Irony

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Bus strikes, kills advocate of bicycle safety

One of the country’s top experts on bicycle and pedestrian safety was killed Tuesday morning when she was struck by a tour bus while crossing a downtown intersection.

Susie Stephens, 36, of Winthrop, Wash., was fatally struck shortly after 8:30 a.m. as she tried to cross eastbound at Fourth and Chestnut streets. The driver of the Vandalia Bus Lines vehicle told police he did not see Stephens as he made a left turn from eastbound Chestnut Street onto northbound Fourth Street.

This is really quite amazing.

NPR and contemporary worship

On the way to catch Ocean’s Eleven yesterday at a late matinee, I listened to an interesting segment on NPR’s All Things Considered that was delving into the contemporary worship scene. The real audio is linked six items down on this page. Linda asked some solid questions, but made two mistakes. First, she pretended that ‘tenderer’ was a word. Second, she didn’t point out a contradiction in two of the answers given. I’ll let you try to figure out which answers I thought contradicted each other. Perhaps there’s more than one. After all, I was dealing with traffic when listening to the segment…

Anthrax and the USPS

I have a general question regarding the use of the US Postal Service as a delivery vehicle for anthrax: Is anyone surprised? Why not FedEx or UPS? Oh, that’s right… those organizations are run efficiently for profit, rather than losing $1.7 billion. They use these magical notations called barcodes, that allow simple people to wave wands over them resulting in the knowledge of where and when the package traded hands at all points in its delivery. They have a sane number of distribution centers, so that if irradiation machines are ultimately needed to fight terrorism, the cost would be more manageable. And the list goes on.

Chiasm off the newswire

Here’s some news articles from the past couple days in reverse chronological order:

   Retail Sales Show Strength

      Number of Laid-Off Workers Plunges

         Mixed signs from US economy

      Employment Picture Seen as Bleak for Months

   Retailers Post Dismal Sales for November

There you have it. So for all of you who think journalists don’t know literature, you have just witnessed the use of a chiasm on the newswire.

Holy Land Foundation

Richardson, TX is in the news (see top item). For those who don’t know, I live and work in Richardson (a northeast suburb of Dallas, home to the Telecom Corridor). The ISP that got hit is just down the street from the offices of a friend of mine, who had the pleasure of watching a swarm of people wearing jackets with ‘FBI’ in loud yellow print on the back descend on the place.