Off-Topic

COMING ATTRACTIONS? How about a lot of commercials?

It wasn't too many years ago that the idea of a regular old product commercial at a movie theater was unheard of. Then the idea was launched. It was a novelty, usually a commercial with higher production values than TV commercials. You never saw more than one or two before the deluge of preview trailers -- I remember a couple of Coca-Cola ads in particular.

We went to the movies tonight and there must have been half a dozen commercials, most of them quite ordinary, before just one preview. This is not a good trend.

AHMED CHALABI, it turns out, is "Ahmed Chalabi." AH-med CHALL-uh-bee. America is all about perseverance, and apparently the Ignorant American school of pronunciation has stuck around long enough to become correct.

Those of us who fancy ourselves a little more worldly would have guessed ACK-med Chuh-LAH-bee, and we would have called the tennis players Marat Sah-FEEN and Daniela Hahn-TOO-kuh-vuh, and the U.N. guy Kofi Uh-NON, and the Afghan city Kah-BOOL. But, no, Safin is SAFF-in and Hantuchova is HANN-too-ko-vuh and Annan is ANN-un and Kabul is Cobble. Go figure.

The one I refuse to accept is the "bell grade" pronunciation of Belgrade. Help me out here, o worldly ones, but it can't be possible that the Slavic peoples share our concept of "e ending equals long vowel," can it? Mustn't it be BEL-grahd? I have a hard time picturing Slobodan Milosevic saying, "Xyzliczevic jibberish jzynovic jibberish BELL GRADE. Gnocidevic atrocivic jibberishevic BELL GRADE."

I'LL MISS Tom Mangan's blog, Prints the Chaff. Tom, a fellow copy editor who works at the San Jose Mercury News, has been Romenesko-esque in the way he's had his finger on the pulse of newspaper journalism. You can find the archives here.

In other linking news, you'll find a net gain to the left with my belated readdition of the off-again, on-again Nonsense Verse and Shampoo Solo.

I CAST NO ASPERSIONS, because heaven knows I watch just about every other reality show, but I don't understand the appeal of "American Idol."

IT'S BEEN A WHILE, I know. My excuse could be that I really didn't have anything interesting to say, but when has that ever stopped me?

The D.C. branch of the Olives restaurant chain (family trivia: Jacqueline held her bridesmaid luncheon at the Las Vegas location) served me a nonsensical but wonderful entree: tenderloin steak atop spaghetti sauce. Sauce bolognese, more properly, but still. It was weird. And it was wonderful.

Jacqueline has become an avid Scrabble player. And she finally tried Korean food. I'd be exaggerating, but not by as much as you'd think, if I said this ranked right up there with certain standard male fantasies. She not only tried it; she liked it. Wow. The Korean food, that is.

A Las Vegas trip is near.

It's French Open time. And I've broken a racket, so I get to shop for a new model. Oh, I have another racket -- another three or four rackets -- but at my lofty level you must have a matching set. Which makes that eBay purchase of a single rare model look dumber and dumber, while still a lot of fun.

Other than that, it's been several weeks of threatening weather and hellish working conditions and a house that's falling apart even as it rises in value beyond our wildest dreams.

Tomorrow (and by that I mean "today") we meet with some very nice, very competent architect-design-builder types whom we trust very much, aside from the fact that they're trying to extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from us. A really nice presentation could win those dollars, but I'm betting on their winning only paranoia and recriminations. And it's mightily depressing that the decision on whether to spend those dollars must depend partly on how firmly we believe the Capitol Hill neighborhood will remain intact and non-radioactive for as long as it takes to pay off that home-equity line of credit.

In addition to the aforementioned work nightmares, there's the whole Lynne Truss thing, which I suppose is bothering me more than I thought it would. I can stand Patricia O'Conner's brilliant "Woe Is I" being a bestseller and my "Lapsing Into a Comma" being just a cult favorite, but I'm not sure I can stand "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" making Lynne Truss a millionaire while "The Elephants of Style" can't even merit a review -- good or bad, uh, anywhere.

In my own newspaper, George Will and Michael Dirda go on and on and on about the jump-on-the-bandwagon bestseller about punctuation that can't even get basic punctuation right in its title. I don't expect cheerleading, but a tiny mention would have been nice. Of course, a tiny mention would have required knowledge of my book's existence, which clearly wasn't there. Publishing is a rich-get-richer industry.

With all the crap going on, one thing it's taken my mind off is the same-old, same-old fear that city dwellers face: street crime. A return of that fear was not exactly what I needed, but what spurred this long-overdue post was a rattling of the front door in the wee hours as I played computer hold-'em, inspired by the "World Poker Tour" episode paused on TiVo. I was used to the rattling, and the resultant scurrying of the cats, as a common consequence of the wind, but this time it happened over and over in quick succession. Accompanied by male voices.

I made the 911 call and dealt with the very slow, way-too-methodical, not-exactly-standard-English-speaking D.C. operator, and the police eventually did arrive. By that time the guys who were trying our door had moved on to other doors and I was largely over the scare. But what else am I going to have to deal with? I'm at my limit.

Posted by Bill at 2:35 AM   |   Link   |  

THREE DECADES of stinking badges. (Or, for all you Freudians, "With an ID like this, who can have an ego, let alone a superego?")



That's a shadow there in back, not a mullet.

Yes, I was a troubled loner. I fit right in.

I have no comment at this time.

SORRY, but I have to nominate this as my favorite Amazon.com reader review so far of "Eats, Shoots & Leaves."

P T Barnum strikes again, May 3, 2004
Reviewer: Hamp from New York, NY
How easy it seems to be to fool people, with a book heavily hyped, about British punctuation and filled with errors and inconsistencies. Sort of amusing, but not very, and very, very wrong too much of the time. Kudos to the PR machine that created this - I only wish it had a sound basis in fact. Look to style guides, to Bill Walsh (The Elephants of Style), to Barbara Wallraff (Your Own Words), to the older Fowlers, to the AP Style Guide, the New York Times Style Guide. Save your money on this one - or give it to your favorite charity.

AND NOW, for your viewing pleasure, I offer a schematic representation of every highway in Northern Virginia.

Point B
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So, basically, you take your little on-ramp and you see a sea of lanes. Wow! There must be four, five, six . . .

Oops -- you have to merge to the left right away, but then, smooth sailing. All those lanes! You're not going that fast yet, but you're not 111 years old either, so you decide that maybe the second lane from the right is for you. Or maybe the third. But -- oops -- the second one ends, and then the third. Get over, and get over. Still a bunch of lanes left, though, and you move over another lane still to avoid being in the far right. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Before you know it, lanes you didn't even know existed to the left are way, way too far right. I'm beginning to rethink that whole straight-ahead thing as the steering-wheel default.

DON'T MISS The Onion this week. The lead item ("Tom Hanks This Week's Guest President") is a bit of a dud, but just about everything else falls into the instant-classic category.