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Not Quite a Damn Lie. More of a Darn Lie.

2012-02-08T10:34:00.000-05:00

You may have read last night or this morning about the December statistic for U.S. job openings being near a three-year high. That's literally true, but it's, well, kind of a stupid thing to say. Because the actual three-year high was the statistic for September. In other words, the December number was the highest in three months. If you want to say the December number approached the three-year high set in September, fine. But "near a three-year high" is just misleading. Woo-hoo! Things haven't been this good since ... oh, I see, just the other day. It's also potentially ambiguous: Especially once it's run through the headline grinder, it's apt to lead some readers to believe you're talking about the number being the highest in nearly three years, which is a different thing altogether. (That headline grinder, you may notice, also led some outlets to just dispense with the "nearly" and proclaim this a three-year high. Now, that's a damn lie.)

I wrote some years back about a similar error in the [blank]est-since-[blank] department, one that resulted in understatement rather than overstatement. (After searching frantically for that blog entry I knew I wrote, I finally found my rant in "The Elephants of Style.") When Roy Jones Jr. won a version of the world heavyweight boxing title at 193 pounds in 2003, USA Today called him "the lightest heavyweight champion since 205-pound Michael Spinks in the mid-1980s." Of course, 193 is lighter than 205. It's also lighter than 199 3/4, which is what Spinks weighed when he beat Larry Holmes for the title. While it is interesting that there was another example of a not-so-heavy heavyweight champ in the interim, Jones's fake title (Lennox Lewis was the real champion, but that's another rant) made him the lightest champ since 180-something-pound Floyd Patterson way back in the late '50s and early '60s.

Before we start arguing about whether since can mean because (spoiler: it can), maybe we should all get on the same page about what since means when it means "since."

Penney want a cracker?

2012-01-26T09:18:00.000-05:00

You may have heard that J.C. Penney is permanently cutting its prices.

Well, no, it isn’t. I didn’t go to business school, but I think it’s safe to say that selling your fine Stafford Signature no-iron shirts at 2012 prices is a piss-poor strategy for 2015 and 2020 and 2050. I doubt that’s what the current executives have in mind, and even if they did, I really doubt the current executives are immortal. Not that the company will necessarily outlast them, especially if I’m somehow wrong about all this. (Note to self: Invent time machine and stock up on 20-cent shirts, just in case.)

But I’m not wrong. And so, Journalism 101: Do not report that anybody is going to do anything. You’re not a seer. You can report that the company says it’s going to do so-and-so, and even then you have to first ask yourself whether the CEO or the spokesman really meant what was said.

In this case, the wording is clearly a mistake. The company meant “permanent” in the sense of regular prices as opposed to sale prices. It’s lowering regular prices and cutting back on sales in a strategy that may or may not work. If the strategy doesn’t work, the company has every right to change course -- and if it does, a bunch of news outlets will be revealed as big, fat liars. Even if it does work, the company has every right to raise its lowered prices a bit every once in a while to keep up with inflation. And a bunch of news outlets will be revealed as big, fat liars.

Don’t be a parrot. When a cop tells you the suspect produced a weapon, you’re allowed to say the robber pulled out a gun. When Reuters tells you about lorries and trainers and high-calorie biscuits, you’re allowed to say trucks and sneakers and energy bars. I don’t care what J.C. Penney’s news release says; your job is to use your own words to tell the story. Journalists should not be stenographers. If your editor tells you to “type in this here press release,” you should start looking for another job, one at a real news organization.

Or Perhaps Some Counterprogramming

2012-01-23T13:32:00.001-05:00

Not interested in the big game? Tired of the Puppy Bowl? Tune to Travel Channel at 6 p.m. Feb. 5 for SUPERB OWL SUNDAY.* Join who else but Andrew Zimmern for a tour of some places where the bird is as delicious as it is wise.

Brought to you with limited commercial interruption by Tootsie Pops.**

*Not really.
**Not really.

Introducing My New Sports Bar

2012-01-23T09:32:00.000-05:00

To put it another way: Super Bowl. Two words.

No Problem. I'm Fine.

2012-01-10T11:30:00.000-05:00

I had to laugh when I saw the comments on a nice DailyWritingTips review of "Garner's Modern American Usage" quickly devolve into a discussion of the plague of "No problem" as a substitute for "You're welcome" in response to "Thank you."

