Waaaaait a minute, waitaminute, waitaminute.
This is something I just realized: since when are direct competitors cooperating when it comes to how much they pay their employees? Holy frakkin crap, that just sounds inherently evil.
Imagine Ford, GM, Chrysler, etc, teaming up to decide how much they want to pay their employees! Or Kroger, Walmart, and Meijer having meetings to discuss how much they’re going to pay their grocery baggers! What if the University of Michigan, Michigan State, Washtenaw Community College, and every school in the state met to decide on a fixed wage for their media support staff (that’s me)?
Isn’t that illegal?
It sure sounds illegal.
If NBC wants to pay their writers 100% more than what they’re getting now, can’t they do that? From the sounds of things, the answer is no, because all the other studio heads would have to agree. That makes no sense. If NBC wanted to dominate in ratings for the next 10 years, all they’d have to do is make a deal with the striking writers. Talent would flock to them. Ratings would soar, they’d get tons of ad revenue, and everyone would get rich.
Why aren’t they??
Am I missing something?
I can’t figure this one out. No comic today because I’m lost in my thoughts–what are yours?
*****
Off-topic: Lost, Season 3 DVDs are out today. My mom hinted she got them for me for Christmas, so if that’s the case, my 2 week vacation coming up will be filled with sugar plums, dancing fairies, and tons of Lost.
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Like, totally whatever.
There is a lot of things that worry me about our society but one of the bigger ones is how we communicate. Without language we’re unable to think, and with poor language we can only think poorly. There are too many people who just don’t understand basic grammar and spelling. I see misspellings on billboards. I get ten emails a day from business students and professors that lack capitalization and punctuation. My own supervisors sign their emails with their names in all lowercase. I don’t get it. But I’m worried that the ease of the internet is causing our language to evolve into something lazy.
Part of our evolving language that needs to stop is the word “like.” During the bus ride to my car yesterday I listened to a conversation between two girls who used the word like 56 times. The bus ride was just under 8 minutes.
‘Like’ can be used in many situations, such as when you are comparing something (it’s like this other thing…) or when you enjoy something (I like steak). It should not be used in the place of “um,” or when you are trying to put emphasis on something you are about to say. I admit that I’ve used it incorrectly just as much as a lot of other people — most of us have — but if we’re not careful it’s only going to get worse.
You know that cloudy feeling in your brain when you’re struggling to put something into words? Maybe if we stopped inadvertently comparing things to things like it, we’d know what it is we’re talking about.
When I was in college I saw it used when students talked to their professors, in an attempt to sound smart by slowing down their speech and over-pronouncing certain words: “I just want to be, like, absolutely sure that I, like, know what it is I’m doing.” Unusually in such a situation the word immediately following ‘like’ is elongated. Example: “I really want to know, like, oooowhat it is I’m supposed to do.” People doing this think they are being articulate. I know this because I’ve done it a few times.
In social situations, I don’t think it’s used as much to articulate as it is to emphasize. “He was really rude,” doesn’t sound as dramatic as, “He was really, like, rude.” Maybe because the ‘like’ implies you aren’t sure if ‘rude’ is the correct word or not, so the person listening to your story imagines something that goes beyond words: this guy was beyond rude, so much so that there are no words for it. He was only like rude.
Sometimes people start their sentences like this: “So like…” and end with “…or whatever.”
When I was a kid people made fun of people who do this and they were called “valley girls.” I’m not sure if that was common knowledge or if that was just on Saved by the Bell, but anyway, now we’re all valley girls. Like, if you count how many times you say it, like, I bet you’ll be surprised. Let’s blame Bush:
To sum up: let’s speak with conviction. It’ll be hard to think about what we want to say before we actually say it, but I know we can do it.
Side note: this is part of “Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk,” which was written by Lost co-creator/producer Damon Lindelof. What you just saw is the first page. Check the rest of that shit out.
Are you smarter than a fifth of U.S. Americans?
Incase you haven’t seen, watch this…
Miss South Carolina Teen
Pundits are having a field day dogpiling on poor Caitlin Upton, Miss South Carolina Teen. Asked in competition, “One fifth of Americans can’t locate the United States on a world map; why do you think that is?” her response was rambling and literally incoherent, with non-sequitor observations about Iraq and South Africa. She has since said she froze. Genuine freezing might have been preferable; saying nothing would have been better than what she did say.
