What Were They Thinking?: A comma, a comma, my kingdom for a comma!

There is a new “ride the bus” ad on Seattle city (and King County) buses, with alleged bus riders saying “I do make a difference by riding the bus.”  But it raises a question to me:

Who the heck was the copy writer on this?

There are four ways you could use this basic sentence:

I make a difference by riding the bus.

This is the answer you give to the question “How can you have an effect and promote a green lifestyle?”  The response is simple and factual.  Riding the bus is the important thing here.

I make a difference, by riding the bus.

This is the answer you give to the question “Can you have an effect and promote a green lifestyle?”  Yes, you can (hello Obama), and here’s how I do it.  It’s a little more forward.  It stresses that you can make a difference, with riding the bus being one person’s answer.

I do make a difference, by riding the bus.

Here, the response is to a question like “Can someone really have an effect and promote a green lifestyle?”  There’s a bit of disbelief in that, requiring the refutation word “do”, and then the clarification of how the person makes a difference.

I do make a difference by riding the bus.

And then there’s the one actually being used.  This is the response to “I don’t think one person can really have an effect and promote a green life.  Prove it.”   The response is refutational, and petulant, and ultimately inadequate.  There needs to be a little foot stomp and the follow-up line “I do, I do, I do!”  (And I don’t mean to reference an ABBA song here.)

In other words, they opted for the worst of the four options, the one that carries the least weight and the most whining.


But you know, maybe there are other values to the wording.  How about the meter of the line?

i DO make a DIFerence by RIDing the BUS.

Hmm, okay.  But as I said, a bit whining with the emphasis on “do”.

I make a DIFerence by RIDing the BUS.

The meter here has to fall on the first syllable instead, but then swoops into the same meter for the rest of the phrase.  And that’s not a bad thing, since it then stresses personal responsibility.

So meter is out as a reason to use this wording.  Anything else?


Oh lord, no.

“I do.”

Is this a subliminal gay marriage thing, maybe?   By putting those words — which hold a lot of symbolic power in our culture — in front of thousands of people every day, are we keeping the concept of marriage in the front of everyone’s subconscious?  And since marriage really only gets coverage in light of same-sex civil marriage these days, is reminding people that it exists a subtle way of pushing for tolerance?

Or am I a conspiracy theorist today?

[Thanks to the Seattle Transit Blog for the image.]

[Thanks to William Shakespeare for the entry title reference.]

Ireland: Seattle to Amsterdam to Dublin (part 2)

11:45 am, Dublin time (somewhere over England, sitting sideways in the airplane seat)
(3:45 am in Seattle)

It was looking like the 12:00 time was bogus, since the next listed flight was actually 13:10, but they got us on our original plane and got us out around 12:20.

The coffee was lousy, by the way.  And a “Large” was about 10-12 ounces, so it was way overpriced.  Decent apple cake, though.

Aer Lingus has the least leg room of any plane I’ve ever been on.  My knees touch the seat in front of me. If my thighs were 1/2 inch longer, sitting would be difficult.  Is this where I make a leprechaun joke, since I’m going to Ireland?

Screaming kid on the flight.  There was one on the flight to Amsterdam, too, but that one shut up for most of the flight.  I honestly think that parents should not only have to buy a separate seat for any kid under 4 years old, they should have to pay double for it.  Anything to convince them to just stay off tightly packed transports until the kid is old enough to not scream like this.  (Yeah, I realize that he’s probably in some distress from pressure changes.  I don’t care: the parents’ “need” to travel with the tot is abusing both the kid and the rest of us.)

No inflight magazine, just a “sell you snacks and perfume and jewelry and other stuff” catalog.  But the snacks listing really shows we’re in a different country.  Beyond the easy stuff like scones and shortbread biscuits, there’s a “Full Breakfast” (sausages, bacon [ham], black & white pudding [blood sausage with oatmeal filler, and an oatmeal sausage without the blood], tomato, sauteed potatoes, farmhouse brown bread, butter, marmalade, fresh orange juice, and a hot drink; €8, roughly $12).  And two sandwiches: chicken & stuffing, and cheese & spring onions (€4.50 each, about $7.50).  Nifty.

