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The question irked reader Jonathan Siegle in Springfield, Ore. He was reading a column in The New York Times through means of David Brooks. He stumbled over: "The number of people who could credibly claim to have had a meeting like that with McCain are vanishingly small."

Should that verb have been "IS vanishingly small"? Reader Siegle thinks so, and I agree, but the topic merits some kicking around. The trouble with "number" is that it won’t stay still. It bobs and weaves and wiggles gone. Suppose we are document about a gaggle of golfers. A number of them appear to have existence to like the course, no more than the number of those who analogous it seems likely to diminish. Now it’s singular; now it’s plural. What it is, is synesis. Kindly await it up.

Trust your ears, you writers! There’s no insufficient and simple decide to guide you.

The best notification is to trust your ears, but read your copy. A contributor to Our Ohio magazine missed that lesson last month in document about a farm for gourmets. The proprietors vie "to keep up by Americans’ changing pallets." After years of hard work, they "won through East Coast pallets."

The writer wanted "palates," of succession, but was unhorsed by a rambunctious homophone. Hundreds of homophones roam the literary range. They are defined as two or more words that (1) sound alike, (2) are spelled differently, and (3) wish different meanings. The list begins by ail/ale and winds up with wail/whale. The computerized spell-checker is a great invention, but it’s no match for the chameleons that roam our the a b c. They grip!

American idioms are hazardous in a different way. They give immensely to the piquancy of our speech, but sometimes … I don’t know. The Associated Press filed a story out of Fayetteville, N.C. "Authorities have charged the husband of a Fort Bragg Army nurse through abuse for the woman’s remains were found in a brush fire three days after she went missing."

Went missing? The idiom and its inexplicable cousin, "turned up absent," are parts of our everyday speech. Would it have been more fittin’ to write that the promote vanished, or disappeared, or was simply "reported missing"? It’s a judgment call.

A question of first impression, at least in this space, comes from Robert Wooten in Raleigh, N.C., and Catherine Lyle in Seattle. Why, they wonder, do we need three bickering — till, ’til and until — to do the work that could be done more economically by a uncompounded word?

My first speculation on this matter is an old thought. You have heard me voice it many state of things: Ordinarily we read in silence. That is, we unravel to ourselves, but in the process we read not only by our eyes but also by our inner ears. At minutest in prose, the meaning of talk must always be paramount. Good writers are moreover attentive to the unheard severe of what they write.

The say in reply to the in suspense question must be, it depends. That is, it depends upon the rhythm of the passed on a criminal. Would the cadence have existence better served by two syllables or one? Surely, "Wait ’til the cows come home" is better than asking a virgin to await "until" the cows amble back to the barn. On the other hand, there are times when that second syllable is demanded: The lovers of immortal ballad pledged their fidelity "until we get again." Cadence counts.

As a matter of everyday usage, The New York Times forbids the apostrophized ’til except in quoted difficulty. The Associated Press stands indifferent in the cause. Translators of the King James Bible used "until" 32 times, "till" only twice. See Romans 5:13. Go in peace.

(Readers are invited to authorize dated citations of usage to Mr. Kilpatrick in care of this newspaper. His e-mail address is kilpatjj@aol.com.)

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After retrieving it, I straighten up and survey the sweep of the L.A. harbor. I breathe, savoring the salty San Pedro cast. Inside, my husband awaits me with a mug of tea. It's our wont to sit at the kitchen table and practise reading news stories out loud to each other.

But something has changed. There we sat one morning otherwise than that, without even mind, we had plopped open our yin and yang MacBooks (undermine black, his white). Clicking away, Ted read me a headline from CNN, and I remarked on a wacky forward from a intimate.

This went on for on the eve 15 minutes judgment I remembered to get the wall-paper. When I brought it upstairs and guiltily unsheathed it next to the two sleek laptops, it seemed an awkward suitor.

"Ah, the paper," my husband said, and set aside his laptop. But I be able to't deny it. Lifelong addicts to the printed quotidian paper, like chocoholics who lose their feel for the bonbon, we are moving advance.

The print version of the L.A. Times is skinnier every day. And recently the cuts, resignations, and layoffs at the Times, in particular, were featured on CNN and the News Hour with Jim Lehrer.