Now, I'll continue to make a prescriptivist spectacle of myself and argue that caring less and not caring less are two different things, and that literally doesn't mean "not literally." I'll roll my eyes at the new vowel shift, which has today's youth sitting at their dusks to take their tusts (and hoping to do well to please Mom and Dodd). I'll refuse to say, OK, fine, if everybody gets confused about stanch and staunch and gantlet and gauntlet, I guess they win. But, for the life of me, I cannot fathom why anyone would be so married to the "You're welcome" convention that any deviation causes them emotional distress.

I'd write a little more about that, but I guess I already did.

Oh, and -- as I said in the comments to that blog post -- I'm fine with "I'm fine" as a response to "Can I get you something to drink?" You don't have to be named Geoffrey to see that it makes perfect sense as shorthand for "I'm fine without a lovely beverage, thank you."

'Times' That Try Men's Souls

2011-12-28T10:27:00.001-05:00

If I start with $100 and end up with $250, did that money grow 2 1/2 times?

A reporter and I are having a good-natured disagreement: He says yes, and I say no.

The increase in question (I've simplified it for this example) was 150 percent. There's no arguing that; it's just math. To me, that translates to growing 1 1/2 times. The reporter points out that growing 1 1/2 times sounds far less impressive than doubling-and-getting-halfway-to-tripling. At first glance, it sounds like a mere 50 percent increase. I see his point, and besides that, nobody would ever say something "grew 1 1/2 times." I would say the amount grew 150 percent. The writer proposed "more than doubled," which sounds more striking even though it's less precise, and even though the amount much more than doubled, and that was fine with me.

But he still thinks I'm wrong. Let's examine the point further. For starters, I'll add by to the sentence, so it can't be read as meaning that the amount grew on two or three occasions. Then let's raise the stakes. Because double is such a handy word, I think "grew two times" is almost as unlikely a phrase as "grew one time" or "grew 1 1/2 times." Triple and quadruple are viable words as well, if less common, and I'll skip quintuple just for good measure.

So let's say I started with $100 and ended up with $600. My money sextupled, but few would say that. Now then: Did it grow six times? It multiplied six times, and the result is six times the original amount, but it grew 500, not 600, percent. So which model does the grow by ___ times expression follow, the multiplication or the percentage change?

Here's how I do the math: Even though nobody would say something "grew by one time," that would have to mean it doubled -- which, inconveniently enough, means growing by 100, not 200, percent. So if doubling is growing one time, tripling is growing two times, quadrupling is growing three times, quintupling is growing four times and sextupling is growing five times. You don't get to count the return on your original investment as an increase, though that issue gets confused a little in the casino, where a big "99 percent" return on a slot machine means you're losing a dollar of every hundred you put in (note the use of the correct word return there).

My friendly adversary pointed me to a dictionary that defines the verb triple as meaning "to increase three times in size or amount." And there is the -fold model. A twofold increase is doubling, a threefold increase is tripling, and so on. To which I respond: None of the dictionaries on my shelves are that sloppy, and those shelves also hold an otherwise wonderful usage book in which the author is tripped up by -fold, insisting that tripling would be a twofold increase. (It's a special case, -fold, because "a onefold increase" is not only never used but also impossible. You can fold something in two or three or more, but you can't fold it in one.)

Whatever the answer, as I told the reporter, the fact that we're disagreeing should be a clue that such a reference would be unacceptably ambiguous. You have people like me, in the "Do the math" school, and you have people like him, in the "Aw, c'mon, everybody knows what that means" school. My bottom line, as with the dispute over "times more" vs. "times as much as," is that we're dealing with a confusing and ultimately bankrupt expression. When you're tempted to say "three times more," make it "three times as much as." When you're tempted to say "grew three times," say "multiplied three times" or "grew 200 percent" or "tripled."

LOL 101

2011-12-12T11:33:00.002-05:00

The finale of Season 19 of the CBS reality series "The Amazing Race" included a challenge in which one member of each of the remaining pairs had to sit down at a manual typewriter and reproduce a passage. That passage included the numeral 1, or at least a number that looked as though it did. The typewriter's keyboard did not include a 1.

