I am reminded of an old quip, which I have heard attributed to various people but will credit to Minnie Pearl, since I heard her say it first: "If I had known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.":
Doctors conclude in the July issue of the Harvard Health Letter that one of the best ways to help ensure you'll live past 80 is to first set your sights on making it to 65.
So, I have a new strategy. I figure if I can just make it to 60, I have a darn good chance of making it to 61.
Comments
I find it odd that you spend so much of your workday posting on this blog.
Aren't you getting paid to work on editorials?
No wonder they are so incoherent and abstrusely written.
gee, Jim ... you read them, don't you ? That usually means they've done their job.
Abstrusely? Be careful Leo, there could be an aspiring intellectual 'mongst us!
Better get the Funk & Wagnall out.....
Actually, editorial writing and blog posting are both part of the job I get paid for. For what it's worth, I work on editorial-page functions during the day. I do blog work in the evening at home, setting the posts to kick off the next morning.
I am sorry that you find my editorials "incoherent and abstruse." According to the editorial-writing handbook we all use, that is several steps below where I should be right now, given my training and experience. When we first begin writing editorials, usually after several years of reporting, we are supposed to be "ignorant and clueless," since all we know how to do is pile fact on fact without building a chain of logic out of them. The next phase, after a year or two, is "simpleminded and naive." Editorial writers at The News-Sentinel actually get to skip that step, because The Journal Gazette has a special dispensation to stay at that level forever.
Next is "boring and pointless," also called the "five-year rut," followed by "misinformed and illogical" and "incomprehensible and obtuse," which moves rather quickly to "incoherent and abstruse," where you think I am right now. The fact is I moved out of that phase several years ago, having won the right to move into "dense and abstsract." I did so well at that that I went almost immediately to "condescending and convoluted."
I am in training right now for the next level, "arrogant and impenetrable," during which I will preach only to the true believers in code language we don't care if the rest of you understand or not. If I stay on the job long enough, I will be admitted into the 10th and highest level of editorial writing, "insensitive and insulting."
Some blog trollers, I've noticed, think they can skip right to this step. While their insults have a certain surface charm, the lack of experience results in a lack of depth and staying power.
I'm sorry that, instead of merely letting escape a passing thought, you didn't critique a complete editorial, citing examples of its incoherence and abstruseness so that we might engage in a lively argument over its merits. But I suppose we all do what we can.
TOUCHE'