I heare that Kirk Kerkorian is bidding a chunk of money to buy Chrysler. 

Yaaaawwwwn.  Whatever.

But hearing that during WWII Kerkorian flew one of the coolest airplanes ever?

Now that is interesting!

Periodically, I take out (rhetorical) contracts on bits and pieces of the English language that need to be communally expunged. 

Every once in a while, it seems to work.  A few years ago, I demanded that the word “bloggy” disappear from the language.  It’s been a while since I’ve seen that linguistic abomination in print.

So it’s time for another round of linguistic executions. 

1. “Internets”:  Usually used ironically – to show how very much more clever the user is than the madding hordes on the “internets” – the term is an offshoot of the ancient (in Internet terms) Usenet habit of taking a newbie mistake and making it part of the vocabulary (“This is sucks” – alt.aol.sucks, 1993).  The problem is, to be anything but ironic, these turnabouts are predicated on the user actually being more clever than the person committing the malaprop.  A casual reading shows this rarely to be the case.  Please stop.
2. “Truthy” (“truthiness”): When everything is “ironic” all the time, then nothing is ironic.  And if we extinguished not only the word but the concept, perhaps John Stewart would be able to do something other than the same show, week in, week out, forever and ever, amen…
3. “Dee di deeeee!”: Unless you are Carlos Mencia, using this phrase suits you better to be a target than a user of the phrase.  You’ve been warned.  Not Carlos?  No se va.
4. “Hel-looooo?”:  Time for a new phrase to indicate your nonplussment at your fellow human’s concentrated denseness (in your enlightened opinion).
5. “It Is What It Is”: Like “going forward” and “at this point in time”, after about two trillion uses, It Is meaningless.

Carry on. 

In the fall of 1981, I took Journalism 101. The teacher – Jim Smorada, then the editor of the Jamestown Sun – was a great reporter and a great teacher.

And while my “career” as a “journalist” was short, underpaid and undistinguished, I can honestly say that I held true to almost everything Mr. Smorada taught me…

…including, perhaps most importantly of all, his imprecation to never, never, ever refer to myself as “this reporter“. Of this, I am modestly proud.

That is all.

(more…)

Comment-section gadfly gadflea gadmite gadamecium RickDFL wrote:

On behalf of the younger generation can I just say that watching all you old baby boomers re-fight the war protests of your youth, only this time without the cool soundtrack and hot women, is really boring.

I pointed out that I’ve banned people for less than calling me a baby boomer. His response:

From wikipedia, “There is little agreement as to the exact beginning and end dates of the baby boom, but it is commonly identified as starting in 1946 and ending in 1964.” So, if you were 38 on 9/11 2001, you were born at the tail end of the baby boom. Hate to break it to you.

Well. Wikipedia says so. I guess that settles it!

Rick – didja catch that whole “there is little agreement” bit at the beginning of your pullquote? Slapping an arbitrary date on something that subjective is inherently unclear and lazy.

Fortunately, that’s why I’m here.

Baby boomers were the children of the World War II generation. While they largely started having their kids nine months after VJ day, and kept right on breeding into the early sixties, their Boomerhood was a factor of being children of the “Greatest Generation”.

On VJ day, my dad was nine and my mom was five. They might have been old enough to fight in the Volkssturm, but not for the US. Demographically, socially and morally, I am not a baby boomer. Never have been, never will be.

But – and again, with apologies to Jeff Foxworthy – here’s a little quiz to help you decide what generation you really belong to.

You Might Not Be A Baby Boomer If…: you have more Clash, Springsteen and Sex Pistols than Beatles and Stones in your music collection.

You Might Not Be A Baby Boomer If…: you have never used the term “Camelot” unironically to refer to anything after the 13th Century. Or if the word “Camelot” to you means dancing knights who push the pram a lot, rather than Jackie Onassis.

You Might Not Be A Baby Boomer If…: the Teheran Hostage Crisis is more prominent in your memory than Kent State.

You Might Not Be A Baby Boomer If…: you think Dennis Miller was a better Weekend Update host than Chevy Chase.

You Might Not Be A Baby Boomer If…: “Quadrophonic” and “Eight Track” mean the same thing as “Edsel”.

You Might Not Be A Baby Boomer If…: “Woodstock” was a bird.

Carry on.

Headline yesterday: “There’s only one Andy Johnson”

With Scottish independence looming as a real possibility, it’s especially appropriate to note that it’s Robert Burns’ birthday today.  And nobody notes these things like Sheila:

He was born poor, in the middle of the 18th century. He had a lot of brothers and sisters, and his parents were farmers. Yet his father decided that Robert, his eldest, should have a bit of an education. A tutor was hired, and Robert, in between the farm chores and hard work, learned how to read and write. And a whole world opened up to him through language (as it is wont to do). Writing came naturally to him. He started writing poems and songs almost immediately, some of which are still famous today.

