Is Reuters Dumb Enough for *You* Yet?

Cuz they’re dumb enough for *me*! Now. Headline today:

Anger, despair in main Myanmar city as prices soar

“Main Myanmar city”, eh? “Main Myanmar city”? So is Angkor Wat “that famous, weird stone temple-looking thing you might have seen a picture of and that’s in that one Asian country”? How about Reuters gives us a dateline of “that place where Kim Jong Il lives most of the time”? Back when I was working in “main United States city on the east coast, but not the capital”, could I have referred to our office address as “920 That One Street Where All the Musicals and Theaters Are and Times Square Is, but in a Totally Different Neighborhood from That Stuff”? I used to like picking up the R train at “station named after a street famous for being the location of a well-known stock exchange” as it was arriving from “that part of the really big American city where people talk funnier than in some of the other parts of that same city”.

Anger, despair — screw food prices, they’re angry and despairing because western journos think so highly of their country they can’t name the freakin’ capital. Or just don’t want to because it might confuse someone. Or just don’t want to because it might fail to entice people into read the story. Heck, there’s only 6,000,000 people who live in that main city. Then there was that whole “fast moving wind situation that moves around like a gigantic whirling funnel” that kind of wrecked the place. Maybe that made them angry too.

And in the news today, I hear that “black man who wants to be president and gives nice speeches” did well in “state where tobacco comes from” today, but it doesn’t look like “white woman who wants to be president and whose husband used to be” has conceded the nomination yet after her “non-losing effort” in “state where they have that one main car race”.

After work tonight, representatives from “the main company that has a really popular website that a lot of people use in order to find other stuff on the internet and that’s really well known” took us out slick-track racing. That was cool. The place was located in “kind-of main city in the small, prosperous local county where there are some office buildings (and a slick-track place)” just off of “street with the funny sort-of Dutch-sounding name”. And afterward, after hanging out a while at the track, I took “big road with eight lanes with a 65-mph speed limit that runs sort-of along the coast from foothills north of main American city on the southerly part of the west coast all the way to the southern-middle part of the small, local, prosperous county” home. I actually merged with another freeway along the way, but I don’t want to get into that.

“Yangon” or, in the old rendering, “Rangoon”. Six million people.

I wish someone could tell me whether (a) the world’s getting dumber or (b) I’m just becoming more aware of how dumb it’s always been.

Pray for Mojo.

bkd

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