July 24, 1970: The Antichrist takes up residence at a Baton Rouge, La., appliance store. And I freakin' missed it.
I had no idea that the malevolent ruler of the world had such a fascination with color TV. He and the 9-year-old me would have had something to talk about.
I bet he could have gotten me an RCA AccuColor set long before 1975, when the Old Man finally relented, succumbing to non-stop bitching by me and my mother and admitting that color television was not, alas, a fad. We did not get an RCA from McLeod's, however.
My father was a Magnavox man.
First Trump, now this.
Can't we Americans get any damned thing straight anymore?
Then again, if newsroom staffers at metropolitan dailies can't be expected to know the difference between "they're," "there" and "their," why should we suddenly become competent at politics? Or anything else, actually.
Joe the Plumber isn't getting paid to understand political science. People at newspapers, on the other hand, are paid to know the King's English -- or at least they used to be.
Obviously, there must be too many damn Germans in the Omaha World-Herald newsroom -- two-word proper nouns magically become one-word ones.
In America, we have "cold fronts." At the World-Herald, they have "coldfronts." In Germany, I have no idea what "Redaktion" do at Der Daily Blabben.
But I do have an idea that somebody's getting paid good money for making their employer look like the home of grammatical (insert your own one-word compound noun here).
Yeah, I know it sounds petty. But I'm just kinda, sorta tired of people just not doing their damn jobs, and seemingly not giving a rip about that.
Molly the Dog can't believe it. She thought the humans were supposed to be the smart ones.Silly dog.
I suppose it would be too much to assume that the canine on the Milk-Bone box is named Mini. I suppose it's too much to assume that both dogs on the boxes of Milk-Bone "Mini's" answer to Mini.
And I suppose it would be a really gigantic stretch, at this point, to assume the United States hasn't become a nation of blithering illiterates.OR THAT in another 20 years, as Americans devolve into communicating by a series of grunts and clicks, creatures such as my little friend Molly will come to be known as "the articulate ones."
For all I know, she already may have better mastery of the difference between possessives and plurals than your average U.S. high-school graduate.
Come to think of it, that may explain why, after giving the box of treats a good going over, Molly looked at me, cocked her little head and asked "What the hell, Dad?"
I'm not sure what disturbs me more about the state of mass media in these troubled times.
Is it the fixation on bread and circuses, like pointless audience polls (and please don't ask me about the fascination with Kim Kardashian)? Or is it the unrelenting daily confirmation that many members of the Fourth Estate seemingly teeter on the razor's edge of functional illiteracy?
Sorry, make that Forth e-State. Foreth Eestayte? Fowrthe Estayt?
I would say "bring on the new Dark Ages" . . . but I suspect they're already here.
Or is that "hear"?Philm ate 11.
