Month: April 2013

Those daring young men on the… ferris wheel?

John

Last Thursday, Oddity Central featured India’s Dangerous Human-Powered Ferris Wheels:

How do you keep the fun going at fairs in a country affected by frequent power cuts and blackouts? Simple, just hire a bunch of workers to dangle from the bars of manual ferris wheels to keep it in motion.

It kind of looks more like fun than dangerous, but I imagine it gets rather tiring and boring after a while. The two videos below show some of these young guys at work. The second shows the view from one of the gondolas.

Um… did they really mean that?

John

In a report US authorities charge man in ricin probe, SBS states that “A 41-year-old martial arts instructor has been charged with sending ricin-laced letters to President Barack Obama and other public officials following his arrest.” Whoa… replay that. He sent the letters after he was arrested?

I think that’s a case of a misplaced modifier. According to dailywritingtips.com, “The syntax of the English language is fairly flexible, but one rigid rule is that a word or phrase that modifies a word or a phrase should be positioned so that its interrelationship with the target component is clear.” In this case the writer intended (at least, that’s my assumption :)) to say that the man was charged after his arrest, not that he sent the letters after his arrest. The sentence would have read correctly if ‘following his arrest’ was placed at the beginning: “Following his arrest, a 41-year-old…”

Sadly, this type of error is fairly common in the media these days.