Category Archives: General

“My Review”

Posted on by

People who annoy me: those who write on All That Chat and say what they think of a show and call it “My review of…” or “Here is my review.”

It’s not your “review.” It’s your opinion. You’re not a theater critic. A review is something formal that appears in a newspaper or on a theater website. If you’re a random schmo saying what you think of a show, it’s not your “review.” It’s your opinion.

I know it might seem weird that this annoys me, because everyone has a right to give an opinion of a show and theater critics can be clueless or woefully misguided. But it still annoys me. Take your self-promotion elsewhere. Get a frickin’ blog.

Period.

Posted on by

Teenagers are letting their electronic communication styles creep into their schoolwork.

And as the English language evolves, he said, some e-mail conventions, like starting sentences without a capital letter, may well become accepted practice.

“I think in the future, capitalization will disappear,” said Professor Sterling, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. In fact, he said, when his teenage son asked what the presence of the capital letter added to what the period at the end of the sentence signified, he had no answer.

Hmm… prescriptivism vs. descriptivism strikes again.

A&F Revisited

Posted on by

Thinking again about the Obamacrombie boys, I dug up this Salon.com profile of Abercrombie & Fitch’s CEO from two years ago. It’s worth reading because of how creepy and obnoxious the guy comes across. (I linked it here when it originally ran.)

He wants desperately to look like his target customer (the casually flawless college kid), and in that pursuit he has aggressively transformed himself from a classically handsome man into a cartoonish physical specimen: dyed hair, perfectly white teeth, golden tan, bulging biceps, wrinkle-free face, and big, Angelina Jolie lips…

As far as Jeffries is concerned, America’s unattractive, overweight or otherwise undesirable teens can shop elsewhere. “In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids,” he says. “Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.

Two years later it still makes me want to vomit.