communication. community. cognition.
“I just know it is coming into the house,” she said.
“You know it will fly into the house and you won’t get it out,” she told me.
But I didn’t listen.
We’ve got a little bird, probably a swallow, that has decided to nest in the little potted palm tree just outside our front door. My wife tried warning me several times that I needed to move it. Did I listen? What do you think…? [Read more…]
“Why use a 50-cent word when a 5-cent word will do?” That advice needs to be adjusted for inflation, because we live in the age of Million Dollar Language.
I saw a billboard on the way in to work, highlighting a contest being run by a local bank. Being the stickler for language that I am, something caught in my frontal lobe and wouldn’t rattle out:
“Someone could win one million dollars.”
The contest is called the “Make Life Interesting Sweepstakes,” by AmSouth/Regions (the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of bank mergers; two great banks that couldn’t bear the thought of being someone else’s minor appendage, so they joined forces like the last two good looking people from the shipwreck.)
I previously spilled the beans about the 2008 rollout of the Apple iWife. Now, I’ve unearthed the top-secret details of a coming breakthrough in Digital Video Recorder technology.
One of the downsides of media consolidation is the propensity of a small error to be magnified. Like this one, for example, from the Nashville Tennessean:
Plan for emergenies
Spring tornado season a good time to make sure you and your family know what to do
Don’t blame staff writer Vivi Hoang. Editors slap the headlines on the stories, and several sets of eyeballs passed over that typo. Unfortunately, because of media consolidation, no one at the Dickson Herald, Ashland City Times, nor Fairview Observer caught it either. Not that they could change it if they wanted to.
I blame Tennessee for being landlocked. They’re not used to have a C around.
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, journalism, Tennessean[/tags]
I have an annoying habit of noticing things that seem to bother me, and no one else. I have an even more annoying habit of sharing those things with people who don’t seem to mind. And I have an intensely annoying compulsion to continue until others see just what was bothering me to begin with.
I could go over a litany of verbal abuses, but Tim Warner over at Mother Tongue Annoyances already has an online encyclopedia of etymological effluvia. So I’ll try to stay orientated to the advertising and pop culture linguistic lashings. And this time around, I’ll be taking a bite out of Nature Valley‘s new 100% Natural Cereal. [Read more…]
Apparently, I need to add “prophetic visionary” to my online resume.
Or, I can add “shameless plagiarist” to Michael Medved’s.
I recently wrote about the ways in which we can build communities. I still hold that in the long run, you are better off building slow through good content and sound reasoning than you are starting with the universe and whittling down. I called it Addition by Subtraction. It was also designed to be the thematic introduction to Invenntiveness, which continues the meme of defining by “circling the wagons.”
Which leads us to Michael Medved’s latest Townhall.com column, which says everything I was saying, but goes much further into the consequences of using Addition by Subtraction.
In the run-up to the fateful election of 2008, conservatives face a clear-cut choice: we can rebuild our movement as a broad-ranging, mainstream coalition and restore our governing majority, or else settle for a semi-permanent role as angry, doom-speaking complainers on the fringes of American politics and culture.
We can either invite doubters and moderates to join with us in new efforts to affirm American values, or we can push them away because they fail to measure up to our own standards of indignation and ideological purity.
In short, we must choose between addition and subtraction: either building our cause by adding to our numbers or destroying it by discouraging all but the fiercest ideologues.
His basic point advance beyond mine (if you are not so inclined to browse for yourself) is that those who slash the fiercest and cut the deepest in carving their Circles are most likely to end up their own bloody victims.
And thus ends, in circular fashion, my one-minute review of a movie critic. (And Michael, I was kidding about the ‘plagiarist’ crack. I seriously doubt you are one of my dozen readers. Although, if you are, a comment now and then wouldn’t hurt.)
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, Michael Medved, Ann Coulter, partisanship, social media[/tags]
