Things to Make One Question “Why?”

I follow a few West Virginia road conditions Twitter accounts because 1) they may be kind of useful and 2) let’s just be real and I’ll admit that I’m a nerd for roads and they just plain interest me. Anyway, for whatever reason, the folks that run these accounts never spell out “vehicle” when they put up tweets about multi-vehicle accidents. Ostensibly this would be to save characters as tweets only allow for 140. However, they ALWAYS put directional indications on the roads both before and after they name the roads. What? It reads so poorly: “Multi-vehicle accident on northbound I-77 northbound at mile marker 16.”

If you want to save the characters, quit being redundant.

ROOTing From Across the Country

Tonight, the Penguins are playing the Islanders in the first round of the NHL playoffs, so they’re on ROOT Sports Pittsburgh. That makes tonight’s Mariners/Bucs game a radio-only game from the Pittsburgh side. I’m up in Detroit for work this week and am therefore outside the Pirates’ home television market which allows me to watch the Bucs on MLB.tv. The only broadcast available, obviously, is the Mariners broadcast which is on ROOT Sports Seattle. A great many baseball teams use a Fox affiliate to do their broadcasts, but there are a few teams that broke away from Fox a few years ago and are now under the ROOT name instead. Since getting MLB.tv, I’ve started watching some teams that either regionally or nationally I’d had no exposure to previously. One of those teams is Seattle. I watch them on a fairly regular basis too: usually the Bucs (who generally start games at 7:05 EDT) are finished with their games just as the west coast teams like the Mariners are starting (at 10:05 EDT). So it’s nice to be watching the other team’s feed and still have some familiarity with the announcers and the look and feel of another ROOT affiliate. Plus, it’s kind of neat to hear these guys, who haven’t been to Pittsburgh, talk about Pittsburgh.