Caption This!

Captions rejected by the Kansas City Star sports editors in favor of Royals catcher John Buck looked on disconsolately Sunday after Texas’ Hank Blalock scored the game-tying run on Chris Davis’ two-out, infield single in the eighth inning in Arlington, Texas

Royals catcher John Buck looked on lachrymosely Sunday after Texas’ Hank Blalock scored the game-tying run on Chris Davis’ two-out, infield single in the eighth inning in Arlington, Texas

Royals catcher John Buck looked on woebegone Sunday after Texas’ Hank Blalock scored the game-tying run on Chris Davis’ two-out, infield single in the eighth inning in Arlington, Texas

All your John Buck are belong to us.

The weight of the world resting awkwardly on his heavily padded shoulders, Royals catcher John Buck looked on Sunday after Texas’ Hank Blalock scored the game-tying run on Chris Davis’ two-out, infield single in the eighth inning in Arlington, Texas

His spirits lower than the yield on a T-bill, Royals catcher John Buck looked on Sunday after Texas’ Hank Blalock scored the game-tying run on Chris Davis’ two-out, infield single in the eighth inning in Arlington, Texas

Royals catcher John Buck had a case of the mean reds Sunday after Texas’ Hank Blalock scored the game-tying run on Chris Davis’ two-out, infield single in the eighth inning in Arlington, Texas

For sale: Baby shoes, never worn. Please contact Royals catcher John Buck.

Royals catcher John Buck worried about the next call from his bookie on Sunday after Texas’ Hank Blalock scored the game-tying run on Chris Davis’ two-out, infield single in the eighth inning in Arlington, Texas

Wearing a face that he keeps in a jar by the door, Royals catcher John Buck looked on Sunday after Texas’ Hank Blalock scored the game-tying run on Chris Davis’ two-out, infield single in the eighth inning in Arlington, Texas

April must have seemed the cruelest month to Royals catcher John Buck, having seen the best leads of his generation destroyed by shoddy bullpens, leading him to struggle through an existential crisis to rival the ones by Camus and Sartre, had they played baseball.*

Royals catcher John Buck expressed second thoughts about putting Jamey Wright on his fantasy baseball team after the reliever gave up a two-out, infield single in the eighth inning in Arlington, Texas

Wondering who would stop the rain — and the bleeding — Royals catcher John Buck looked on Sunday after Texas’ Hank Blalock scored the game-tying run on Chris Davis’ two-out, infield single in the eighth inning in Arlington, Texas.

Royals catcher John Buck beat on, boats against the current, as the Royals were borne back ceaselessly another game in the standings Sunday after Texas’ Hank Blalock scored the game-tying run on Chris Davis’ two-out, infield single in the eighth inning in Arlington, Texas.

Catcher John Buck spent his final fit, his final bellyache as the Royals bullpen blew another save — no surprises there.

Buck wept.
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* This one was contributed by Buzz Bissinger. He’s a terrible writer.
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Yeah, there’s gotta be a better way to say that

All right, I’m not gonna kill the guy (gal) this time, but only because the article has a solid kicker. Still, there’s just one line that I can’t get past in the AP story relaying how “The Red Sox made official Friday what had been agreed to a week earlier: Jason Varitek, their catcher and captain, is returning for a 13th season.” And I’m not even going to blame the reporter for the clunky lede. See? I can change!

Back into carping churl mode. The article covers the basics, gives us some figures, etc. etc., but then gets caught in a rundown between second and third:

The Red Sox hope the switch-hitting Varitek, who turns 37 on April 11, can rebound from a dismal season in which he batted a career-low .220 with 13 homers and 43 RBIs in 131 games. He is highly valued by pitchers for his ability to handle them and was selected for his third AL All-Star team last year.

All right, all right, settle down now. You want to go with the obvious and immature gay joke, that’s your business, but just keep the giggling down so I can put in my own obvious and immature reading. Namely that this sentence makes it sound like everyone in the Boston rotation has emotional problems only Varitek can solve. Except for the knuckleballer Wakefield, who has his own personal catcher-cum-shrink.

Is it just me? It’s like Beckett has borderline personality disorder and Francona can’t figure out his onfield meltdown but ‘Tek has read all the self-help books and knows just what to say. He goes out to the mound and “handles” the pitcher and in between innings he explains to the pitching coach “Remember, you have to use ‘I language.’”

I shouldn’t judge. The line is definitely backward and another reminder to avoid the passive voice, but what it’s saying is not uniquely stupid by any means. Coaches, managers, agents, they’re always talking up a catcher’s nebulous ability to “handle” pitchers, or more commonly “call a good game.” I let my SABR subscription run out a while back, but I’m pretty sure nobody’s ever been able to point to a catcher having an impact on how his pitching partner performs.

