War of the Words

I have grammar on my mind. Mainly because for some reason it seems that is all I’ve been doing lately. I edit at my job, I have an editing class, I’ve been taking editing tests in another class, editing essays in another class and reading Shakespeare in another (if you don’t see how this is related, then you have never seen a journalism major trying to read the retarded babble that is ye olde english).

Then last night I edited admission essays for students trying to get into CU’s journalism school. I still have no idea why they asked me to do this; I never actually wrote an admission essay. Due probably to a clerical error, they let me straight in so I had no idea what I was doing in this workshop. This of course was not what the students wanted to hear; most of them picked up their essays and ran to somebody else. But the point is I still showed up.

Believe it or not I showed up mainly because I actually enjoy editing. Of course, this is mainly because writing is one of the few things I don’t regularly mess up. I’m sure many of you find this highly amusing. “Mitchell,” you are probably saying, “I see more spelling, grammatical, factual and ethical errors on your site than on an episode of Jersey Shore.” To witch I reply its nun of you’re business or there business.

I’m going to be honest, I don’t really bother to look over these rants for errors; that would upset the very strict deadlines I work with. My strict schedule is as follows: 20 minutes brainstorming ideas (and by that I mean sleeping on the couch). 40 minutes of research (as in watching Golden Girls reruns). 10 minutes writing the actual thing (as in spewing verbal sewage all over computer screen). 25 minutes confirming facts (by eating a sandwich). So as you can see, this leaves little time for any actual proofreading. Besides, that sounds like a lot of work for a stupid blog that nobody pays me to write.

But I honestly do like editing good writing. Notice how I say good writing. Editing good writing is fun and easy. Editing essays written by people with the IQ’s of gerbils who were dropped on their heads at birth is not as fun. In those cases it’s easier to crumple up their essay and throw it in the trash (oh wait, sorry we are in Boulder, so you have to throw it in the recycle bin). Do you want to figure out if you have good grammar or have gerbil poop for brains? Here’s a quick and easy little test. What is wrong with the following passage:

Justin Bieber, the teen age singer who’s prepubescent, angle-like voice has captured the hearts of girls worldwide, was arrested for cocaine possession yesterday after cops found five kilograms in Biebers bedroom.

A. Teenage is one word; it’s whose not who’s; it’s angel, not angle; and there is an apostrophe in Bieber’s.

B. Ain’t none nothing wrong with this their sentence. ‘Cept prepubescent ain’t a real word. Might be sum sorta fish.

C. Justin Bieber is my favorite singer in the world and he would never do cocaine.

D. Justin Bieber is not a singer; he is a whining abomination. And we don’t use kilograms. We’re Americans dammit, not Canadians.

If you said A, congratulations! You are correct and you have what it takes to work in writing (By the way, you may think the angle-angel is a pretty obvious mistake, but I know at least one person who doesn’t know the difference, and she knows exactly who she is). If you said B, you should just go back to whatever part of Alabama you came from and never touch a pen or pencil again in your life. If you said C, I hate you and isn’t it past your bedtime? If you said D, you may not be grammatically correct but I like you, so I’ll give you a pass.

The one thing I admit I still have no clue about is active versus passive sentence structure. My editors always tell me about this. So I’m assuming active structure goes something like “Bob ran around a lot,” while passive would be “Bob went to sleep.” Speaking of sleeping, I’m going to go brainstorm my next article.

I Am A Sellout

Some of you might have noticed something different about the site in the past few days. This probably means you are spending way too much time on the computer looking up useless sites. Anyway, there are now ads on my site. That’s right; I have officially sold out to corporate America and caved in. Of course, it’s not like I had some sort of moral objection to it in the first place. That would require having morals, of which I have very few (none if you don’t consider my hatred of tofu to be a “moral”).

I mean, if I’m going to be writing this stuff and people for some reason keep reading this stuff, I might as well make some money off of it. Sure, it’s not like I’m getting paid a ridiculous amount of money, but seeing as I spend about fifteen minutes on each entry and it requires me to do very little other than sit in front of my computer and spew hateful stereo-types and generalizations, any money I’m making is more than I deserve. I’m pretty sure Bill O’Reilly says this to himself every night before he goes to sleep.

Apparently the way it works is that this program looks at my readers and decides which ads they might be interested in. Now, this worried me, because I’m a little suspicious of the people that read this, and I have a feeling there are going to be some really strange ads popping up on the screen. They also use keywords from my entries to determine which ads they place, which might explain why there have been a lot of ads for cattle prods and Justin Bieber CDs. Then, the more people that see and click on the ads, the more I get paid. But I’m not supposed to tell you to click on the ads. That would be illegal. So definitely don’t click on the ads. (If you could see through my webcam right now you would see my winking very subtly. Then again, you would also see me sitting in an office chair in my underwear, so maybe it’s a good thing you aren’t seeing through my webcam.)

