I only today caught up on last Sunday’s New York Times Style Magazine, a seasonal supplement I read if I have time. Mainly I avoid it because it angers me that I will never have a salary large enough to be considered among the magazine’s demographic, people who can relate to articles with leads that begin like this: “When the architect Annabelle Selldorf designed her dream kitchen in her weekend home in East Hampton....”

I felt better reading a one-pager in it by Alexandra Jacobs, an editor for The New York Observer, who writes that she “abohor[s] music’s slow seepage into every nook and cranny of American life,” particularly when she’s dining. Aside from taking a position I disagree with, and it being a trend piece that seems to base its trend on something that happened only to the author and a few of her friends, her article contains the most winceworthy simile I’ve read recently:

While entertaining, he simply summons a station of streaming commercial-free indie rock through his computer, like a school of salmon over that great river of the Internet.

Like a school of salmon? This phrase brings the author’s whiny enterprise to a halt. It doesn’t seem to have been made in jest (although possibly ignorance, in that venerable mainstream media tradition of being five years behind on general knowledge of technology and pop culture).

It’s so bad, I’ll conclude with this photo of a salmon striving to justify its small existence, much like Alexandra Jacobs writing.