Thursday, July 24, 2008

Pursuit for truth

"Currently laid with asphalt the district is in pursuit of a grant from Nike..."

How does an entity covered with asphalt pursue anything? That's what you call a low-speed chase.

Speaking of chases, the local paper (source of the charming sentence quoted above) informed us earlier this week about a young man who is in critical condition after his car crashed during a high-speed chase. I read this article to my son, who spends a lot of time on the local country roads delivering pizzas, except I left out the vital information about where the incident occurred.

"So?" he said.

"The high-speed chase happened on route 550," I said.

"How fast was he going? 25?"

The road in question is not exactly conducive to high-speed chases or to any other use of high speeds. In fact, it's not terribly comfortable at low speeds. It is a road best encountered at no speed at all.

And that's a characteristic it shares with the local newspaper. It doesn't matter whether I read at high speeds or low speeds: my pursuit of truth gets stalled or smashes into a solecism, a dangling modifier, or a mysterious information gap, leaving me feeling as if a fresh load of asphalt has been laid over my brain cells.

But hey, maybe that'll make me eligible for a grant! If it works for the district, why not for me?

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