But the good thing is that you don’t have to be worried about me becoming too commercial. You don’t have to worry about me censoring things just because those **ALERT: This portion of the entry has been edited and formatted to fit this site.** And you definitely can count on me to stick to my guns and not over commercialize this site just because all of those **ALERT: It’s time for Music Hour! sponsored by the Disney Channel, with your guest, Joe Jonas!**

But in all seriousness, I’m not one of those guys that think that making lots of money means you’ve sold out. I see this a lot with musical bands. People get all upset with them when they sign a big record contract because they think that all of a sudden they will become too “corporate” and will go away from their roots. If I were these musicians, my response would be something along the lines of “You can kiss my Aston Martin.” Drugs are not free okay? The love of music only goes so far, and integrity doesn’t buy yachts.

Okay, so after that completely random little tangent, let’s get back to ads. As a journalism major, I realize that the media is ruled by the pursuit of advertising revenue. This scares me, because I have met many advertising majors and (while this may be a sort of journalism turf war and I might be biased) ad people have pralines for brains. (By the way, what the hell is a praline? Is it a nut or is like a candy? Somebody should look that up for me.) They rarely come up with good ads, and when they do, they ride them until they are just irritating. Geico is a great example. Sure, maybe the gecko and the caveman and the money with the eyes were funny the first time, but not the next fifty times. The only commercial characters I never get tired of seeing are these guys, this dude, and whatever the hell these are.

But just because I understand my industry is run by ads doesn’t mean I’m happy about it. Do you want proof that ads have a way of ruining even the most pure and sacred things? Read this story. Yeah, so in order to make sure their ratings were good, they let five kids who didn’t even spell a word right into the last round. This is stupid because it takes away from the spirit of the competition; namely watching little kids spell a word wrong and break down into tears as their dreams come crashing down before them and their parents disown them. For all I know one of those kids might not be able to even spell their own name (then again, with so many Indian kids in this competition that is nothing to laugh at).

This all happened because of ads and ratings. ESPN took one of my favorite things in the world (the spelling bee, not Indian kids; not that there is anything wrong with Indian kids) and they’ve twisted it into a money-grubbing death machine. Thankfully, even though I now have ads on my site, I will always serve as the watchdog of justice and corruption. I’m going to give those people at ESPN a piece of my **ALERT: We interrupt this program for a special segment, sponsored by ESPN.**

All a Twitter

I am now officially a traitor and a hypocrite. I’m worse than Benedict Arnold, Judas, Brutus, and that fat guy from Jurassic Park rolled into one. I have started a Twitter page for this site. That’s right, me, a self-respecting journalism major (notice “self” respecting, very few others respect me as a journalism student) is now on Twitter, one of the downfalls of journalism as we know it. I am more of a disgrace to my fellow journalists than Sean Penn is to his fellow chimpanzees.

No matter how many more good things I do with my life, when I stand before the gates of heaven, I will be denied entrance solely because of this sin. In addition of course to having watched the Jonas Brothers 3-D Concert, throwing a Bible into a dumpster once, swearing at my teachers, drinking excessively, cheering for the Jacksonville Jaguars, yelling at small children, pissing in public, listening to Barry Manilow, voting for Joe Biden, lying to a priest, cheating on an exam, betting on preseason hockey, buying sweatshop sewn shoes, kicking dogs, drawing the prophet Mohammed with crayons in the first grade and constantly making fun of minorities, rednecks, handicapped people, women, and Tim Tebow. That’s right; I finally give in to all of you who think that Tebow is the second coming of Jesus. Although you would think that if he were godly he would be able to throw a spiral without looking like a retard and beat a bunch of inbreds from Alabama. See there I go again, I couldn’t go five seconds before I made fun of rednecks, handicapped people, and Tim Tebow in the same sentence.

Okay wow, let’s see if we can recover from that tangent. What were we talking about? Twitter? Why? Oh that’s right; I sold my soul to the devil. So maybe I’m overreacting a bit, sort of how like how Charlie Sheen has a bit of a drug problem. It’s just that for so long I have been critical of Twitter and all of the babbling idiots who use it. I mean, I really don’t need to know what Oprah is putting in her fifth sandwich of the day. I figured that I would become a respectable journalist, writing stories and drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and looking very journalist-like until I died of lung cancer like all of the other respectable journalists.

