Some peeves:

(1) If you’re riding a bicycle, YOU ARE NOT A PEDESTRIAN. I’m sick and tired of cyclists who ride the wrong way down one-way streets or ride through red lights. It happened to me again this morning. I was waiting to cross a street on my way to the PATH station. When the “walk” sign finally lit up, I began crossing, even though I saw a biker coming from the cross-street who I KNEW was going to keep on biking through his just-turned-red light. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of being deferred to. So he chaotically swerved around me and rode on into the intersection, where he had to brake in the face of oncoming traffic. If not for me, he might have made it all the way through. I heard him say, “My gosh!,” which I think was in response to me. I gave him a lingering glare and continued walking.

I don’t care how great you think you are for biking instead of driving a car. You still have to follow traffic rules.

(2) What’s with the phrases “the exception that proves the rule” and “a rule that is more honored more in the breach”? Neither makes sense. The exception doesn’t prove a rule. It’s evidence that there is no rule. As for “honored in the breach,” Google shows me that the phrase made more sense in its original meaning (it’s from Hamlet). But now it’s nonsensical.

(3) Tim Russert needs to learn how to read. Several times on “Meet the Press” every Sunday, a newspaper or book excerpt appears on the screen and he reads along with it aloud, but he inevitably screws up some words. It’s annoying but funny.

Happy Monday!

After writing yesterday’s entry, I thought about chronicling all the instances of “trick openings” that I find in newspaper articles. I didn’t expect to find another one so soon.

From today’s paper:

In a deal driven at least in part by the hunger to get programming for a cable network, Rupert Murdoch pays an unimaginable price for a family-controlled institution, one steeped in a distinctive set of values, the gold standard in its field.

A familiar story line. But this isn’t another account of Mr. Murdoch’s acquisition last week of The Wall Street Journal and its owner, Dow Jones & Company, from the Bancroft family. Nine years ago, the Fox Entertainment Group, a unit of Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation, stunned the sports world by buying the Los Angeles Dodgers — The Wall Street Journal of the National League — from the O’Malley family, which had owned the team for decades.

Can we please have a moratorium on a particular journalism cliché? I don’t know if it has a name, but I’m calling it the trick opening. It’s used to alert the reader to a supposed historic parallel to a present-day situation. Here’s an example in this weekend’s New York Times Book Review, from the beginning of a review of a book about Bill Clinton’s first term:

The president is a failure. His foreign policy is a mess, and he’s hounded by scandals at home. A hostile opposition has seized the Congress, and he’s fought to stay relevant in the face of humiliating approval ratings.

George W. Bush today? No. Bill Clinton in 1995.

The name of the book prominently appears at the top of the review: “Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency.” There’s also a big photo of Bill Clinton at the top. So it’s not like we don’t know the book being reviewed is about Bill Clinton.

Are we supposed to find this opening clever? “Wow! You sure got me! At first I thought you were talking about George Bush — I had no idea you were actually talking about Bill Clinton!”

I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. I come across this trick in the newspaper every so often, and it always annoys me. It’s just lazy.