I know it's pretty lazy to get blogging subjects from the daily news. So call me lazy.On the TV behind me right now, one of Fox News' opinion shows is debating a news item that happened recently. In Florida.
This neighbor/friend of the family/whatever guy molested a little girl and the father and a friend beat him into a coma. Instead of calling the cops. So of course they are in jail right now. The thing is, according to Florida law (the Fox guys and girls are saying) the perp could have gotten five years in prison for molesting the little girl, and her father is now looking at 15 years to life for the beating. So the debate (on Fox) is that the little girl's assault is not as important in the eyes of the state of Florida.
Now, we just can't have this terrible vigilante justice being meted out, right? What say you?
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I am a writer (of sorts) and I collect similes. I collect interesting quotes, too, but that is another post. Similes and metaphors. You know the difference, right? Of course you do. Anyway, a simile has to have "like" or "as" in it somewhere, and a metaphor just substitutes unreal stuff to illustrate something or other. Ummm. Like "The moon was a ghostly galleon, tossed upon cloudy seas." Like that. But a simile has to have "like" or "as". Poets are the best source of both, of course, and Carl Sandburg is better than most:
1. "Mamie beat her head against the bars of a little Indiana town..." (Metaphor, see?)
2. "...a voice like a north wind blowing over corn stubble in January." (Simile, right?)
Anyway, I came across a couple from (supposedly) modern college freshmen journalism majors. Not quite Sandburg, but poetic in their own way:
1. "He was a plate of room-temperature pork, and she was growing on him like an E. Coli colony."
2. "Her vocabulary was as limited as, like, ... whatever."
Don't leave yet. This post may still be salvageable.
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Did you know that Persis Khambatta had died? I didn't know that. She died a long time ago, in 1998. I was sad when I finally found out about it today. She was Miss India when she was 15 years old, in 1965. I didn't know that either. I only knew about her from the Star Trek movie about Veeger (Voyager). Rest in peace Ilia.
