Official Announcement from the WORD’s Office of Emergency
Consternation & Badminton: Due to a projected power outage as
PG&E shuts off electricity to hundreds of thousands of hapless and
powerless people across Northern California at midnight tonight, WORD
potentates have ordered tomorrow WORD inflicted on you tonight. Power is set to
be shut off at midnight to spare PG&E any possible liability from wildfires
that *might* occur in high winds over the next few days. —Yours in
Powerlessness, the WORDmeister.
“I jot down everything that strikes me as having any
potentiality whatever to be useful in the future composition, and since I am
learning on the job and don’t know what the piece will be like, I scoop up,
say, ten times as much stuff as I’ll ultimately use. . . . Factual writing is
also a kind of treasure hunt, and when the nuggets come along you know what
they are.”
—John McPhee, author and Pulitzer
Prize winner, “Mission:
Choosing what to leave out,” The New Yorker, 2015.
• Editorial Comment: I seem to get a lot of gravel.
PeezPix
Water, water everywhere
FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the
planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. If you have
recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore,
send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone
else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just
quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. Don’t shoot the messenger.)
“I don’t think writers are sacred,
but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right
order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
No comments:
Post a Comment