Friday, November 15, 2013
NAME CHANGE
Welcome to jimjustsaying (formerly SZSEZ). Same wine, new bottle. Thanks for visiting; I hope you like what you see and visit here again....Jim Szantor
CELEBRITY ENDORSEMENTS
What they're saying about Jim's provocative blog:
--"The most fun you can have with your clothes on (but DO take a shower afterwards)."--Dick Cavett
--"If Jim writes it, I'm there!"--Larry King
--"Almost too entertaining!"--David Letterman
--"Almost too entertaining!"--David Letterman
--"Blogaschizzle!"--Snoop Lion
--"The one thing I DO read!"--Sarah Palin
--"About what you'd expect from a dopey, sniveling piece of execrable skunk vomit from Wisconsin!"--Don Imus--"The most fun you can have with your clothes on (but DO take a shower afterwards)."--Dick Cavett
POPCORN
- The use of colored paper clips is an obvious cry for help.
- Common Advertising Pitch of Our Times: "You can now pre-order [name of gizmo or gadget or Harry Potter book here]." Pre-order? You can either order something, or you can't. There's no such thing as a "pre-order." What they really want is your money for something that either (a) doesn't exist yet or (b) if it does, is somewhere in a cargo hold in Hong Kong harbor.
- So, next time you get an e-mail pitch to "pre-order" something you have no intention of ordering anyway, please reply with a notice of "pre-indifference" or "pre-refusal" to their request. I'm not sure they would "pre-appreciate" it, but "pre- do" it anyway. (I "pre-thank" you!)
- I don't know which I hate most--changing the vacuum-cleaner bag or the ink cartridges in my printer. (But I know which one costs the most!)
- Why do people eat out at "homestyle" restaurants? When I eat out, I want a "restaurant style" restaurant.
- jimjustsaying's Law of Dining: $5 is the point at which a hamburger or a plate of spaghetti are as good as they're going to get.
- I've been on a health kick, but maybe too much so. I'm looking for a decaffeinated coffee table.
- Today's Foreign Word With No English Equivalent: Shemomedjamo (Georgian). You know when you're really full, but your meal is just so delicious, you can't stop eating it? The Georgians feel your pain. This word means, "I accidentally ate the whole thing."
- Why are Barbara Walters and Morley Safer still working? Did they give all their money to Bernie Madoff?
- jimjustsaying's Media Word of the Week (a word you'll see in print but never hear an actual person use in real life): "Nettlesome."
- Is there a Soft Rock Cafe for trendy middle-age folks?
- Jim's Time-saver Tip of the Week: If you close all the vents on your car except the one closest to you and turn it up high, you can blow-dry your hair while you drive.
- "War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”--Ambrose Bierce
- The Moon: A heavenly body that affects the tide and the untied.
- Web sites are like sex: When you interact with one, you're interacting with every Web site that that Web site has ever interacted with.
- The Home Shopping Network is a classic example of an idea that went wrong somewhere between conception and execution and kept getting worse.
- Three things I've never seen in Sturgeon Bay: A panhandler, a street mime and someone getting a shoeshine.
- Jim's Party Icebreaker of the Week: "Did you know that the pig is the only animal that sunburns? That ants never sleep? That the whip-poor-will is the only bird that hibernates?"
- Fortune Cookie Message o' the Month: "A tub and a rub will change your day."
- Jargoneering: "Upsalite"--The world's most absorbent substance at low relative humidity, says Wired.Com's Jonathon Keats.
- Created almost by accident, Upsalite has an estimated 1 trillion pores per gram, making it up to 20 times more absorbent than cat litter. Uses? Toxic-waste cleanup and controlling humidity in the manufacture of electronics. (Kind of hard to work into a conversation, but there you have it, yey another public service of jimjustsaying.com)
- Newspaper Obituary Nickname of the Week: "Bossy." As in Frank "Bossy" Barca (Kenosha News obituary, July 26, 2013). R.I.P., Mr. Barca.