I refuse to make fun of her. Personally–and I’m completely serious here–I’m wondering if she didn’t have a sort of mini-stroke brought on by the stress of the moment. It makes sense to me. People who have had strokes sometimes find themselves unable to say the words they’re thinking; instead random words are tossed out. Circumstances such as those that she found herself in would be enough to burst a blood vessel in anyone’s head. They probably did dry runs with her about assorted world topics and her synapses just started spitting out fragments of those replies.
Second, I don’t think that a country that has tolerated seven years of a president so characterized by malaprops that entire 365-day calendars are devoted to them–a president whose town-hall meeting questions are carefully vetted before they’re spoken–gets to laugh too hard at a scared teenager who had a tough question sprung on her. Caitlin Upton has to do her own damage control; she doesn’t have a press secretary to face reporters the next day after a session of babbling incoherence and say, “Okay, what she MEANT to say was…”
And it WAS a tough question, because in thirty seconds she had to try and come up with an answer that was fundamentally upbeat and positive because, hey, that’s what beauty pagents are all about. If someone asked me that question and I had to come up with an off-the-cuff response, it would be this…
“One fifth? I’m surprised it’s that low. On the quiz show “Power of Ten” it was recently revealed that twenty-five percent of surveyed Americans believed that the inventor of the diesel engine was Vin Diesel. The fact is that obesity is not the number one health problem in this country, it’s stupidity. A lot of Americans are stupid. Bone dry stupid. Stupid as a box of rocks. They were born stupid, they were stupid in school, and they became stupid grown-ups. And there’s enough of them out there to have a considerable impact on this country, because morons are running for high office and morons are voting for them and putting them in there. Americans are oblivious to the rest of the world, and if that were not the case, then maybe our leaders might have listened when the rest of the world said, ‘Stay the hell out of Iraq, you morons.’ Many Americans have a fundamental arrogance that stems from a basic lack of intellectual curiosity. They don’t read. They don’t learn. They don’t think. They tune out with television or computer games or Ipods and obsess about what Lindsay or Britney or whatever other troubled pop tart is up to rather than caring about things that really matter.
Our educational system needs to be overhauled beyond the test-centric mandates of No Child Left Behind. If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and he will feed himself for ever. Students need to be taught HOW to think, not WHAT to think. More money needs to be spent on programs for kids who are already gifted so that those gifts can be fully realized and brought to fruition. We need to remember that the arts enrich a civilization; that science and scientific thinking is not the enemy; that it is more important to care for poor people over here than blow up poor people in other countries.
The fact that one fifth of Americans can’t find the country on the map pales beside the likelihood that one fifth of Americans probably couldn’t find their own asses with both hands and a flashlight. And that stupidity is going to continue to be a hallmark of our country until we work together to remedy the situation from the top down.”
Not an easy thing to sound upbeat about in thirty seconds, is it.
My condolences to Ms. Upton. Now…she needs to strive to be part of the solution, rather than be dismissed as part of the problem.
PAD
Here she is on Good Morning America (which happens to be owned by the same company that owns the pagent…. hmm… I wonder if that’s just a coincidence?)
heh heh…
heh heh hA…
HA HA hA hA hA…
Boston Public
I just saw an episode of Boston Public that I think has hooked me to at least watch a few more episodes. I didn’t realize how much the show actually is about. All this time I always thought it was about how a school operates, but it really raises a lot of controversial topics that are in today’s society.
The word “nigger” was discussed on today’s show. The students brought up the point that it’s okay for black people to use the word to refer to each other, but when white people use it, it’s not right. I thought they brought up a lot of good points. It kind of changed my point of view on the word. Before I kind of used to think that words were just words, and it was the specific person who put power into it. If I were to call a black person nigger, they’d probably be pissed, but if a black person were to do it, they wouldn’t think anything of it. Whoever is being called “nigger” has the power to decide how they interpret it. I used to think there was no difference between who used the word, but now I can see one.
One of the students brought up the point that the word was created by white supremacy. So when a white person uses it, it kind of reinforces that. But for black people, the people on the recieving end, when they use the word it, in a way, takes away the meaning that the white people originally gave to it. It’s like they’re challenging it, and making it into their own thing. I just thought that was a good point, and it got me thinking.
I hate how one word has so much power, though. It really shouldn’t be that way.
