Pure gold, clay feet

Some Sydney journalists work very hard. I know I'm always having a shot at Auntie's journos, but for sheer crayon-clutching bad grammar, take this final sentence in an article ('Pilgrimage that's pure gold', Sydney Sun-Herald, October 16, 2005) by Cheryl Rogers:

"Legend has it that the house was the envy of the neighbours whose chimneys were made of clay."

I mean to say, you'd have to work pretty hard to screw up a sentence as completely as that, wouldn't you?

While we're mentioning that execrable rag, the Sun-Herald: I read a used one yesterday. It was as thick as its owners, editors and journalists, but, as far as I could find, contained not one reference to this week's two biggest stories, viz, 12 million people on the verge of starvation in Southern Africa, and the Pakistan earthquake tragedy which a UN official last week called "worse than the Asian tsunami". Is it not about time that readers of this awful 'newspaper' boycotted it entirely? For the life of me, I don't know why it still has a solitary reader, because its track record has been as bad as that for as long as I can remember. (If it was the Sunday Telecrap, please excuse me. Sydneysiders will understand, as it is almost impossible to tell the two publications apart.)

At ease. Back to Auntie.

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