- 48th Wisconsin Town I Didn't Know Existed Until I Saw It Mentioned in a Green Bay Press-Gazette Obituary: Wild Rose. (R.I.P. Kenneth Tronnier, Green Bay Press-Gazette obituary, Oct. 17, 2013). Previous entries: Athelstane, Walhain, Duck Creek, Breed, Anston, Sobieski, Amberg, Osseo, Angelica, Brazeau, Waukechon, Sugar Camp, Kossuth, Lessor, Kunesh, Pulcifer, Cato, Florence, Greenleaf, Eaton, Poygan, Hofa Park, Hilbert, Hollandtown, Beaufort, Glennie, Harshaw, Bessemer, Crooked Lake, Tigerton, Goodman, Readstown, Dousman, Butternut, Montpelier, Cecil, Red River, Gillet, King, Laona, Kelly Lake, Glenmore, Tonet, Stiles, Morrison, Dunbar and Askeaoton.
- Today's Latin Lesson: Nos affero procul muneris. ("We gave at the office.")
THE QUOTE RACK
Addicted to the Apocalypse
Once upon a time, walking around shouting “The end is nigh” got you labeled a kook, someone not to be taken seriously. These days, however, all the best people go around warning of looming disaster. In fact, you more or less have to subscribe to fantasies of fiscal apocalypse to be considered respectable.
And I do mean fantasies. Washington has spent the past three-plus years in terror of a debt crisis that keeps not happening, and, in fact, can’t happen to a country like the United States, which has its own currency and borrows in that currency. Yet the scaremongers can’t bring themselves to let go.
. . . Consider the deficit-scold organization Fix the Debt, led by the omnipresent Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles. It was, I suppose, predictable that Fix the Debt would respond to the latest budget deal with a press release trying to shift the focus to its favorite subject. But the organization wasn’t content with declaring that America’s long-run budget issues remain unresolved, which is true. It had to warn that “continuing to delay confronting our debt is letting a fire burn that could get out of control at any moment.”
. . . There are two remarkable things about this kind of doomsaying. One is that the doomsayers haven’t rethought their premises despite being wrong again and again--perhaps because the news media continue to treat them with immense respect. The other is that as far as I can tell nobody, and I mean nobody, in the looming-apocalypse camp has tried to explain exactly how the predicted disaster would actually work.
On the Chicken Little aspect: It’s actually awesome, in a way, to realize how long cries of looming disaster have filled our airwaves and op-ed pages. For example, I just reread an op-ed article by Alan Greenspan in The Wall Street Journal, warning that our budget deficit will lead to soaring inflation and interest rates. What about the reality of low inflation and low rates? That, he declares in the article, is “regrettable, because it is fostering a sense of complacency.”
It’s curious how readily people who normally revere the wisdom of markets declare the markets all wrong when they fail to panic the way they’re supposed to. But the really striking thing at this point is the date: Mr. Greenspan’s article was published in June 2010, almost three and a half years ago--and both inflation and interest rates remain low.
So has the ex-Maestro reconsidered his views after having been so wrong for so long? Not a bit. His new (and pretty bad) book declares that “the bias toward unconstrained deficit spending is our top domestic economic problem.”
Meanwhile, about that oft-prophesied, never-arriving debt crisis: In Senate testimony more than two and half years ago, Mr. Bowles warned that we were likely to face a fiscal crisis within around two years, and he urged his listeners to “just stop for a minute and think about what happens” if “our bankers in Asia” stop buying our debt. But has he, or anyone in his camp, actually tried to think through what would happen? No, not really. They just assume that it would cause soaring interest rates and economic collapse, when both theory and evidence suggest otherwise. . . .
So the next time you see some serious-looking man in a suit declaring that we’re teetering on the precipice of fiscal doom, don’t be afraid. He and his friends have been wrong about everything so far, and they literally have no idea what they’re talking about.
The schmooze news
What pundits like [Maureen] Dowd never point out is that for all his schmoozing, Bill Clinton got the government shut down on him not once, but twice! And for far longer. Moreover, these same Republicans who he had sucked up to spent months investigating him and embarrassing him before the world, before they voted to impeach him. So spare me if I do not buy into this Clinton negotiated and Obama does not. Even he said he would not negotiate with Republicans over funding government.
Early--very early--and often
Authoritarian Azerbaijan accidentally announced the re-election of President Ilham Aliyev a day before the polls opened. The Central Election Commission’s smartphone app showed Aliyev winning a third term with 73 percent of the vote, with just 7.4 percent going for opposition candidate Jamil Hasanli. The CEC quickly retracted the "results," saying it had mistakenly republished the last election’s returns, but since Hasanli didn’t run in 2008, that seemed implausible. The country, ruled by either Aliyev or his father since 1993, has never held an election that Western observers deemed free and fair.
