250 Words on Back to the Future

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

(You may remember this as something I posted on social media last year. Afterward, I squinted hard and thought, “That looks like it’s about 250 words long!” So, with some editing, I repurposed it. If you read it before, I hope you enjoy it again!) 

After 36 years, today is the day I get something important off my chest.

There’s a scene in "Back to the Future Part III" (1990) in which time-traveling inventor Doc Brown, trapped in the year 1885, shows Marty McFly an enormous clanking machine whose purpose is a mystery until it deposits a few dirty ice cubes in a bowl. It's an ice maker! Very charming and funny.

My beef: artificial refrigeration had already been invented and was widespread by 1885. Commercial ice plants were operating in most major cities, including Los Angeles, which couldn't have been far from Doc and Marty's fictional Hill Valley, Calif. (which was also somehow within walking distance of Monument Valley, Arizona, but never mind). If Doc Brown wanted ice, he could have copied existing technology or had blocks of it shipped from L.A. on the train he later hijacked. 

I can only reconcile it by thinking of the ice-making scene as a character bit, like how in the first "Back to the Future" movie Doc built an elaborate Rube Goldberg device to feed his dog and cook breakfast. Maybe his Wild West freezer was the same sort of thing: an unnecessarily complicated creation to accomplish something that could have been done much easier but less cinematically or fun.

Otherwise, it's the one piece of the "Back to the Future" trilogy that shatters my suspension of disbelief. Or, as a disappointed Ant-Man realized in "Avengers: Endgame," "So 'Back to the Future' is a bunch of bullshit?!"

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250 Words on the AP Stylebook

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

On my first day writing for a newspaper, I used a serial comma (also known as an Oxford comma), which goes before the “and” in a series like “tea, scones, and jam.” My boss, a crusty sportswriter who’d been on the job for decades and would continue for decades more, deleted it. 

“I think that comma’s optional,” I smart-mouthed back. Without a word, he walked to a shelf, opened a blue-covered spiral-bound book to a dog-eared page, and slapped it on the desk beside me. It was the Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual, the Holy Bible of the newspaper industry, and it forbade serial commas (unless required for clarity).

I read it cover to cover the same day.

Some of my favorite newsroom memories are arguments about tiny details of journalistic style. I still use the AP’s convention of writing out the numbers zero through nine (one, two) and using figures for multi-digit numbers (10, 137), except when they begin a sentence (Two hundred rhinos rampaged…) or are part of a sequence (Act 1, Act 2…) or have a decimal (3.14159) or or or…

There are many exceptions. You might imagine how fast you can get lost in the weeds. 

When I began working with Abrams Books, I was dismayed to learn they follow the competing Chicago Manual of Style, with very different, equally arbitrary, rules. One adapts. Still, decades after I last wrote for a newspaper, AP style remains my default setting. That job hammered it into me.

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PLEASE SUBSCRIBE! I am sharing these little "250 Words On" essays via Substack, which will email a new one to your In Box every Tuesday morning. Just follow this link and enter your email address. It's free, and I promise to never use your address for evil purposes.