Floor Fashion

Floor Fashion June 2004 | Filed under Architecture, Doors and Windows, Melbourne, Photos

Local furniture retailer Thomas Gannan is moving across the street to a building that's been boarded up as long as we've been living in the area. I've watched the progress with interest, particularly the repair of the vintage lino. Repairing lino rather than embarking on wholesale destruction of same is one of many recent signs that fashion has turned full circle in my 26-year lifetime.

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This sentence is not modelled on a luxury yacht

11 January 2008
Filed under Language, Text, The Media

People paid up to $US100,000 ($A115,000) for the inaugural Singapore Airlines A380 flight last year, in which first class suites with real beds were modelled on luxury yachts, after wiring glitches caused the plane’s delivery to be delayed by two years, causing EADS billions of dollars in losses.

This sentence was already too long when they decided to add the bit about the beds. Why on earth is it relevant, when reporting on an airport mishap, to note that the beds on the plane involved were modelled on luxury yachts?*

It’s a really common construction in stories coming straight off the wires and into the paper: you have the story, which is usually two or three short paragraphs, followed by a gargantuan sentence into which somebody has packed the entire history of the subject, with no regard to whether the clauses in the sentence relate to each other or to the story at large.

* Update: I can’t read.

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