Oh come on, what did I tell you guys about the giggling! Grow up!

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If I may be so bold

Let’s face it. I am a latent homosexual It’s easy for me, with the luxury of time afforded the unemployed, to pick on minor errors of grammar and style in articles written by journalists working on a strict deadline. Fair enough. I’m going after bigger game this time, picking on minor errors of editing in two films that seem unimpeachable.

First, The Shining. Could just as easily be named The Chilling — this is a spooky classic that really gets under your skin. If you haven’t seen it, well, you’re a moron. Sorry to break it to you. But I’ll tell you the plot revolves around a family hired to look after a hotel in the dead of a Colorado winter. The father ends up going boing-koo-koo and two people die. The end.

It’s a two-hour film, but it is taut as a hanging and gives you just about as much room to breathe. There’s not one shot in there that doesn’t belong.

Except for that one.

During the film’s climax, the demons of the hotel reveal themselves and help terrorize the long-suffering wife/mother, played to perfection by queen weirdo Shelley Duvall. At one point she sees a sex act between an industrialist and what seems to be history’s first furry. A bit later, she runs into the lobby, which is now chock-a-block with skeletons and cobwebs, and shot with a purple filter.

In between, racing through the hallways of the hotel, she comes across a dude in a tuxedo who raises a cocktail glass to her and says, “Great party, isn’t it?” Did I mention he has an axe wound in his head and blood all over himself?

That’s the bit I would snip, not only because it’s bad, but because it’s redundant. First, the wife/mother has been victimized enough. Second, it’s just not that scary — we’ve already had a few scenes in the movie with tuxedo-clad bald guys who speak in eerie British accents. And fifth, it’s pretty weak, a bit obvious in its irony. Hey, wait a minute — this isn’t a great party at all! He’s lyin’!!

I am now officially better than Stanley Kubrick. If he doesn’t like it, he knows where to find me.

Another gem of a film with a tiny flaw? No Country for Old Men. Now, nobody is a bigger fan of this film than I am. I’ve watched it enough times to act out the scene in the gas station in its entirety, calling on two of my lesser-known personalities to do so.* The Oscars are as arbitrary as baseball’s MVP awards, but I was still pleased to see NC4OM clean up. So what kind of jackass thinks he can improve on the Coen Brothers?

This kind!

Here it is: There’s a scene where Woody Harrelson’s character, Carson Wells, is hired by (wait for it) the “Man who hires Wells.** It becomes clear right away that Wells is a maverick (and a goofball) when he sits down without being asked, because his employer strikes him “as a man who wouldn’t want to waste his chair.” This is also the scene where Wells is asked how dangerous the Javier Bardem character is: “Compared to what, the bubonic plague?”

In a word, Wells is insouciant***, a point further underscored by the last line in the scene, where he asks his employer to validate his parking ticket. At least that’s the scene’s last line in the universe where I have final cut, because I find the next exchange superfluous:

Carson Wells: You know, I counted the floors to this building from the street.

Man who hires Wells: [sighs] And?

Carson Wells: There’s one missing.

Man who hires Wells: We’ll look into it.

It’s a nice enough exchange, taken straight from the book, but it’s redundant. Everything prior to it has established that Wells is independent and not intimidated by authority, nor by Anton Chigurh. Watch it a couple times and you can see that it slows the pacing down just enough to be a problem. A problem for me at least, seeing as how I need to trim those seconds from films so I can spend hours complaining about them.
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*To the delight of, em, the rest of my personalities.

**Awfully imaginative, that Internet Movie Database.****

***That’s Woody Harrelson, insouciant all over.

****You’re still not David Foster Wallace — Eds.
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Don’t make me edit. You wouldn’t like me when I edit.

I know what you’re thinking. Here he goes again, picking out a minor ambiguity in an AP article, fixing it for our enlightenment and acting like it makes him a journalist. Oh no, this is much more important. This one doesn’t call for the red pen* so much as it calls for the writer to be punched in the face.

That’s right, Christopher “S” Rugaber! I’m callin’ you out! We gonna throw down!

In a recent AP article, Chrisagaber drops a dime on the federal government, exposing to all that the deficit for fiscal 2009 could reach a cool trillion. That’s a lot of cabbage. Sounds like a big deal. Tell it Chris!

The federal government ran a record budget deficit in November, putting Uncle Sam on track to post an all-time high annual shortfall of $1 trillion or more.

