Why I love local news

The teaser of the local NBC station's "Billy Joel Can't Drive" story:

"Rock legend Billy Joel has a minor injury after his car drove into a small beige home in Long Island."

"A small beige home"? I don't think I've ever seen a car-crashes-into-house story that specified the color of the house before. Would he not have crashed into it if it were red, or blue, or purple? And don't all houses, regardless of race, creed, or color, have a right not to be driven into?

South Philly

Oh, you gotta love South Philly politics. Where else would a newspaper article with the title "Don't assume Vince Fumo is a crook" be considered an endorsement? And then turned into a flyer and stuck under people's doors to encourage them to vote for the guy?

Spellchecking amusement

Okay, I get very easily amused after I've been copyediting all day; but I do find this funny: when Microsoft Word's spellchecker encounters Christina Aguilera, the suggested replacement is "Uglier."

Can you hear me now?

You know, one of the best things about the ubiquity of cell phones is that telephone companies have stopped calling all the time trying to get you to change your long-distance service. (My response was always something along the lines of "I don't care how much I'm paying, I don't make many long-distance calls and I'd rather pay whatever I'm paying than go through the hassle of changing services." Two cents less a minute after 9 p.m. if I answer all your questions and fill out all your forms and tell my current service I'm not using them any more and answering all their questions? Um, no thanks. I'm willing to pay just about anything if people will leave me the hell alone about it.)



My parents have a rental property at the Jersey shore, and they don't want to pay the phone bills for all the tenants all summer, so they didn't sign up for long distance service when they bought the house. It took the telephone companies months to accept that they really didn't want long distance. "But we'll give you this rate!" "But we don't want it." "But we'll offer you this deal!" "But we don't want it." "But it's such a good price!" "But we don't want it." "Are you sure?" "Yes." "Are you really, really sure?" "Yes." "Are you really, really, really sure...?" Man, you'd think we were trying to explain that we didn't want oxygen.

Word of the day

More from the medical book:



The scientific/medical/technical term for swearing—a symptom in only 10–30% of people with Tourette's disorder, incidentally—is "coprolalia." (Which, I think, is basically a fancy New Latin–derived way to say "talking shit.")

Actually scary medical fact of the day

Okay, this one is actually scary:

"The biggest risk factor [for Down syndrome] is maternal age (1 in 1500 offspring of 16-year-old mothers and 1 in 25 offspring of 45-year-old mothers)."

I'm saying "scary" because there are an awful lot of people putting off having children until their late thirties or early forties, and then apparently expecting everything to work out hunky-dory as if they were still rabbit-fertile teenagers, and it's just not a good idea, okay? (Intentionally waiting until that age isn't, anyway. Don't plan on it. You can't schedule reproduction and the workings of genetics like a board meeting or a conference call.)

Medical mnemonic of the day

The "five Fs" of cholecystitis (cholesterol gallstones): "fat, forty, fertile, female, and flatulent." Man, I'd hate to have that on my chart. (It also sounds like the beginning of a really, really bad personal ad.)