I love this article by the vice president, executive managing editor and copy chief of Random House, listing commonly used phrases with redundant words that should be removed from your writing…
- hollow tube
Bet you hadn’t thought of that one, had you.- hourly (or daily or weekly or monthly or yearly) basis
- integrate with each other
- interdependent upon each other
- join together
- kneel down
- knots per hour
One knot = one nautical mile per hour.- last of all
- lesbian woman
Come on, folks. Think.
Via SMBC, of course…
Honestly, let’s just wipe out 20 years of progress. Per a University of Michigan study:
Among 10th grade students nicotine vaping also increased at a record rate as it doubled and rose eight percentage points, from 8% to 16%. This is the largest percentage point increase ever recorded by the survey for any past 30-day substance use outcome in this grade.
For secondary students in grades 9 through 12 the increases in nicotine vaping translate into at least 1.3 million additional nicotine vapers in 2018 as compared to 2017.
“Vaping is reversing hard-fought declines in the number of adolescents who use nicotine,” said Richard Miech, the lead author and principal investigator of the study. “These results suggest that vaping is leading youth into nicotine use and nicotine addiction, not away from it.”
Or as Kevin Drum prefers, in handy chart format:
Honestly, this is bad.
Vaping in general, and Juul in particular, have wiped out years of hard work to get teens off of cigarettes. And since most of the increase is in vaping nicotine, it means we’re raising yet another generation of addicts, sucked in by the same kind of marketing that was originally used to suck them into cigarette smoking. What a crime this is.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus for president…
OK, exaggeration. But we look forward to the Atlantic Antic every year. It is unofficially the oldest and largest street festival in New York City and it’s right in front of our place (we live on Atlantic in the Ex-Lax building).
For me street fairs are largely about food, and the Atlantic Antic is better than other street fairs because this is a foody neighborhood. You can get the normal street fair stuff (nothing wrong with that) but also crazy awesome local stuff. There’s a Spanish church on Atlantic that shows up with crazy good food. I try to keep a running list of what I eat every year.
This year I ate:
There’s a local gumbo place that was serving gator and andouille sausage jambalaya, but I was too full to try it:
Of course, there was music and shopping and kids stuff and all that other stuff. I’m just too full to write about it…
How can a 28 trombone version of Bohemian Rhapsody be anything but amazing?
The thunderbolt and lightning section is around the 3 minute mark for those in a hurry…
Just watch…
I’ve already hit the grumpy old man stage of my life and nowhere is that more clear than in English usage, grammar and font choices (observant folks will note the lack of Oxford comma). Don’t get me started on less vs. fewer.
I was on a business call today when someone asked if something had been “productionalized“. I work in software, so I understand what they were saying, is it a feature that has been built and is actually in use. But why is that better than “in production”? The latter is clearer and has the benefit of using actual words.
Corporate speak is full of this nonsense. It’s all jargon to make the speaker seem more sophisticated.
What is the client’s ask?
Ask is a verb, not a noun. Seriously, stop it. Why would you say that instead of “what does the client want?”. There’s only one reason, to be pretentious.
And Comic Sans is evil…
The NYC Pride March was yesterday. It’s a big deal in New York and even stuffy bureaucracies like the MTA join in, with seriously amusing subway Service Notifications
Reminder: It’s 2018
Travel Alternative: Sashay away
https://twitter.com/carrasquillo784/status/1010905832236699648
I am a huge RSS feed guy, I don’t understand how anyone follows many different topics without it. I started following The Lefsetz Letter because I follow The Big Picture, which often linked to it. The Big Picture is intelligent finance and The Lefsetz Letter is quirky personal music/pop culture. Both are classic blogs in that they have a personal voice.
Lefsetz on Stern:
Netflix is a club.
Just like Howard Stern’s radio show. Occasionally Howard makes news, mostly while interviewing celebrities, the gossip columns go wild, but mostly if you don’t listen, you’ve got no idea what’s going on.
But those who do…
Kind of like Netflix.
Now some news outlets noted that Howard’s appearance was going live last week. But I saw no reviews. It wasn’t deemed NEWS! That’s right, despite all the hype about the internet, the Long Tail, the major and the minor, the truth is something different. We’ve returned to the sixties. There’s a burgeoning underground, even though those in control of the major media outlets deny this.
Kind of like network television. Kind of like Fox. Kind of like Disney.
If you read the so-called news outlets, Howard Stern’s radio show doesn’t exist. And despite the appearance of Obama on Letterman’s Netflix debut, the follow-up episodes had no fallout in the culture.
Unless you were a member of the club.
That was a while back and I’m a fan of the Letterman Netflix show so I noted it. Today he posted something on The Greatest Showman. My youngest daughter plays the soundtrack constantly on Spotify, but I don’t normally think of her as part of a global trend. Maybe I should…
I was clueless until my buddy Jeff Laufer hipped me to it, singling out the track “This Is Me,” an empowering anthem straight out of the “Fame” playbook, Why is this phenomenon getting no ink, despite hiding in plain sight for six months, the flick having been released back in December 2017.
And then, today’s “Record of the Day” informed me that in the U.K. the soundtrack was number one for the nineteenth time in twenty three weeks.
But we never hear about it!
Five out of the eleven cuts on “Greatest Showman” have triple digit million streams on Spotify. And the remaining tracks are deep into double digits.
Not a single cut on “Hamilton” breaks triple digits.
As for the iTunes Store, “The Greatest Showman” is number three right now.
So what we’ve learned is despite the lauding of hip-hop, it’s not the only game in town.
Anyway, he’s good for about a post a week. Silly to not check it out (RSS link).
Steve Fischer's Random Blog 