But if you have ever sat in a journalism class today, you are instantly aware that this will not happen. For one thing, they reminded me that I do not smoke or drink coffee. But the only thing we talk about in journalism classes are how journalism is dying. We might as well be taking a class on witch-burning. So in my panicked state, I chose to start up a blog and Twitter site, two things I vowed I would die before I did (the others were watch an episode of Gossip Girl and have to use a catheter, so I guess 50 percent isn’t that bad). I figured if it came down to a question of money or morals, I didn’t have morals to begin with so I might as well make some money.

Besides, my Twitter page is just a shameless promotion of my site, so that makes it okay. I mainly use it to put links to the sites and occasionally make jokes about Canadians. It’s not like I’m Ashton Kutcher and I think that I am so important that the world needs to know what my pistachio-sized brain is thinking every five minutes. I mean, I can understand people who use Twitter to keep up with their friends and news, but by the looks of this list of the top Twitter sites, that is clearly not the case with most people. I mean, CNN is the only news site in the top 20, and the only things the other 19 contribute to the world are bad movies, bad music, bad TV, and bad health care reform.

Besides, how do you even follow people on Twitter? For those of you who have remained pure and have no idea how Twitter works, Twitter only allows 140 characters per post. This means that posts are composed of some sort of strange language where whole words are never used. Plus the tagging system involves a lot of those # things and @ things and “RT,” whatever that means. For instance, this is one of Ashton’s tweets: “The @mrskutcher vs kevin bacon race is getting tight. pls vote of wifey http://pep.si/CelebChallenge pls rt.” I swear that is what it says, random letter for random letter. The only words in there I understood were “bacon,” “race,” and “tight,” which leads me to believe that this is some sort pig eating contest. So all we can really gather from this is that Ashton Kutcher eats pigs for fun, and PETA should go bomb his house.

Next On the Agenda: Nap Time

So this past Tuesday I attended a City Council meeting as part of an assignment for my reporting class. And by attending I mean I didn’t go. I frankly had more important things to do, like sleep. If you think sleep is not important, you should try getting the swine flu, like I just recently did. I slept for two days straight, and I’m pretty sure the only reason I didn’t die is because I was too sleepy to die. Of course the day I finally get up the energy to go back to class, my reporting teacher decides to make us cover this City Council meeting. Unfortunately, the meeting started at 5 in the evening and is probably still going on. I, like many college students (including most of the others in the reporting class), have way too many things on our plates to be spending six hours sitting in a building that does not involve a bouncy castle.

I was however able to catch some of the meeting on television. Yes, they air these meetings on live television, bumping the Jonas Brothers to third on the list of the stupidest things on television (both are still chasing those TV priests who inspire people to give their money to them… er… God, via yelling and hair gel). Anyway, this is what I could gather from those five minutes: absolutely nothing. These meetings are run by trained politicians, who are well versed in the art of making nothing into something and making that something very boring. These people could sit there and argue about the proper spelling of the word “is.”

Anyway, the main agenda of the evening was a bill on reducing the size of houses in Boulder. As a person who does not currently live in a house and will probably never own a house in Boulder, this issue was about as interesting as a lecture on proper sod removal technique. But apparently to everybody else it was a huge issue. And by everybody else I mean the ten lonely wackos who showed up to the goddam meeting. I mean, these people got up to the podium and referenced emails they sent the council before hand. That’s right, this was my assignment and I still did less research than these people. Most of these people were mad that the character of the city was being compromised by these large buildings. Now, I’m not here to nitpick, but since when did Boulder have character? If by character you mean rich snobby businessmen surrounded by pot smoking vegan hippies, then yes, Boulder has tons of character.

Besides, who are we to tell rich people how big they can build their houses? Frankly, when I get rich, I’m not going to ask my neighbors for permission before I start building my mansion. Do you know why? I won’t have neighbors. I’m going to buy my own damn island. And yet here are these concerned (by concerned I mean filled with jealous hatred) citizens of Boulder who are insisting that large mansions are an eyesore upon their neighborhoods and corrupting the youth of America and solely responsible for decreasing literacy rates and inner city violence in Colorado (even though everyone knows the real culprit is Hannah Montana).

I think by now I’ve properly illustrated how stupid covering this City Council meeting would have been. Now, I’m not saying I haven’t covered stupid things as a reporter before. But do you know what made those meetings way more interesting and captivating? It was the fact that it was in my own community, and I could really connect with the issues at hand and feel like I had something at stake. Haha I’m just joking. It’s because I was getting paid. They should give ADD kids money to pay attention, because I’ve somehow been genuinely interested in things like duck habitats and solar panels where normally I would have fallen asleep so fast I would have fallen face first into the duck pond (by the way, I was at that duck habitat for three hours, and the only thing I never saw were ducks).

