New Law Would Ban Marriages Between People Who Don’t Love Each Other
Gosh but I hope one or two homophobes stumble across this delightful send up.
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From the category archives:
Current Affairs
“I think we ought to get it over with once and for all and ask all the people who are interested in banning words to get together and form their inevitable committee on word propriety. I think it would be a great thing if we could just get the list together ahead of time, along with what the committee feels the appropriate sanction is for each word. “Ho” we know is a fireable word, as is “niggardly,” but what about “snapper”? How about “curry muncher”? What is the appropriate punishment for a “What’s wrong, do you have sand in your vagina?” joke? I mean there are so many unknowns right now, nobody knows where he or she stands.”
Excuse me, but I have to go look up “curry muncher.”
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Mark Ramsey has done another interview with Seth Godin that I highly recommend. Mr. Godin is promoting his new book, “Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?” I encourage you to listen to the interview. It isn’t long. Here are a few excerpts:
“…school was organized by the powers-that-be to turn the typical student into a compliant, quiet, sit-in-straight-rows, fill-in-little-circles-on-the-SAT, follow-the-path, go-to-the-job-you-get-at-the-placement-office kind of person. And there’s a reason for that: It’s that if you are the organization busy hiring people, the more people you have who want to do the jobs you’ve got, the cheaper you can get away with paying them. As a result, we’ve created a culture where a few people are able to drive the agenda and a lot of people end up working hard to fit in and have a lot of fear about doing anything but that.”
“You read about people who are making $80K, $90K, $200K a year as middle managers for Fortune 500 companies, and then they get laid off and can’t make $15,000 a year working at a 7-11, and the question I’d ask is: Where did the $70,000 worth of value go? Did the person change or just their income?”
“It’s a crisis because all these years that we were watching blue collar people lose their jobs, exported to China or wherever… All these years that we watched machines replace people on assembly lines, we just shook our heads and said that’s really sad but that’s not us, that’s them – good thing it’s not us. And now it’s us, now they’ve come for us.”
“Well, I think that broadcasters have now embraced the fact that spectrum is finally on its way to being valueless. It was an 80-year run, but there’s no intelligent person I know that says that in 10 or 15 years from now they are going to be glad they own 660 on the AM dial.”
“All those kids who are in school today, who are learning how to do the jobs of 1960 or 1970, they’re in big trouble. All those 40- or 50-year-old executives who are hoping they’re going to wait this thing out, they’re in really big trouble.”
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The Hurt Locker more than lived up to its billing as an “intense” film. Black Hawk Down intense. Only the men and women who have served in Iraq (or who live there) can say how real the movie is. Real enough, I suspect.
I’m not sure the film makers had any sort of political statement to make about our presence in Iraq, but I came away thinking there is no way to win such a war. Unless the last suicide bomber blowing up the last Humvee with the last chunk of siMMtec counts as winning. Not sure what it would look like for our side.
The “can’t go home again” theme reminded me of Tommy Lee Jones’ character in Rolling Thunder. I still don’t know what to make of the brief appearances by David Morse, Ralph Fiennes and Guy Pearce.
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Every year the Well (one of the early, pre-web, online communities) invites Bruce Sterling to chat about the state of the world. This year, he paints a grim picture of where the “present” is heading:
“Various entities and institutions have scrambled together safety pins and gobs of glue to rig the global economy so that it appears to be ambling along, but isn’t it a great conceptual Jenga, ready to fall if you move the wrong block? What kind of shuffling and reshuffling can we expect, if there’s a global economic meltdown? And has the collapse already happened – are we like the coyote, run far beyond the edge of the cliff, waiting for gravity’s effect?”
On Google News and Twitter:
“I’m looking over my Twitter stream here, because it seems a more useful barometer to me now than Google News. Google News definitely has that rickety Jenga feeling that JonL is talking about. Whenever you see something on Google News nowadays, you have to wonder: “who owns this so-called news organization now? What’s left of them financially? Is there even a shred of objective fact in this?”
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A reader of Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish wonders why the undie-bomber didn’t just blow himself up in the toilet. It’s a good question, worth a full read. The fact is, the Bad Guys really don’t have to blow themselves up anymore.
Some guy strolls past security at the Newark airport and brings the airport —and much of the country— to a grinding halt. Shit, they can do that all day long.
Here’s one from the Abdullah Smays Dot Com Terrerorist play-book:
Twenty two-man teams dressed in hazmat suits. Maybe have the bio-hazard logo on the back. Each team just walks through a high-traffic area like a mall, an airport, football stadium. People would go ape shit trying to get out. Everything would shut down for hours. Hell, I’m not even sure it’s illegal to wear a hazmat suit.
Reminds me of a Peter O’Toole/Audrey Hepburn movie (How to Steal a Million, 1966) where they keep setting off the alarm in a Paris museum. The cops keep responding, only to find nothing. They finally turn off the alarm.
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In his final Stop the Presses column (for Editor & Publisher), Steve Outing revises history with a look at how things might have gone for the newspaper industry. And –since they didn’t– what to expect next. From the HTMHG list:
1. In 1994-95, newspaper executives recognize that the Web is something with the potential to rock their world, and increase R&D budgets significantly in order to plan for and begin building new businesses based on fast-developing new technology.
2. Learning from media history (e.g., TV started out as radio with a video image of the announcer speaking into a microphone), newspaper leaders decide not to repeat it this time around. They direct new-media R&D staff to design new online services that create original content and new utilities — things that are not possible in print but are online.
3. Fat and happy with enviable profit margins, newspaper companies’ leaders take note of the wave of Internet start-up companies in the late 1990s. Business development executives with technology experience are brought in from outside the newspaper industry to identify the most promising trends and start-up companies, and begin making acquisitions and/or significant investments, in a big way.
You get the idea. I do dread the day I read a similar “what might have been” about the broadcasting industry.
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