Becky and I both have our final Daily Trojan articles of all time in tomorrow’s paper, which is the last issue of the semester.
Becky’s is a farewell column in the Opinions section. After a tongue-in-cheek tribute to herself, she leaves her readers with “loads of hard-won, but entirely useless, pearls of wisdom and otherwise random observations.” Among my favorites:
Even if you discover the cure for cancer, Carson Palmer will still make more money at quarterback for the Cincinnati Bengals than you ever will.
If you buy a self-help book for someone who doesn’t need it, the person will resent you. If you buy a self-help book for someone who does need it, the person will also resent you.
Sneezing on someone is no substitute for a proper introduction.
Insurance companies employ only heartless bastards who sell spoiled milk to school children and club baby fur seals.
And, finally:
If you don’t know what blogging is by now, you’re out of the loop.
Heh.
My final article, meanwhile, is a bit less dramatic. It’s just a shortened, newsified version of the multi-thousand word magazine story I wrote for my journalism class about the alleged Troy Hall burglar, Roosevelt Carmichael.
It’s a decent story, but unfortunately, the DT editors once again demonstrated their remarkable ability to introduce ridiculous errors into otherwise spotless articles. For instance, where on earth did this comma come from?
The man who allegedly burglarized dozens of Troy Hall and Troy East apartments in fall 2001, was sentenced in March to more than six years behind bars.
That’s my lead sentence, folks. The incredible thing is, someone who is supposed to be an “editor” actually had to look at that sentence in its original form (without the comma), read it over, and actively make the decision to add a comma where it clearly did not belong.
Remarkable.
Ah, well, it’s an appropriate end to a frustrating career at the Daily Trojan — fighting in vain, to the very bitter end, against bad judgment and utter incompetence.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention that the DT “editors” also apparently don’t know the difference between parole and probation.
I used the word “probation” six times in the article, because that’s the proper term, but the deck (underneath the headline) stated, “Arrested in 2002 for violating parole, Roosevelt Carmichael faces six years in jail.”
Dumbasses.
Oh, and while we’re on the topic, check out this gem from a photo caption in the Sports section:
USC recruit Whitney Lewis is now eligible to join the football to join the team in fall after receiving a qualifying SAT score on TUesday.
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Categories: USC, Graduating College
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May 1st, 2003 at 9:51:04 am
:-)
Oh, how I feel your pain!!
Someday you’ll miss having such incompetent editors–that is, until you get some again in the real world at some podunk newspaper job. I mean, the guy was the high school newspaper editor at Ass Nowhere, Kansas, so he must be pretty smart!
May 1st, 2003 at 11:30:23 am
You know, that comma would be OK if there were another after “The man”… but only if there were a sentence preceding it, or if you consider the headline a sentence. Perhaps it’s a conspiracy to make you look like an idiot in your last article, tainting your entire college experience with a little unpleasantness at the end.
On the other hand, it’s probably just run-of-the-mill incompetence, though how someone can rise to editor at the DT without knowing how to use commas is beyond me. (Assorted grumblings about ‘kids these days’ omitted)
Congratulations on graduation, too. Fight on!
May 2nd, 2003 at 3:34:54 pm
Oh man, don’t even get me started…
I had an editorial once that started off like this: “If you take out your atlas and look at the Mediterranean Sea, you will see a body of water directly northeast of it called the Aral Sea. The Aral Sea is actually a large freshwater lake. All native life in this lake is dead.”
Well, my editor wasn’t happy with how terse and powerful the wording was, so he changed the last sentence of the paragraph from “All native life in this lake is dead,” to “Well, all native life in this lake is dead.” Why, God, why?