Making newsiness - 28-29 September 2010
Sep. 30th, 2010 12:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptGood day, all of you who make our world more interesting by the second. The week of conspiracy awareness continues. Take a look at what Bnned Books Week looks like throuh the eyes of its sponsors, as well as a few examples of what censorship looks like, past and present. The ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom is also running several posts and videos on the subject of censorship, including telling me that the dictionary has been censored and banned more than just at the beginning of this year. For anyone who wonders why we still make a fuss about it, there are some people who do think it's appropriate to ban books in school settings, because young children might look at a book intended for older children and have questions or be exposed to older children concepts.
If you're a Quentin Tarantino fan, the news of the loss of his editor, Sally Menke means that the next film he does will have to try and lvie up to her, or will go off in another direction entirely. The films she created with Tarantino resonate both with viewers and with other editors.
If you value tradition, especially when it comes to January 1 parades and bowl games in California, then the addition of a corporate partner to the Tournament of Roses Parade feels like another tradition is getting swallowed up.
If you're a student of traditions, though, you might be cheered by an excerpt talking about how prostitution was excellent work in the frontier West, paying far more to the successful than even the best of women's or men's work, and providing benefits on par with what we consider standard today. And speaking thereof, a fedearl judge in Ontrio struck many of the anti-prostitution laws down, agreeing with the plantiffs' case that they constituted Charter violations by forcing sex workers outside of the safety of a house to do their jobs, including client screening, calling the police on bad customers, and other such dangers.
Finally, though, a time-honored tradition - concept cars, some of which look like what we drive now, some of which look like what we drive in a 1950s sciecne fiction novel.
In the world today, a prominent figure in the blogosphere of Iran has been sentenced to 19 years in prison for alleged "anti-state" actions.
A premature child's life was saved through the use of an ordinary plastic sandwich bag, which served as a heat trap for the child and prevented hypothermic death.
Violence in Afghanistan left Afghan president Hamid Karzai tearful about the future of the young in his country, believing they will flee. Perhaps some hope to temper this with is some Taliban groups indicating a willingness to come to the negotiating table.
Last out, Pakistan was tapped to head the IAEA governing board, a bit of an interesting decision, given Pakistan's stances on several issues, including not being a signatory to the NPT.
Domestically, there are several wealthy people who think their tax rates should be increased to pay down deficits and to invest in infrastructure, so not all the rich oppose all tax increases, but notice there where it says they want the money to be used for things that will solidify economic footing and provide them with a platform on which to build their own ideas, corporations, and investments. It's basically been the argument in favor of big stimulus poured into infrastructure that's been "disproven" by ARRA, which was too small by every calculation to achieve its stated goals. And then there's the part where the plan that did happen, the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, conclusively made things worse off for those not part of the top 1 percent of Americans. And there's plenty of data to back that assertion up.
If you're about to discover an inconvenient truth about people who would rather you didn't find it, expect to be told that your perfectly legal behavior is illegal.
Senator Jim DeMint or South Carolina has threatened that he will put a blanket hold on all legislation after this Friday until after campaign season is done, ostensibly because he won't be able to read all of those bills. What we're seeing, instead, is the Republican filibuster distilled and concentrated down into one person abusing the rules of the Senate, instead of one party doing so, but likely with similar effect. The Republican Party is making an excellent case for the Congress of next November to do some serious rule re-writing before they decide to adopt anything.
Christine O'Donnell, when saying she was a witch, is actually rehashing a very old lie, the Satanic Panic of decades ago, and rather than come clean about it and admit she was making it up, she decides to double down on it. She really does want a world with a secret Satanic conspiracy, odd as that sounds to the rest of us. And worse, though, she proves herself yet again to be unsuitable for office because she tries to reinforce her lies, instead of coming clean on them.
Last out, though, a picture of the religious knowledge of the United States, broken down by various faith groups. Overall, in knowing about their own beliefs and the beliefs of others, as well as the role of religion in the public sphere, atheists, agnostics, and Jews score the highest, while Protestants score highest on a set of questions about the Bible. Other findings of the study indicate that a lot of Americans who have a faith don't read or interact with other faiths. Which might explain why we have the arguments of Islam is the Bloodthirsty Religion taking root - the people who are being told they're under attack have done (and may not want to do) outside research to confirm what they're being told. If they did the research, though, they'd find that America has a rich Muslim history, several prominent figures who have studied its scriptures, and many pronouncements, treaties, and other official correspondence that indicates we got along just fine with Muslim countries in the past.
