one crazy Saturday morning paper

Capital Fastpitch continues its improbable run this morning--improbable only to outsiders who don't know Nicole Fernandez and Krista Shannon. Update: the run is over. Pity.

In other news, drunk and disorderly buffoons started a massive brawl early Friday morning.

The fight started about 2 a.m. at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Franklin Street as patrons trickled out of The Vault nightclub, Olympia police reported. It ballooned into an unruly crowd of about 300, with several groups scuffling and flashing gang signs as they clogged Franklin Street, police reported.

The comments veer off track as they always do.

Last, today's Orwell Award goes to "The Rev. Dylan Clifthorne" for his letter to the editor. Even if I might disagree with it, I wouldn't be sure what I was disagreeing with. Quoted in full:

We cannot afford to maintain the regime of rhetoric. There exists a plague in public language, and propagandistic speaking has been counted on before our chickens have hatched. The truth behind words is only supplanted with weighty shortcomings of the idea of truth itself.

Listen, friends, the map is not the territory. We should turn our gaze upon how we say things rather than what we are saying. Supreme vigilance is necessary in this era of self-propaganda. Tainted intention holds us in an enigmatic entrapment of understanding, but the outlook’s promising.

To the door of a better future, communication is the key which we have swallowed. I challenge all to blaspheme the convention of insipidly ideological language. We must raise plain-speaking high on the altar, for hypocrisy is our last bastion of Freedom, the dominant communion of patriotism.

Propagandists are all alike. They want to agitate emotions, exploit insecurities, and capitalize on the ambiguity of language by bending the rules of logic. As history has shown, they can be quite successful at it, but so can we.

We may climax at verbal illegitimacy, but we come down the gentle slope of unintended honesty and old-fashioned American perseverance, a beautiful example of commitment to integrity and democracy.

Our crusade against misinformation and manipulation of language will be cadenced by the beat of conveniently practical dismissal and tacit falsification.

In times like these, our only option is to turn to the age-old adage, “you best check yourself ’fore you wreck yourself.”

I vote it for most self-referential rhetoric of 2006.

(Unless it's satire, like a previous letter calling for thanks to Mt. Rainier. The Non-Reverend Clifthorne--any relation?--has a more prosaic style.)

(Incidentally, this may be the same Dylan Clifthorne who signed the TrueCost Economics Manifesto--"On campus after campus, we will chase you old goats out of power." Or maybe it's this '97 graduate of Beloit. Or maybe it's this "awesome guy" and bike-loving CHS grad. They can't all be the same person... can they? In-the-know Olympians are encouraged to comment.)

(Become reverendized here.)