Mice on Toast

Mice on Toast May 2006 | Filed under Photos, Travel | Comments (1)

From an exhibit at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in LA.

Views from the Floor

jess says:

I went to the jurassic museum years ago and have been trying to remember the name of it since! Glad I was nosey enough to check out your site and came across this pic. What a strange and delightful little place it is! I'm one of ur students from VCA. I also discovered we have the same star sign and were born in the same year. (I'm the one who said I was scared of computers, but here i am!) Glad to hear the museum is still going strong. c u tomorrow.

Speak, friend, and enter


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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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