A direct, one-sentence lede.† Very nice. The next paragraph is also straightforward and helpful. But then, the deluge:

The increased red ink stems from both lower tax revenue and increased spending that is a result of the recessionary economy. The government is receiving less in business and personal income taxes while spending more on programs such as unemployment insurance and food stamps.

Oh, yeah. We’d have that budget balanced by now if it weren’t for all those losers who got shitcanned and are eating lunch on the taxpayer dime. I didn’t even know we still had food stamps! I saw Super Size Me, I know poor people are fat. Cut that entitlement out so we can go back to that budget surplus thing.

In fairness, Rugaber (whose full name is an anagram for ‘Our Graph Bitches Err’) does get around to mentioning that little business about nationalizing the bank industry. You know, that thing that costs around $700 billion, or 21.2 times what we spent in 2007 on “food stamps.” By the way, it’s actually called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program now. Oh, SNAP!

And by the other way, did you notice that the budget for oh SNAP doubled between 2000 and 2008 ? That surprises me quite a bit, because I really thought the Bush Administration tax cuts would benefit the poverty-stricken most of all. Way counter-intuitive.

I’m not getting paid enough to look up how much we’re spending on unemployment insurance, but I’ll wager my first billion that it’s quite a bit less than the cost of keeping Citi out of Chapter 11. It probably costs less than the wars we’re winning all the time, but we keep those off the books anyway.

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*Blue pencil? Pink eraser? Orange stars, green clovers?

†Knowing why they spell it lede — $40,000. Wait, we did this already. And actually, now that I think on it, my J-School degree cost around $50,000 because I had to enroll in an extra semester just because I turned in my thesis ten years late. Point is, I try to appreciate any value I can get out of this sunk cost wherever I can. Go on, ask me about ‘half-mast’ and ‘half-staff,’ the pleasure’s all mine.
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Do I have to do everything around here?

Innocently perusing the fark headlines, I check out a story about San Francisco restaurants encountering a new breed of customers: The non’trée. You know, they buy an appetizer instead of an actual meal because times are so tough. No entree. Get it? Ha, ha.

As entertained as I was by the lead and the first graph though, I quickly ran into trouble with the nut graf,* which had me grasping for the editor’s pen:

Not since 9/11 have Bay Area restaurants, whether it be the fancy, white-tablecloth ones or the cozy neighborhood hangouts, seen such a lull in business. But this time, restaurant owners say, it’s worse.

I am currently in a chemo fog so cloudy that I can no longer play “Yankee Doodle Dandy” on the guitar. But even I can see these two statements don’t jibe with one another. Maybe you can too. This is the worst it’s been in seven years… no, worse even! It’s worser than worst!

Surely we can find a Bay Area foodie who can tell us the last time it was really this bad. About the great truffle panic of ‘85 maybe, when Stars had to offer two-for-one deals and Jeremiah Tower wept openly into a bowl of arugula. Or how after the quake on ‘06 Sam’s Grill resorted to selling catfish, nothing but catfish and scrod.

I’m guessing you might not even need the services of a crusty old caterer to learn the last time there was this much of a drop off. I’m willing to bet that we only have to go back an extra few months and we can rewrite the passage this way:

Not since the dot-com bubble burst in 2000 have Bay Area restaurants, whether they be the fancy, white-tablecloth ones or the cozy neighborhood hangouts, seen such a lull in business. But this time, restaurant owners say, it’s worse.

You’re welcome, San Francisco Chronicle. Happy to help.

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*Knowing the phrase “nut graf”? $40,000. Old gag making fun of old ad tagline? Priceless.
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Let be be finale of seem

Reason #412 not to read the news: Not only is the news always bad, it’s also badly written. Maybe I’m a churl, maybe I’m a schoolmarm; maybe I’m a lonely man but baby, I’m amazed at how bad the writing is in front-page, mainstream news.

Exhibit A: Today’s insightful AP article headlined “Analysis: Obama on his way toward election win.” First impressions, without even reading the article: Gee, ya think? You guys are talking about his campaign against Senator Clinton, right? The race against McCain has been over for maybe two weeks now, but the AP is only now getting around to conceding.

The article itself, I don’t know where to begin. The beginning, I guess. The first graf is tolerable enough, a straightforward sentence saying Obama appears to have locked up enough electoral votes to win on Tuesday. Then we get this:

Even if McCain sweeps the six states that are too close to call, he still seemingly won’t have enough votes to prevail, according to the analysis, which is based on polls, the candidates’ TV spending patterns and interviews with Democratic and Republican strategists.