In his "60 Minutes" interview with Dick Cheney, Dr .Sanjay Gupta made it clear that Dick Cheney had gotten special treatment to ascend to the vice presidency, given that he’d already had three heart attacks, the first one at 37. As Dr. Gupta noted, the Bush campaign was concerned enough to check with the famed Texas heart surgeon Denton Cooley, who talked to Dr. Reiner and then informed the Bush team--with no examination--that Cheney was in "good health with normal cardiac function."
"The normal cardiac function wasn’t true," Dr. Gupta said to Cheney.
"I’m not responsible for that," replied the man who never takes responsibility for any of his dark deeds. "I don’t know what took place between the doctors."
Four months after being cleared, Cheney suffered his fourth heart attack during the 2000 recount and had to get a stent put in to open a clogged artery.
If the doctors had not signed off on Cheney’s heart as "normal," then Cheney would never have been vice president, and Donald Rumsfeld never would have been defense secretary, and Paul Wolfowitz never would have been his deputy, etc., etc. And W. wouldn’t have been pushed and diverted into Iraq.
Hello, smartphone; goodbye, smarts
It's time for you to take step No. 1 and acknowledge that there is a problem that you are powerless to resolve--that the moment you and your date finish ordering dinner, you pull out your smartphones and start texting so you don't have to face the possibility of silence; that you have come to believe that you more-or-less actually have read "War and Peace" because you read the plot summary on Wikipedia; that you find out what your kid is up to not by talking to her but by monitoring her Facebook page; that at work you cannot go more than 10 minutes without checking email no matter how much else you have to do and that if there are no new messages, you feel like a loser; that you're always taking pictures of yourself so you can check how good you look; that you cheat on the crossword puzzle.
But think of the upsides. You can never get lost anymore, you always know how to pack for wherever you're going. You deal with fewer mediocre meals, fewer hotels with lousy service. There are no ticket lines for the movie, no need for pickup lines at bars, no risk of boredom as you play Temple Run or check stock prices between subway stops.
Gone is the frustration of not being able to identify the song you're hearing or the inadequacy of not knowing the meaning of the acronym that the know-it-all in the next office used at yesterday's staff meeting. Instant expertise on every subject, and all the data you could imagine to back up your own personal convictions about the evils of gluten, delivered to your brain in predigested paragraphs. Camera at the ready for every photo op, voice recorder for whatever idea pops into your head and out of your mouth.
So what if your attention span has been fragmented into nanoseconds, if you measure your social life by Facebook friends, your professional worth by Google hits and the worst words you can imagine are "airplane mode"?
We are all one-marshmallow OCD narcissists, granted by our devices the magic of comprehensive instant gratification, of self-reinforcing worldviews, of control over the daily minutia of our fates and fortunes. To not be irrevocably addicted to our smartphones would be senseless. . . .
Nothing can be worse for civil society than a culture in which all people feel they can get whatever they want whenever they want it. From the one-percenters and the disappearance of social mobility, to the continued dissolution of political civility and political gridlock, we are seeing an erosion of the overarching social cohesion that makes it possible for democracies to function.
If our smartphones aren't the cause of that, they are certainly resonant co-conspirators, as they compel our continual devoted attention, at once isolating us from one another, while stripping our cognitive landscapes of an appreciation of the necessity and, yes, even the virtue, of ambiguity, unpredictability, risk, conflict and compromise.
Liquid gold?
If you bought a gallon of [ink] over the life of your printer, you'd have paid about $4,731 for a liquid that one aftermarket vendor told [PC World] was "cheap" to make. For some perspective, gasoline costs about $3 per gallon (at the moment), while a gallon of Beluga caviar (imagined as a liquid) costs about $18,000--surprisingly, only about four times as expensive as good old printer ink.
"I personally think that consumers are getting ripped off," says Steve Pociask, president of the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit educational and research institute in Washington, D.C. Pociask recently co-authored a 50-page study on the ink jet printer and cartridge market. "In some cases, we found that [the price of] the printer could be 1/8 of the total cost of printing," says Pociask. "Over the life of the printer--and by that I mean three years--you can easily spend $800 for the printer and ink."
Beware, your character is showing
"Character is what you do when no one is watching." It's a bit of a trite saying, attributed to coaches, motivational speakers and fortune cookie writers. Still, the expression's popularity illustrates the power of the idea behind it. Character is what you do when the only controlling authority is your conscience.