In technology, something rather odd and that makes me suspicious of its veracity - Fabrican, supposed spray-on fabric. It seems to good to be true. (Oh, and speaking of - if something currently claims to be able to jailbreak an iPhone 4, it's lying to you. Maybe later there will be something that can, but for now, no, there's no way.)
If you are concerned about having a whole body image taken of you at an airport, according to Dontscan.us, you have the right to opt out of your imaging, although this will likely subject you to a significant pat-down. And if you think that Halo and all the other syborg warfare games are in our future, news of better exoskeleton design is no doubt confirming that you're on the timeline for this.
T-Mobile claims they have the right to screen who they carry on their text networks, so as to avoid having offensive campaigns conducted using their networks.
Brain surgery by going in through the eye appears to be a possibility soon. Neat, no more need to pop the top off. If that's the case, I wonder, then, whether they can get to the great science of fixing optics and the nerves back there.
In related messing around with the brain, magnetic stimulation in the right part of the brain means the body chooses more sinister options regularly. Err, rather, magnetic stimulation on the the brain makes even dominantly right-handed people use their left.
Finally, a peek inside how the grant review and funding process works, and it looks a significant amount like the sausage-making of politics. Not through flashy campaigns and people wheeling and dealing, but in the cruch of having only a limited amount of resources to allocate to several outstanding proposals.
In opinions, thoroughly discredited propagandist L. Brent Bozell III rails against the introduction of reality shows and documentaries about poly people, considering it yet another front that the amoral media wants to normalize to further destroy traditional marriage and its values. A far more convincing argument would have been to rail against it because it's a rare feat indeed that manages to take something that most people would find odd and present it in a totally normal, un-sensationalized way. But that would mean we admit that something like that should be allowable and normal, deserving of respect and education instead of visceral or religiously-induced reactions to anything different. And it would mean not immediately investigating someone who agreed to have such a documentary made for bigamy, mostly in the sense of at least examining what secular, non-religious reasons we have to outlaw multiple wives. It would be not doing what Mr. Glazov accuses all totalitarian regimes of doing - trying to stifle laughter, amusement, or finding joy in life, because happy people don't revolt against things. It would be treating people as they are, instead of thinking that mere association with something that might be touched by someone in a group you disapprove of will infect the minds of the young and transform them into that disapproved-of group. Or insisting that they dig up bodies that are buried in a religious cemetery because they're of a disapproved-of group. (Even though they're part of the mystical branch of that group, and seriously, what kind of message do you send to someone by trying to force them to dig up their peacefully resting dead.)
Mr. Hill suggests that China-as-superpower is a boogeyman, whereas the real China is just barely managing to hold the country together, suffering from bubbles in GDP growth, pollution problems, and lots of peopel still living at subsistence levels outside of the cities. Not to mention other problems, like water flow and the usage of the major sources of water for several countries. (Seriously, though - water is a big deal, if not bigger, than many others.)
Kwame Appiah offers four things that he thinks our descendants are going to shake their heads at us over, as we do about slavery and women voting. The environment, our prison system, factory meat production, and the shuffling off of the elderly to live alone and die alone are his major candidates. The question is important, though - if we think about what future generations will condemn about us, it gives us a good idea of soemthing we should be working on.
Mr. Boortz returns with a column detailing what he sees the Obama agenda as and why the people of the country don't want to see it enacted, with as much villany and anti-Americanism as he can accuse the president of in such a short setting. Which makes Mr. Gardiner quite willing to say that the Tea Party has more power than the President, based on polling that doesn't point out the disapproval and disappointment runs in two directions, about equally split between those who think he's done too much and those that think he hasn't done enough. I'm not giving the Tea Party any more credit than they've earned, and by all the looks of things, if you want to talk about power, you look at the people that are pulling the marionette's strings, funding astroturfs and Republican campaigns with money outside the official Republican channels. Those people might have more power to influence than the President, but they're not the Tea Party as people understand it. They're the people establishment Republicans refer to as "small businesses", the ones in the 3 percent that control 50 percent of small business earnings. If you want to see what a lot of the Tea Party is like, well, they're like most electorates - they have innumeracy problems. And many of them aren't informed, so they can be persuaded by sound bites, and some of them have dark motives for their support.