Seemingly? Seemingly? Wow. You really have a lot of confidence in this exclusive analysis of yours, don’t you AP? One second you tell us who’s going to win; the next, things only seem a certain way. Oh okay. Next the Times will be telling us they have a funny feeling the GOP will lose seats in the Senate but they can’t put their finger on why.

In fairness, the AP has to hedge its bets because they can’t be seen to be favoring one candidate over the other. Wait a minute — of course they can. This article comes with the FDA-style warning “Analysis” in the headline. They can present, how you say, an interpretation of the news, dare we say, an analysis. We’ve analyzed the race and it looks like that one’s going to win, and the other guy’s chances don’t look so hot. There you have it.

But “seemingly” is just the first hedge in this bold, provocative article. Soon we get this:

It’s still possible McCain can pull off an upset. Some public and private polling shows the race tightening nationally. And, roughly one fourth of voters in a recent AP-GfK poll were undecided or said they still could change their minds. It’s also still unclear how racial feelings will affect the results in voting that could give the country its first black president.

And, the word “and” isn’t an independent clause, so don’t give me this “And,” jazz. And, “Some public and private polling” is right up there with “Some people say,” as in “Some people say Obama is a Muslim who dances on the graves of Jews.” And, how about that last sentence that appears to be a reference to the Bradley effect, but is so vaguely written that the reporter might as well have said “And, hey, this guy’s black, I mean, who knows what’s going to happen?”

You want more? Bad writing or bad analysis? Writing: Referring to “Traditionally Republican” areas is okay but “usually GOP states” doesn’t do it for me. Analysis: Saying McCain still has a chance in Pennsylvania, “where public polls show Obama leading by double-digits, though McCain aides say it’s much closer.” Uh huh. I think these are the same McCain aides who vetted Sarah Palin for him.

The article goes on and on in this vein, repeating itself a few times before eventually unraveling. Somehow the kicker got buried in the midsection, where McCain’s lead pollster displays the audacity of hope: “All signs say we are headed to an election that may easily be too close to call by next Tuesday.”
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Did you know the word ‘cloudy’ existed before the word ‘cloud’ ?

Smaller PCs Cause Worry for Industry
Published: July 21, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO — The personal computer industry is poised to sell tens of millions of small, energy-efficient Internet-centric devices. Curiously, some of the biggest companies in the business consider this bad news.

I could have written this New York Times article on the new nimble network computer. In fact, I did write it – many times, 12 years ago, as a Silicon Valley reporter for Bloomberg News. My primary job back then was writing a daily “Shares of Cisco Systems Inc. fell as much as 6 percent on concern that sales growth is slowing at the world’s largest maker of computer networking equipment” story, but once in a while I would have the leeway to take a stab at those ‘trend’ stories that captivate American audiences so.

One of these trends was the shift toward “network computing.” Client / server! The Internet! The power is in the network, the hardware’s just boxes! Who needs a PC, who needs a hard drive? Just hook up a keyboard to the network and you’re done! It’s a bold new idea in business – the thin client! The dumb terminal! Rah, rah, rah!

Oh no, what’s Intel gonna do when everyone starts asking for $199 laptops? How is Microsoft going to survive once everyone realizes they don’t really need a $500 suite of software just to download porn business data? Scott McNealy says Windows is a hairball – no way they recover from that! Short that puppy dog before it breaks $5! Come on honey, let’s go make some NOISE! You know, the famous “Netscape Oracle IBM Sun EMC” alliance. You still have your t-shirt and coffee mug from that ‘98 conference, right?

The highlight, I think, was the Oracle ad showing the inner-city kid overcoming his economic challenges by using his $200 network computer to download information on Virginia Woolf, or something, and presumably growing up to be a millionaire professor. Only slightly more grand and overstated than the general notion that Wintel was going to take it in the neck from this worrisome trend of, you know, computer use going up.

Anyway, this month’s Times article hits all the usual notes, adding the new moniker of “cloud computing,” which admittedly sounds cool. And it’s great to know there’s actually a computer company called ANUS. Nice work, Times.

The funny thing is, despite my rare dose of skepticism here, I actually got suckered in by the article and bought one of the cloud computers mentioned in the article. I couldn’t get over the fact that I could get a supposedly full-functioning laptop from H-P for $500 – that’s barely more than an iPhone, and you probably get the benefit of a browser that can handle Flash. Online reviews are bipolar, saying it’s either a wunderkind or a uselessly overmatched unworkable gimmick. But I haven’t bought myself a toy in, I don’t know, ever, and if it doesn’t work out I’ll have something else for the in-kind contribution stack. Win-win-win.