Letters to the Editor
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That's the pot calling the swallows back to capistrano
This is a truly terrible piece - I thought for sure Salon could do better finding someone who can crank out some stellar writing.
"He didn't just make hearts throb, he made them break". Ouch. Heath Ledger deserves better than this. And can someone please tell me who the hell Mary E. Williams is?
How do these terrible writers get a gig at Salon?
What, you mean that they gave one gig to a bunch of different writers?
Yeah, the nerve, they might not even know how to manage his plural and singular agreement.
Oh and grammar aside, for bad writing in the mixed metaphor department, "crank out some stellar writing" is pretty hard to beat.
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Geez, nitpick much?
(a) The letter writer is not a paid position.
(b)
"How do these terrible writers get a gig at Salon?"
"What, you mean that they gave one gig to a bunch of different writers?"
That's silly. No one would have any trouble whatsoever parsing that sentence. To phrase it to pass the high school English teacher's muster, you'd have to say:
"How do these terrible writers each get a gig at Salon?"
And that's awfully stilted.
Let's just settle on "How did this abysmal writer get a gig at Salon?" and leave it at that, shall we?
(c) "for bad writing in the mixed metaphor department, "crank out some stellar writing" is pretty hard to beat.
... is also silly. It's perfectly good colloquial speech, as the word "stellar" is so common that it doesn't even come up to the level of metaphor any more. "Crank" is pretty common, too.
If that's the best you can do to defend Mary Williams' sophomoric writing style, it must really, really suck.
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Remembering River Phoenix
I was trying to figure out why Heath Ledger's death upset me so much and I think it is because of River Phoenix. To the writer who mentioned this earlier - you echo my thoughts exactly. I never got over River Phoenix's death and now I have the same thoughts with Heath Ledger. So much potential gone to waste.
I really enjoyed Heath Ledger in "A Knight's Tale" and also noticed him in "The Patriot". His performance in "Brokeback Mountain" just devasted me.
I am sorry for his family, especially his daughter.
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@Thadeus
Let's just settle on "How did this abysmal writer get a gig at Salon?" and leave it at that, shall we?
Sure except that's not what the nitpicker wrote. Which renders your whole point meaningless.
Speaking of nitpicking, are you serious? After what you just wrote? Oh and no I wouldn't have written the stilted version either, but you notice that was your putting words into my mouth (see that's a non-mixed metaphor). Notice also please that it was only the arch and hyper-critcal nature of the poster nitpicking to begin with that incuded me to write, it's not like just pouncing on someone because of daring to post something with bad writing in it.
I read "crank out stellar writing" and saw an image of someone hand cranking either sausages or movie film perhaps, since surely something like that is where that came from and is still the image it conveys (which is how metaphors work) and then saw that what was being cranked out was a ribbon of stars. Or something.
Which is how bad mixed metaphors work. Those who use them give the feeling that they don't understand that imagery is actually involved, that these are just pretty words to string together.
Nice try, but nope, I think the only silly post was yours, the other person was at least speaking for herself.
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re: AP Britney obit
What's the big tumult about AP's Britney obit? Well of course celebrity obits are written in advance. How does anyone think media is able to immediately grind out the story of a celeb's life moments upon its end?
Way back in 1971 when I was taking a journalism class, I found out that obits about virtually anybody prominent were written and stored for future reference. I remember there was kind of cool slangy word for it, though it escapes me now.
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The essential point, @Anonymous...
... if you can get your metaphorical head out of your metaphorical butt for a minute, is that you were excoriating that other Anonymous for daring to insult the writing ability of the Great Mary Williams, without first ensuring that their 11th-grade English teacher wouldn't object to their particular choice of syntax and grammar.
Which is absurd on its face. It simply has no weight at all as an argument, because you failed to make a point that was relevant to the initial one.
Did you notice that? "Face" and "weight" are metaphors! Isn't that just neato?
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that explains it
Ah, Ambien, for me that's all I need to hear. For those of you unfamiliar with the medication, it sure does induce disorientation, and serious memory lapses, as in I-don't-remember-that-I-just-took-some-pill memory loss. I stopped taking it not too long ago when I realized that the night before I had not only taken one, but three. I had repeated my night routine several times before conking out, and did not remember it at all until I counted them out and realized I had no recollection of taking more. Still don't. So you get zonked, and for some of us, the Ambien doesn't take you down, you just walk around totally wonky, talking on the phone all night, organizing photo albums, then falling asleep on the floor. Yep, that could have been me. My husband was the one who finally forbade me to take them anymore, because I could not remember some conversation we had the night before. So I can see why it would have been so easy to OD on whatever you have lying around. But why do celebrities have such access to so many different types of pills? Don't they have responsible doctors, like mine, who told me to lay off the wonky pills? Who was his doctor anyway? Why did he have so many different pills to take? I can't imagine why someone would have six different tranqualizers? Not even during my panic attacks was I given so many sedatives. Poor guy, probably took his Ambies, forgot, then took whatever was around at the time, forgetting that you CAN'T mix these drugs. My condolences to his family. As for Heath, may his soul rest, finally.