Because young people do not yet have fully formed characters, they often need incentives beyond exhortations to do the right thing. That's one reason most parents reward good behavior and punish bad behavior: to create real-world consequences for poor decisions and thus train the habits of the heart.
Schools do the same thing. When I was a kid, one of the chief tools in this regard was your "permanent record." You don't want to get caught cheating, running in the halls, cutting class, drinking beer, etc., because it might go down on your permanent record, teachers would warn. . . .
We now live in a society in which there's always someone watching. Text-messaging, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, email, etc., amount to the new permanent record. In the past, if you embarrassed yourself in some horrendous way, you could often reinvent yourself simply by moving to a new town and starting fresh. Now your permanent record is in the Cloud, and your scarlet letter can be found with a Google search.
Indeed, the Internet is creating unprecedented opportunities for people of low character to advertise it. If Anthony Weiner had simply used the phone as a phone instead of a handheld peep-show booth, he'd probably be the next mayor of New York. Miami Dolphins lineman Richie Incognito couldn't stay incognito because of the permanence of text messages and voicemails.
Such stories are extreme examples of the Internet culture's tendency to reward oversharing. But they also reflect a much older and broader cultural trend that celebrates self-expression over self-discipline. That tension has been baked into the cake since the Enlightenment, and it's not going away. But it's nice to see society self-correct every now and then. It's a sign of good character.
Once upon a time, walking around shouting “The end is nigh” got you labeled a kook, someone not to be taken seriously. These days, however, all the best people go around warning of looming disaster. In fact, you more or less have to subscribe to fantasies of fiscal apocalypse to be considered respectable.
And I do mean fantasies. Washington has spent the past three-plus years in terror of a debt crisis that keeps not happening, and, in fact, can’t happen to a country like the United States, which has its own currency and borrows in that currency. Yet the scaremongers can’t bring themselves to let go.
. . . Consider the deficit-scold organization Fix the Debt, led by the omnipresent Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles. It was, I suppose, predictable that Fix the Debt would respond to the latest budget deal with a press release trying to shift the focus to its favorite subject. But the organization wasn’t content with declaring that America’s long-run budget issues remain unresolved, which is true. It had to warn that “continuing to delay confronting our debt is letting a fire burn that could get out of control at any moment.”
. . . There are two remarkable things about this kind of doomsaying. One is that the doomsayers haven’t rethought their premises despite being wrong again and again--perhaps because the news media continue to treat them with immense respect. The other is that as far as I can tell nobody, and I mean nobody, in the looming-apocalypse camp has tried to explain exactly how the predicted disaster would actually work.
On the Chicken Little aspect: It’s actually awesome, in a way, to realize how long cries of looming disaster have filled our airwaves and op-ed pages. For example, I just reread an op-ed article by Alan Greenspan in The Wall Street Journal, warning that our budget deficit will lead to soaring inflation and interest rates. What about the reality of low inflation and low rates? That, he declares in the article, is “regrettable, because it is fostering a sense of complacency.”
It’s curious how readily people who normally revere the wisdom of markets declare the markets all wrong when they fail to panic the way they’re supposed to. But the really striking thing at this point is the date: Mr. Greenspan’s article was published in June 2010, almost three and a half years ago--and both inflation and interest rates remain low.
So has the ex-Maestro reconsidered his views after having been so wrong for so long? Not a bit. His new (and pretty bad) book declares that “the bias toward unconstrained deficit spending is our top domestic economic problem.”
Meanwhile, about that oft-prophesied, never-arriving debt crisis: In Senate testimony more than two and half years ago, Mr. Bowles warned that we were likely to face a fiscal crisis within around two years, and he urged his listeners to “just stop for a minute and think about what happens” if “our bankers in Asia” stop buying our debt. But has he, or anyone in his camp, actually tried to think through what would happen? No, not really. They just assume that it would cause soaring interest rates and economic collapse, when both theory and evidence suggest otherwise. . . .
So the next time you see some serious-looking man in a suit declaring that we’re teetering on the precipice of fiscal doom, don’t be afraid. He and his friends have been wrong about everything so far, and they literally have no idea what they’re talking about.
--Paul Krugman, New York Times
The schmooze news
What pundits like [Maureen] Dowd never point out is that for all his schmoozing, Bill Clinton got the government shut down on him not once, but twice! And for far longer. Moreover, these same Republicans who he had sucked up to spent months investigating him and embarrassing him before the world, before they voted to impeach him. So spare me if I do not buy into this Clinton negotiated and Obama does not. Even he said he would not negotiate with Republicans over funding government.
