I do realize that a great majority of things I say here are negative. And I’m turning over a new leaf (leaf, HTML page, whatever. MARVEL at the coding savant that is I! BOW BEFORE ME! But I digress.) Down with the crankiness. Down with the rants. Down with the down. More positiv-ity. Positiv-ness. Non-negativity. Optimism.

But to do that, I need just ooooone last one…

And this will be dedicated to the Staten Island Advance. O how I hate you. I can accept that your name is pronounced “AD-vance” instead of “ad-VANCE” like the actual word. Plenty of people do funny things with their names, so if you, AD-vance, want to pronounce your name in a pretentious and annoying way, fine. At least you aren’t trying to spell it “Statyn I-lynd ADvans”. Considering the caliber of your writers, I’m surprised you aren’t already. Because seriously, these people are morons.

I have only the benefit of one miserably sub-par undergraduate newswriting class. But I have several things going for me that the folks at the AD-vance don’t. One: I can spell. Two: I can construct a sentence. Three: I can understand that objective reporting is supposed to be… wait for it… o yes… objective. Without opinion. And without fail – especially in the Sunday paper – there is at least one glaring example of the lack of each of those three things.

The worst bit is that it isn’t a complete loss. There’s nice local stuff, and old pictures, and a section written by teenage reporters. They always have the movie times all nice and in order. They have very lovely color comics, and Miss Manners and Dear Abby and Ann Landers and Heloise and all those cutesy columns, and the fact that none of those are written by their purported authors is not at all the fault of the AD-vance. But please, learn how to spell, learn how to make your subjects and verbs agree, and learn how to write an article without editorializing everything you breathe on. Let me digest my Sunday breakfast in peace.