Hacker News Reader

Not necessarily "hacks" per se, but Language Log is quite good: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/

William Safire's weekly "On Language" piece in the Sunday New York Times did this type of thing for decades and was required reading in my English classes. Sadly he passed on recently but you should be able to find stuff like this in his books or in his articles in the NYT Archive.

I think Safire would probably have suggested that you used "died" rather than "passed on". No?

He would also have suggested a comma after "sadly," so that it's obvious that it's the writer's comment, rather than a modifier on the way Safire died.

You have to read this (I read the french version, I hope the english one is close):

A Short Course in Intellectual Self-Defense

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583227652

I occasionally return to this and browse around: http://www.nt.armstrong.edu/terms.htm

The examples are great.