Radical Transparency

Micaela the Intern just sent me this.

Definitely the first time Perez Hilton has ever showed up on this blog.

And that fact (and his post) raise a few questions:

A. Is Perez actually sad about NPR?* Seems like lots of his readers (an impressive percentage of whom, hilariously (and awesomely), represent themselves with pictures involving boobs or shirtless dudes) are not sad.

2. Is NPR really liberal? Is it really offensive to the Perez Hilton community? Or might some of those people just be spitting back anti-intellectual propaganda? Someone sometime somewhere some way convinced them that the elites were out to get them, and they get freaked out by anything that feels in any way academic or theoretical or learned (that how you spell lear ned?)?

d. Huge bummer that NPR is feeling the financial squeeze. I think they create real value. Great news. Great interviews. Great analysis. And, while pledge drives make me crazy, I love the theory behind their voluntary subscription model. They ask people to name their own price, to pay what they can. And that makes so much sense in so many ways. Clearly, it's vulnerable, however. I'll be curious to see if they step up the fundraising efforts in some way.

*Note: Sorry to show my liberal bias with a link to The Huffington Post.  I don't really even like The Huffington Post.  But they post the whole cutbacks memo from the NPR CEO, and I figured that's probably the most useful thing to read at this point.

My dad asked me to ask the internets if R.I.P. stood for requiescat in pace or requiescat in pacem. 

The results of my Latin-illiterate but highly scientific research were not overwhelmingly conclusive, but I saw enough to feel confident betting on pace.

But now I'm wondering what to make of this line, which I found when I clicked on a link that appeared - thanks to an overaggressive imagination that leapt at an unintentional pump fake from a Google search result metatag - to be a pace vs pacem argument:

A wise friend once explained to me that there are two types of people in this world: those who know Greek and barbarians.

A. I'm pretty sure that's a joke, but I also don't think jokes like that are 100% un-serious.  And, given even the slightest sliver of seriousness, wow is that a bold statement.

2. My dad does know Greek.  Ancient and Modern.  Very well.  Dude came very close to going down a life path toward Ancient Greek Scholar status.  And by life path I mean overgrown rabbit trail that sort of leads in a general direction and might have a fossilized footprint (or skeleton) or two somewhere in the middle of the woods.  The specificity of a pursuit like that blows my mind every time I think about it. 

3. My favorite types of people joke came to me through Chris Abani's first TED Talk.  There are three types of people in the world.  Those that can count.  And those that can't.

I'm pretty sure both the video camera and the internet were invented with situations like this in mind:

Once upon a time... from Capucha on Vimeo.

A. Someone please teach me French.

2. Giuls, my darling sister, it's time for you to settle down and start a family so I can have little nieces and nephews and spend every free moment of the rest of my life telling stories with them.

d. The hippo was allergic to magic.

Note: My capitalization ok on that title? Tricky when all that separates one word from another is an apostrophe.

Tom Ridge on the fact that Obama has a reported 7 to 13 percentage point lead in Pennsylvania:

If John McCain has a Webster's dictionary, the words not in it are surrender, quit or give up.

A. If he has a dictionary.  Which makes me wonder what percentage of people these days actually do have dictionaries.

2. Congrats to Webster's for building a very serious brand.  Maybe Tom Ridge is a statistical outlier here, but I bet there are quite a few other people that refer to all dictionaries as Webster's dictionaries.  Webster's dictionaries now join the likes of Band-Aids, Q-Tips, and Slurpees as branded products whose names now stand for entire product categories.

d. When it comes to common dictionary metaphors, I much prefer: if you look up the word "tough" in the dictionary, you'll find a picture of John McCain.  Mostly because I like the image of some kid that doesn't know the meaning of an adjective flipping to a page, finding a picture of someone or something that the adjective describes, and trying to make a visual connection.  In the McCain/tough case, I imagine the hypothetical kid guessing that "tough" means bald or old or grumpy.

In response to Crayon's comment on my blog post about Tom Konrad:

http://www.moreperfectmarket.com/2008/07/elusive-blueprint.html

http://playcrayon.blogspot.com/

Thanks dude. He might get upset if he found out you called him a gorilla, though. Orangutans don't like people mixing them up with other apes.

A few things worth noting:

A. Tom Konrad, poor guy, isn't mentioned at all.

2. Crayon is something of a mystery.  Glad to have had him brought to my attention, however.  Love the lyrics at the end of each post.

D. Why is it that most people feel the need to pronounce a non-existent G at the end of the word orangutan?  If orangutan pride is all I crack it up to be, then I'm sure all this mispronunciation business absolutely infuriates them.