Dilemmas and Romantics

The other day I was faced with a dilemma.  It wasn't a 'moral' one, but to me it was a dilemma.  The other day I read an article that was honestly the lousiest piece of writing it has ever been my sorry experience to read since 'Fifty Shades of Grey'.  It was from a newspaper, and it was stuffed to the very defiance of physics with piss-elegant prose, grotesque grammar, woeful wordage, claptrap conjunctions, and sagging syntax.  In fact, the entire article was a distressed discombobulated disaster.  It made me want to contact the newspaper and suggest they get the work experience student to do what he or she is meant to do, ie, make the coffee and sit and watch; NOT write the articles.  It referred to those involved with rodeos as the 'horsing community'.  Horsing?  Seriously?  But what stopped me writing a letter to the newspaper about this atrocious article that was a pitiful paean to jingoistic journalism was this: it reported on the death of a rider in a campdrafting event recently held in my home town.  It would have been monstrously churlish of me to pick on the awful writing, given the tragic situation that was its subject.  Perhaps I should wait until they do a report on the cake stall, or when the old chook in charge of a local CWA retires, and then rail against the dreadful quality of the writing.  See?  I'm not entirely without the milk of human kindness.

Today, after I see my accountant, I will call by the cinema to collect the double pass I have won.  I am very excited to have won these tickets.  I enjoy a trip to the cinema, and when it's gratis, even better. I rang the local radio station and gave the answer to a question asked.  That answer, my friends, is 'Xanadu'.  You're no doubt mentally congratulating me that I know Xanadu is the summer home of Kublai Khan, and that this is the subject to of a poem by Coleridge, a Romantic poet.  Romantic is my favourite style of poetry, but Keats, not Coleridge, is my favourite of The Romantics.  The Romantics was also the name of a band who had a hit around 1980 with 'What I Like About You'.  Yes, it was in Xanadu Kublai Khan decreed his 'stately pleasure dome'.  But it is with sheepish embarrassment I admit I knew the answer 'Xanadu' in this context was that uber-crappy movie starring Olivia Newton John, Gene Kelly, and some other sap nobody's ever heard of since.  I do admit the soundtrack has some guilty pleasures, and ELO is good.  I like 'I'm Alive', even though the opening scene where it's used totally makes me shudder.  It's got Livvy and the dancers playing other Greek muses coming to life, and doing some kind of interpretive dance.  I think what the choreographer had them trying to interpret is having gobbled a box of Mogadon and then swimming breaststroke in a pool of molasses.  And I'm sure I roller skated to the titular track at a rink somewhere, only instead of being all graceful like the skaters in the movie, I went hurtling into the wall, with my arms crossed over my face.  I plan to retire on these good looks, if the writing does not work out.