As you may recall from an earlier post, the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid,” is a piece of corporate jargon used to indicate company loyalty.
Sometimes it’s not enough to just say you drink the Kool-Aid. If you really want to show devotion to a company, you have to go farther. Not as far as Jonestown, thankfully. For example, take a look at the photo below, sent to me by a good friend (let’s call her “Ruby”).
Pictured here with two cube-farm co-workers, Ruby is the one metaphorically drinking the metaphorical Kool-Aid:
action item - n., a specific task that needs to be accomplished; usually used in the context of a corporate meeting.
When someone takes “ownership” of an action item, this indicates responsibility to accomplish the specified task. Here’s a usage example: “At the last meeting, we decided that someone from the legal department needed to review our proposal. Who owned the action item to reach out to them?”
This piece of corporate jargon provides a more passive (and polite?) way of pointing the finger at someone and saying: “you must do this.” For example: “Can you take on that action item to complete the TPS Report? Does Tuesday give you enough time? Great.”
Popular corporate jargon usually offers something a little something more than what is offered by standard English. Often, that “little something more” is vulgarity (see, e.g., “bio break” and “drink the kool-aid“). Today’s corporate jargon entry offer’s another good example.
one throat to choke - when a customer has one company to blame when things go wrong.
To understand the meaning, imagine this call to a customer support line:
COMPANY A: “We’re a software company. What you have is a hardware problem. You need to get help from Company B.”
And inevitably, this is what happens when you call Company B:
COMPANY B: “I don’t know why those dolts over at Company A told you to call us. Your problem has nothing to do with our hardware. You need to call back Company A and get help from them.”
The customer gets bounced back and forth between these two companies without ever getting the problem resolved. At some point, the customer may develop an urge to strangle someone, but the trouble is that they don’t know whom to strangle.
What every customer needs is “one throat to choke.”
With one company to blame, the customer also has only one company to praise when things go right. So while the phrases “one back to pat,” “one hand to shake,” or even “one cheek to kiss” convey exactly the same point, I’ve never heard them used. “One throat to choke,” with its vulgar mental image of assault or attempted murder, rules the day.
“Wait a minute. What did you just say? You’re predicting four dollar a gallon gasoline? I hadn’t heard that.”
Look at him. He’s incredulous. He looks like he’s about the accuse the reporter of fear mongering. Gas prices were close to $4 at the time of this press conference, and today it’s well over $4.50 (at least where I live).
Later on in the press conference when asked a completely different question, Bush dodged it, saying he couldn’t answer because he’s been too focused on other things, like high gas prices. The same ones he learned about for the first time in that same press conference.
“Cookie” is one of those words that an adult cannot utter without sounding childish. I don’t care if you’re 98 years old and wearing both a monocle and a top hat. If you say the word cookie, you don’t sound like an adult.
It’s hard to maintain your dignity as an adult and admit you want to eat a cookie. At a deli counter recently, I was asked “do you want chips or a cookie with that sandwich?” Instinctively, I felt the need to lower my voice when I uttered: “I want a cookie.”
Maybe this is one of the things that makes the idea of a “cookie diet” so appealing. The concept is: “eat cookies, lose weight” as this 6-second clip explains:
I can lose weight by eating cookies? Fun! It’s like being a child again! Maybe I can start an exercise regimen using only swing sets and seesaws. Forget about stairmaster, take a look at my new home gym:
The lawyer in me wants to point out that sure, you can lose weight by eating nothing but cookies, but doesn’t it depend on what your definition of a cookie is? Can you take a salad, mash it down into a little round circle and call it a cookie?
I think the true test of whether or not something is a cookie is if children want to eat them. If a cookie diet cookie and a double-stuffed Oreo elicit the same smile on a 7-year-old, then it’s a cookie. If not, then it’s probably not really a cookie, it’s a smallish, round, food-substitute.
“Eat smallish, round, food-substitutes and lose weight! It’s that simple!”
Back in 2006, I had a little political argument with a group of friends over dinner.
I argued that the Democratic Party nominee would pick Barack Obama as the VP candidate in 2008. My dinner companions were unanimous in declaring how naive I was. “Obama as the VP nominee?” They laughed. “Impossible.” We actually made an informal bet, agreeing that the loser would give money to charity of the winner’s choice (5:1 odds against).
