Where is the last ditch? (or what is a metaphor for?)

    Some thoughts on the rhetoric of journalists (alternately lurid, trite, hackneyed, rich in solecisms...) with a truckload of examples to embarrass everyone and ensure that I never work in this town again...

Oh hey, here's a fresh and fairly good one from the October Mother Jones: "a continuous series of pipelines and processing plants that line the Mississippi as it twists like a busted-up slinky toward the gulf"(48, although I think both Slinky and Gulf should be capitalized)...

Ah, were but all journalist so dexterous with their words!

As I return to this germ of an essay after

Journalese. Again. Laughter permitted.

In the wake of my Lougheed eulogy, where I smirk slightly at the Edmonton Sun for calling our exalted late premier "a driving force" behind the Canadian Constitution's notwithstanding clause (LET'S HEAR IT FOR THE NOTWITHSTANDING CLAUSE!!!) and the tangential question of exactly how many driving forces (of the Lougheedian thrusting variety) produced our monumental legal technicality, I pick up today's Globe and Mail, and here on B1 of the Business section is an article on "The oil sands' day of reckoning" (da dum!) (c'mon Gropers and Flailers, you can call them "tar sands"--no hard feelings) displaying a similar rhetorical flourish and the same murkiness of the quantitative: "...at the Joslyn project 90 minutes northwest of Fort McMurray, French giant Total SA is clearing the way for a new $8-billion mine that is a major backbone of the next chapter in the oil sands."

Okay, exactly how MANY backbones (major or minor) does Alberta's bitumonstrosity have?? Or, um, would it be "the next chapter" that has one of those major backbones? I'm so confuzzled...

Facebook asks, what are you doing?

I'm channeling Mackenzie King -- Waxing poetic if necessary, but not necessarily waning prosaic.


Any resemblance to the weaselly verbiage flying around Canada's Parliament these days is purely echoic.