It certainly doesn't help when their soundbites are lying to them, blaming Democrats for the sunset provisions of the Bush tax cuts, when it was the reconciliation process that required them, as well as taking things like the Pledge to American as a serious indication that the Republicans are going to change their tactics to something that will be truly effective and across-the-board for spending cuts and deficit reduction. Or they're painting the Democratic party as European socialists and the perfect party for leftists, who keep voters through emotional appeal, the religion of liberalism, and by demonizing all their opponents as bigots, instead of actual policy appeal. Any actual socialist would laugh at the idea of the center-right Democrats being socialist anything, the actually liberal part of the world is complaining that the center-right Democrats are being center-rightists, and point out the party that proudly flaunts its religious ties and platforms more is the Republican Party. As for the canard that Democrats have no policy appeal and just demonize everyone around them, remember the polls that said the bits and pieces of the health care bill were popular? And that people like better wealth equality? Yeah, they have policy appeal. And you can't accuse someone of jumping to bigtory where it isn't warranted when the track record confirms that there are plenty of bigots on your side, of the kind that will insist openly gay student body presidents resign. While being the assistant attorney general in their day jobs. That said, Mr. Blankley can find the silver lining in the Tea Party crowd by making them the incarnation of an anti-elitist sentiment that stands up for values, morals, and absolutes in a time of situational ethics and elites who erode society through the control of media and academia to keep themselves in power and wealth.
Staying in politics for a bit, Mr. S. Moore blames the deficit problem squarely on Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, who have been Speaker and Majority Leader for most of it, regardless of which President was in power. So, they're to blame for the frantic bailing that was demanded of them by everybody to keep banks and other firms afloat so that they didn't collapse and crush the economy more? The stuff that Republicans were heartily approving of when their guy was in power? The stuff some of them still want to do, despite their new hawkishness on debts?
As it stands, when comedian David Limbaugh says that the election will be about him and what he's done, he's right. Where the Republicans run the risk is that their attempts to paint those accomplishments (or lack thereof) as negative may backfire if the President can successfully convince the people tht he's done lots for them already, even though some of his big-ticket items are unfinished thanks to his opposition's perpetual filibuster in the Senate. If the prevailing narrative stays that Obama and the Democrats are out-of-touch elitists, then the Republicans can probably look for gains, especially from their Tea Party wing.
Stepping into education for a bit, Mr. Bluey goes after President Obama in the context of the education documentary "Waiting for Superman" and the "Education Nation" special on NBC, saying that the President's sending his own children to private school while allowing his Education Secretary to take back opportunity scholarships shows how much he believes in public schools, while trying to achieve national control over them through Race to the Top and national educational standards. Local control is apparently to be praised intrinsitcally over a "federal bureaucrat" getting to decide what gets taught in schools, as I can't detect anything in the piece that provides reasons why local control is superior other than "It's not D.C., so it must be better." For a primer on how it should be done, Rick Ayers lays out what he found to be wrong with "Waiting for Superman" - a lack of full disclosure about the financial situations of schools doing well, the lack of consideration for factors contributed by general poverty around some schools, the implication that standardized tests actually measure student ability and that learning is merely a matter of jamming sufficient factoids into someone's head, the anti-union, anti-educated-teachers, and anti-tenure stances, especially when compared with the universally pro-charter, pro-lottery, pro-privatization/"competition" tone, ignoring the disincentives to teaching that cause many new teachers to leave, those that stay to be terrorized instead of consulted, and that draw promising graduates to industries like finance, and the tone that says the United States is at war with other educational systems for dominance. Y'know, the context. While education needs reform, from the sounds of that critique, it needs the reforms proposed there like it needs another hole in the cranium.
And finally, stepping outside of politics, Ms. Graff complains about marketing-speak and terminology invasion in the service industries, things designed to make people feel valued while they shop at Big Box Conglomerate or eat out at Corporate Chain Restaurant, but lacking the actual service that would come with it. The readership wrote in to complain about how the terminology works on them like it's supposed to, but they expect their service people to actually do things that would make them feel like the words that are being used. Most of you know someone who works in a service industry, and if you were paying attention to their stories, you would know they don't get paid enough to back up the words, but they're going to be docked, dinged, or worse if they don't use the exact phrasing their Evil Corporate Masters have come up with. So, yes, complain about the terminology and the false expectation it creates - to the corporate offices, not the drones who are powerless to fix it, treat service people like people and not minimum-wage drones, and you might find that the service does meet the expectation.
Last for tonight, further proof that everyone needs an editor, and not just the spell-checker. One missing letter changes the meaning of a billboard significantly and causes embarrassment to the school district that it was promoting. The company putting up the board claimed responsibility and has fixed the problem. Similarly, one should always make sure all the calculations check out when it comes to things like trying to pull cars from the water. Just trust us.