The Times Sunday Magazine is only a monthly now, and the Sunday Opinion and Books section, a pullout tabloid my husband and I through all ages. fought over, ended its long cast July 27. It has been merged into other sections. That day the editors mournfully wrote, "This final issue… is a regrettable concession to the economics of the newspaper business and the characteristic travails of this company."

My young friends dress in't see why we waste a single moment mourning the printed newspaper's probable demise. I look prostrate at my laptop. It has advantages. I don't have to recycle it, carting heaps of it to the sapient bin. Newspapers are cumbersome and environmentally problematic.

But, I think part of the reason we are saddened by the end of the physical newspaper has to do through the senses. There's the sound of pages bending course, the feel of the paper, the smell of the ink.

I don't expect to give this up casually. I'm clinging to a 38-year-old love affair. For me the arrant folly hit in the summer of 1970, between my junior and senior years of college, when I did an internship at a little out-of-the-way paper in Iowa.

The newsroom, a dusty high-ceilinged chamber cluttered with Mississippi River delight, was on the second cover with a floor. On the primeval floor were the large, black presses and the hot linotype machines.

I loved going down there and watching the typesetters at their machines, flawlessly lining letters up backwards. I loved the smell and sound of the presses.

In the pressroom, language was machinery by exciting physicality. Words were three-dimensional and muscular. To me, the typesetters were heroes – men who loved the shape of war of words, the following the exact words style of a line, the fonts, the spaces, the ens and ems. The newspaper of the pressroom was visceral, uproarious, oily, and thrilling.

I remember because typesetters pick up the first paper off the press, snap it open, still-house warm, and read it like a lover. You've never seen a reader as avid as a hot-type pressman. Sometimes they'd tell a reporter they liked some story or other. Getting approval from a typesetter was among the highest compliments.

They each apportionment of lost their jobs, of course. Soon subsequently I left, the paper went offset, the first big shift of my lifetime by print. And of methodical arrangement that was equitable the beginning of ceaseless change.

About once a year I go to the Huntington Library in Pasadena, one of my favorite places. The thing I always want to see – practically a religious icon for me – is the Huntington's breathtakingly beautiful Gutenberg Bible. I feel of emotional looking at those gorgeous golden words, letters painstakingly crafted into words of enduring betoken. I revere those pages, recumbent and quiet in the dusky protective light.

Of course Gutenberg's press changed the world. And that's how, I'm sure, future humans will regard the first PC.

I'm not strife it. I love my MacBook, I even the tender passion the explosion of shared language that Bill Gates and other driven geniuses set in motion. In reality, I'm using my MacBook right now and hoping you make out what I've written on it, whoever you are. But there besides should have existence time for a respectful period of lamentation for the newspapers we're leaving behind.

• Jan Worth-Nelson teaches writing at the University of Michigan-Flint.

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The distressing Jones scandinavian legend encapsulates why in this way many Americans and others in the world now react to any outstanding athletic achievements with a dose of uncertainty. Champion athletes might be Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger), for the reason that the Olympic motto would have it. They besides tend hitherward with a questioning asterisk. Did they do it by dint of. cheating?

In a recent USA TODAY/Gallup Poll, more than one in three sports fans said they are suspicious when a track-and-field athlete sets a world enrolment. "The take a note of that anyone does anything well or out of the ordinary, it's assumed right away that they've taken drugs," U.S. swimmer Dara Torres, 41, said Thursday on NBC's Today.

That's unfair, nevertheless there's no mystery with regard to why some athletes clasp such gigantic risks. The prizes of fame, glory and wealth from endorsements are just so enticing. Nations have power to pile in succession pressure, moreover, and help with evasions. The days could exist gone when female East German swimmers churned revealed by the state seemed suspiciously male (and were later proved to have been doped up). Even in the way that, among other scandals, Bulgaria has already withdrawn its entire weightlifting team this year because of doping. At minutest 37 other athletes have been disqualified since April. That's almost double the 19 who failed deaden with narcotics tests before the 2004 Olympics.

Olympic organizers tout the real and deterrent effect of else, and better, tests. In Beijing, officials are set to carry out a record 4,500 tests, up from 3,700 in Athens in 2004. Even so, it's impossible to have being comprehensive. In reality, the drug display is like a game within the Games. At least common commonly used blood booster — synthetic erythropoietin, or EPO — can't always be detected. Nor can full of heart growth hormone. Marion Jones might distil have her medals if her coach, Trevor Graham, had not given authorities a vial of the then-unknown designer steroid — known as "the clear" — that she and other famous athletes used. Who knows what other substances are out there?

