Wasting no time and jumping right into our comment stream we pluck out a couple of pointed, well-penned lunkers for you all to admire. On our story about and concerns about possible fires in the neighborhood, we caught these comments in our angler's net:
"How about instead of citing the teens, we go and build campfires in the living rooms of Lamorinda parents who can't keep their kids at home at 4:30 am?" -- Gary Peare
"We used to go to Tilden. They had firepits and it was way far away from adult supervision. Which we wanted. We'd stay until someone started telling the escaped killer with the hook story. Then it was home to boring old mom and dad." -- Bob and Ann
On a story we ran dealing with an the financially minded among us took him -- and us -- to task:
"I know a lot of people who worked closely with financial markets and "predicted" the 2008 meltdown. This guy is not Nostradamos." -- Louise Benvenue
Actually, there was a lot of expressed skepticism over this story and we actually liked that, respecting readers who do their own thinking and knowing we have a bunch of them reading us -- but wishing more of them would use their own name when commenting. Brings more to the party.
On a little thing I penned about we also had a number of comments, almost all of them from people who found the practice as fingernails-on-a-chalkboard exasperating as I do:
"Maybe "like" is the new "um", which even highly educated speakers seem to insert multiple times in speech. At least "like" is a word that has actual meaning, but both seem to be simply verbal tics." -- Kathleen
"When I used to work in high tech, I would often interview foreign software programmers who would begin all of their sentences with "like". For example, "Like, I am a C++ programmer and like I also know Java. Like I am interested in your position that like I saw on your website." I was always curious about how/where they learned English.
Hopefully most teenagers will grow out of saying "like" and "I'm all." -- Amanda
"It's everywhere and it's annoying. I hear moms talking in young-talk with their kids all the time and it makes me want to scream." -- Nancy Lee
"Unfortunately, with technology becoming the ever increasing replacement for interpersonal communication, chances are it will only get worse." -- Nikki Brickman
And we must have been feeling pressure on the parental front this week as it seems I penned another screed on -- and what happens afterward:
"I once heard an interview with Nicole Kidman on NPR. She told the host that her middle-school-aged kids asked her to drop them off a block away from school. I remember thinking, "If Nicole Kidman is your Mom and SHE's not cool enough, what chance do the rest of us have?!" -- Eileen McPeake (Patch's Nomination for "Post of the Week!"
And now-veteran commenter Nancy Lee weighed in with a fix for the derisive teens we portrayed dissing Dad:
"Send these three to school in Singapore for a year. That will straighten them out!"
Hmmm. Yes.
Thanks for writing. You made it a fun week.
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