Week 10

Word of the Week

I found the word tonnage in an article accusing the iPhone of making it's app world look the best by considering things like wallpaper as apps.  The sentence said, "or perhaps allowing competitor's apps to run on the platform to increase 'tonnage.'

Most of the definitions that yourdictionary.com have for the word are having to do with cargo or shipping.  It's also defined as weight in tons.  It comes from the Old French word tonne.


Catch of the Week

While reading stories about the basketball team and the loss last weekend, I came across "Eving Walker's hot shooting helps Gators into Sweet 16" and flagged it immediately because of the sloppy writing.  It reads as if written verbatim from a telecaster's comments or the reporter's notes.  It is hardly a story, which I think is a common problem with sports stories.  It also states the obvious, like "Kenny Boynton sprains ankle...Boynton left the game with a sprained ankle."  I think it shows a lack of effort on the reporter to research the matter further.


Headline Challenge

I found this headline on stumbleupon.com.  Really?




Passage of the Week

Something that really struck my emotions was a story about the rescuers risking their lives to contain the radiation spills in Japan.  It was on bloomberg.com, but when I went back to my saved link, Bloomberg had removed it.  I think maybe because there was some controversial material about how a mother of a rescuer quoted her son talking about how he and most of the rescuers were sure that they would either die soon from radiation poisoning or in the future from cancer.

It also talked about how not all rescuers were getting lead sheets to separate themselves from the radiation when they slept, and how one rescuer sleeps on a desk for extra precautions.  The living conditions were also not acceptable considering how much these people are risking, and the story talked about the sleeping conditions and the lack of nutrition in the food they're getting.

I wish the story was still up, but here was the link I saved from Thursday.  I found it on google news.