What to do? An approach being tried by the U.S. Olympic Committee, and independently by a group of athletes calling their effort "Project Believe," might have to be the next scale. Under these programs, athletes volunteer to make ready baseline and extensive samples for testing to show they are clean, the couple when they compete and when reinvigorated substances, and tests for them, emerge. It's the dejected further logical next step in that other, insidious Olympic competition in which athletes have to demonstrate that they are not merited Citius, Altius, Fortius but that, unlike Marion Jones, they didn't use performance-enhancing drugs to get that way.

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Even admitting housing prices are still falling, some bargain hunters are already getting to be in action. What takes patience these days is the financing

by Lauren Young

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Is it good to dare hinder part into the property market? Some real estate pros are switching into replete bargain-hunting mode level as home prices continue to fall nationwide. But allowing that you’re tempted to join them in bottom-feeding, look audibly. Not no other than is there a chance close prices will diminution more and not recover for years, but even seasoned professionals are struggling as they try to work in a puzzle deals.

Among the bargain-seekers is Jim Gillespie, president and chief executive of Coldwell Banker Real Estate. In April he closed on a 35-year-old, three-bedroom, two-bath ranch house just south of Santa Rosa, Calif. A year and a half ago the seller paid other than $450,000; Gillespie got it for $320,000. He wasn’t trying to make a killing: “The street I look at it, I got a fair market cost,” he says. “I’m not saying it will go up to $450,000 overnight, but it’s going to have existence a good investment. People shouldn’t examine judicially to time the market.”

Gillespie purchased the house as being his son and family (they’re renting it from him) in that which is called a abrupt sale. Here’s in what state it works: A lender allows a property to be sold for smaller quantity than the total amount fit on the mortgage and any other loans on the property. If a homeowner has a $300,000 mortgage but the tavern has sunk in value—the in the greatest degree it can get to is, say, $250,000—the bank can prefer to forgive $50,000 of the mortgage to get the property off its books. For homeowners, short sales offer a way to be shy of foreclosure and still pay off their loans by settling with the lender. Negotiations take place betwixt the buyer and the shore.

The transactions are complex, and Gillespie waited five months to hear that his offer was accepted. It was only afterward that he erudite from the bank that there was a second mortgage on the home he hadn’t known over. “We had put this much time into getting this house that [we decided] we could wait longer,” he says. Luckily, Gillespie ultimately wasn’t asked to pay in greater numbers to cover the mortgage. “To our surprise, the decision by dint of. the second-mortgage possessor to waive their stake took less than couple weeks,” he says.

Another real rank insider trying to get a traffic through a short vent is Mark Durliat, CEO and co-owner of Grace Bay Club, a resort in the Caribbean islands of Turks and Caicos. He’s wading into the battered Miami market to buy a second home, and it has been a deeply frustrating process.

Durliat, who spends about 30% of his time in Miami, found his dream home through a real estate broker about five months ago. It’s a luxury condominium in succession Brickell Bay Drive, with three bedrooms and an sea view. He expects to reward about $1 million on a property he figures is integrity $1.6 million based on the prices buyers were paying for properties identical to his in the same building two years ago. “My position is that it will beg three to four years to reach this value, which suits me fine,” Durliat says. It will take that long for the Miami market to labor through its glut of inventory, he adds.

Durliat has spent more time than he bargained for negotiating—”in fact, waiting to negotiate”—a price. It often takes several weeks to get a response from the seller’s bank every time a change to the offer is made. “This has been a brutal exercise,” he says. “If you are not patient and you are desperate for a home, this certainly isn’t the way to do it.” An even bigger thwarting, however, is financing. In June, Durliat lined up a pledge to cover 70% of the purchase. Now his bank, JPMorgan Chase (JPM), says it will science solitary 60%, such he needs to find a new lender.

Financing is moreover proving to be more of a hassle for Paul Johnson, the ex-mayor of Phoenix. He now runs a homebuilding concourse called Old World Communities as well as a distressed-property investment fund. He’s looking for a vacation property in the mountains of Colorado to buy with three of his brothers. They plan to use it for vacations six times a year and rent it without the rest of the time.

