johnfulwider dot com

Off to Europe.

A Guide to Menu English: “Menus are the Pavlov’s bell of eating out. They are a literature of control. Menu language . . . serves less to describe food than to manage your expectations.”

Oh Mylanta, I’ve been spelling Romenesko’s name wrong in my links column. (Fixing it …) I hang my head in shame, especially after somewhat sarcastically pointing out the abundance of writers who get Gillmor’s name wrong.

Interesting justification for killing a newspaper employee’s off-the-clock blog: “Denis Horgan’s entire professional profile is a result of his attachment to The Hartford Courant, yet he has unilaterally created for himself a parallel journalistic universe where he’ll do commentary on the institutions that the paper has to cover without any editing oversight by the Courant,” [Hartford Courant editor Brian] Toolan said. “That makes the paper vulnerable.” Here we have a quotation awash with hyperbole and hubris from a person who may well look scornfully upon newspaper sources using the same rhetoric. If Horgan’s blog were not now shut down, I’d be one of the many readers waiting to see how a person could artfully refute the almost certainly false assertion that his “entire professional profile” is owed to one employer, while retaining his job.

Apple music service to go live: While the story loaded I composed my clever linktext — “Offering expected to be overpriced, underpowered, and lacking needed buttons, just like the company’s computers.” But 99 cents a song is a good starting point.

A clever turn of phrase from Reuters’ Dan Whitcomb in this story: “But with the war in its waning hours, all is quiet on the western coast — leading conservatives to suggest that [Janeane] Garofalo and her fellow travelers are in full retreat from a public backlash and feeling chastened by a swift American victory.” Who says wire copy is bland?

The excellent online magazine Slate is making money (Warning: NYT link, may disappear) and “could be the exception that ends up disproving the rule that held that content sites generally serve as a trapdoor for good intentions and prodigious amounts of money.”

“Blogs are a hybrid of instant messaging and personal web pages. They’re a conversation.”

“Journalism has become like professional wrestling — something to be watched, not believed.”

Finally, a fuel for the environmentally minded foodie: Greasel. The Slashdot thread on this system for turning fast-food grease into diesel-engine fuel offers some real classics:

To get fuel for the next stop they dropped by the local Chinese take-out place and relieved them of some of their waste grease. They pulled out of town leaving an exhaust trail that smelled like shrimp fried rice.

I worked at a McDonalds in high school (about 1991), and one of the maintenance guys had an old (even then!) mid-1970s VW Rabbi (someone chiselled off the T for the fun of it) which was running on used shortening. . . . [T]he car - and I mean *the whole car*, from interior to exhaust - smelled like Chicken McNuggets. Sometimes, Filet-O-Fish.