In my opinion, to make the reporting class truly representative of today’s journalistic environment, they should pay us very little money and then fire us so they have money to hire fifty new web design nerds who spent their college years creating viruses and spilling hot pocket cheese on their sweatpants. Forgive me if I’m a little mad about this, but it’s very frustrating when your chosen profession, your true passion (or in my case, the only thing I don’t completely suck at), is slowly disappearing in the real world. I swear, every journalism professor I have just sits there and tells me how much it sucks to be a journalism major. So to prepare us, these classes try to teach us diverse journalism skills, like web design, architecture, flipping burgers, pole dancing, prostitution, etc. Because the world will always need doctors and lawyers (to sue the doctors), but sometime in the future (like yesterday), people will no longer need journalists. Instead of paying for poor reporting and plagiarism, they can get it for free on Twitter. While we journalists are stuck with all of our morals and ethics of reporting, Twittering idiots can bypass all of that and just write “Obama calls Kanye West ‘jackass,’” even after Obama requested it be left off the record.

Now, there are probably some of you who are thinking to yourselves, “Mitchell, if you would just buckle down and do the stupid reporting assignment instead of writing stupid notes about it you would be done already and you would stop complaining and I could go back to mindlessly Twittering.” Well, unfortunately I have writers block, and when I have writers block I find that the best cure is to write about something else. So really, by reading this, you are all helping me to write my article for reporting class. As such, I feel I have the right to blame all of you when I get an F on this paper.

Breaking News: You Are An Idiot

This past Friday I was sitting in the San Francisco Airport eating a clam chowder sourdough bread bowl and watching CNN. Seeing as I was eating, not studying, and home was a few hours away, I was pretty happy. Then this evil sound reached my brain and my ears started to gush blood, and sure enough I looked up at the airport TV and saw: Nancy Grace.

Okay, so maybe you live a blessed existence and have no idea who Nancy Grace is. Nancy Grace is a TV personality on the days that she isn’t ruling over the depths of hell. She has a show on CNN which pretty much just consists of her yelling and mocking her guests, callers, and most of the human population in general. Do you remember hearing about those experiments where they would raise children in cages and just feed them and not give them any love or human contact and they would die? Well, it turns out they didn’t actually die; they grow up into people like Nancy Grace. Now, she says that she empathizes with victims, but I have a hard time believing that this creature is even capable of feeling empathy. I wouldn’t ever be that angry even with a live badger clamped onto my nose. It’s like her menstrual cycle got caught in PMS mode. I’m pretty sure that her pre-show ritual is biting off the head of a baby bunny rabbit. She used to be a prosecuting attorney, and if I were on a jury I would put in a guilty verdict simply out of fear that she would track me down and kick down my door holding a shotgun and a crowbar.

But Nancy Grace is not the only one out there. For whatever reason (as with everything else, I’m blaming it on American Idol and Simon Cowell), TV producers think we love getting advice from angry people. It’s like getting your news at your anger management meetings. Have you ever watched that show “Mad Money” on CNBC with that guy Jim Cramer? The show is just this guy yelling out financial advice and berating his callers with the same tone you might use to yell at your dog if it ate your newborn child. I’m sure he gives very sound advice; I just never hear it because whenever I watch his show I end up cowering in the nearest corner and trying to apologize for my investment portfolio to whoever will listen. And I don’t even know what an investment portfolio is. I would much rather get my financial advice from the E*Trade babies (not only are they calmer, they sing “Broken Wings” by Mr. Mister, one of my favorite groups).

But CNN is still the place to go if you want to listen to people who think that the rest of the population wakes up in the morning and eats lead paint chips for breakfast. Apparently, they think that people don’t watch TV shows if all they do is report the news. Although to be honest, I know I don’t. I mean, all the news reports are that society basically sucks right now, and I don’t need that from my news channel. If I want to get depressed about the state of humanity I can just change the channel to MTV. The thing about news channels is that there is only so much news to report. After awhile, you realize you are just watching the same 15-minute sequence over and over again. You know you’re running out of news when you bring in three analysts to dissect President Obama’s stand-up routine at the White House Correspondents dinner. (I would give him a B; at one point he made a joke about Dick Cheney’s memoirs being titled “How to Shoot People in the Face and Torture.” Maybe it’s just me, but the fact that Dick Cheney has done these things could be one reason you might not want to make fun of the man.)

So in their attempt to make the news interesting, news networks have hired outsized personalities to make you feel like an uneducated idiot (then again, watching almost anything on TV gives me that feeling). You could ask these people a question about the U.S’s relationship with the sovereign nation of Durkastanislav and they would rant for ten minutes about how the government is mishandling the situation and what their plan is even though 1.they know nothing about Durkastanislav because 2. I just made up that country. But still, you better agree with what they say, or else Nancy Grace will show up at your door with a shotgun. And unlike Dick Cheney, she always finishes the job.