Excerpt from an actual man-on-the-street interview, referring to the calling plan of a major national wireless carrier:
"INTERVIEWER: ...So now with this plan?
MAN ON THE STREET: I'm trying to get as much cancer in my ear as I can by having it attached to the side of my head. "
"The Financial Times was always doing special reports on little countries I'd never heard of," says former Guardian advertising rep Philip Davies. "I was thinking about April Fool's Day 1977 and I thought, why don't we just make a country up?" Special reports editor Stuart St Clair Legge suggested the title that was to become a legend: San Serriffe, part typographic pun, part credible name for a tropical isle.
It also had the special appropriateness for the Guardian of challenging spelling. During its long relationship with San Serriffe, starting with the original supplement itself, the paper has printed the name with carefree inconsistency, using every possible variation of "r"s and "f"s, and, on one occasion, two "e"s.
Picking up Legge's theme, staffer Geoffrey Taylor designed a shrunken semicolon-shaped version of New Zealand's twin islands and based everything on the rich vocabulary of print. Leading islanders, such as the dictator General Pica, and places like the capital, Bodoni, were named after fonts of type and their measurements: he even got away with a wilderness area on the north island called Wodj of Type.
The islands were positioned off the Canaries and with just over three days to go, the final shape of the major, seven-broadsheet-page supplement was drawn up. Then, in the late afternoon of March 27, two jumbo jets collided at Tenerife airport, causing the worst aviation disaster in the world, in which 583 people died. The delicate web of April Fool fantasy suddenly seemed marginal. The editor, Peter Preston, teetered on the edge of pulling San Serriffe, but fortunately it was not abandoned. With a Herculean effort, the islands were relocated in the Indian Ocean, their history, flora and fauna completely revised.
So San Serriffe indelibly joined the map of the world. Next morning, the phone calls started early, the letters followed later. Thousands of readers were taken in; spin-offs soon included "I've been to San Serriffe" car stickers and a T-shirt from the islands, which sold a record 12,000 to readers.
From the AP: "Lettuce implicated in Taco Bell outbreak"
Remember: the lettuce hates your freedom.
Following up on Wired's six-word short stories, here are the fruits of Friday-afternoon office ennui:
Wachovia. Watches over ya. Too much. [Matt Ward]
Corporate greed. Indictment. Heart failure.
Hero orphaned. Fears overcome. Group victory!
Dirt. Mud. Spin. Sound bite. Election.
In the beginning God. We hated.
Wannabe Samurai joins seven. Blood everywhere.
Once upon a time. Ever after.
Aliens eating sushi. 12:01 oceans emptied. [Jeremy Tufts]
Testman jumped out of television. Angry.
Copywriter presents campaign. Client checks watch.
Hypnosis proved unsuccessful. Account lost. Layoffs.
Within the color printer hamsters multiplied.
Painter fell. Family sued. Agency closed. [Aaron Johnston]
Redundant. You’re telling me that I’m
Violence antidote perfected. Those responsible assassinated.
Born. Died. Born again. Damn zombies. [Jason Comerford]
A friend forwarded me an amusing email:
MENSA INVITATIONALAlas, this isn't quite what it appears to be; the Washington Post has no such "Mensa Invitational." This is an oft-circulated Internet joke chain letter, as detailed here.
The Washington Post's Mensa Invitational once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.
Here are this year's winners. Read them carefully. Each is a real word with only one letter altered to form an artificial word. They are terrifically innovative:
1. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with
2. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.
3. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating.
4. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.
5. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.
6. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
7. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
8. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
9. Hipatitis: Terminal coolness
10. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)
11. Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.
12. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
13. Glibido: All talk and no action.
14. Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
15. Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.
16. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
17. Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you're eating.
18. Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an asshole.