And at the end, can you tell which is which? The law says one of those people is entitled to the full benefits of marriage, and the other is not. Can you spot the one the law discriminated against?
If you're a Quentin Tarantino fan, the news of the loss of his editor, Sally Menke means that the next film he does will have to try and lvie up to her, or will go off in another direction entirely. The films she created with Tarantino resonate both with viewers and with other editors.
If you value tradition, especially when it comes to January 1 parades and bowl games in California, then the addition of a corporate partner to the Tournament of Roses Parade feels like another tradition is getting swallowed up.
If you're a student of traditions, though, you might be cheered by an excerpt talking about how prostitution was excellent work in the frontier West, paying far more to the successful than even the best of women's or men's work, and providing benefits on par with what we consider standard today. And speaking thereof, a fedearl judge in Ontrio struck many of the anti-prostitution laws down, agreeing with the plantiffs' case that they constituted Charter violations by forcing sex workers outside of the safety of a house to do their jobs, including client screening, calling the police on bad customers, and other such dangers.
Finally, though, a time-honored tradition - concept cars, some of which look like what we drive now, some of which look like what we drive in a 1950s sciecne fiction novel.
In the world today, a prominent figure in the blogosphere of Iran has been sentenced to 19 years in prison for alleged "anti-state" actions.
A premature child's life was saved through the use of an ordinary plastic sandwich bag, which served as a heat trap for the child and prevented hypothermic death.
Violence in Afghanistan left Afghan president Hamid Karzai tearful about the future of the young in his country, believing they will flee. Perhaps some hope to temper this with is some Taliban groups indicating a willingness to come to the negotiating table.
Last out, Pakistan was tapped to head the IAEA governing board, a bit of an interesting decision, given Pakistan's stances on several issues, including not being a signatory to the NPT.
Domestically, there are several wealthy people who think their tax rates should be increased to pay down deficits and to invest in infrastructure, so not all the rich oppose all tax increases, but notice there where it says they want the money to be used for things that will solidify economic footing and provide them with a platform on which to build their own ideas, corporations, and investments. It's basically been the argument in favor of big stimulus poured into infrastructure that's been "disproven" by ARRA, which was too small by every calculation to achieve its stated goals. And then there's the part where the plan that did happen, the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, conclusively made things worse off for those not part of the top 1 percent of Americans. And there's plenty of data to back that assertion up.
If you're about to discover an inconvenient truth about people who would rather you didn't find it, expect to be told that your perfectly legal behavior is illegal.
Senator Jim DeMint or South Carolina has threatened that he will put a blanket hold on all legislation after this Friday until after campaign season is done, ostensibly because he won't be able to read all of those bills. What we're seeing, instead, is the Republican filibuster distilled and concentrated down into one person abusing the rules of the Senate, instead of one party doing so, but likely with similar effect. The Republican Party is making an excellent case for the Congress of next November to do some serious rule re-writing before they decide to adopt anything.
Christine O'Donnell, when saying she was a witch, is actually rehashing a very old lie, the Satanic Panic of decades ago, and rather than come clean about it and admit she was making it up, she decides to double down on it. She really does want a world with a secret Satanic conspiracy, odd as that sounds to the rest of us. And worse, though, she proves herself yet again to be unsuitable for office because she tries to reinforce her lies, instead of coming clean on them.
Last out, though, a picture of the religious knowledge of the United States, broken down by various faith groups. Overall, in knowing about their own beliefs and the beliefs of others, as well as the role of religion in the public sphere, atheists, agnostics, and Jews score the highest, while Protestants score highest on a set of questions about the Bible. Other findings of the study indicate that a lot of Americans who have a faith don't read or interact with other faiths. Which might explain why we have the arguments of Islam is the Bloodthirsty Religion taking root - the people who are being told they're under attack have done (and may not want to do) outside research to confirm what they're being told. If they did the research, though, they'd find that America has a rich Muslim history, several prominent figures who have studied its scriptures, and many pronouncements, treaties, and other official correspondence that indicates we got along just fine with Muslim countries in the past.
In technology, something rather odd and that makes me suspicious of its veracity - Fabrican, supposed spray-on fabric. It seems to good to be true. (Oh, and speaking of - if something currently claims to be able to jailbreak an iPhone 4, it's lying to you. Maybe later there will be something that can, but for now, no, there's no way.)
