More good news...

BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD ...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/23/AR2010102303510.html

Did I mention bad?

Show this to anyone who claims that the economy is improving.

I don't think that it really needs a lot of explanation. Ten years ago, it took almost 42 ounces of gold to 'buy' the DOW. Today it takes less than 8 ounces. The DOW has gone down since then, so, given that the value of gold, silver, and just about everything else has increased, it indicates that things are getting worse, no matter how it looks in the short term.

Not a sermon, just a... no, it's a sermon. People need to listen.

Did you see that thunder hit the building? It tasted LOUD!

I was checking the news today and saw this headline:

Gunshots Fired At the Pentagon

Gunshots can't be 'fired'. A gunshot is a sound, and as most sounds are pressure waves moving indiscriminately in all directions, they can't be directed 'At' a target.

I suppose (for the sake of argument) that one could say that the Pentagon is not just a building. It is also a region of Washington. One could logically say that 'gunshots were heard at the Pentagon', or maybe 'gunshots were reported at the Pentagon', but that doesn't sound aggressive enough. 

The only way this sentence works is by changing the headline from 'Gunshots Fired At the Pentagon' to 'Shots Fired at the Pentagon', which would at least be closer to proper grammar. That implies that the Pentagon (the building) was ATTACKED, which is clearly the intent of this article.

Notice I also changed the 'At' to 'at'. If you're going to capitalize everything, do it, but don't capitalize 'at' and then ignore 'the'. Consistency is key. Maybe they should capitalize every letter instead, like this:

GUNSHOTS FIRED AT THE PENTAGON

That's very dramatic. Some exclamation points and an emoticon might be helpful as well.

WTF?! GUNSHOTS FIRED AT THE PENTAGON!!!!! 

The best part of the article, though, isn't the headline, it's this bit of stellar journalism:

Pentagon spokesman Col. Dave Lapan confirmed reports of possible shots fired near the building. 

A civilian reported he may have heard shots at about 5 a.m. ...

Sigh. I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise that this came from Fox News.

Is -insert old platform- gaming dead?

I just saw this headline:


How Online Will Kill Console Gaming


And I had to sigh inwardly. How long have we heard some derivation of this statement? Every few years some genius editor from the gaming industry has to ejaculate the literary spooge "Is PC gaming DEAD?!" 
We've been listening to them say that for well over ten years now, and yet, people are still playing PC games. People still build monster rigs, people still play LAN games, people still play Flash games on crappy old computers.
If PC gaming died back when they first started predicting its demise, then PC gaming would be this moldy, rotting corpse wandering around in the dark, eating your brains while you stared blindly into the soft glow of your LCD.


Wait, that actually sounds like PC gaming.

I just need to add a computer eating his brains...

Redundancy, part 1

Why do people say 'science lab' when referring to Spider-Man? Why not just 'lab'? I mean, isn't a laboratory generally considered to be scientific? I've personally never heard anyone say 'science lab' outside of referring to Spider-Man.