I’ve written here before how I have yet to read or hear anything from or by Barack Obama that is anything other than lawyerly obfuscation and manipulation. The liberal media will go on and on blushing about Obama’s greatness and his poetic language, or whatever they deem transcendent...
Turns out our neighbors to the north have quite a (sarcastic) sense of humor about them.
You have to read the article and then at least the first ten comments to get the true joy out of this reading experience (read Rhino especially):
BEWARE THE KILLER HOT DOGS
see more Engrish
Who will save us?
Who will save book publishing?
What will save the newspapers?
What means 'save'?
If by save you mean, "what will keep things just as they are?" then the answer is nothing will. It's over.
If by save you mean, "who will keep the jobs of the pressmen and the delivery guys and the squadrons of accountants and box makers and transshippers and bookstore buyers and assistant editors and coffee boys," then the answer is still nothing will. Not the Kindle, not the iPad, not an act of Congress.
We need to get past this idea of saving, because the status quo is leaving the building, and quickly. Not just in print of course, but in your industry too.
If you want to know who will save the joy of reading something funny, or the leverage of acting on fresh news or the importance of allowing yourself to be changed by something in a book, then don't worry. It doesn't need saving. In fact, this is the moment when we can figure out how to increase those benefits by a factor of ten, precisely because we don't have to spend a lot of resources on the saving part.
Every revolution destroys the average middle first and most savagely.
Stolen shamelessly without permission from Seth Godin's Blog. Read this and mull it over many times and prepare for the future.
Actually, I don't have ten, but it's a nice number to project authority on a subject matter, which is why using lists and touting them in a blog post's title helps make the thing go viral. I guess people cannot digest paragraphs, or good ol' expository writing or–heaven help us!–essays anymore. They need lists, so they can have etch little compartments in their tiny little brains and also have food for fodder when trying to sound authoritative on a subject: "Yeah, there are three good reasons why…blah, blah, blah."
So my main (numbers one through ten) reason for generally shunning lists is this–you can't develop a logical argument or a good piece of exposition by hanging it all on lists. Oh, sure, you can squeeze in a list in lots of written pieces, but I'd say for the most part lists are mere shameless expositions of laziness (when it comes to writing) and hasty ploys to go viral for an audience that disdains having to read and be led to a logical conclusion.
When I read the following article on "blogging like the British," I kept trying to figure ways I could use lists on my restaurant review site, but nothing seemed to really fit the challenge. What am supposed to write, something that goes "the ten reasons I hate Jenny's Slop House are…"?
Anyway, the article has lots of good advice in it, but I would not agree that you have to spell out numbers through 100 (read: one hundred). I start using digits at 10, and that's a good enough artifice (most books might say to use digits after ten) for everyday writing.
Earlier, the Oxford Dictionary named unfriend the Word of the Year, and now the American Dialect Society has proclaimed google (lower case for Web searches) as the Word of the Decade.
Bing, the Microsoft search engine, has chimed in by announcing that Twitter was the most popular word of 2009.
What does all this mean? That we spend too much time on the Net, and we should remind ourselves to get a life in 2010.
Google that, will ya?
I guess it’s best to start with the positive (no plural). At least disgraced baseball slugger Mark McGwire had the courage to own up to his steroid abuse–partially anyway.
In admitting yesterday that he had used steroids (whose names he conveniently couldn’t remember), McGwire fell back on what has now become the number-one cop-out defense of their use. He used them for medicinal purposes.
He was okay up until that point, had he just gone on and said he didn’t realize he’d get hooked when he saw what they did for his performance on the field. Instead, during an hourlong interview with Bob Costas, he repeatedly denied that using steroids gave him any performance boost. He instead thanked "The Man Up Above" for his power to whack 70 home runs at an age (34) when most baseball players are fading fast.
Those who have been exposed as steroid users have now fallen on three standard defenses: complete and utter denial (Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds), "I didn’t know I was taking them because they were in a vitamin a teammate gave me" (Rafael Palmiero), and medicinal use (McGwire, Andy Pettitte).
Another approach is MLB-sanctioned and team-complicit silence (Manny Ramirez), but one should expect nothing less from a sleazeball organization like the L.A. Dodgers.
Anyway, call McGwire’s defense "The Super Acetaminophine Explanation": Using steroids in "low doses" healed my body without giving me any additional strength or endurance, so it was all okay.
Then if it were all okay, why the hell did you break down and cry on TV and make the rounds of apologizing to everyone, including the Roger Maris family? Remember, Mark, they were just pain killers and body healers, not performance enhancers. No need to apologize for that, now is there?
College and universities have long required applicants to write essays to evaluate their ability to reason and use the English language effectively.
However, what on earth would answers to any of these questions ever reveal on the reasoning side:
How do you feel about Wednesday? (University of Chicago, 2002)
Are we alone? (Tufts, 2009)
Make a bold prediction about something in the year 2010 that no one else has made a bold prediction about. (University of Virginia, 1999)
First we had Roger Clemens and his use of misremembers, and now the New Oxford American Dictionary has chosen unfriend as its Word of the Year.
The dictionary defines unfriend this way:
"To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook."
What next, "I unlove you and want a divorce"?
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