--Online commenter Josy Will on Maureen Dowd's Oct. 20 column on Barack Obama
Early--very early--and often
Authoritarian Azerbaijan accidentally announced the re-election of President Ilham Aliyev a day before the polls opened. The Central Election Commission’s smartphone app showed Aliyev winning a third term with 73 percent of the vote, with just 7.4 percent going for opposition candidate Jamil Hasanli. The CEC quickly retracted the "results," saying it had mistakenly republished the last election’s returns, but since Hasanli didn’t run in 2008, that seemed implausible. The country, ruled by either Aliyev or his father since 1993, has never held an election that Western observers deemed free and fair.
--The Week
Doctor, that hurt!In his "60 Minutes" interview with Dick Cheney, Dr .Sanjay Gupta made it clear that Dick Cheney had gotten special treatment to ascend to the vice presidency, given that he’d already had three heart attacks, the first one at 37. As Dr. Gupta noted, the Bush campaign was concerned enough to check with the famed Texas heart surgeon Denton Cooley, who talked to Dr. Reiner and then informed the Bush team--with no examination--that Cheney was in "good health with normal cardiac function."
"The normal cardiac function wasn’t true," Dr. Gupta said to Cheney.
"I’m not responsible for that," replied the man who never takes responsibility for any of his dark deeds. "I don’t know what took place between the doctors."
Four months after being cleared, Cheney suffered his fourth heart attack during the 2000 recount and had to get a stent put in to open a clogged artery.
If the doctors had not signed off on Cheney’s heart as "normal," then Cheney would never have been vice president, and Donald Rumsfeld never would have been defense secretary, and Paul Wolfowitz never would have been his deputy, etc., etc. And W. wouldn’t have been pushed and diverted into Iraq.
--Maureen Dowd, New York Times
Hello, smartphone; goodbye, smarts
It's time for you to take step No. 1 and acknowledge that there is a problem that you are powerless to resolve--that the moment you and your date finish ordering dinner, you pull out your smartphones and start texting so you don't have to face the possibility of silence; that you have come to believe that you more-or-less actually have read "War and Peace" because you read the plot summary on Wikipedia; that you find out what your kid is up to not by talking to her but by monitoring her Facebook page; that at work you cannot go more than 10 minutes without checking email no matter how much else you have to do and that if there are no new messages, you feel like a loser; that you're always taking pictures of yourself so you can check how good you look; that you cheat on the crossword puzzle.
But think of the upsides. You can never get lost anymore, you always know how to pack for wherever you're going. You deal with fewer mediocre meals, fewer hotels with lousy service. There are no ticket lines for the movie, no need for pickup lines at bars, no risk of boredom as you play Temple Run or check stock prices between subway stops.
Gone is the frustration of not being able to identify the song you're hearing or the inadequacy of not knowing the meaning of the acronym that the know-it-all in the next office used at yesterday's staff meeting. Instant expertise on every subject, and all the data you could imagine to back up your own personal convictions about the evils of gluten, delivered to your brain in predigested paragraphs. Camera at the ready for every photo op, voice recorder for whatever idea pops into your head and out of your mouth.
So what if your attention span has been fragmented into nanoseconds, if you measure your social life by Facebook friends, your professional worth by Google hits and the worst words you can imagine are "airplane mode"?
We are all one-marshmallow OCD narcissists, granted by our devices the magic of comprehensive instant gratification, of self-reinforcing worldviews, of control over the daily minutia of our fates and fortunes. To not be irrevocably addicted to our smartphones would be senseless. . . .
Nothing can be worse for civil society than a culture in which all people feel they can get whatever they want whenever they want it. From the one-percenters and the disappearance of social mobility, to the continued dissolution of political civility and political gridlock, we are seeing an erosion of the overarching social cohesion that makes it possible for democracies to function.
If our smartphones aren't the cause of that, they are certainly resonant co-conspirators, as they compel our continual devoted attention, at once isolating us from one another, while stripping our cognitive landscapes of an appreciation of the necessity and, yes, even the virtue, of ambiguity, unpredictability, risk, conflict and compromise.
--Daniel Sarewitz,, Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes, Arizona State University.
Liquid gold?
