To be exact.

A string of comments responding to a story about a street art installation created for the London Olympics:

29Please sign in to rate a Thumb UpPlease sign in to rate a Thumb Down1

Who Owns The Fed  •  Truth or Consequences, New Mexico  •  2 hrs 52 mins ago

The best of Britain already left.

2 Replies

• 

  20Please sign in to rate a Thumb UpPlease sign in to rate a Thumb Down1

  Jim 2 hrs 5 mins ago
  

  a few hundred years ago to be exact!

  
  
  
  

  • 

    0Please sign in to rate a Thumb UpPlease sign in to rate a Thumb Down0

    Steve 24 mins ago
    

    right on Jim!

In addition to recoiling at the bigoted nationalism, please note that Jim's comment cites the time of the best of Britain's departure from the British Isles as being exactly a few hundred years ago. Now I'll apply that same grammatical logic to a few other scenarios:

A: "Exactly how much does this sandwich cost?"
B: "A few dollars."

A: "Can you tell me the exact address of the hospital, please? And quickly!"
B: "It's a few blocks from here."

A: "Exactly how much jet fuel do we have left?"
B: "Enough to go a few hundred miles."
A: "Okay, well, the nearest land at our current heading is 430 miles away, so if we need to turn around, now would be the time to do it. What's the exact fuel level?"
B: "Like a few hundred gallons, I don't know."

So I'm a nerd. But honestly I think that's preferable to thinking that "a few" and "exact" can be applied to the same value. Especially if you're going to be posting stuff all over the internet for everyone to look at.

Just upload photos to Facebook later.

It seems like lots of horror movies produced these days center around a cinema verite shooting style that presents the action as real found footage, usually shot by a group of young adults on some little adventure. Their shaky camera operation rarely manages to capture more than a glimpse of whatever monster or apparition is tormenting them. Film creators do this because a) the terror that your imagination can create having only seen a snippet of a frightening sight is stronger than the terror you might really feel if you got a long, good look at the frightening sight, b) things are more frightening if they seem realistic, and the less you see of something that's not real, the more realistic you will imagine it to be, and c) it's much cheaper to concoct a frightening image for one second than to orchestrate entire drawn-out sequences. So this strategy makes sense.

But it occurs to me that if any message is being sent by these films, it's that you shouldn't film outings or trips that you take with your friends, especially if you are all twenty-something singles. If you're driving to the Catskill Mountains with a bunch of college buddies, for example, filming your trip seems to greatly increase the likelihood of something awful happening to you. So just take some pictures on your phone and call it good. Your friends will thank you after they're not tortured and dismembered in the Catskills.