Monday, August 22, 2011

No, We Don't Want To Be Todd Martens

Horrifying of course to have seen a homicide on the train, but this Chicago-adoring (Feel free to move there any time, punk!) typist for the L.A. Times has some serious problems w/ usage/vocabulary too.

We thought "cab" here might have been a simple (YET STILL ABSOLUTELY INEXCUSABLE! Read your crap before posting.) typo,
We were all in the first cab, and the assault occurred directly behind the conductor’s pen. Most riders huddle toward the center of the train, oblivious or disinterested in the fact that the first car provides a grand view of the twists and turns of the Los Angeles tunnels.
but he repeated it:
I looked down, and saw a string of blood working its way down the ridges of the subway cab.
Shouldn't that be "grooves in the floor of the car," or something? Although "a string" would imply it was in just one groove.

Not to mention that he thinks the operator (Not "conductor.") is an animal who is kept in a pen or corral.
The conductor yelled that no one was to leave the train, and went back into his corral.
What the hell? Do young people know nothing, or absolutely nothing? Get this:
The knife looked almost homemade. Its handle was wooden, thick and seemed haphazardly carved. The blade was crude, maybe four or five inches long and three inches wide. A reporter asked me if it could have been a kitchen knife. I haven’t spent enough time in kitchens or Crate & Barrels to know exactly what a kitchen knife would look like.
Odd & specific details to remember, but does Martens really not know from a kitchen knife? The blade was "crude," as if it had been forged in a backyard smithy somewhere?

Also, he's a pig:
I saw a beautiful woman who had been on the train frantically asking people what happened, and I walked over to tell her. If Hollywood has taught me anything, it’s that meet-traumatic has far more power than the meet-cute, but as I got closer I saw she had a wedding ring and opted to let others fill her in.
This after he "knew he would be sick." Odd that after giving up on romance he managed to walk about two blocks before heaving in front of Trader Joe's.

We're feeling a little sick now ourself, especially after determining that Todd must be closer to 30 than to 20.

The literate among you are invited to look for other oddities in his lexicon. The prize for finding them is that you don't get stabbed.

This isn't bad usage, but it's cretinous:
I have never, at least knowingly, been less than five feet away from someone with the capacity to stab another human being.
Wise up before it's too late. Even your board-game playing hipster indie-rock "friends" probably have the capacity to stab someone, quite possibly over a board game.

6 comments:

Substance McGravitas said...

Edit: Swapped the word “murder” for “homicide” as I have since gotten a better handle on crime terminology

Period!

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

Well, to be fair to Stabby Laddie, it doesn't seem like the stabbing was unprovoked:

A rider holding what looked like a bike chain got into an argument with another passenger. The man with the chain "started swinging wildly.... He was flailing his chain, but it wasn't really hitting the guy. He just seemed crazy," Martens said.

Unknown said...

What.A.Fucking.Douchenozzle.

I was in the Ventura/Oxnard area all weekend and watched Ch4 news so I saw this carnage and I believe I also saw this asshole as the words in his post were also the same ones used by the idiot to describe the scene to the reporter, who of course was reporting live from the scene on the 10 or 11pm newscast.

M. Bouffant said...

G-Nazi Editor:

Our thought was Stabby could have used his brace of skate boards to defend himself from the flailing chain, but we can't guarantee we would have done any better.

No one noticed "an arsenal of police?"

Glennis said...

He hasn't spent enough time eating with utensils to know what a kitchen knife looks like.

M. Bouffant said...

Piling On Editor Piles On:

Bagged snack food, sammiches & soda pop from a can. He may never have used a drinking glass either.

Dusty, we're sure he would have squawked about it if he'd been interviewed. He was probably too busy barfing. The guy we saw on the NBCLA site said he couldn't see the (crude) blade.