The thing about Burns, his time and his place that fascinates me is its commentary on education.  Burns came a bit before the “Edinburgh Renaissance”, but he was something of a model for that blossoming in technology, politics and art – mostly self-educated, a polymath, one of many brilliant people who leapt out of normal class distinctions through the sheer will to learn and intellectually conquer; men who didn’t distinguish between conquering technology and mastering art, since they went hand in hand; people who didn’t need academics to pronounce them fit to contribute, but who learned what they wanted and needed and proceeded to change the world. 

Happy Birthday!

…who was the first person, for example, to think of frying an egg.  “Hm – here’s the slime from those things the birds leave lying about; let’s put it on a griddle-shaped piece of granite and fry it up with some tabasco sauce and see how it goes?”

Ditto truffles.  “I just wrenched a piece of fungus from the mouth of this warthog.  I smell delicacy!” 

Nice to know that I’m not the only one who wonders these things.  Doug from BoGold ponders the clam.  Who?  Where?  Why?:

There’s really nothing about a clam that convincingly resembles “food.” It’s a hard shell with something resembling phlegm inside.

And yet, at some point in history, someone put one in his mouth and swallowed it. Was culinary history made by the equivalent of that kid on your grade school playground who would eat a bug for a quarter? Was it more of a hazing incident that had a surprisingly tasty upside? Was someone starving on a desert island and it was either eat a clam or feed the seagulls with your own carcass?

And so while I don’t feel any better informed about these things, I feel a little less lonely…

New York’s stench is apparently a Jersey swamp thing:

Across the length and breadth of Manhattan, people were asking, “What’s that smell?” after a pungent odor like natural gas or rotten eggs blanketed the borough and northern New Jersey for three hours yesterday morning.

By evening, the answer seemed to be a stinky gas emitted by a New Jersey swamp or marsh.

So the winner of the “Why Does NYC Stink” poll is “Jersey Swamp”.

I’m out $20; I had “the fetid stew of [frequent commenter] Angryclown’s ill-contained ire wafting in from Queens” or Lawn Gisland or whereever he lives…

is “endunder“.

That is all.

For Christmas, Red has one of my favorites.

Bloomington has the Mall of America.

But New York has the Megarestroom, in Times Square.

Sheila, um, “visited” it.

There is a small stage over to one side (it keeps getting worse) – and standing on the stage is a guy in blue and white (what a surprise), wearing huge furry brown bear claws … and he is dancing. Not even with all that much heart or conviction. He’s just up there. Dancing. Trying to maintain SOME of his dignity. He has props up there, in case anyone wants to join him. And yes, people wanted to join him.

I hated the human race even more.

On the downside, the poopblogging title has been snatched away from the Twin Cities.

On the upside – read it.

Back when I built model airplanes/ships/cars/tanks pretty obsessively, one of the best parts was reading the Japenese translations on some of the imported kids. Hasegawa kits were particularly fun, with malaprops enough to make Yogi Berra and Jessica Simpson vow to quit their evil ways.

But for all that, it’s nice to know some things never change. Via Croc-o-Lyle – one of the best Usability and User-Centered Design blogs around – the Japanese safety manual for the Wii.

Like every Twin Citian under the age of 70, I wasn’t listening to Willy Clark yesterday morning.  In fact, like an awful lot of Twin Cities radio listeners, I haven’t listened to KSTP since Mischke moved to the middle of the working day and Bob Davis moved to late mornings.  As in, not at all. 

Nada.  Zip. 

Seriously.  KSTP-AM is my radio alma mater, and I haven’t hit its preset on my car radio since Rush Limbaugh changed stations.  Not once.

But I digress.  A little bird told me that Willy Clark was talking about me yesterday.  To be fair, I needed that little bird, because I didn’t know Willy Clark was even still on the air (and, looking back, I see that we’ve gotta be up to about contract time here…).  Anyway, he wasn’t happy:

A mention of SITD came up around the 8:30 mark.  Kenny Olson was Googling reviews of the show, they came across yours (Kenny read his description, something about a smug, talentless punk) and Willy characterized the guy that wrote that as an unemployed loser who can’t get hired in radio, or something like that.  

Oh, my.  Aren’t we feisty?  Wouldn’t Willy Clark be much more – I dunno, listenable if he took some of that feistiness and used it to sound like he wasn’t on NyQuil on the air?

Willy Clark:  I am employed; very well-employed, as it happens (details never shared online).  As to being a loser – well, I’m no “morning guy at KSTP”, but I do OK. 

But the ultimate question, Wills, is not “can Mitch get hired in radio”; I did in the past, and I have the best unpaid gig in the business right now.  But I don’t work in radio anymore.  Other challenges called – challenges that don’t involve stroking the egoes of or supplying coke to program directors.

No, the real question is “Could Willy Clark get a job outside of radio?”

And “Will he be able to, soon?”