Submitted to 20 publishers and agents, the typed manuscripts of the opening chapters of two books were assumed to be the work of aspiring novelists. Of 21 replies, all but one were rejections. Sent by The Sunday Times of London, the manuscripts were the opening chapters of novels that won Booker Prizes in the 1970's. One was "Holiday," by Stanley Middleton; the other was "In a Free State," by Sir V. S. Naipaul, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature. Mr. Middleton said he wasn't surprised. "People don't seem to know what a good novel is nowadays," he said. Mr. Naipaul said: "To see something is well written and appetizingly written takes a lot of talent, and there is not a great deal of that around. With all the other forms of entertainment today, there are very few people around who would understand what a good paragraph is."Like I always say, the only constant in the world is change, but there’s still no accounting for taste. Book buyers aren’t looking for, you know, writing; they’re looking for a multimillion-dollar cash cow they can turn into a movie, a record album and a theme park.
Both cognitive and evolutionary approaches to lit-crit have been gaining recognition and adherents over the past decade or so. Cognitive critics are less interested in recurring plots or specific themes in literature, but they share with the Darwinists an interest in using scientific advances to help explore the universally observed human tendency toward creative expression, or what the fascinating anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake called in Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why, “making special.” This unironic -- though hardly uncritical -- interest in science represents a clear break with much of what might be called the postmodern orthodoxy, which views science less as a pure source of knowledge and more as a means of controlling and regulating discourse and power. The postmodern view has contributed to a keener appreciation of how appeals to science are often self-interested and obfuscating.Criticism being the exploration of a personal reaction, it follows that the self-examination that it entails would lead some down a more scientific path, ostensibly to find data with the cold hardness of fact to support their own feelings and interpretations. But it figures just as much that those very “facts” are actually quite specious -- any statistician will tell you that you can find any amount of data to “prove” your “theory,” no matter how insane. Simple old willpower can bring any nutty notion to light but the ideas that strike a deeper, more logical and rational chord within us -- theories like evolution, for example -- tend to take on lives of their own, far beyond what their discoverer ever intended or even understood themselves. I remember a bit from Bertrand Russell’s The History of Western Philosophy where he talked about how a philosopher in ancient Greece -- Anaxagoras, I believe -- came up with a version of heliocentrism, long before 17th-century scientists like Copernicus and Kepler proved it so; the point being, sometimes the answer sits right in front of people for a long time before anyone notices. Lit-crit might come up with some fancy new terms but unless they’re really, really challenging the status quo, it’s just gonna be old wine, new bottle.
Finally the truth has sunk in: Nick Hornby is incredibly overrated. High Fidelity was wonderful, but every novel of his since then (About a Boy, How to Be Good) has started off well and then fallen completely apart.
His newest, A Long Way Down, continues the trend and advances it by blowing its wad within the first 50 pages instead of the first 100, substituting cutesy banter and the occasional sharp observation for plot and characterization. He gets off good bits here and there:
How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are all these gaps in speech where you just have to put a "fuck." I'll tell you who the most admirable people in the world are: newscasters. If that was me, I'd be like, "And the motherfuckers flew the fucking plane right into the Twin Towers." How could you not, if you're a human being? Maybe they're not so admirable. Maybe they're robot zombies.There. I've just saved you $24.95. You're welcome.
What happens when a proofreader has too much time on his hands:
Commonly heard by the proofreader:
“Don’t find anything wrong.”
“That’s what the client approved.”
“That’s what legal approved.”
“Please don’t find anything wrong.”
Constant feminine chatter regarding weddings and/or children
“How late can you stay?”
“Do I have to change that?”
“Please, please, please don’t find anything wrong.”
“Have you ever actually spoken out loud in the office? Ever?”
Never heard by the proofreader:
“Yes, I’d love to make this grammatically correct.”
“The client is very thankful for your input.”
“Why, yes, I thought The DaVinci Code was overwritten pop-thriller nonsense, too! Have you ever read The Name of the Rose? Now, there’s a sizzler.”
“Let’s see... what are you waiting on? A one-page ad you’ve already proofed five times? The only change was moving the map graphic around? No need for you to wait another hour and a half -- go ahead home and put some food in your stomach and relax. We’ve got this covered.”
Ah, office life...
