The UK Independent's Jon Rantoul won't be using clichés any time soon:
Normally, though, politicians are the worst offenders. It is not clear how much they themselves are to blame, or how much they are simply overwhelmed by the substandard drafting of civil servants and speech writers. Perhaps they lack the time to put a pen through it and rewrite it themselves. It is a national scandal that the Civil Service provides such ghastly drafting of official documents, full of turgid abstractions that are intended, perhaps unconsciously, to conceal the thinness of the content. As for speeches, what do politicians pay their speech writers for?
The Prime Minister's speech on NHS reform last week was a shocker for clichés: "pillar to post; in the driving seat; frontline; level playing field; cherry picking; one-size-fits-all; reinvent the wheel; let me be absolutely clear; no ifs or buts". If each of those were not on the List [of banned clichés] before, they are now.
The Daily Parker has adopted the list, effective immediately.
I'm wrapping up in Fairfield County, Conn., today, then I get five nights at home before popping off to Boston for an indefinite series of 4-day weeks there. At least it's Boston, a city I enjoy, and one with easy access to the airport. (I expect my commute will be two hours shorter than it is to Connecticut.) Parker won't like it, though: he'll likely board from Sunday night to Thursday afternoon every week for the duration of the project.
No word yet on Internet connectivity. The client with whom I'm wrapping up this morning trades good-sized portfolios, so they have strict security. The Boston client manages securities as well, so I may not have much contact with the outside world there, either.
I'll survive, and so will Parker, if for no other reason than the regular, magical increases in my bank account twice each month....
Because of a barrage of comment spam, I've temporarily killed the comment feature of The Daily Parker. These things usually pass in a couple of days. Management apologizes for the inconvenience.
I keep getting asked about my Facebook notes: why did I leave out the punchline? Where's the rest of the post? Why do you post three at once at odd hours?
The simple explanation: I post on my blog, The Daily Parker, throughout the day; Facebook reads the blog's RSS feed at 8-hour intervals; and the RSS Feed only has the article blurb. Facebook also rearranges embedded links and photos, so sometimes pictures attached to blog entries just seem to vanish.
Fascinating, no?
After a lot of procrastination, I've finally upgraded The Daily Parker to dasBlog 2.3.
Nothing outwardly has changed, but apparently the developer community has fixed a ton of bugs and, more helpfully, upgraded to .NET 2.0. I don't have time at the moment to go through the entire feature list, but I'm sure there are a couple in there I'll use.
Mainly I was tired of having an item on my to-do list since October 2008. (I said "a lot of procrastination.")
Actually, there will be a Cubs game, in about 10 minutes, but I won't be there, for the following reasons: It's cold out, it's raining, and I have a financial accounting exam in about a week for which I am slightly more prepared than I am to swim the English Channel.
Instead of rainy Cubs photos, then, here is a great post about ghostwriting:
I recognize the paradox [of ghostwriting celebrity memoirs]: the bookstores are already happy to sell this kind of fraud, so why can't online authors engage in the same sort of duplicity? The answer is that online authors need to err on the side of honesty and integrity in order to support not only their own work, but the internet as both a medium and distribution platform.
... Speaking of frauds, do you remember Milli Vanilli? They’re a Grammy-winning singing duo who had to give their Grammy back when it was revealed that the people singing the Grammy-winning song weren't the stage-act duo who accepted the award. C+C Music Factory got into the same kind of hot water when they replaced a full-figured singer on one of their hit songs with a shapely non-singer for that song's music video.
As for the Cubs, well, they were eliminated mid-May, so oh well. Pitchers and catchers come back in five months.
Via Tom Hollander comes Strange Maps, a blog I will have to read through when I get a free moment next year. The blog supports Frank Jacobs' forthcoming book, Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities. The blog starts with "Lunatic Asylum Districts in Pennsylvania," moving through "The Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World" and "Heineken's 'Eurotopia'" on its random walk through maps. Very cool blog.
Example: a map showing the best beer in America, based on the number of medals won, with a handy refiguring of the results by population:
The top 10, reshuffled to reflect the number of medals per million of inhabitants, looks quite different, reflecting a dominance by states with a strong micro-brewing tradition:
- Colorado – 64.4
- Oregon – 42.5
- Wisconsin – 38.6
- Washington – 16.2
- Missouri – 15
- Pennsylvania – 13.5
- Massachusetts – 12.6
- California – 12.8
- Texas – 5.6
- New York – 5.1
Also from Hollander, a report that Samoa changed sides:
As sirens and church bells wailed across Samoa just before 6am on Monday, drivers obediently stopped their cars. Then, after instructions issued over the radio by the Prime Minister, Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, they shifted to the other side of the road and ushered in history.
"After this announcement you will all be permitted to move to the other side of the road, to begin this new era in our history," Mr Tuilaepa told his people, warning: "Don't drive if you are sleepy, drunk or just had a fight with your wife."
Good advice, that.
Sunny and 13°C in Chicago today. Result: Parker got almost two hours of walks. Other result: Pithy, pointless blog entry. Everyone wins!
Last Thursday, The Daily Parker turned three.
Actually, yesterday, the dog turned 2 years, 5 months; but the blog is three years old.
And in honor of this august day in November, I hit "Post" three times before correcting all the typos.