If you bought a gallon of [ink] over the life of your printer, you'd have paid about $4,731 for a liquid that one aftermarket vendor told [PC World] was "cheap" to make. For some perspective, gasoline costs about $3 per gallon (at the moment), while a gallon of Beluga caviar (imagined as a liquid) costs about $18,000--surprisingly, only about four times as expensive as good old printer ink.
"I personally think that consumers are getting ripped off," says Steve Pociask, president of the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit educational and research institute in Washington, D.C. Pociask recently co-authored a 50-page study on the ink jet printer and cartridge market. "In some cases, we found that [the price of] the printer could be 1/8 of the total cost of printing," says Pociask. "Over the life of the printer--and by that I mean three years--you can easily spend $800 for the printer and ink."
--PC World
Beware, your character is showing
"Character is what you do when no one is watching." It's a bit of a trite saying, attributed to coaches, motivational speakers and fortune cookie writers. Still, the expression's popularity illustrates the power of the idea behind it. Character is what you do when the only controlling authority is your conscience.
Because young people do not yet have fully formed characters, they often need incentives beyond exhortations to do the right thing. That's one reason most parents reward good behavior and punish bad behavior: to create real-world consequences for poor decisions and thus train the habits of the heart.
Schools do the same thing. When I was a kid, one of the chief tools in this regard was your "permanent record." You don't want to get caught cheating, running in the halls, cutting class, drinking beer, etc., because it might go down on your permanent record, teachers would warn. . . .
We now live in a society in which there's always someone watching. Text-messaging, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, email, etc., amount to the new permanent record. In the past, if you embarrassed yourself in some horrendous way, you could often reinvent yourself simply by moving to a new town and starting fresh. Now your permanent record is in the Cloud, and your scarlet letter can be found with a Google search.
Indeed, the Internet is creating unprecedented opportunities for people of low character to advertise it. If Anthony Weiner had simply used the phone as a phone instead of a handheld peep-show booth, he'd probably be the next mayor of New York. Miami Dolphins lineman Richie Incognito couldn't stay incognito because of the permanence of text messages and voicemails.
Such stories are extreme examples of the Internet culture's tendency to reward oversharing. But they also reflect a much older and broader cultural trend that celebrates self-expression over self-discipline. That tension has been baked into the cake since the Enlightenment, and it's not going away. But it's nice to see society self-correct every now and then. It's a sign of good character.
--Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online
THE LINK TANK
No, the sky is not falling!
By many measures, the U.S. is in great shape
http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/1BAF0O/EXWK5S/BDMLL4/FXKFOZQ/AMKBRD/LE/h
The mutilated economy
Twisted thinking still holding our country back
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/08/opinion/krugman-the-mutilated-economy.html?hp&rref=opinion
Why women don't like women bosses
'Sisterhood' falls apart at the workplace
http://www.thedailybeast.com/witw/articles/2013/11/13/why-do-women-say-they-don-t-like-working-for-female-bosses.html
Gone but not forgotten
Departed employees often take more than their belongings
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303442004579123412020578896.html?mod=ITP_journalreport_1
A case for hope
Governance could finally return to Washington
http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/7CWL7Z/HYK6Y0/DI4HHX/C55ZPL9/SPT112/VU/h
Jumper cables for the mind
Would you give your brain a jolt if a Harvard scientist said it could make you smarter, more creative and less depressed?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/magazine/jumper-cables-for-the-mind.html?ref=magazine
The Greenspan paradox
Long-standing stability created more economic risk
http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/DME6KX/8Z2BZY/5MCFF2/YHBB1TV/97WURO/HK/h
Hillary in 2016? Not so fast
Democrats can cheer and pundits can lay their bets, but it’s an awkward moment for political royalty like Mrs. Clinton
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/opinion/bruni-hillary-in-2016-not-so-fast.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Hydration hysteria
You just don't need all that water!
http://eedition.chicagotribune.com/Olive/ODE/ChicagoTribune/LandingPage/LandingPage.aspx?href=Q1RDLzIwMTMvMTAvMTA.&pageno=MQ..&entity=QXIwMDEwNQ..&view=ZW50aXR5
The extra legroom society
From airlines to amusement parks, tiering is expanding
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/12/opinion/bruni-the-extra-legroom-society.html?hp&rref=opinion
Every effort is made to ensure that all links are still operative.