It’s now official: I lost the bet.
Not long after that, I wrote this less-than-accurate post explaining why I thought Obama would end up as the VP nominee. Among my other statements, I said “he won’t run for president, so he won’t get bloodied in the primary.”
Genius.
This was a little less than two years ago, long before Obama had declared his candidacy for presidency. Even a year ago, how many of us just assumed, as a matter of accepted truth, that we would never see an African American at the top of a major party ticket in our lifetimes? We just assumed we hadn’t yet made it that far as a country.
It turns out Obama had more confidence in us than we had in him.
I tried Lunesta the other night after having trouble sleeping. I slept well, but when I woke up, it tasted as if I’d fallen asleep with my mouth full of old pennies. The taste lasted all day.
It turns out I’m not the only one who had a problem like this (see here or here and see the fine print at the bottom of the official website where it mentions the “unpleasant taste”).
I don’t want to complain too much. After all, “pennies in the mouth” is a better side effect, then say, a damaged kidney or liver. Or heart failure.
TV commercials for Lunesta typically show a glowing butterfly gently floating near a person apparently in deep, peaceful slumber. My idea is that they change the commercial to show the butterfly floating around the sleeper’s mouth, and when the sleeper breathes in deeply, she accidentally swallows the butterfly. In the morning, there should be the remnants of a brown, dead butterfly in the person’s mouth.
“CAUTION: Avoid sudden deep intakes of breath in close proximity to Lunesta’s butterfly mascot”
Earlier today I walked by my manager’s desk at work and grabbed a couple of pieces of candy out of her bowl. Picked up a red one and a green one, both in wrappers with Korean writing. I put the green one in my mouth … and only then looked at the label. which read:
“Pine Needles Taste Candy”
In case you were wondering, yes, it did taste exactly like pine needles.
I explained to my manager that I preferred to eat fresh pine needles, thank you very much. Who needs the extra sugar?!
San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders had promised to veto a City Council resolution supporting gay marriage. At the eleventh hour, with the resolution on his desk, he changed his mind. In an emotional speech, Mayor Sanders explains why he reversed his position.
With his wife by his side and holding back tears, Mayor Sanders reveals that his daughter Lisa is a lesbian. Speaking of her, and of the gay and lesbian members of his staff, he says:
“In the end, I could not look any of them in the face and tell them that their relationships — their very lives — were any less meaningful than the marriage that I share with my wife, Rana.”
I remember when I was a child, we drove by a restaurant with the name “The Pink Pear.” My father chuckled, mentioning something about there being a double meaning to the restaurant name. An upscale Hooters, essentially. Try as I might, I didn’t see the double meaning — perhaps this was an early sign of gayness.
And perhaps a more recent sign of gayness is that I should enjoy a cocktail with these ingredients:
As you might imagine, I intend no chest-related double meaning here. Instead, the only double meaning is perhaps a suggestion that you order two at once.
Also, I recommend that you not substitute the Grey Goose pear vodka with the more common Absolut pear vodka. Both vodkas taste of pear, but in my opinion Absolut Pear has hints of an underripe pear laced with DDT.
[There might already a drink called the Pink Pear, but since I don't know about it, I'm crediting myself with inventing the name. Add another second to my 15 minutes of fame! Justin gets a h/t for introducing me to Grey Goose Pear vodka. Mmmm.]
During the Miss Teen USA 2007 competition, contestant Caitlin Upton (Ms. South Carolina) was asked the following question:
“Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is?”
Her answer was spectacular:
If you think about it for a minute, Caitlin Upton’s answer does provide valuable insight into some of the root causes of the problem.
For your enjoyment, here’s an attempted transcript:
“I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so, because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and I believe that our education like such as South Africa and The Iraq and everywhere like, such as, and I believe that they should — our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. — er — should help South Africa, and should help The Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future for our ch–.”
This weekend I went to see a reprint of Metropolis, the famous 1927 Fritz Lang silent film.
The film is so iconic that many scenes looked familiar, and yet there were some scenes that surprised me. I’ve seen the cityscapes before, and of course the well-known the “Machine-Man” robot (an obvious inspiration for Star Wars’ C3PO fifty years later), but I’d never seen the interior design shots before, and some of them were stunning. So were the fabulous art deco futuristic ticker tape machines and the giant underground machines powering the city. I couldn’t find any online pictures that came close to capturing the power of those scenes.