If you are concerned about having a whole body image taken of you at an airport, according to Dontscan.us, you have the right to opt out of your imaging, although this will likely subject you to a significant pat-down. And if you think that Halo and all the other syborg warfare games are in our future, news of better exoskeleton design is no doubt confirming that you're on the timeline for this.
T-Mobile claims they have the right to screen who they carry on their text networks, so as to avoid having offensive campaigns conducted using their networks.
Brain surgery by going in through the eye appears to be a possibility soon. Neat, no more need to pop the top off. If that's the case, I wonder, then, whether they can get to the great science of fixing optics and the nerves back there.
In related messing around with the brain, magnetic stimulation in the right part of the brain means the body chooses more sinister options regularly. Err, rather, magnetic stimulation on the the brain makes even dominantly right-handed people use their left.
Finally, a peek inside how the grant review and funding process works, and it looks a significant amount like the sausage-making of politics. Not through flashy campaigns and people wheeling and dealing, but in the cruch of having only a limited amount of resources to allocate to several outstanding proposals.
In opinions, thoroughly discredited propagandist L. Brent Bozell III rails against the introduction of reality shows and documentaries about poly people, considering it yet another front that the amoral media wants to normalize to further destroy traditional marriage and its values. A far more convincing argument would have been to rail against it because it's a rare feat indeed that manages to take something that most people would find odd and present it in a totally normal, un-sensationalized way. But that would mean we admit that something like that should be allowable and normal, deserving of respect and education instead of visceral or religiously-induced reactions to anything different. And it would mean not immediately investigating someone who agreed to have such a documentary made for bigamy, mostly in the sense of at least examining what secular, non-religious reasons we have to outlaw multiple wives. It would be not doing what Mr. Glazov accuses all totalitarian regimes of doing - trying to stifle laughter, amusement, or finding joy in life, because happy people don't revolt against things. It would be treating people as they are, instead of thinking that mere association with something that might be touched by someone in a group you disapprove of will infect the minds of the young and transform them into that disapproved-of group. Or insisting that they dig up bodies that are buried in a religious cemetery because they're of a disapproved-of group. (Even though they're part of the mystical branch of that group, and seriously, what kind of message do you send to someone by trying to force them to dig up their peacefully resting dead.)
Mr. Hill suggests that China-as-superpower is a boogeyman, whereas the real China is just barely managing to hold the country together, suffering from bubbles in GDP growth, pollution problems, and lots of peopel still living at subsistence levels outside of the cities. Not to mention other problems, like water flow and the usage of the major sources of water for several countries. (Seriously, though - water is a big deal, if not bigger, than many others.)
Kwame Appiah offers four things that he thinks our descendants are going to shake their heads at us over, as we do about slavery and women voting. The environment, our prison system, factory meat production, and the shuffling off of the elderly to live alone and die alone are his major candidates. The question is important, though - if we think about what future generations will condemn about us, it gives us a good idea of soemthing we should be working on.
Mr. Boortz returns with a column detailing what he sees the Obama agenda as and why the people of the country don't want to see it enacted, with as much villany and anti-Americanism as he can accuse the president of in such a short setting. Which makes Mr. Gardiner quite willing to say that the Tea Party has more power than the President, based on polling that doesn't point out the disapproval and disappointment runs in two directions, about equally split between those who think he's done too much and those that think he hasn't done enough. I'm not giving the Tea Party any more credit than they've earned, and by all the looks of things, if you want to talk about power, you look at the people that are pulling the marionette's strings, funding astroturfs and Republican campaigns with money outside the official Republican channels. Those people might have more power to influence than the President, but they're not the Tea Party as people understand it. They're the people establishment Republicans refer to as "small businesses", the ones in the 3 percent that control 50 percent of small business earnings. If you want to see what a lot of the Tea Party is like, well, they're like most electorates - they have innumeracy problems. And many of them aren't informed, so they can be persuaded by sound bites, and some of them have dark motives for their support.
