Wavedash

Seen on my morning commute to work. The SUV’s owner wrote “HIRE ME. SMU MBA - FINANCE.” followed by his (her?) gmail and phone number, on all three rear windows. The best part is the contrast between “MBA - FINANCE” and a medium usually reserved for highschool Homecoming.

Somehow I doubt slapping “MBA” on the back of your car is going to lead to many job offers.

“Economy” means frugal restrained, which has come to mean “cheap.” Economy class. Economy car. Economy-sized. If you’re “economical,” you’re efficient with your money and focused on reducing expenditures.

So isn’t the phrase “Consumer Economy” a contradiction?

It’s appropriate that Environmentalism finally becomes the target of Internet-driven grassroots efforts. After all, the Internet and Environmentalism were both invented by Al Gore. Right? Right. (Sorry, I’ll leave the decade-old jokes alone for the rest of this post.)

Grassroots efforts to get the local school to switch to new lightbulbs are all well and good, but the activists (and now entrepreneurs) over at Carrotmob combine the momentum of the “Green” movement with social networking savvy. Executive summary: Carrotmob negotiates with local businesses to get “bids” on which will make a bigger commitment to greening their company. Then, members descend on the winner with cash in hand and patronize the store, ideally giving it a hefty boost in profits for the day. The idea is to reward businesses with a mob. Like a carrot on a stick. Get it?

It’s a cute idea. Even more exciting, though, is the way it captures the difference between “going green” and old-school Environmentalism. Earth Day is great, but Americans were never really able to separate Environmentalism from dirty vegetarian hippies who want only to ruin your fun. Or something.

The new movement (or fad, depending on who you talk to) combines Environmentalism with the most powerful force in America: consumerism. Continue reading →

How funny that commencement speeches are almost always boring. Except for the rare occasion, you get riled up and excited (or furious that LAST year they got BILL COSBY and THIS YEAR we get the MAYOR I mean COME ON did they even TRY? - but that, too, is tied to each class’s sense of entitlement to a brash, dashing, exciting speaker). This is the end of college, your victory day. Graduation. You *did* it. Only the speech is the rhetorical equivalent to breakfast cereal. It’s either dull or uselessly saccharine, and never as exciting as the packaging promised. About halfway through the speech, you slump in your chair and realize graduating college is not a thrilling event. You aren’t unleashed onto the world. You’re cast into it, ostracized from the debaucherous Never Never Land of College U. Your four years of themed parties (which all boil down to guys in boxers and girls in schoolgirl outfits), staying up all night to argue the difference between Lawful Evil and Chaotic Neutral, and in general being surrounded by aspiring people of infinite potential, all end with someone who has allegedly “achieved” something that you suspect was less fun than cramming fourteen people into a Camry to go to Taco Bell.

This is why commencement speeches invariably disappoint, and why the late David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon Commencement Speech is so breathtaking.

Hm, perhaps that’s a poor choice of words, which DFW would have enjoyed pointing out. So I’ll leave it be.

Ah, Monday. What better day than Monday to take pleasure in other people’s displeasure? You’re back at work (stop reading blogs on company time, you miscreant!) and have not one, not two, but five full days before you reach 40 hours.

To make you feel better, here’s a video of Houston drivers getting hit by lightrail trams.

Some background: during my time living in Houston, the city completed its controversial lightrail system in an attempt to alleviate traffic congestion. Forbes recently declared Houston the 5th most traffic-congested city in the country, placing it behind San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. Houston beat out Boston, Chicago and New York City.

Don’t worry, people of Houston. If you keep ignoring the plain-as-day “No Left Turn” signs and getting hit by trams, you’ll be #1 in no time.

Have you ever noticed that:

In most matters, impatience is an anxiousness for something you want to become something you have.

In matters of love, impatience is a fear that what you have won’t last long enough to become what you want.

Oh dear, I’ve gone and violated Godwin’s Law. At least I got it out of the way early, which was unavoidable as the entire point of this post is a review I read of Pat Buchanan’s new book. The former Nixon Adviser/former presidential candidate/current MSNB correspondent hops aboard the World War II revisionism short bus, and it’s obvious the NY Sun reviewer enjoyed lumping his book in with recent far-left attempts at the same. Buchanan’s thesis, according to the review, is simple: we (in particular, Britain) should not have entered war with Germany.

From the review:

There is really only one controversial claim in “Hitler, Churchill, and the Unnecessary War.” This is the notion that Britain should not have offered to guarantee Poland against Nazi aggression in April 1939, and so would not have had to go to war when the aggression came that September. This would have been the wiser course, Mr. Buchanan argues, because Hitler had no interest in war with Britain. In fact, he admired the English as racial comrades, and more than once floated the prospect of the two nations dividing up the world between them. His real target was the Soviet Union, and it would have been better for Britain and the world to allow those two monstrous tyrannies to fight each other alone.

Extrapolating this idea made for an interesting thought experiment. The review goes on to outline how Germany, if all was quiet on the western front, would have easily been the first European to win a land war in Asia. But taking Buchanan’s ideas and expanding them, suppose Hitler had only succeeded in conquering Europe, Stalin cemented his bloc in the east, and England and the U.S. remained neutral. Buchanan argues that the conflict would have been so great between the two fraternal twin totalitarian regimes that it would have solved both, and we would be living in a western wonderland today.

My question is, besides in the great Butter Battle, when has this happened?

Continue reading →

Have you ever noticed that:

When you nail a point, it’s the same as when you hit the nail on the head? Both imply precision, even though nailing a picture to the wall is much different than squarely hitting a nail once. Congrats on not hitting your thumb, I guess.

Then you can hammer something. If you nail a question, you got it right without difficulty. If you hammer your point home, you engaged in rhetorical brutality, pushing your position over and over until you succeeded. But how often do you use a hammer without a nail? Shouldn’t their respective metaphors be the same?

If a baseball player nailed the ball, the phrase implies he swung the bat accurately and skillfully. If he hammered the ball, he struck it with a powerful swing.

It goes to show how two tools that work together for a single purpose (to attach one thing to another thing) can take on different connotations. Once that divide occurs, the metaphors begin to diverge even further. After all, what would you think if someone said, “Man, I got so nailed last night, and then I hammered this chick?”