyone knows that only R-r-r-r-r-ruffles have r-r-r-r-r-ridges, so when it comes to quality standards, they could possibly say that T-t-t-t-t-toyota has t-t-t-t-t-talent, but they would have to be rigid enough to leave those ridges alone. And the rest of the disciples, it goes without saying, especially if they're wearing straight laced straight jackets, which would bring a whole new meaning to the concept of "supply chain discipline" that I find particularly odious. At least, those are my inner most thoughts on the matter, whatever that means.

Elle