Mocking The Homeless In Print For Fun And Profit: A Guide

The lead story in this week’s edition of The Weekly Press, the Center City newsweekly, is about how SEPTA’s service is poor, its stations aren’t well-designed, it’s messy and so forth. I know: Stop the presses and all that.

The author, Richard Carreño, has a Wikipedia entry about him — “Holy shit!,” I said, when I found it — that notes he used to be from London. (Hence all the comparisons to the Tube.)

The article’s a little weird, though, and not just for the mysterious “move over Inga Saffron?” line halfway through it. Let’s take a look at some of the earlier paragraphs:

Everyone has a pet SEPTA horror story. How about the Hooverville-like encampments by bums in some Center City subway-surface (Green Line) stops? The malodorous wafting of urine stain that pervades the Broad Street (Orange Line) subway? The pimped-up, teenaged thugs who harass fellow passengers on the El (Blue Line) each school day? Police? Forgetaboutit.

A female Center City friend, who works at Penn, tells me that there isn’t a day that goes by that she doesn’t get the heebie jeebies when at Penn’s Green Line station. That’s the stop, as thousands of commuters know, inhabited by Penn’s version of Quasimodo, an unfortunate who has all the good looks of his doppelganger from Notre Dame, as well as being blessed with the laser-like visual acuity of Charlie Manson.

Ha ha! Isn’t making fun of the homeless fun! I can’t wait until his next article comparing wheelchair-bound people to characters from Beauty and the Beast.

SEPTA Fie! Semper infidelis [Weekly Press]
Richard Carreño [Wikipedia]
Photo by surplusparts

And The Neighborhood Shortening Continues

Yesterday, Graduate Hospital becomes G-Ho. Today, Bella Vista becomes:

Hmm. I guess that’s fine, but that’s not really that much shorter, now, is it?

The Weekly Press

Namedropping: It works for professional writers and it can work for you

Clearly, Philadelphia-area writer Thom Nickels knows how to churn out the words. He’s the author of, I think, eight books (but it could be as many as 81). And he writes columns for the Weekly Press and Metro, &c.

He’s developed many a writing trick in his years as a writer, and in the cover story for the Weekly Press this week — it’s about the glorified bus stop art project at around 40th and Walnut — he shows us the fine art of namedropping:

Oh, what a witty bon mot, and OH Susan Sontag! Whoo! You met Susan Sontag! I’m totally reading ’til the end now.

The Weekly Press [Philly1.com]

Grizzly man

Wow. It’s only January 11 and we already have entry No. 2 in the “most overwritten lead of the year” contest. (I might want to come up with a better title than that.) Like our first entry, this involves animals. Also like our first entry, it’s not normal bad prose that makes this lead bad, it’s just the metaphor it uses.

It comes from the Weekly Press, the Center City community newspaper. They’ve been big proponents of saving a group of four rowhouses on 18th Street dubbed “Rindelaub’s Row.” This weekend, demolition of the four houses started, and Press contributing editor Thom Nickels begins his story like this:

Residents of the 18th Street Rittenhouse Square area woke up Saturday morning to the sound of crowbars and wrecking balls. What normally would have been a quiet dawn was awash in crashing sounds.

Rindelaub’s Row was coming down, or at least the face of it was. Demolition crews made sure to hit the façades of each of the four buildings facing 18th Street, marking their territory in the style of Alaskan grizzly bears.

I know it’s sad when something you’re fighting for doesn’t work out. But Alaskan grizzly bears? That metaphor came flying out of nowhere.

Demolition destroys Rindelaub’s Row [Center City Weekly Press]
Tuesday: Demolition, man
Photo taken from Changing Skyline, taken by Inga Saffron’s daughter, Sky Kalfus

This post is philarious

Not to get too meta/inside baseball for you here, but I noticed a sentence in this Weekly Press story about the opening of Cira Centre that caught my eye:

On stage for the ceremonial grand opening, Mayor Street made a few light remarks, as did Joey Sweeney, chief CEO for Brandywine.

Holy shit! The editor of Philebrity is CEO of Brandywine Realty Trust? Was that your birthday present? Geeze, you think you know someone…

Cira “Left of” Centre Skyscraper [Weekly Press]
Boyfriend - Joey Sweeney [BewitchedBy]
Profile - Jerry Sweeney, CEO [Brandywine Realty Trust]