The Johnsons have made three offers on Telluride properties in six months and have offer down a deposit for a $3.

In Richard Branson’s latest venture, Virgin will be unveiling its own broadband sacrifice in the fourth quarter of this year

by Jo Best

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In its latest set of quarterly results, Virgin Mobile has revealed it will be unveiling its own mobile broadband offering in the fourth quarter of this year.

The move comes about due to a recent renegotiation of the virtual mobile operator’s agreement through its netting supplier, T-Mobile, for the cost of voice and data services. As a result, the operator says it now “desire also have existence able to price more competitively in the growing fickle data usage market”.

A spokesperson for the quad-play company declined to agree somewhat distinct parts without ceasing how the business is likely to have being priced, whether it will be make use of on a pre- or post-pay basis and available speeds to the time when the service is launched.

However, should Virgin’s mobile broadband product echo T-Mobile’s own offering, customers be possible to expect a theoretical maximum of 7.2Mbps—translating to a real-world maximum of 4.5Mbps—within the M25 area. T-Mobile also launched its HSUPA netting in July, promising effective upload speeds of 1.4Mbps.

Virgin becomes the last major operator to launch a mobile broadband service, following rival O2 which made a 3G data product advantageous to existing customers in April this year.

Virgin Media also used its second-quarter results to reiterate its plans for a 50Mbps fixed broadband business, now expected to go live in the second half of this year.

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This week, investors will be focusing another time on the U.S. currency and the energy markets, limit also on retail industry reports to standard consumer spending.

Consumers would certainly benefit from lower food and fuel costs, but they also still face falling abiding-place prices, herculean debt loads and any unsettled job market. If it appears that they are struggling severely, the modern lean downward in energy prices might not be enough to sustain a stock market rally.

On Wednesday, the Commerce Department reports upon retail sales in July, data approach attached the heels of spotty sales figures released by the agency of individual retailers last week. According to the median estimate of economists surveyed by Thomson Financial/IFR, the report is likely to show flat sales for the month compared with June, when deal out in small portions sales rose by dint of. 1 percent.

Some major retailers are also releasing their quarterly results this week. Those companies include Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Macy’s Inc., JCPenney Co., Kohls Corp., Abercrombie & Fitch Co. and TJX Cos., which operates T.J. Maxx and Marshalls.

Last week, the Dow Jones industrial average rose 3.60 percent, the Standard & Poor’s 500 director rose 2.86 percent, and the Nasdaq composite index rose 4.46 percent. All three major indexes posted up their biggest weekly gains since April.

A huge chunk of the gains came Friday, when the U.S. dollar soared against its main rival currencies. That helped hurl the stock market’s rally, and a sell-off in goods ranging from unripe oil to gasoline to corn to soybeans.

A big rally came earlier in the week, too, on Tuesday, after the Federal Reserve said “economic activity expanded in the second quarter, in some measure reflecting growth in consumer spending and exports.”

But being of the kind which any investor will tell you, the markets have been extremely volatile, and vocation a be superior or a bottom to a market is a tough endeavor.

Moreover, there are many economists who say the weak dollar has actually been what’s keeping the United States from sliding into a severe recession. The reason is exports — when the dollar is simple, U.S. goods are cheap to foreigners.

“The main cause of support for the U.S. thriftiness in recent quarters has been the strength of net exports,” wrote Bernard Connolly of Banque AIG Research in a note Friday. “But the world economy has fallen off the edge of a clift.”

Last month, the Commerce Department declared the exchange gap narrowed in May thanks to record-high exports. The department on Tuesday releases its June delineation on the trade deficit, which is expected to have widened again.

In other economic given conditions, the Labor Department on Thursday releases its hand of consumer prices for July — economists are anticipating a rise of 0.4 percent, or 0.2 percent after stripping out food and energy prices.

And on Friday, the University of Michigan reports on consumer sentiment for the first part of August. Economists predict a modest mount.

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NEW YORK In Paris, they send for it La Plage, or the put aground. And in Bogota, Colombia, it’s Ciclovia, or bikeway.

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For six hours Saturday in New York, it was called Summer Streets: Nearly seven miles of Manhattan that were stripped of traffic, creating a weekend playground for bikers, walkers and loungers.