When the beverage service rolled out, I became further convinced that Aer Lingus is a budget airline on the same level as Skybus in the states. First flight I’ve been on where you had to pay for the beverages.  €2 ($3!) for a soda or a cup of lousy airplane coffee!  Watch for this level of cheapness to hit the main carriers in the states within three years.  I’d love to predict Southwest first, but I’m betting on Delta or American jumping before them.  At least with Skybus (“Pillows are just $10!  Blankets are extra!  But maybe you were lucky and got the $20 ticket for this flight!”) – emphasis on “bus” – you kind of expect it.

What the fuck is up with the flight staff hocking duty free stuff on the flight itself?  No, I don’t want to buy a full-size bottle of liquor or a watch from the stewardess.  What is this, Times Square in the 1970s?  (“Psst, buddy!  Wanna buy a Rolex?”)  This one, I can’t blame on Aer Lingus, since Northwest did it, too.  I wonder how much volume they actually sell?

Ah, the kid finally shut up.
…And then started up again 10 minutes later.

Couldn’t You Try a Little Harder?

I get leery of places and things which have to tell you up front how good they are in order for you to partake.

I first noticed this back in the mid-90s, when I was working for a gay newspaper and was asked to review a novel (Iowa, by Patrick Moore).  Unlike those which have pull quotes on the back touting how ground-breaking and fantastic the novel is, for this one the publisher put a quote on the front, which implied that they didn’t think that the title, author’s name, and photo of a shirtless twink would sell the book.  (Instead, they needed a quote by someone I had never heard of, like that would help sell it?)

(You might think that I remember the book so it must have been good.  No, I remember it because of the stupid pull quote on the front, which I even tagged in the review I wrote.)

Later in the decade, I started noticing a motel chain called Quality Inn.  If it’s good, quality should be expected, so if you have to tell me that it is “quality”, I’m inclined to disbelieve.  (This went a step further a few years later when I chanced upon a small restaurant, the Quality Diner.  Er, no thanks!)

And now for the latest: the DVD of Eddie Murphy’s film Norbit just came out, and it touts “Hysterically funny!” in huge letters on the cover, nearly as prominent as the title.  Was this the best review line they got for the film?  Heck, by the whopping 9% rating it garnered at Rotten Tomatoes, it may be the only good review line they got.

Bad Song Poetry

Okay, I’ve never really been one who enjoys reading poetry, but I do enjoy certain poetic forms when done well (haiku, especially), and by extension, I despise it when something is done really poorly.  Song lyrics, of course, are a small subset of poetry, and in most cases, the poetic nature of them tends to just wash on by.  But not always.

One of the few country-western songs that just drives me around the bend is Tim McGraw’s “Don’t Take the Girl” (which I heard on the radio this morning, and thus was made worthy of bitching about here), because of a line break in the second verse.  There is a term called “enjambment”, dealing with breaking phrases between lines.  When done well, this can add extra depth to a poem.  When done poorly, you get horrors like this:

He kissed her lips in
Front of the picture show

>shudder< No value is added here, and because of how song lyrics can expand and contract the length and placement of the syllables to go with the music, the “in” could easily have been shifted to the next line and not broken the prepositional phrase.

What makes this song more notable, though, is that the third verse does superb enjambment, where the second line of these three works syntactically with both the line before and the line after:

I’ll gladly take her place
If you’ll let me
Make this my last request

For the record, the other two country songs that I utterly despise — but for thematic reasons rather than poetic ones — are Colin Raye’s “That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It” (the “It’s okay to lie to your wife” song) and Reba McEntire’s “She Thinks His Name is John” (which tells us that casual sex, just once, will give you AIDS and you will die).  Play those and I change the channel; I merely bitch with the Tim McGraw song.

Dr. Laura

Updated from original post dated September 23, 1999…

Okay, I don’t outright hate Dr. Laura.  When she limits herself to dealing with family and marriage issues — the stuff she is licensed for — her advice is generally pretty good.  But she gets on my nerves.  (And those of a lot of people.  She got parodied in a Stephanie Brush humor column, and a version of her even got used as a patsy by the super-villain The Kingpin in the “Spider-Man” comic strip.  And try this short bit for fun.)

