headlines – don't confuse the narrator

pause for pedantry

Often, as I surf the internet, I find phrases, badly cropped headlines, verbal ambiguities, and punctuation failures that bring me up short and make me pause. When this happens, I tend to take a screenshot of the offending – or amusing – text and store it off to one side.

The intention is then to write about it on the blog, but sometimes I completely forget. Which is why the images in this post are from a whole range of contexts. While some of them are not particularly recent, I think they are probably still worth commenting on.
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Notes for the apocollapse

Everyone deals with things in their own way. For me, saying things aloud or writing things down gives them form and allows me to look at them a little more objectively. I have always appreciated the “How can I know what I think till I see what I say?” school of thought.

So, back when the coronavirus was little more than a Chinese whisper (am I still allowed to use that expression from my childhood?) I started making notes and gathering anecdotes. At the time, I wasn’t sure I’d ever put these thoughts into any kind of order or make them public. Now though, I’ve decided to go back through them, make some corrections and changes, and see what happens when I string them together.
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eternal sunshine

It’s a long time since I first came across Sydney Smith’s comment to his brother, “We have reversed the law of nature: you have risen by your gravity, and I have sunk by my levity.” And probably just as long since I first heard it suggested that we should repeal the law of gravity.

Somewhere in the same space in my brain where I access those ideas is a link to the idea of climate change, in particular to scientists’ warnings that, despite its name, global warming will bring harsher winters.
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pizza again?

All the recent news about the New Horizons mission has brought to mind a poem inspired by Pluto’s demotion from planet status in 2006:

In the dog house

My Very Excellent Mother used to be
the soul of generosity, and her beneficence
a universally-acknowledged truth.
Around the world, students rejoiced
when they recalled that she
Just Sent Us Nine Pizzas.

But as time passes, so it seems, the universe
contracts; mom’s liberality is capped
and scientists decree that students
will make do with
Nothing.

Supperless
I’m banished to my room. I must redo
my fourth grade science project.

Apparently the latest discoveries strengthen the argument to have Pluto reinstated as a planet. I suppose that means pizza may be back on the menu.

non-poetical

The DCTN strap-line is “(mostly) first-person poetry, prose and opinion” and I try and keep the blog more poetical than political. Of course, with the UK election looming, this is going to be more and more difficult; I suspect there’s more politics in poetry than there is poetry in politics.

So, recognising that politics are bound to enter into things sometime soon, I’ll get started with a few fairly random recent thoughts. First, a somewhat startling headline snipped from the BBC website: