Your Long Drives Quizo Update

I have mentioned in the past that I listen to NPR. That fact is a little weird even to me, but then again a lot of things are weird to me that the rest of the human race finds perfectly normal.

My being an NPR listener is more an accident of geography than politics. I’ve heard it said that the target audience for NPR is over-educated liberals, to which I would respond that if you are someone who believes that a person can be “over-educated” please identify yourself so that I can beat you to death with a Louisville Slugger and then hang your jellied corpse from a telephone pole with a sign that says “this is what we do to people who disdain knowledge.” Seriously, motherfucker, I am the child of schoolteachers and I will kill you with a bat.

Anyway, where was I? Ah, right, NPR. So, yes, the reason I listen to NPR is neither because I am a liberal (my politics are, most of the time, in a scary place well past liberal) nor because I am approximately 140,000 times smarter than the rest of the population. It is also not a consequence of my deep, abiding humility.

No, honestly, I listen to NPR because years ago I had a job that required me to commute every day from Northeast Philadelphia to a small town called Livingston, NJ. Livingston is about 20 miles west of Newark and as near as I could figure the only things in the whole town were a Borders, a Best Buy (where I bought, oh God, Star Wars Galaxies) and my office. Back in the pre-iPod era I drove up there every day for four months, and between Exit 6 and Exit 10 the radio landscape is a vast wasteland. The only thing I could pick up on my car radio at the time was an NPR station out of somewhere in North Jersey. It was on that commute that I got hooked on the BBC specifically; the World Service’s unique blend of information and condescension is the closest thing to me being on the radio since… well, since I was on the radio in college. So ever since then I’ve tended to listen to NPR in the car and, interestingly, almost nowhere else. It’s more than just a habit/compulsion anymore. There are things on there I legitimately enjoy – the wicked, black humor of the Marketplace Morning Report is a personal favorite – but I’m not going to lie to you, there are a couple things about NPR that absolutely annoy the hell out of me.

First and foremost, as I have mentioned in the past, is the traffic report. The traffic report on NPR isn’t useless. It transcends useless. Compared to the traffic report on NPR, useless is something so incredibly useful you can’t possibly live without it. The sheer paucity of useful information in the traffic report used to make me wonder why they even bothered until one day, as I sat in a gigantic traffic jam on I-95 that went completely unmentioned by NPR, I became convinced that the NPR traffic report exists solely so, like, one guy who lives in a rotating series of homes in the hinterland suburbs can get to and from work at WHYY.

This morning, on the way to work, the 7:30 traffic report, I swear to God and the man Jesus presented here verbatim and in its entirety, was: “there is an accident at the intersection of County Line Road and Cherry Lane. Everything else is fine.”

You’ve gotta be fucking KIDDING me.

Now, thanks to another very long drive I used to make regularly – from Northeast Philadelphia to Lehigh University for the year and a half I went there – I know that the intersection of County Line and Cherry Lane is in FUCKING SOUDERTON. If you don’t know where that is – and for reasons I will detail in a few seconds it is perfectly understandable if you don’t – Souderton, in addition to being the hometown of Jamie Moyer, is thirty-eight miles from the Dark Horse. THIRTY-EIGHT MILES! To give you some perspective, you know what else is 40 miles from the Dark Horse? The dead-smack-middle of the Pine Barrens. Do you care about the traffic out there? Can you even name a ROAD out there? I can, but once again that’s an area I’ve driven through about 9000 times in my life to and from the shore. No normal person listening to a Philadelphia radio station cares about traffic 40 miles away, at least not to the exclusion of all other traffic in an area of approximately FOUR THOUSAND, FIVE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SIX SQUARE MILES.

Worse yet, when you add the cheeky little tag of “everything else is fine” – so painfully obvious a lie that George W. Bush himself could not sell it successfully – those 18 words evolve beyond uselessness into a mind-shattering horror of Lovecraftian proportions. It is not so much a traffic report as it is Cthulhu himself snaking one of his slimy tentacles through the airwaves and rending your brain into jabbering insanity.

It has been my direct experience that the traffic report is the only portion of NPR that relays blatant factual inaccuracies at every opportunity. The actual informational content of the reportage gets no complaint from me. After all, where else am I going to get a seven-minute shame-spiral on just WHY my health care is so much more expensive than, you know, every other major industrialized nation on every planet within 500 light years of here? No, I have no issue with the fascinating and depressing things I learn from NPR every day.

I DO have an issue, however, with the fact that NPR stories do not appear to be edited by anyone with any kind of remotely advanced training in English composition. I know this person does not exist because if they did, the rough draft of 9 out of 10 NPR news stories would be sent back to the reporters and producers with “WORD CHOICE, FOR GOD’S SAKE WORD CHOICE” scrawled across them in the editor’s blood.

I freely admit this is something I am obsessive about beyond a useful or even rational point, but it nonetheless still drives me up a wall. This morning, at one point, when I heard the NPR news anchor refer to the Gettysburg Address as one of the “most iconic speeches in American history” I literally shouted at my empty car “YOU CANNOT USE THE WORD ‘ICONIC’ THERE!” I know what he meant, of course. But that’s not what he SAID. “Iconic” is the 100%, absotively-posilutely ass-wrong word to use there. It is a visual descriptor. It is an adjective that describes how things LOOK. A speech cannot be iconic for the same reason that Starry Night cannot be ear-splitting. The English language DOES NOT FUCKING WELL WORK THAT WAY.

A little later one reporter was talking about “the rhythm of the evening meal” and I wanted to stab something, not because the word doesn’t mean that but because it’s just WRONG. It is an excessively-prosaic choice when you are talking about, as they were at the time, an epidemic of childhood obesity. Yeah, when I’m trying to convey the importance of a public health issue I want to talk about the “rhythm of the evening meal.” Christ. I’m not sure who should be shot first, whoever wrote that line or whoever thought it was okay to go to air. Stop writing. Seriously, just fucking stop. You’re going to hurt yourself.

This sort of thing happens on NPR all the time, probably because their rubric falls just slightly outside the strict boundaries of just-the-facts-maam Columbia-style journalism. And I’m fine with something a little more colloquial, but come ON, people. The Doctor was right: words are powerful. They’re magic. If you won’t or can’t use them properly, please, put them down and leave them to those of us who can.

Because, frankly, I think we can all agree that the less pissed I get the better off we all are.

JLK