[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 22, 2013 by admin in Missing Links
Beyonce’s butt beats Bieber’s, the Lupe Fiasco Fiasco, a cute cat video, and a badass mouse that howls at the moon and eats scorpions and tarantulas.
Apparently, Beyonce isn’t the
first thing on Bill’s mind… |
It probably says something about America that the real buzz about the presidential inauguration yesterday wasn’t driven by Obama’s inspiring vision for the next four years, but focused instead on the first inaugural use of the word “gay”, on who won the Clarkson & Beyonce smackdown, the Lupe Fiasco fiasco, and perhaps most importantly, on which politician sneaked the most peeks at Beyonce’s rear (see below). Frankly, I don’t see how their eyes were aiming so low, with President Obama’s Ceremonial Drone Flyover roaring overhead. We promise to get to the bottom of this issue below, butt first, some shopping tips and YouTubidity: Read the rest of this entry »
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 21, 2013 by admin in Popular Media
So you think you know your Impact from your Hattenschweiler? Your Georgia from your Palatino? Prove it.
My girlfriend sent me a letter.
So I tested and graded it. |
It’s been a long time since we did the Monday Demotivators; as we pointed out when we stopped, with so many people unemployed, it didn’t seem there was anyone to demotivate on Mondays any more! But the other day my girlfriend sent me a letter that inspired me. I mean literally sent me a letter. It was the letter “B”, and she needed to know what typeface it was. And before I go on, let’s just clarify the difference between typeface and font, so the more graphically inclined in your life don’t cringe every time you say “font”. Anyway, since my girlfriend had so little character – or only one character anyway – I couldn’t use the easiest cheat, the What The Font tool at MyFonts.com. So in the process, I learned that – like any normal person – she couldn’t tell Palatino from Times, Ariel from Helvetica, or Futura from Avant Garde. I also learned that in spite of hundreds of hours of yearning, searching, and kerning, I’m a bit of a typetard myself. Are YOU a font of typeface wisdom? Let’s find out. First, a super easy test, especially if you’re hipster enough to have seen the film Helvetica
. If you can’t pass the So you think you can tell Arial from Helvetica? quiz, you’re a total noob. Your next logical choice if you failed that one would be Sara Newton’s Fontastic Quiz, which provides some verbal cues for the fontographically impaired. Bumping it up a notch, we have the iFont game , which is still multiple choice, but a little challenging. Which is why the original version was called The Rather Difficult Font Game. And if you’re more interested in knowing what type YOU are, rather than the other way around, you may want to try the What Type Are You (has audio) from the design firm Pentagram. Happy Monday!
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 20, 2013 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Doublespeak isn’t really lying, it’s just a temporary failure to implement honesty.
I was at a meeting the other day in which someone questioned the need to “be honest” about something that had occurred at the office the day before. This led to a rambling, circuitous dialogue about what truth and honesty mean, and when and whether they’re important. The ensuing debate utilized all the usual justifications for deception, like “protecting feelings” or the likelihood that a trivial negative truth would distort an overall message. At first I was quietly lamenting the demise of basic honesty in our lives, but as the debate rolled on and became more convoluted, I was reminded of a book that came out in the 90′s called Doublespeak Defined
. It was a clever collection of the common doublespeak of the era. Later in the day I pulled the book off the shelf for the first time in ages, and I have to admit that although some of the examples cited in the book still provided a laugh, what struck me more was how the language almost sounded normal. But I guess in an era when message consultants like Frank Luntz (political consultant and author of Words That Work
), are able to transform a term for something you’ve already paid for – like “social security” – into something it sounds like you don’t deserve – like “entitlements”, or when “stockpiling machine guns” means “exercising Second Amendment rights”, this shouldn’t be surprising. But the real world impact of the thinking caused by this kind of language usage can have tangible unfortunate results. One example I ran across recently was a term used amongst shareholders and executives inside the insurance industry. The term “Medical Loss Ratio” (ironically also called the “benefit ratio”, a classic example of doublespeak), refers to the percentage of an insurance company’s revenue that is paid out to policy holders. A high MLR means that the company paid a lot out in benefits, and this will make shareholders unhappy, so that the stock will go down, which means the CEO probably won’t get a bonus. The irony here of course being that everyone inside the company benefits when Read the rest of this entry »
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 19, 2013 by admin in Comics
In pursuit of the purrfect Meow Mix.
Remember Caturday?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 18, 2013 by admin in Clean & Green
Poor, poor fracking. It’s so misunderstood.
It’s amazing how many people still haven’t heard about fracking, or are only superficially aware of what it is. Especially since now you can actually see the results of it from orbit. Even in New York state – an area where public water resources are most likely to be devastated by the process, public sentiment is still split almost 50-50. And although the recent release of the film Promised Land
(starring Matt Damon) offered hopes of bringing attention to the issue, its early performance at the box office suggests otherwise. And it probably won’t help that the cash-flush energy industry is pouring on the public relations spigot to buy ad time that screens before the movie, right in the theater. So if you have no idea what the frack hydraulic fracturing is, and don’t feel like sitting through energy industry propaganda followed by a Gus Van Sant film, a good place to start is probably the award-winning documentary Gasland
. Nothing gets a point across like watching people’s tap water catch fire. Which is one of the many disturbing side effects of fracking. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of intelligent arguments in favor of fracking. Malcolm Gissen points out that poor fracking is just misunderstood. And Kevin D. Williamson points out that we need to face our frack hysteria. And then there’s the website ResourcefulEarth.org, which points out that “the shale gas revolution is firing up an old-fashioned American industrial revival, breathing life into businesses”. The problem is, these intelligent people are basically shills. Malcolm Gissen says in that article that he considers himself an environmentalist, but his only significant pursuits for the last decade have been in investment counseling. And Kevin D. Williamson is a writer/editor with the National Review. He has a book on Amazon
, and in the description it says the book will explain “how the ideology has spawned crushing poverty, devastating famines, and horrific wars. Lumbering from one crisis to the next, leaving a trail of economic devastation and environmental catastrophe…” Sounds like an anti-capitalist tree hugger rant, right? Well, it would, if the the book weren’t called “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism” . And that website referenced? As is so often the case these days, if something is really bad for you, there are plenty of front groups paid for by the people who don’t give a shit about anything but their bottom line to tell you that it’s not. And the breezy “green” design style of that site masks the fact that it’s operated by the “Competitive Enterprise Institute”, which which SourceWatch points out has long ties to tobacco disinformation campaigns and climate change denial. So as you ponder the cases presented by the experts on either side of the fracking debate, you might want to ponder the expert’s motivation. Who knows. Maybe the indictments and record $4.5 billion penalties in the gulf oil spill case have made energy exec’s hearts soften to the value of human life and a clean Earth. I mean, they have nothing to hide, right?