It certainly doesn't help when their soundbites are lying to them, blaming Democrats for the sunset provisions of the Bush tax cuts, when it was the reconciliation process that required them, as well as taking things like the Pledge to American as a serious indication that the Republicans are going to change their tactics to something that will be truly effective and across-the-board for spending cuts and deficit reduction. Or they're painting the Democratic party as European socialists and the perfect party for leftists, who keep voters through emotional appeal, the religion of liberalism, and by demonizing all their opponents as bigots, instead of actual policy appeal. Any actual socialist would laugh at the idea of the center-right Democrats being socialist anything, the actually liberal part of the world is complaining that the center-right Democrats are being center-rightists, and point out the party that proudly flaunts its religious ties and platforms more is the Republican Party. As for the canard that Democrats have no policy appeal and just demonize everyone around them, remember the polls that said the bits and pieces of the health care bill were popular? And that people like better wealth equality? Yeah, they have policy appeal. And you can't accuse someone of jumping to bigtory where it isn't warranted when the track record confirms that there are plenty of bigots on your side, of the kind that will insist openly gay student body presidents resign. While being the assistant attorney general in their day jobs. That said, Mr. Blankley can find the silver lining in the Tea Party crowd by making them the incarnation of an anti-elitist sentiment that stands up for values, morals, and absolutes in a time of situational ethics and elites who erode society through the control of media and academia to keep themselves in power and wealth.
Staying in politics for a bit, Mr. S. Moore blames the deficit problem squarely on Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, who have been Speaker and Majority Leader for most of it, regardless of which President was in power. So, they're to blame for the frantic bailing that was demanded of them by everybody to keep banks and other firms afloat so that they didn't collapse and crush the economy more? The stuff that Republicans were heartily approving of when their guy was in power? The stuff some of them still want to do, despite their new hawkishness on debts?
As it stands, when comedian David Limbaugh says that the election will be about him and what he's done, he's right. Where the Republicans run the risk is that their attempts to paint those accomplishments (or lack thereof) as negative may backfire if the President can successfully convince the people tht he's done lots for them already, even though some of his big-ticket items are unfinished thanks to his opposition's perpetual filibuster in the Senate. If the prevailing narrative stays that Obama and the Democrats are out-of-touch elitists, then the Republicans can probably look for gains, especially from their Tea Party wing.
Stepping into education for a bit, Mr. Bluey goes after President Obama in the context of the education documentary "Waiting for Superman" and the "Education Nation" special on NBC, saying that the President's sending his own children to private school while allowing his Education Secretary to take back opportunity scholarships shows how much he believes in public schools, while trying to achieve national control over them through Race to the Top and national educational standards. Local control is apparently to be praised intrinsitcally over a "federal bureaucrat" getting to decide what gets taught in schools, as I can't detect anything in the piece that provides reasons why local control is superior other than "It's not D.C., so it must be better." For a primer on how it should be done, Rick Ayers lays out what he found to be wrong with "Waiting for Superman" - a lack of full disclosure about the financial situations of schools doing well, the lack of consideration for factors contributed by general poverty around some schools, the implication that standardized tests actually measure student ability and that learning is merely a matter of jamming sufficient factoids into someone's head, the anti-union, anti-educated-teachers, and anti-tenure stances, especially when compared with the universally pro-charter, pro-lottery, pro-privatization/"competition" tone, ignoring the disincentives to teaching that cause many new teachers to leave, those that stay to be terrorized instead of consulted, and that draw promising graduates to industries like finance, and the tone that says the United States is at war with other educational systems for dominance. Y'know, the context. While education needs reform, from the sounds of that critique, it needs the reforms proposed there like it needs another hole in the cranium.
And finally, stepping outside of politics, Ms. Graff complains about marketing-speak and terminology invasion in the service industries, things designed to make people feel valued while they shop at Big Box Conglomerate or eat out at Corporate Chain Restaurant, but lacking the actual service that would come with it. The readership wrote in to complain about how the terminology works on them like it's supposed to, but they expect their service people to actually do things that would make them feel like the words that are being used. Most of you know someone who works in a service industry, and if you were paying attention to their stories, you would know they don't get paid enough to back up the words, but they're going to be docked, dinged, or worse if they don't use the exact phrasing their Evil Corporate Masters have come up with. So, yes, complain about the terminology and the false expectation it creates - to the corporate offices, not the drones who are powerless to fix it, treat service people like people and not minimum-wage drones, and you might find that the service does meet the expectation.
Last for tonight, further proof that everyone needs an editor, and not just the spell-checker. One missing letter changes the meaning of a billboard significantly and causes embarrassment to the school district that it was promoting. The company putting up the board claimed responsibility and has fixed the problem. Similarly, one should always make sure all the calculations check out when it comes to things like trying to pull cars from the water. Just trust us.
And at the end, can you tell which is which? The law says one of those people is entitled to the full benefits of marriage, and the other is not. Can you spot the one the law discriminated against?