I wish Bill and Cathi, the token old people, had still been in the race. They would have known instantly that you simply use the lowercase l (or should I say the lowercase L?) with such a typewriter. But the teams still alive were all made up of relative youngsters, and every relative youngster participating in this challenge ~~puzzled~~ puzzled to some extent over how to make that 1. Some puzzled over how to get the darn paper in the darn machine.

I used manual typewriters in my junior-high-school typing class in the 1970s and even in college journalism classes into the '80s. I can't say for sure that I ever used one without a 1 key, but I sure have spent way too much time cleaning up after oldsters who typed letters into their numbers. In Courier and the other monospaced fonts you find on typewriters and many computer screens, l,00l looks just fine in place of 1,001, and so it's hard to spot (see below). In print, however, the result is often bizarre. WYSIWYG mode is a good thing. A sharp eye is an even better thing.

The El Generation has largely been displaced, and today the more insidious letter-for-number typo is the use of the letter o in place of the zero (usually it's the lowercase letter, but you see the capital now and then). Their proximity on the keyboard and the common use of "oh" in spoken references to zero don't help matters. There, too, the mistake is easy to miss on a computer screen. Speaking of CBS television shows, the O-vs.-0 issue came up in the title of the new version of "Hawaii Five-0." The network, citing utility for online searches, requested that news organizations write the show's name with a zero, even though it's pronounced as an "oh." Some sticklers bristled, but for me it's a coin toss. The number is pronounced like the letter, so either version seems fine.

By the way, here's a look at the offending characters in some common typefaces (click here for an image if your browser isn't showing you the font changes):

ARIAL
1,001 reasons not to type l,00l or l,ool or l,OOl
COURIER
1,001 reasons not to type l,00l or l,ool or l,OOl
GEORGIA
1,001 reasons not to type l,00l or l,ool or l,OOl
HELVETICA
1,001 reasons not to type l,00l or l,ool or l,OOl
TIMES
1,001 reasons not to type l,00l or l,ool or l,OOl
VERDANA
1,001 reasons not to type l,00l or l,ool or l,OOl

A Simple, Desultory Philippic About Black Friday

2011-11-25T10:00:00.001-05:00

We're stuck with "Black Friday," I suppose, but it's kind of a ridiculous monicker. It's said to refer to black (as opposed to red) ink, as in that allegedly being the day when retailers' balance sheets finally edge into positive territory for the year. I've long doubted that, and Kevin Drum and Ben Zimmer do a great job of telling the real story. What looks like a sardonic term is, in fact, a sardonic term.

I'm all for sardonic, but now stores are using the term with a straight face to celebrate their sales.

There is something to be said about embracing a derogatory term to take away its power. But this isn't an example of that. It's an example of stupidity. That same stupidity, the inability to distinguish between fact and commentary, between names and descriptions, has given us frontage roads named Frontage Road and base models of car lines named the Base.

Look:

A punk rocker who calls himself a punk rocker is a joke, a poser. Play punk rock and people will call you a punk rocker.

Label humor or satire "humor" or "satire" and you've killed the joke. Present humor or satire and people will laugh.

Build a frontage road and people will say, "Hey, look, there's a frontage road."

Offer a cheap car that isn't the XLT Landau Brougham Super Sport and people will talk about the base model.

And if you put crap on sale the day after Thanksgiving, people will know what you're doing.

An LOL Moment

2011-11-17T12:58:00.001-05:00

Meet Guga, our household's Cat No. 2.

Speaking Words of Wisdom?

2011-11-15T16:05:00.001-05:00

Here's a new one on me: A reader who went to parochial school tells me a nun was "very adamant" about the idea that people's names used in apposition should not be set off with commas, because that would risk confusion with direct address.

In other words, you'd have to say "My mother Mary is at home," because "My mother, Mary, is at home" would be telling someone named Mary that your mother was at home.

Anyone else ever heard of this wacky "rule"?

It's absurd, of course, for a number of reasons. (Even if all your readers were named Mary, most would presumably realize you weren't writing directly to them.) But I suppose some people would roll their eyes at the logic most of us apply -- using commas if we have one mother and no commas if we have two or more.

A Homework Assignment

2011-11-09T14:14:00.000-05:00

I could care less about "I could care less," but I couldn't care less -- at least not a whole lot less -- about the passive voice.

