Winning the Lottery

I find myself flabbergasted by Maureen Dowd's column today. I choose to view this column like a lottery. Even if the odds are a million to one, if you buy a million tickets, chances are you'll win once. That describes Maureen Dowd's relationship with sensible conclusions. Sooner or later, she just stumbles upon them by accident.

OF TOP HATS, TOP KILLS AND BOTTOM FEEDERS by Maureen Dowd

It’s unnerving, disorienting. 

Why do crappy writers insist on starting columns with bullshit sentences like this? No, this does not draw me deeper into the article saying “OMG!!! WHAT IS UNNERVING AND DISORIENTING?!?! AND WHY DID SHE USE A COMMA INSTEAD OF A CONJUNCTION?!?!” The ambiguity of the pronoun doesn’t make me feel like I need to know what she’s talking about. The evasion of grammatical conventions does not make me think that her opinion must be important; it just makes me think she’s a crappy writer.

Hell: Where You Are Judged in Run-On Sentences

Since Helen Thomas’ refuses to contribute to the arena of relevance—her column this week is about the role of the First Lady and fashion trends—I’m forced to look elsewhere for this week's Object of Ridicule and Scorn. So I looked outside the box, and found the barely-coherent Mark Morford, a SFGate columnist (Morford doesn't have the chops to make it into the print edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, whose larger online content is under the banner of SFGate) that decided to lambast Laura Bush after her appearance on Larry King Live. It’s nice that I get to stick with Thomas’ chosen theme of first ladies. As usual, some commendations are in order. Good for Morford for not pulling any punches. The guy had the courage to speak his mind. Sadly, we were all forced to confront just how incoherent his mind is.