By many measures, the U.S. is in great shape
http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/1BAF0O/EXWK5S/BDMLL4/FXKFOZQ/AMKBRD/LE/h
The mutilated economy
Twisted thinking still holding our country back
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/08/opinion/krugman-the-mutilated-economy.html?hp&rref=opinion
Why women don't like women bosses
'Sisterhood' falls apart at the workplace
http://www.thedailybeast.com/witw/articles/2013/11/13/why-do-women-say-they-don-t-like-working-for-female-bosses.html
Gone but not forgotten
Departed employees often take more than their belongings
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303442004579123412020578896.html?mod=ITP_journalreport_1
A case for hope
Governance could finally return to Washington
http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/7CWL7Z/HYK6Y0/DI4HHX/C55ZPL9/SPT112/VU/h
Jumper cables for the mind
Would you give your brain a jolt if a Harvard scientist said it could make you smarter, more creative and less depressed?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/magazine/jumper-cables-for-the-mind.html?ref=magazine
The Greenspan paradox
Long-standing stability created more economic risk
http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/DME6KX/8Z2BZY/5MCFF2/YHBB1TV/97WURO/HK/h
Hillary in 2016? Not so fast
Democrats can cheer and pundits can lay their bets, but it’s an awkward moment for political royalty like Mrs. Clinton
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/opinion/bruni-hillary-in-2016-not-so-fast.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Hydration hysteria
You just don't need all that water!
http://eedition.chicagotribune.com/Olive/ODE/ChicagoTribune/LandingPage/LandingPage.aspx?href=Q1RDLzIwMTMvMTAvMTA.&pageno=MQ..&entity=QXIwMDEwNQ..&view=ZW50aXR5
The extra legroom society
From airlines to amusement parks, tiering is expanding
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/12/opinion/bruni-the-extra-legroom-society.html?hp&rref=opinion
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Tuesday, October 15, 2013
POPCORN
- What's the difference between a "buff," an "enthusiast" and an "aficionado"?
- Government shutdown commentary: How long would a private company stay in business if it had thousands of "non-essential employees"?
- Another in a list of jimjustsaying's Media Words (words you see or hear only in news reports and never hear a normal person use in real life): "garb." (As in, "The gunman was said to be wearing military-style garb.")
- I'm not saying I'm a mediocre poker player, but let's just say nobody ever called me Amarillo Jim!
- "If you're the smartest person in the room, find another room."--Michael Dell, Forbes.com
- There will never be a John Boehner Lookalike Contest.
- "You never really know where you are born. You have to take your parents’ word for it.”--former major-league baseball player John Lowenstein.
- I deplore mass shootings as much as anyone, but this infernal digging for "Why?" is getting tiresome and pointless--as if someone could have a good reason. Whatever the reason, the loose cannon went off, and ferreting out The Motive solves nothing. Are billions of dollars for the necessary mental-health care--the standard "cure-all"--suddenly going to materialize? Is the NRA going to lay down and die?
- Any chance Jimmy Kimmel or Craig Ferguson could go on an extended vacation like Arsenio Hall? (I'm just sayin'.)
- Overheard I: "I’m in pretty good shape for the shape I’m in."
- Overheard II: "Those fireworks . . . scared the bejeebers out of me!"
- Notwithstanding the lunacy of having statues of ballplayers in the first place, the next one I see that actually looks like the player will be the first.
- Jim's Party Ice-Breaker of the Week: "Say what you want about the Dead Sea, but it's apparently a good place for, say, redheads to sunbathe. Because it is 1,400 feet below sea level, the sun's ultraviolet rays pass through more filtering layers of atmosphere before reaching the ground, scientists say. Result? Much less chance of sunburn, though precautions are still advised for prolonged exposure. "
- More words you see in print but never hear anyone use in real life: "foreign matter," "sundries" and "hydrogenated."
- Stores that stick price tags over vital product information deserve to go bankrupt.
- The next time you hear someone say the non-word "negatory," you have my permission to expectorate vigorously in their direction.
- And people who make a vocal sound that is supposed to approximate the "Twilight Zone" theme are in need of immediate counseling, if not deportation.
- I had a dream that Meat Loaf became a vegan and took up the ukulele.
- Isn't it about time for the federal government to step in and ban movie sequels?
- I've actually met a Latvian but I'm still waiting for my first Estonian.
- Newspaper Obituary Nickname of the Week: "Jimmy-Cowboy." As in Jerome "Jimmy-Cowboy" Trofka (Green Bay Press-Gazette obituary, May 6, 2013). R.I.P., Mr. Trofka.
