The Sun-Sentinel Gets Raw, Forgets Math

This fruit fly wants a train, and he wants it now.

​You know, Sun-Sentinel, there's a certain art to these things.

I thought it was cute bordering on precious when, a couple of weeks ago, you tried to emulate the cattier elements of big media by having dueling columnists thrash it out over the merits of Florida's putative (and now aborted) high-speed rail. "Only people with the historical perspective of a fruit-fly" would oppose the rail, wrote Stephen L. Goldstein. Kingsley Guy, apparently a man capable of precisely that kind of Tephritidal thinking, suggested that the Obama administration might support the project because its members are "certifiably insane and should be confined to the psychiatric ward at Walter Reed hospital."

Adorable! You're almost ready for cable!

Look -- I understand that readership is tanking and that you've gotta do something to keep people coming back to the website. But of all the many activities engaged in by the world's more successful reportorial organs, is snotty snipery really the one you want to emulate?

If so, you ought to at least do it well. As it was, a commenter had to supply the arithmetic that your columnists forgot to tabulate, estimating that Florida's high-speed rail would lose the state about $30,000 per day. This would have been useful info to include in the stories, would it not?

Also, I think you guys missed the broader point re: high-speed rail. For such a railway to make sense, you've gotta have some place worth going to. Some South Floridians, at some far extremity of human desperation, may find themselves in need of a quick trip to Orlando. But who the hell would make a habit of it?

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