Enough with the children already!

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said the word children 45 times in her speech about the State Children's Health Insurance Program.
Did your speech writer take the day off? For the love of baby jesus ... the word is in the BILL... we.get.it.


Here's a sample paragraph:
" In my case, grandchildren. My children are grown. So it's not a question of that. But you who have children, god bless you, i'm jealous, you have children at home, you have health insurance for your children. The children we are trying to give this health insurance don't. They can't afford it. And by the way, over 90% of them make one-fifth of what a member of congress makes, one fifth of what a member of congress makes. So we're talking about people who are playing by the rules who are trying to get up to the middle class or sustain themselves into the middle class, we are talking about a deeply held value, an ethic that to be a great nation, we have to take care of the health of our children."

Your approval ratings are -25 % ... no bills are passing ... at least tighten up your oratory skills and set a good example... for the children.

Tighten Up: the camera phone edition

In recent days I've seen two completely ridiculous sights. First, on Sunday in Georgetown, Mollie alerted me to this window display at Sisley:



The writing is a bit hard to make out, due to the setting sun and the general crappiness of the camera phone, but it says:

Getting' groovy
S I S L E Y

Sisley, a subsidiary of the United Colors of Benetton, is generally to be praised for its clothing offerings. However, they are worthy of nothing but scorn in matters of punctuation.

Sisley, let me 'splain you something (note that I didn't write 'explain): You can be getting groovy, you can be gettin' groovy (the preferable instruction), but you cannot ever be "getting' groovy," for the absurd combination of "g" and apostrophe precludes grooviness. While on the subject, when did "groovy" become an acceptable usage again? Do people suddenly have an unarticulated, market research-identified wish to be groovy? Sisley: tighten up.

Elsewhere in temporal laxity, on my walk home from work today, I caught the following headlines out the corner of my eye:



Oh god! Governor Corzine got in another accident!!! How will his still-mending bones handle the trauma? And look--CBS, in an act of pure malice, has fired Don Imus again!

Could it be that the Inquirer newsroom is suffering some kind of "Groundhog Day" like recurrence where they are stuck in mid-April while the rest of us move on in time? Perhaps, owing to contraction in the news business, the Philadelphia daily has taken to distributing their paper outside their core market using horse and buggy?

Whatever the cause, you have to love the juxtaposition of a two-month old paper above the slogan, "Best to read it every day."

Philadelphia Inquirer: get with the times and tighten up!