She has a tendency to weigh the importance of kids in the family too strongly for my tastes, coming off more or less as “If you have kids, they are your entire life until they are 18 years old.  To have any pleasure of your own that does not both include and focus around the kids is wrong.”  I don’t have kids, myself, and I have little expectation of ever doing so, but this seems a bit heavy handed.  Not completely wrong, but not completely right, either.  Just “over the top.”

(My favorite — not — example of this was when a male caller talked about how he had come to terms with being gay, and how he and his wife were considering getting a divorce.  Dr. Laura’s response?  Since he and his wife had a child, divorce was not an option.  The couple must stick it out until the daughter grew up; they were not allowed to develop other relationships or otherwise have lives of their own.  Another decade of misery and stress for both parents was the only solution Dr. Laura would consider.  Never mind what that situation might do to the child.)

She also has a tendency to be abrasive with her callers, jumping on side issues (especially kid-related ones) rather than letting the caller speak through their problem.  Sometimes this is the right thing to do, as many callers are rather unfocused and/or unwilling to self-analyze.   Most of the time, though, it just comes off as abuse from the advisor.

The biggest problem with Dr. Laura is when she moralizes.  She goes outside the bounds of being an advice show and into the realm of preaching about what is wrong with society.  (Two of her favorite topics in 1999 are (a) homosexuality and (b) libraries and the Internet.)  She also has a tendency to quote from news stories and letters, giving minimal context, using those phrases which support her or deride those she is opposed to.  To someone used to reading between the lines and being suspicious of such “opinion journalism,” it is evident what she is doing, but does her average listener have the skills and skepticism to sift around her statements?  And then there is her use of hot-button words like “pedophilia,” words which evoke a reaction stronger than is warranted by whatever story (usually kids and the Internet) she is dealing with.

Further, she gives no opportunity for people with differing opinions to express them to her.  Callers to her show are apparently carefully screened in order to prevent confrontation on issues.  Dr. Laura explicitly avoids having an e-mail address, and there is not even an obvious way to contact her (or her people) on her web site (there is a chat forum of sorts, but it is subject to editting and enforced “politeness”; it is easy to guess what is apt to happen to anti-Dr. Laura opinions there).  The end result of this is that Dr. Laura has a “bully pulpit” from which she is allowed to speak her mind without fear of contradiciton.

This also means that the only recourse for people who oppose her views is to express themselves via the press, or to attempt to have radio stations (and now, television stations) drop/limit her show.  And that just gives more grist for her mill, allowing her to say that she (innocent, good-hearted little her) is being attacked.   (And then she quotes only the extreme bits of such articles, of course.)  Her favorite claim on being attacked seems be that it comes from “gay activists,” without detailing who they are or what their agendas might be, tarring all gay and lesbian people with the same brush.

So what can or should be done about Dr. Laura and her shows?  With neither the ability nor the hope of getting her to moderate her opinions and moralizing, and without trying to outright stop (i.e., censor) her, the best suggestion is to try and limit her instead.  In the San Francisco Bay Area, the 1999 popularity of her radio show was such that its carrier, KGO, expanded her show to about double the previous amount of weekly time, even going so far as to bump the schedules of their local talk radio hosts into later slots and removing their female host from weekdays altogether, relegating her to reduced hours on weekends, plus fill-in slots for the other hosts.  Dr. Laura’s annoyance factor and the amount of time spent moralizing went up dramatically as a result (although I can’t be sure whether there was a percentage increase for such as well as a total time increase).  Fortunately, in July 2000, backlash and negative reaction to Dr. Laura (and her then-upcoming televison program) had increased to the point that she was bumped completely off KGO and onto its conservative sister station, KSFO. Ask your local radio or television station that carries her show to cut her show back to a smaller time slot.  In addition to limiting her time in the “pulpit,” it will encourage her to focus on advising individuals — the ostensible purpose of her show — and it will enable your radio station to give more variety to the listeners by using more hosts, hopefully even local ones rather than someone with a national focus like Dr. Laura.  Everyone will win.

For more info on Dr. Laura and the fight to moderate her bully pulpit, visit the Stop Dr. Laura website.  (Note: I am not associated with this website in any way.)