“Bellissimo!” declared Antonio de Lucia, a tourist from Caserta, Italy, who read about the circumstance and decided to walk about three miles from his Chinatown hotel to a friend’s Times Square restaurant - with greater degree of than 90 pounds of luggage. An hour into his hike, he was smiling as he sauntered up a stretch of Park Avenue awash in cyclists, pedestrians and in-line skaters. One man on a bicycle swooped down a sloped division of the avenue yelling “whee!” at full spoken sound.

“It’s a twinkling of conformity to fact for this city. People are participating - New Yorkers are united through their city,” said de Lucia, a 29-year-old business consultant.

Bike-loving celebrities Lance Armstrong and David Byrne are helping Mayor Michael Bloomberg launch the proof. It emulates similar initiatives in cities around the world in aiming to create a livable, ecologically gentle urban environment.

The 6.9-mile, car-free route started at the Brooklyn Bridge and ended to the boreal at East 72nd Street, with links to Central Park and other open spaces. It included stretches of Park and Lexington avenues and is set to be repeated for the next two Saturdays, starting at 7 a.m.

The idea is bare, in the words of the city’s official Web position: “Play. Run. Walk. Bike. Breathe.”

Bloomberg says the event will turn to more regular if the trial draws enough people to the public way drollery while not irking too many vehicle-linked businesses.

Saturday’s inaugural Summer Streets was a boost for some enterprises, like Eneslow Foot Comfort Center. It had a display of succor shoes external on Park Avenue and offered free foot analyses for fitting - doubling its business, manager Warren Person said.

But no cars meant slow traffic at Roman’s barber shop, owner Roman Ibragimov said. The shop, off Park Avenue, generally draws a lot of business whereas taxis and other motorists are not barred from the neighborhood, he said.

Ibragimov had only one purchaser at midday Saturday, leaving him dismayed at the expectation of future Summer Streets events.

“But this is unachievable! It’s no good,” he exclaimed.

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According to treaty regulatory filings, the five corporates showing big mortgage-related losses are U.S. Central Federal Credit Union, Western Corporate Federal Credit Union, Members United Corporate Federal Credit Union, Southwest Corporate Federal Credit Union, and Constitution Corporate Federal Credit Union, the Journal said.

The filings indicate that the good reputation unions — cooperative financial institutions — be under the necessity together reported about $5.7 billion in "unrealized" losses as of the end of May, the paper said.

The Journal quoted the National Credit Union Administration, the federal regulator overseeing credit unions, as saying that the losses were convenient to be reversed at the time mortgage markets stabilize, and that the institutions were sound and adequately capitalized.

However, some outside observers are concerned that the credit unions were underestimating the depth of their mortgage-market problems, the WSJ said.

(Reporting by the agency of Tenzin Pema; Editing by Louise Ireland)

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GATX is the leading bidder for the unit and negotiations are ongoing, the body said.

A GE spokesman declined to comment. GATX was not immediately reachable for make notes.

CIT Group Inc (CIT.N), a commercial lender hit constrained by the credit crunch, is also looking to sell its rail car leasing unit.

Lease financing company GATX, which controls one of the largest rail car fleets in the world, was also seen as a contender for CIT's transaction, not the same source familiar with the matter told Reuters highest week.

GE's rail assets had a without deductions carrying value of about $2.8 billion as of the end of last year on its balance sheet. The accounting value of CIT's rail portfolio was over $4.4 billion.

For buyers, these assets could be winning. Returns on investment for rail car leases are often over 15 percent a year and by the price of scrap metal rising, the value of rail cars is also rising.

CIT Rail owns and manages a fleet of more than 100,000 rail cars. GE Rail Services' assets include 165,000 rail cars and 120,000 intermodal trailers, containers and chassis.

As the two units compete for buyers, GE could have a slight vantageground over CIT because it may be dexterous to finance at least a participation of the deal if it wanted.

GE, what one. has been retooling its finance business over the last year, may also be favored with greater degree of leeway to take a hit on price because it be able to better afford to. It had about $850 billion of assets of the same kind with of June 30 and earned $22 billion last year, while CIT had surrounding $87 billion of estate at the end of June and posted a $111 million pure loss in 2007.

Last month, GE reached a deal to take a bribe for its Japanese consumer lending business and is in addition looking to part with its $30 billion portfolio of private-label credit-card operations, notwithstanding it has acknowledged that deal will be tricky to earn done in the midst of a credit crunch.

(Editing by Richard Chang)

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