dave donovan dot org

Good news:  The BBC series “Top Gear,” a cult-fave here in the US through the magic of YouTube and torrents, but a sensation in Europe, is at last coming to America.

Good news:  The current “presenters” (or hosts, as we call them stateside) of Top Gear will remain on the current show and will not be hosting the new show.

Good news:  Adam Carolla is the first host chosen for the series.

Bad news:  The show will be aired through NBC.

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Why doesn’t anyone else seem to have a problem with the expression, pick and choose?  You don’t even have to think about this one very much to realize how redundant it is.  I don’t need to hear even one more person talk about picking and choosing their battles.  I wasn’t aware there was any difference between these things.  Is anyone out there picking and choosing their nose?  I can’t quite get my head around the point of this one nor figure out who’s to blame for it.

Lake Superior State University’s Public Relations department recently did a year-end piece on the top expressions of 2007 that have to go, and to my surprise this wasn’t among them.  Nor was that annoyingly overused and meaningless “Tipping Point.”  Both should’ve been. 

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Should any non-criminal behavior be criminalized?  I think the more important question is, how many more of your freedoms do you want to leave up to a politician to decide for you?  Haven’t we allowed them too much latitude already? Our founding fathers believed that people can and should govern their own behavior, and the pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness should be left to us. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers have died attempting to protect our freedoms for us over the last two centuries, and it is an insult to them and to the wisdom of our predecessors that we continue to allow a few thousand tyrants to strip freedom away from 300 million of the rest of us. The more freedoms we empower these tyrants to take away from us, the more they’ll feel justified in taking away other freedoms as well.  Precedents are set and referenced by other politicians and lawyers for future policymaking, followed by phony statistics to convince us that we’re all safer.  I don’t want to be safer, and I don’t want you manipulating my countrymen with the false promise of it either.  Freedom is more important than safety.  If you let politicians take away your freedom in exchange for safety, you’ll simply have less of both.

And of course, politicians won’t have to abide by these laws because we’ve allowed them to be above the laws they’ve created. Just look at the Kennedys and that Foley guy. I have no sympathy for politicians who are ensnared in the foolish laws they’ve created for the rest of us - but they still get away with breaking them anyway.  Why do we allow this to continue?

As much as I welcome the rapid-journalism-environment of blogging, I long for the now-bygone days of editors.  I come across more grammatical, spelling and confusing multiple-rewrite sentence errors now from the big boys of journalism that are downright embarrassing, and make reading these “posts” (rather than articles) a chore of trying to figure out which word the author was trying to use and distracts me from the content of the article.  Here’s a particularly glaring example, from which I trackbacked this post:

Despite being legimately stripped of its poster child status by George, Craigslist is still be paraded around as example of the world that awaits us if something isn’t done and done soon to guarantee neutrality.

- David Berlind

Three errors in one sentence alone. 

Update:  Proving it’s gone beyond mere occasional mistake to near epidemic, the following is a direct quote from the ZDNet headlines by Dan Farber:

After 30 aquisitions totally nearly $7 billion, EMC still gets most of its estimated $11 billion in revenue from storage sales.

I know you guys need to get your articles out as fast as you can these days, but please – either re-read your posts and do a better job of self-editing them, or send them through an editor first!