Via Jason Permenter.

Kevin Carey, in Too Weird for The Wire, deploys a well-timed run-on sentence to highlight the nuttiness of conspiracy theorist John Wales:

Soon, Posses were sprouting across the country, attracting veterans of the 1960s-era tax protest movement, Second Amendment absolutists, Christian Identity adherents, and ardent anti-communists who had abandoned the John Birch Society because they felt the organization wasn’t extreme enough. Local groups would meet to share literature, listen to tapes of Gale’s sermons, and discuss preparations for the approaching End Times. This extremist stew produced exotic amalgamations of paranoia, such as when Posse members would explain the need for local militias to stockpile weapons in order to defend white Christians from blacks in the coming race war sparked by the inevitable economic collapse caused by the income tax and a cabal of international Jewish bankers bent on global dominance through one world government, for Satan.

The paragraph appears 3,400 words into the article and is so out-of-place that you’re almost forced to stop midway through and start again from the top, except more slowly. Its sheer length highlights the absurdity of Wales’ ranting illogic, which is, of course, the point.

—Janet Fitch, Jacket Copy

I’ve only been blogging here for a few months, but I’ve been whispering into the great unknown for a bit longer. Back when I was interning as a technical writer at Sun Microsystems, I authored a blog called Mark Settle’s Mighty Pen.

I just pulled it up for old times sake, and some of the entries are cringe-inducing. Like my take on Sun’s penchant for cross-branding:

SunThis, an extension of SunThat, leverages SunSomeOtherThing to preserve network resources and speed time-to-market.”