If you're one of the haters, or a particularly enthusiastic cheerleader for the active voice, your assignment is to win me over to your side, without mentioning "Mistakes were made." Give me real-world examples of the passive voice just ruining everything, and keep your argument free of passivity.

I'm Off the Wagon

2011-10-29T12:28:00.001-04:00

Sorry for the silence -- it's been a busy time. (Stay tuned for more on that front.)

Meanwhile (or "In the meantime ...," but, please, not "Meantime ..."), here's a little something I wrote for my actual employer, about life in the correctional system.

And don't forget to follow me on Twitter, where I do most of my writing in this short-attention-span age.

Scholarships for Copy Editors!

2010-10-01T11:23:00.000-04:00

Attention, college students: You still have a month and a half to apply to the ACES Education Fund for one of five nifty four-figure scholarships. In addition to the money -- four $1,000 awards and one prestigious $2,500 prize named for Merv Aubespin, the "godfather" of the American Copy Editors Society -- winners get some high-quality exposure to the kind of people who hire copy editors, to the extent that people hire copy editors these days. The application deadline is Nov. 15.

About That Lawyer ...

2010-07-23T05:50:00.000-04:00

... there's good news and bad news.

Mark Your Dictionaries

2010-07-20T15:34:00.001-04:00

"Tank" is now the official, not-at-all-slangy term for "fall." (In a related development, "rise" has become "spike.")

There's Only One Child Myth

2010-07-17T13:12:00.000-04:00

What I'm pretty sure Time is talking about is "the only-child myth." A myth about only children, not the only myth about children.

(If anyone cites "the '-ly' rule" as an excuse for this ridiculous refusal to hyphenate, I'm going to, in the words of a certain Holly Hunter character, lose it.)

Reinventing the newspaper

2010-05-27T11:08:00.000-04:00

When 'Might' Makes Wrong

2010-05-20T12:19:00.000-04:00

Some self-styled sticklers I know, perhaps still smarting at the " 'May' is for permission" lecture they got when they asked "Can I go to the bathroom?" in first grade, insist on changing "may" to "might" whenever they see it used in a non-permission sense. That can be fine -- "I might go to the party" may/might indeed be better than "I may go to the party" -- but it can also screw things up.

Be especially careful when the word "have" is involved. Observe:

"She may have been killed."
"Oh, dear. I hope she just got lost and we hear from her soon."

"She might have been killed."
"So true. Thank goodness she was wearing her seat belt."

(If you read the former example as a quote from a mob boss giving instructions to a hit man, proper English usage is the least of your problems.)

When 'Domestic' Doesn't Mean Domestic

2010-04-18T14:21:00.003-04:00

I pointed out in "The Elephants of Style" that Samuel Adams often shows up on bars' lists of "imported" beer, and that phenomenon bubbled up at the tavern where the American Copy Editors Society toasted the conclusion of its recent conference in Philadelphia.

We were given wristbands that entitled us to $3 pints of domestic draft beer, and so I took a look at the taps and pointed to a Pennsylvania microbrew. That would cost more than $3, the bartender told me, adding that " 'Domestic' means Bud, Miller, Coors . . ."

It might be time for the more descriptivist dictionaries to add that:

6. ordinary or inexpensive [domestic beer]

I settled for a Yuengling, brewed in the town of my birth, which might qualify as premium elsewhere but is "domestic" in both senses of the word in Pennsylvania. (Is there a term that means "non-premium" but wouldn't turn off the marketing types? "Regular beer," to follow the gasoline analogy, falls a little short.)

Happy New Decade!

2010-01-01T00:01:00.019-05:00

Yes, it's a new decade. Of course it's a new decade. The 2010s by definition include 2010. If this isn't a new decade, 1960 wasn't part of the 1960s (but 1970 was). You're not really going to assert that, are you?

Those who are mounting Walshian objections to this reality are getting it confused with the fact that 2000 wasn't the start of the 21st century or the new millennium. Again, it's a matter of definition: The first century is 1 through 100, the second century is 101 through 200, and they told two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on . . .

As I observed 10 years ago, there is a weird disconnect between the way we define centuries and the way we define decades -- and between the two most common ways of referring to centuries. The year 2000 was the start of the decade we call the 2000s, and of the century we call the 2000s, even if the 21st century didn't begin until 2001.