- I'm always amused by signs that say "Not responsible for goods left over 30 days." I figure, if I haven't missed it by then, they're welcome to have it!
- “You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.”--Eleanor Roosevelt
- Guys who constantly use sports metaphors in their everyday speech won't get to first base with a lot of women.
- Jargon Watch: Reverse vaccine: One that selectively suppresses immune cells--rather than bolstering them--to control an autoimmune disease. Used on a diabetic, for example, it would allow pancreatic cells to produce insulin again, according to Jonathon Keats, Wired.com.
- Today's Latin lesson: Haud alio viaticus has umquam been hilaris reverto. ("No one's money has ever been cheerfully refunded.)
Sunday, September 15, 2013
POPCORN
BY JIM SZANTOR
Rhetorical questions, questionable rhetoric and whimsical observations about the absurdities of contemporary life.
- Why didn't they have a re-dial feature on rotary phones--back when we really needed it?
- Red-ink pens leak more.
- Speaking of red, it looks like the President's "red line" was really a . . . pink line? (I'm just sayin'.)
- Why do still-life artists paint bowls of fruit all the time? What have they got against carrots and green beans?
- I don't care what they say: Green Bay won't be a true sports town until it gets a roller derby franchise.
- I hear economists talking all the time about the "ripple effect." What on Earth does drinking cheap wine have to do with the stock market?
- All those who've actually experienced actual tooth-whitening from so-called tooth-whitening toothpastes, raise your hands. (And then bare your teeth.)
- Headline: "E-cigarette use rising among youth." (No word yet on the e-cigar use among older folks. And are e-pipes in the pipeline?)
- Baseball Roundup:
- Sign on door of Detroit Tigers visitors' clubhouse: "No Visitors."
- "Listen up! I have nothing to say, and I'm only going to say it once!"--Yankees manager Yogi Berra to reporters.
- "Gentlemen, that was a real cliff-dweller!"--New York Mets manager Wes Westrum on a hard-fought game.
- "They shouldn't throw at me. I'm the father of five or six kids."--former Giants infielder Tito Fuentes.
- Remember when the substance most abused by children was chewing gum?
- I don't think Alexander Graham Bell, smart as he was, envisioned "smart phones."
- Call me an elitist snob (as many have), but I couldn't pick Ryan Seacrest out of a police lineup if my life depended on it.
- Whatever happened to Mary Hart?
- Quick now: How many of you married people could put your hands on your marriage license inside of five minutes? Five hours? Five days? But your driver's license? Almost instantly!
- When people say " . . . When I'm six feet under," they're speaking proverbially, not factually. Graves are now dug five feet deep, not six, due to improvements in caskets and burial vaults. (Kind of hard to work into a conversation, but true nonetheless!) And even though cremation has taken over in a big way, I've never heard someone say " . . . . When I'm in a mantelpiece urn." (I'm just sayin'.)
- More words you see in print but never hear anyone use in real life: "Beaker," "excrement" and "petroleum jelly."
- Three things I've never done: Worn long underwear, ordered a daiquiri, or smeared a beaker with petroleum jelly.
- I wonder what they did in Medieval times about static cling.
- Obituary Headline Nickname of the Week: "Pruney." As in, Vernon "Pruney" Nelezen, Green Bay Press-Gazette obituary, April 16, 2013. R.I.P., Mr. Nelezen.
- Forty-seventh Wisconsin Town I Didn't Know Existed Until I Saw It Mentioned in a Green Bay Press-Gazette Obituary: Askeaton. (R.I.P. , Lorraine S. Burns, Green Bay Press-Gazette obituary, Aug. 15, 2013). Previous entries: Athelstane, Walhain, Duck Creek, Breed, Anston, Sobieski, Amberg, Osseo, Angelica, Brazeau, Waukechon, Sugar Camp, Kossuth, Lessor, Kunesh, Pulcifer, Cato, Florence, Greenleaf, Eaton, Poygan, Hofa Park, Hilbert, Hollandtown, Beaufort, Glennie, Harshaw, Bessemer, Crooked Lake, Tigerton, Goodman, Readstown, Dousman, Butternut, Montpelier, Cecil, Red River, Gillet, King, Laona, Kelly Lake, Glenmore, Tonet, Stiles, Morrison, and Dunbar.
- Today's Latin Lesson: Operor non dico mihi, ego mos dico vos. ("Don't call me, I'll call you.")
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