Miscellany

1) This week's Louis Black turd-dump. Pick your poison.
Clunky sentence construction? "Central to my thesis here is the argument that if you examine any major historical event closely, you are going to find an enormous collection of bits of information that don't fit in with the overall theory of what happened."
Foolish absolutist pronouncement? "The U.S. Constitution can be read and misread any number of ways." Since Black uses the word misread here, it follows that his use of read must mean read correctly. In that case, there are NOT any number of ways to correctly read the U.S. Constitution or any other text, goddammit. The words are on the page. Read them closely, re-read them, and figure it out. Tricycle does not mean banana, unless the author tells you it does.
Very completely totally redundant word choice? "All too often, those on every side of every argument confuse the two (reality and opinion), using completely loaded language to bless themselves and validate their causes." What does the word completely add to that sentence? How about both sides of an argument instead of every side of every argument? How about letting an editor look over your column? I promise you he or she will not rob you of your writerly essence by cleaning up and tightening your prose. Your answers to questions nobody asked will remain pungently fecal (fecally pungent?).
2) My professor in my Lit Studies for High School Teachers of English class was trying to remember Crispin Glover's name today. He described him and some of his films but couldn't quite pull his name out of the ether, so I said "Crispin Glover?" Only three other people in the class had heard of him. He was in the Charlie's Angels movies, for cry eye! One girl turned to me and said, "Crispus Laughlin?" Then she had me write his name down on a sheet of paper for her, presumably for impending investigation into the Glover oeuvre. Very odd. This is my only class where people have a vague impression that something happened on earth before No Doubt became famous. I figured Crispin Glover had a place in the English major pantheon. Come on. This class pledged love for Little Richard last week. I honestly don't know what's going on. I'm learning interesting, baffling things about twenty-year-olds every day.
3) This morning, while walking to class, I noticed a burly athletic type hurriedly walking through campus while eating a large piece of bright-pink cake on a paper plate. What? Cake is not your typical on-the-go foodstuff, especially when speedwalking, double especially when the eater is hypermasculine and the eatee is bright pink. He had a huge bite precariously perched on his little plastic fork, I'm talking HUGE, pretty much half of the entire piece of cake, and when he brought this enormous bite to his mouth, it slipped off the fork and landed on the dirty ground. He then yelled, "Aw, FUCK!" and stormed angrily along. I can't tell you how happy this whole scene made me.