Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Post-Inauguration Quarterbacking

I was happily able to watch President Obama's (Let's say that again! President! Obama!) whole inauguration speech at work (thanks, Mr. Prez, for keeping it around 20 minutes). Working in an office full of proofreaders (and thus professional nitpickers), we all picked up on Obama's referring to himself as the "44th man" to take the oath of office (consternation! Grover Cleveland!) but it was probably easier to go with the better-known number than to stop and explain a blip of history. After all, Cleveland was a reformist democrat who won the popular vote for re-election, but lost the Electoral College vote thanks to Republican voter fraud in Indiana. We know that never happened again… in Indiana.

As a music buff, I was caught short by Obama's exhortation "pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off..." as I thought he was citing the old Jerome Kern song (Pick yourself up!/Dust yourself off!/Start all over again!).

Still and all, it was nice to hear a President use complete sentences for 20 minutes, each sentence using words already in the dictionary. Put me in mind of where I was on that day 16 years before: Standing on Pennsylvania Avenue, waiting to watch Clinton's inauguration parade, and to boo the previous Bush.

Monday, January 12, 2009

Col. Tribune responds

Surprised I am to find comments from "Col. Tribune" regarding my last post. But maybe I shouldn't be. Surely the Trib's web folks have search bots running all the time to find references specific to its web pages, or, more likely, when someone is linking directly to something on their page that might result in a waste of bandwidth. I actually copied the picture in the previous post and saved to my local server. Perhaps they also Google for the image's tags. And as long as I'm not being libelous or reselling the image, I might be okay.

Some disclosure may be needed: I worked for a few years at the Pennysaver, a suburban shopper that was owned by the Tribune Co. at the time. Afterward, I contributed editorial to many of the Trib's special advertising sections and later did a few features for their CareerBuilder section. Samples? Why, they're right here!

I certainly have nothing against what appears to be the Trib's version of "News 2.0," with content selected by people wating time on the internet (like I am now). Just don't know if this will help keep the daily dead tree version coming to my sidewalk.