My cousin Sinéad is having a fancy dress 30th where all the guests have to dress up as Bob Dylan songs. There are prizes galore on offer, including one for the first person to correctly identify all 16 Dylan songs referenced in the invite.
Well, not quite everyone, but close enough. Courtesy of Viv, here’s another great example of the really useful information the Web throws up sometimes: an exhaustive index of patron saints and their patronages.
Scanning the list, it seems to me that there’s such a thing as too many patrons - maybe some clearer lines of accountability would got some better results on this score, for example. How do you go about thinning these ranks, though? There’s the HR problem from hell.
Hadn’t seen this before:
Courtesy of that nice Chris Morris.
Brad De Long isn’t your typical internationally-respected macroeconomist:
What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been…
Back in the old days–when Donald Luskin, Andrew Sullivan, and Mickey Kaus first decided that there were reputations to be made and Republican brownie-points to be earned by attacking Paul Krugman as “shrill,” and when you could (well, maybe not you, but one, or some of those one might call “one”) using only the suckers of one’s tentacles count us few members of the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill as we gathered in the night psychotically ululating shrill screeds of Bush hatred at the dead, uncaring stars, having been driven into shrill unholy madness by the incompetence, mendacity, malevolence, and sheer disconnection from reality of George W. Bush and his administration–back in those old days, as I was saying, few would ever have thought that we would ever have the privilege of being led in Evensong here at Order of the Shrill headquarters here at Miskatonic University by tonight’s fine and harmonious quartet, made up of Newsweek’s Howard Fineman, the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan, Meet the Press’s Tim Russert, and the New York Times’s John Tierney.
Howard Fineman Is Shrill
Peggy Noonan Is Shrill
Tim Russert Is Shrill
John Tierney Is ShrillWelcome, friends! We are happy to give you your robes and your copies of the Krugmanomicon as we formally induct you into the Order! It’s been a long strange trip, and you are late to the party, but you are very welcome now that you are here!
Now we will sit back and listen as your shrill ululating harmonies fill the sky beneath the dead, uncaring stars with that old favorite melody of Aaaiii! Ph’nglui Mglw’nafh Krugman R’lyeh Wagn’nagl Fhtagn! Aaaiii!!!
The Daily Mail keeps a straight face for this story:
A mobile phone salesman was hauled off a plane and questioned for three hours as a terror suspect - because he listened to songs by The Clash and Led Zeppelin. Harraj Mann, 24, played the punk anthem London Calling and classic rock track Immigrant Song in a taxi before a flight to London.
The lyrics to both tracks made the driver fear his passenger was a terrorist.
I do think it’s terrible when honest, decent taxi drivers - cowed no doubt by our craven media and the scourge of political ‘correctness’ - are forced to blame someone’s choice of music when it’s a simple matter of them being the wrong colour.
I like to imagine what would have happened if our hapless future litigant had eschewed middle class whiteboy rawk and instead muttered a few quick prayers before his flight.
I suppose I’ll watch tonight’s Channel 4 documentary on stammering, but not without trepidation. Stammering can be a really unpleasant thing to watch, and stammerers are acutely conscious of that. However a stammer starts, it’s this awareness which can create the kind of vicious circle in which (to simplify) negative feedback eats at the relative confidence and self-ease that are important for fluent speech, making for a worse stammer, which makes for worse feedback, which makes for even lower confidence. At the bottom of the spiral, a person can end up hardly able to speak at all.
How and what we communicate is fundamental to our sense of ourselves as individuals, and even a mild speech impediment can be emotionally debilitating, and an incentive to hide from some parts of life - avoiding the telephone, running a mile from public speaking, narrowing horizons to what’s safe. I recently met a guy who chose to go to Manchester University over Durham because he found it easier to say. Naturally, that didn’t last long once he actually got there. It’s funny, but the most familiar words can be the hardest to say - when I attended a therapy session a couple of months ago just about everyone in the group said their own name was what got them stuck most often. I’m the same, and once when I was at some sort of summer camp as a kid, I pretended to be called something else just because it was easier. It’s ridiculous and it’s sad - hesitating when asked your own name is an absurd, stupid thing, and again it’s that knowledge that makes it all the more likely.
So, what’s the fix? There isn’t one, really (though this documentary might say otherwise) - once you stammer into adulthood it generally stays with you to some extent. But you can minimise it, partly by trying to desensitise yourself to real or perceived negative feedback (or as Troy McClure might say, “Get Confident, Stupid”). Since the aim is partly to be unconscious of and therefore unconcerned about the potential pitfalls in a conversation, it’s hard to deliberately and consciously achieve. It helps when the people around you don’t make a big deal about it and wait to hear what you’ve got to say. I’ve almost always had that, and I’m very grateful.
I’ve been looking for this for ages - the ‘Diary of Alan Sugar’ that appeared a while ago in Private Eye. The whole thing is below the fold (click on ‘more’), but here’s an excerpt, in which Sir Alan has taken a few acolytes out for grub at the Savoy.
So we’re all settling in nicely, having a bit of a chat - remember, teamleaders, always encourage your team-members to have a bit of a chat but IN THEIR OWN TIME - when a waiter comes up with this bloody great basket and asks us if we want some.
“What’s the product?” I says.
“Bread, sir,” he says.
“How much, my friend?” I says.
“It’s free, sir,” he says.
“I’ll take the lot!” I says, “Then fill your basket up again, bring it back here, and I’ll take that load too”.
And that’s precisely what he did. Be under no illusion: if you’re offered something, and the deal’s to your advantage, buy up the stock before they up the price.
Yet again, I have been forced to face the self-centred, attention seeking, part of my personality. Upon arriving in Dublin airport I took the bus home. Forgetting the horrors of having to wait an hour in Swords, I was glad to be returning. Such was my mood, that despite the fatigue of almost 18 hours in planes, airports, and public transport, I gave up my seat to a woman in the throng of clammy passengers.
While I was rearranging my bag, to move away from the seat, I looked away. A second later, as soon as I had risen, I noted a different person sitting in the seat. Okay, thought I, this woman has a small child to corral. She then thanked the other lady. Throughout the journey, the garrulous maiden insisted on telling everyone who would listen about a nice lady that gave up the seat for her. For a full fifty minutes I listened to compliments lavished upon this transport samaritan, all the while I was silently responding, “Damn you woman! It was I, I who gave you the seat. Lavish your praise upon me!” There was barely a synapse between the thought and a sudden outburst.
I think I share far too many personality traits with Frasier Crane. Though my failings have been acknowledged, were it to happen again, I think I would still damn her eyes.