I’ve decided that when I finally have my billions, I’m going to have my office designed to be an exact replica of the one belonging to Joh Fredersen, the ruler (owner? creator? overlord?) of Metropolis. My replica will come complete with vacuum tube powered computing machine on my desk, a staff of identically clad accountants, a “Thin Man” to spy on my workers in their gloomy underground city, and giant analog wall clock keeping metric time.
Even by 2007 standards some of the visuals and special effects are actually pretty impressive. One surprise was that, in contrast to the bold and pathbreaking visuals, the plot was at times, well, a bit cheesy. Overall a great experience.
Here’s a sample of some of the well known Metropolis iconography.
On April 15th, 1994, a sane Dick Cheney confidently explains how trying to take over Iraq would lead to a “quagmire,” that wouldn’t be worth the American casualties:
Funny stuff. Max Blumenthal visits a College Republican convention, and after hearing the expected GOP pro-war talking points (”what people don’t understand is if it’s not faught in iraq and we don’t win over there, it’s gonna happen here.”), Blumenthal asks:
“If you support the war, why aren’t you serving in the military?”
The results are hilarious.
Blumenthal doesn’t just cover the war in his visit with the Chickenhawk College Republicans. When he interviews some Republicans about their feelings about gays, at first there’s some old fashioned GOP anti-gay garbage. But it gets really interesting when a member of the College Republicans lets us know that he’s been dealing with some suppressed feelings:
Republican Guy: “Everybody at one time in their life has had the inclination towards the other — uh — towards the same sex. . . . But just because you have the inclination does not mean you’re gay because if you have the inclination because you’re curious and stuff like that. . . . But if you accept it, and then suppress your feelings and you pray about it to god, and know that you’re not — are are so much stronger than some other people.”
Max Blumenthal: “Have you accepted it?”
Republican Guy: “Yes, I have accepted it, I have prayed about it to God, and I know for a fact that I am not gay.”
I had the privilege of meeting Elizabeth Edwards at the Human Rights Campaign dinner in San Francisco this weekend, and seeing her deliver this moving speech. How can you not love this woman?
Years later, we’re told by the President that we’re “making progress.” But he’s said that a lot over the years. Take a look at this 30-second montage (2003-2007):
(this clip is actually a TV spot targeting a specific Senator, but the message is relevant to a wider audience)
Don’t forget what we were told:
I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.”
-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Nov. 14, 2002.
No, it’s not what you’re thinking. They didn’t ban gay people. They banned “The Gays.” That is, people with the last name “Gay.”
The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that the Australian version of Facebook (the social networking website) rejects membership for anyone with the last name “Gay.” The paper reports that any attempt to register a Facebook membership under the last name “Gay” results in the following error message:
“Please enter a legitimate name.”
Ouch! As if the inevitable playground taunts weren’t bad enough for children with that last name, now this.
Clearly, Facebook isn’t trying to discriminate against The Gays. The problem is no doubt the result of some oversensitive software filters. I’m sure Rudolf Lipschitz would have faced a similar challenge had he survived long enough to create a Facebook profile.
On the other hand, why is “gay” on the list of terms that are filtered out? I’ve made the point before, but the word “gay” is not a profane term. It doesn’t need filtering.
You would have thought that the software filter gurus would have learned this lesson after the “Enola Homosexual” incident. This incident occurred on September 5, 1994, when the Northwest Herald (a paper in suburban Chicago) ran a story with the following headline:
This nonsensical headline resulted when the word “gay” was mistakenly replaced with “homosexual.” The Northwest Herald’s story was actually about a planned exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution, where part of the fuselage of the famous plane the Enola Gay was to be placed on display. For younger readers, the Enola Gay — not the Enola Homosexual — is famous for being the B-29 bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare, over Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945.
FREE BONUS MATERIAL!
Training material for newspaper editors and Facebook IT employees: How to tell when “gay” means “homosexual”
I would criticize him for dropping out of such an important effort … but since Bush ignored the Iraq Study Group Report in its entirety, I suppose no harm was done.
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