One loyal correspondent raises the question of whether it's the start of the second decade of the 21st century. In-ter-est-ing. On the one hand, it's obviously not (see definition of century above). On the other hand, if the decade we call the 2000s was the first decade of the century, isn't the decade we call the 2010s the second?

Not-Coms

2009-12-05T10:37:00.008-05:00

You may well do some of your holiday shopping at Amazon.com or Zappos.com. But I guarantee you that you'll do none at BlueNile.com or eBay.com. Because they don't exist.

Here's the deal: There are names, and there are addresses. It's easy enough not to confuse "Macy's" with "151 W. 34th St.," but things get tricky when you see the same online store referred to as Amazon and Amazon.com and amazon and amazon.com and www.amazon.com and http://www.amazon.com.

Go to www.bluenile.com and you'll see "blue nile" and "Blue Nile" and "Blue Nile Inc.," but you will not see "BlueNile.com" or "Bluenile.com" or "bluenile.com" or "BlueNile" or "bluenile." You'll see "http://www.bluenile.com" only in your browser's address field. Therefore, if you're writing about that store, you must call it "Blue Nile." Call it "Blue Nile (www.bluenile.com)" if you want to help your readers get there.

Go to www.amazon.com, on the other hand, and you'll see "amazon.com" and "Amazon.com" and "Amazon.com Inc." Amazon.com is both the name and the address. Even if the site consistently said "amazon.com," by the way, I would call it Amazon.com. Proper nouns are capitalized. Grant eBay (not eBay.com) a one-letter grace period if you like, as long as it's not at the beginning of a sentence.

If you want to point to a URL within Amazon.com, then you're talking address, and so you'll want to revert to lowercase. Perhaps there's a big Amazon.com sale at www.amazon.com/sale. I like to keep the "www.," if applicable, in such cases, for two reasons: It helps sharpen the distinction between name and address, and it presents more opportunities for a line break if the sentence ends up in a narrow column. Some people like to keep the "http://," especially when there's no "www.," but that strikes me as silly. There will, however, occasionally be times when you'll want "https://" for a secure site.

On a tour of deal-hunting sites, note the difference between not-coms such as Stop It to Me, RetailMeNot and Coupon Sherpa and dot-coms (or -orgs) such as MyBargainBuddy.com and FreeShipping.org.

Some online stores don't know what their names are, leaving you with a judgment call. Go to www.zingsale.com and you'll see "zingsale" and "ZingSale" and "ZingSale.com." It's usually ZingSale, and so I would call it "ZingSale" or "ZingSale (www.zingsale.com)." Because the name's-the-same dynamic is much tidier, however, it would be an acceptable style decision to take that lone "ZingSale.com" as permission to call the site ZingSale.com. That's the decision I'd make at DealsOfAmerica.com, where the indecision is about 50-50.

Ambush? Why Not 'Conflagration'? Or 'Gefiltefish'?

2009-11-30T01:31:00.009-05:00

Clearly, the horrible attack on police officers in Washington state was not an ambush. No accounts have the gunman hiding in the coffee bar waiting to spring out and shoot the officers.

But a police spokesman used the word "ambush," and it's a more interesting word than "attack" or "assault," and so, by the standards of many news organizations, OK, fine, it was an ambush.

(It wasn't a "murder" either, at least not yet.)

more lowercase silliness

2009-11-20T13:31:00.009-05:00

Filter magazine's review of the Regina Spektor album "Far" begins:

The lowercase 'f' in far is telling.

No, it isn't.

The review continues to lowercase the album title (and, in an extra added bonus blow to reading comprehension, uses neither italics nor quotation marks), presumably because that's the way it is on the album cover, while uppercasing "Regina Spektor" (also lowercase on the album cover) and "Begin to Hope," a previous Spektor album whose cover art also lowercases both title and artist. ("Begin to Hope" and the other pre-"Far" albums merit italics.)

If you're going to be silly, at least be consistent.

As I've said many times, graphic artists do what graphic artists do. They play with capitalization and typefaces and type colors and type sizes. And they should. If they didn't, we'd die of visual boredom. None of that has anything to do with the very basic principle that proper nouns are capitalized. Just as you need not duplicate the cover art's typeface, type size or type color when you're referring to a book or a CD, you need not duplicate the playful use of all caps or all lowercase.

