Totally fascinating piece at BBC News recently:
People may be able to taste words
We are all capable of "hearing" shapes and sizes and perhaps even "tasting" sounds, according to researchers.
This blending of sensory experiences, or synaesthesia, they say, influences our perception and helps us make sense of a jumble of simultaneous sensations.
A promo on MSNBC during Keith Olbermann's show last night tried to tease viewers into watching another program on the network because it would be discusssing the "politically motivated shootings" that occurred at that Kansas abortion clinic and the Holocaust museum in Washington DC.
I guess 9/11 was merely a series of politically motivated plane crashes, then.
So much for the "liberal" media: it can't even call terrorism "terrorism."
Sometimes you stumble across a piece of writing that is so brilliantly nutty, so rife with vocabulary that argues the precise opposite of what the author intends, that you simply cannot let it pass by unheralded.
Such is the case with an essay by Sam Schulman in The Weekly Standard called "The Worst Thing About Gay Marriage."
You must keep in mind, as you read these choice excerpts, that Schulman believes gay marriage is a terrible idea, but more importantly, he believes the entire concept will self-implode because it is not feasible. His reasons for believing this include:
Gay marriage is not burdened with a legacy of historical bullshit about the dominance of one gender over another:
This most profound aspect of marriage--protecting and controlling the sexuality of the child-bearing sex--is its only true reason for being, and it has no equivalent in same-sex marriage. Virginity until marriage, arranged marriages, the special status of the sexuality of one partner but not the other (and her protection from the other sex)--these motivating forces for marriage do not apply to same-sex lovers.
Every Saturday, Markos posts some of the infinitely entertaing hate mail Daily Kos receives, and one of today's batch jumped right out at me:
Trust me when I say this, only a few arrogant egotistical bookworms buy the dribble you produce. The problem we face today, sit squarely in the laps of the dems.. But, please keep on showing your bigot reporting and interpertation skills, its great entertainment.
Oh noes, the readers, they'll doom us all!
It truly does astonish me, the fear that the love of reading instills in some people. It's almost as if those folks know their placement of commas, their lack of usage of apostrophes, and their refusal to match tenses are wrong, and so they are forestalling the pointing out of such. "I, sir, am an American," you can almost hear the perfect embodiment of those folks declaring, "and have no need for such homosexual fripperies as proper grammar or the self-reflection that reading encourages."
This one was a close second, though:
I find [a Daily Kos diarist who shall remain nameless] many comments full of vulgar wording such as the frequent use of the four-letter word beginning with a F. There are women reading these comments, and we are ladies, and we find his use of the word so often, offensive.
Is this a spoof from Ladies Against Women? Alas, it appears to be genuine. If being a "lady" means engaging in self-censorship and the limiting one's language, then fuck that goddamn shit. O, who will protect the ladies from indelicate vocabulary? It's hard to believe females like this still exist in the 21st century...
[This was originally posted on January 22, but I'm gonna bump it up every day.]
4/29: Did I miscount again? Today is the 100th day? Ah... I started counting with the first real day of work, on Wednesday, January 21st. Silly me...
4/28: Looks like I miscounted somewhere. The 100th day will be Thursday the 30th, with the final word being posted the next day.
4/25: Another two-fer as we come down to the wire...
4/9: Another missed day yesterday, so another two-fer...
3/25: Missed a day yesterday, so a two-fer today...
3/11: Yesterday was the 50th day of the Obama administration, so we're halfway through the honeymoon.
2/21: Ooops. I repeated a word: I just noticed that I used "stimulus" twice, and here I've been trying to avoid repeating words. I beg forgiveness and claim ongoing illness on that day.
In my surfing this morning I came across the phrase "100 words for 100 days," and I thought, Cool. A single word each day to describe that day's progress in the Obama adminstration? Cool.
Turns out the phrase was not being used in that way, and it was being used for some PR thing that I have absolutely no interest in. But I like it anyway, so I'm stealing it.
Yesterday was Day One, and now, with the day's events behind us, we can sum it up in one word -- or we can try, at least. So I start today, with yesterday's word. Day 100 will be May 1, so I'll post the 100th word on May 2.
(Gonna be fun keeping up with this while I'm in London for 10 days in February, but I thrive on impossible tasks...)
If you've ever worked in corporate America, read a press release, participated in a focus group, or otherwise encountered those oddities of wordsmithing that are all about using language to make things less clear rather than actually deploying them to communicate in a useful way, you'll love the Landscape Urbanism Bullshit Generator. Click the "make bullshit" button, and out spouts bullshit phrase like:
"rectify front-end convergence"
"brand integrated partnerships"
"aggregate integrated niches"
Have fun.
(h/t Danielle)
As seen in The Times of London, in an article by Philip Delves Broughton, as a new definition for "MBA."
He's being kind, because this is how he -- an MBA himself -- opens his piece:
If Robespierre were to ascend from hell and seek out today's guillotine fodder, he might start with a list of those with three incriminating initials beside their names: MBA. The Masters of Business Administration, that swollen class of jargon-spewing, value-destroying financiers and consultants have done more than any other group of people to create the economic misery we find ourselves in.
Yikes.
(word of the day/phrase of the day: I highlight a word or phrase, especially new coinages or clever usages, that tickles me)
Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink
• Newspaper to be available only on messaging service
• Experts say any story can be told in 140 characters
The whole thing -- over at the still unTwitterized Guardian -- is a hoot to read, but my favorite bits are the historical stories that have been reworked:
A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper's archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include "1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!"; "OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more"; and "JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?"
As seen in The New York Times, and lots of other venues, as a compromise to avoid panicking us peons worried about money while also imparting the urgency of our economic predicament.
Used in a sentence (from 2047): "Sonny, during the Great Recession, we still used fossil-fuel-powered mass transit, and we liked it!"
(word of the day/phrase of the day: I highlight a word or phrase, especially new coinages or clever usages, that tickles me)
Uttered by U.K. blogger Katyboo, whom my pal Bonnie and I met up with today in London for fun and food and wine: drunked out.
Used in a sentence: "Yeah, my mate went to college for a while, but then she drunked out."
(word of the day/phrase of the day: I highlight a word or phrase, especially new coinages or clever usages, that tickles me)