Don’t know if they podcast those things, but if you can get the audio, might make for a good NARN drop.

Good point. 

If anyone taped the Willy Clark show…

…no, I’m being serious here.  If there are any dedicated Willy fans who…

…Hey!  Quit giggling!  I’m trying to run a blog…

Oh, forget it.

20 years ago when I suggested this concept, people got a good laugh.

Who’s laughing now, huh?

Flash memory, with no moving parts to break or wear down, is the data storage technology of choice for devices such as iPods and digital cameras. But phase-change RAM is set to overtake flash entirely—it uses a chemical found in rewritable discs, which is alternately heated and cooled to store data. The result is memory that’s 30 times faster than flash, with more than 10 times the life span.

Granted, my idea was more akin to “dude, what if our universe if just an atom within a larger universe…” rather than a treatise on electrical engineering.

But still.

Since someone among my group of readers knows pretty much anything that exists, I have two questions:

1. What’s the trick to exporting Moveable Type blogs to WordPress?  My old blog has about 8,000 posts; I can only get MT to export about 6,000 before it coughs.  What do I need to do?
2. While the official age to get a job in Minnesota is 16, my daughter (15) is bugging me to find out what the exceptions are.  Where can one work?  What does one need to do?

Thanks in advance.

Chad the Elder has a cri de coeur that is music to my ears. 

He’s talking about “e-business” sites – shopping sites for places like Amazon, Best Buy, yadda yadda – and a key problem many of them have; they’re just not designed for real people to use them.

He wants the companies to…:

Make it Easy to use: The other day I was trying to find some information on a local hotel/water park. The web site was chock full of neat looking Flash animation and graphics. But when I tried to find out how much it would cost to use the water park on a particular day I entered a cyber-hell of being forced to follow link upon link upon link (while animation played for each one) until I was finally able to find what I was looking for. And then, when I was curious about the room rates, I had to go through the same rigmarole again only to eventually be instructed to “call for information.” Arghhh! If I wanted to call, I would have done that in the first place. The whole idea of visiting the web site was so that I didn’t have to make a fargin’ phone call.

This sort of thing tells me I’ll have work to do for a long, long time.  It’s almost a game, trying to guess why a “e-business” site turns out like that. 

The usual suspects:

• Management thinks “usability” means “sizzle”.
• Management thinks graphics artists are qualified to design human-computer interaction.
• Management are former programmers, who think “user centered design” is some touchy-feely commie fad – where it is, in fact, a highly empirical, indeed scientific, approach to making software, including web sites, usable.

Elder enjoins business to…:

Think about the top two or three reasons that customers are visiting your site and make that information as easy to find as possible. Fancy graphics are nice, but what I really care about is finding what I’m looking for as quickly as possible.

It shouldn’t be all that complicated…make it easy to find critical information. It ain’t rocket science, it’s just the internet.

If it were easy, anyone could do it.

Fortunately, this town is crawing with people who do just that.  Some even write about it.  Myself occasionally included. 

(Merry Christmas, fellow HCI geeks)

We don’t care how you make your f*$&%^g pizza:

That’s the basic message from Mrs. Ciminieri at Totonno’s, who was finally persuaded to taste a Domino’s slice in the name of research.

“In Utah, they’re going to love it because they use ketchup and American cheese on their pizzas,” she said. “It tastes like any other pizza you get at the corner slice joint. They used the same tomatoes, the same processed cheese, the same preservatives.”

The worst pizza I had in my life was in…well, actually it was London. And then Paris. And then Amsterdam (which holds the record for the worst hamburger). But New York was in my bottom ten (as well as top three).

But Chicago still makes better pizza.

Sorry, N’yawk.

I’m scanning down the list of possible events in my life, sorted in order of likelihood. I finally got to the very bottom:

#6,784,777,653 – Re-animating the dead with my smile
#6,784,777,654 – Me pitching a called third strike against A-Rod

#6,784,777,655 – Staying up to watch Joey reruns

#6,784,777,656 – Setting off the heat death of the universe via chain of events started by my sipping a cup of hot chocolate

#6,784,777,657 – Voting for Alice Hausman.

And at the very bottom of the list:

#6,784,777,658 – Ever buying anything from CompUSA.

It’s right there on the list!

My blog’s been converted over to WordPress for about a week now.

Observations:

• A week without comment spam – after years of getting crushed by it – is almost unthinkable.
• Speaking of comments – if you’re a former commenter who’s been scared off by the “login” thing, don’t be. After your first comment is moderated and accepted, you don’t have to get moderated anymore (unless you’re a jerk and I ban you).
• And being able to post something to the future and have it publish itself automatically, without my having to physically “publish” it, is soooo cool.
• On the other hand, something in the CSS code makes impossible to embed YouTube containers (for video) without hosing up the page layout. Ideas eagerly accepted.

That is all.

Amazing – it’s five years ago!