Downs and Ups

2009-11-04T10:43:00.005-05:00

This sentence from my own paper contains an obvious problem:

About 10 p.m. on July 9, Gary Condit and his lawyer met lead Detective Ralph Durant in the dimly lit parking lot behind the Giant supermarket on Wisconsin Avenue near the National Cathedral. Cooler heads had prevailed, and Condit had agreed to give a DNA sample.

Durant's title is detective, and so he's Detective Ralph Durant, but in this instance the article was not using his title -- it was simply pointing out that he was the lead detective on the case. The discrete units here are lead detective and Ralph Durant, not lead and Detective Ralph Durant.

The fact that the d should have been down is clear enough, but the underlying issue can get pretty murky. Although I winced at lead Detective Ralph Durant, I'm pretty much committing the same error every time I write Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine or French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

There's a gadfly who periodically writes the Post ombudsman to say as much:

There's no reason to capitalize a title just because it happens to immediately precede a name that it's not part of. For example, the Jan. 12 article starts out referring to "Broadcasting Board of Governors Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson" instead of correctly to "Broadcasting Board of Governors chairman Kenneth Tomlinson."

Well, yes and no.

We take shortcuts in newspaper style. Copy editors working on daily or hourly or secondly deadlines don't have the luxury of cracking open the three-pound Chicago Manual and discussing over two-hour lunches whether to go up or down with that there detective. So we say certain titles are up before names and that's pretty much that, the same way cops make you stop at red lights even when there isn't another car in miles.

And so you see lead Detective Ralph Durant and movie-star Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and freshman Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse.

Now, detective is fuzzy enough that most of us could agree that it is sometimes a title and sometimes a job description. A smaller but still significant number of us would say the same about officer -- we wouldn't cap the word in "veteran Los Angeles police officer Jim Reed."

But how about "police Sgt. Joe Friday"? It's the same problem, really, but few newspaper stylists could bring themselves to write out sergeant even in that case. We get around it with chief by pretty much arbitrarily declaring the title to be "police chief" even when it's "chief of police" or simply "chief," and so the P is up and everyone's happy.

At the New York Times, where things are a little daintier than at your typical AP-style shop, the editors do observe the distinction. Here's the entry from that stylebook (a pound and a half, for the record -- I have the spiffy hardcover edition):

In identifying officials of cities, state or countries, do not make the place name part of the title: Mayor Stacy K. Bildots of Chicago, not Chicago Mayor Stacy K. Bildots. As an exception, for clarity, city and state are acceptable in titles: State Senator Morgan R. Daan; City Comptroller Pat C. Berenich.

Note the handy application of the "police chief" concept to the pesky "state Sen." problem. Arbitrary can be good in situations like this. We have style rules on this and we have style rules on that, and sometimes those style rules collide.

The U.S. Army is the Army, but other countries' armies are just armies. And so we're stuck with the downsyUpsy "Pakistani army Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha." (What -- you'd really say "Pakistani army lieutenant general Ahmad Shuja Pasha"?)

The House ethics committee is actually the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, and so it can't be the House Ethics Committee, and so we risk the UpsydownsydownsyUpsy "House ethics committee Chairman Zoe Lofgren," a breathtaking bit of horribleness compounded by the long unjoined modifier.

So, what are you to do if you're working within the confines of Associated Press (or Washington Post) style? Write around it when possible. The ethics committee's chairman, Zoe Lofgren. Lt. Gen Ahmad Shuja Pasha of the Pakistani army. And so on.

And with the obvious cases -- titles that aren't ranks and aren't abbreviated -- be brave. It's philosophy professor Harvey Baxter, not philosophy Professor Harvey Baxter -- he's a professor of philosophy, not a professor who is philosophy. You'd write Coach Jim Zorn but football coach Jim Zorn -- title vs. job description. The cap comes back for Redskins Coach Jim Zorn and Washington Coach Jim Zorn. And that guy will write the ombudsman. Oh, well. It's an imperfect medium.

You Can Write, but You Can't Edit

2009-11-02T12:54:00.003-05:00

Not Regina Spektor's best effort by a long shot, but, hey, she was nice enough to attempt a theme song for us.

Off-topic, she has some truly amazing stuff.