America's Tsunami?

I have taken in the news through all my senses (as usual) over the past few days. Katrina unbelievably continues to shock and amaze me. Tragically, New Orleans continues to flood, the death count in the coastal area is rising, and the damage estimates exceed global GDPs. Catastrophe has come, and we are now hearing the stories of tragedy. My heart goes out to all of the people whose lives have been effected by Katrina.

Sunday night at 11:00 a professor at a Louisiana University predicted that Katrina may be the American Tsunami. After landfall, we thought we had dodged the bullet, but as the hours passed the damage assessments came in. Then more and more talking heads mentioned the words America’s Tsunami.

Are you serious? 226,000+ people died in the 2004 Tsunami ranking it as one of the worst tragedies in history, and someone can shallowly compare Katrina to the Tsunami? Katrina has killed a number of people. This is a tragedy of its own right, but surely Katrina can’t compare this loss of life to the massive wipeout of the Tsunami.

WTF?

El Sazon Haiku

Backlit, black on white
"Gran Opening Tomorrow"
Praise God, "!Finally!"

VMBs

10:18 – Cell phone rings (on the work phone let caller #1 go to voicemail)
10:19 – You have new voicemail
10:31 – Dial voicemail
10:32 – Voicemail: “Hey Jeremy, I was just calling.”
10:33 – erase message and hang up.
11:07 – Cell phone rings (returning call to caller #1, let caller #2 go to voicemail)
11:08 – You have new voicemail
11:14 – Dial voicemail
11:15 – Voicemail: “Hey Jeremy, I was just calling.”
11:16 – erase message and hang up.

By definition, “I was just calling,” “what’s up,” “how are you,” are all voicemail bombs (VMBs). These time wasting messages mean nothing. They are like sending emails with a subject line that says “Whaddup” and no body to the message. Only the VMBs are worse. I cannot just click “move to trash” as casually as my Gmail interface. Instead I have to stop what I’m doing, call my voicemail, enter password, press 1, listen to message, press 7 to delete, and then hang up the call. All of that for absolutely no more information than the incoming call log. Forget the search for the WMDs, people, we need to stop the VMBs.

Grogger Grammar

Every now and then I get on a grammar kick.

Several years ago I fought a gentleman's fight to remove "X" from the alphabet. I mean the X doesn't do anything that the hard K and S or the Z can't do, and wouldn't the alphabet seem so much more concise at 25 letters as opposed to 26. Of course, that pesky X-ray just looked weird spelled EKS-ray. Needless to say I lost that battle, as you all know (although I still lobby).

Then there was the Eksclamation Ekscitement of the mid 90s. The long, slender dripping Eksclamation point is so mysterious. Ah! He is such an interesting punctuation mark simply in his appearance, and man, the way it can bring to life a statement. Just think about a note I got on my desk last week: “YOU'RE FIRED!!!” Now that had pizzazz. On the other hand the first draft didn't have the same kick, "while we generally find your work abysmal, you are always late, you leave early, and when you are here we are not sure what you do, we simply do not have the funds to pay your poorly negotiated wage nor the coffee and cheese nip bills that you continue to accrue. We are asking you to please never return to this office." Here the obvious was belabored only to end the ranting with the Eksclamation Point’s bastard child—the Period (the story of which cannot be covered here because of the strong emotions that the affair still evokes with the Question Mark). Unfortunately, the Eksclamation Point Ekscitement faired only modest results, but at least Yahoo! bought into it!

My latest grammar kick is the Parentheses promotion. The twins (that begins and ends). The friends with bends. The brother and sister that are real sentence twisters. Oh how I love these guys! I invite them into my sentences to give (the real smart ass) meaning to my sentences, and if you skip over the little secret shared between the brother and sister then you still get the gist of the sentence. Teachers (who never understood my use of the parentheses) have told me to use the Parentheses to store the “beside the point” messages. I thought about that. That would mean that I should tattoo one Parenthesis to my head and the other to my foot. I totally disagree. The Parentheses shout out to the reader, “this little message is cute but if it’s too offensive for you, then it is Parenthetical.” What is even better about the Parentheses is that instead of subtlety including additional information in the sentence, the message has attention drawn to it by the grand introduction and salutation by Mr. & Mrs. Parenthesis.

Even more recently I have sought to incorporate the “air Parans.” Years ago my father started the air quotes, which we all of come to know and love. The air Parans have not been as widely accepted. It seems that just as on the written page, Parans will continue to be the jealous cousins of the quotation marks, but what would you ekspect from that colon family.

I implore you to use more parenthesis (whether you want to or not). They are having a difficult time providing for their families (the brackets), and as of late they have had to turn to prostitution. Mrs. Parenthesis has been working night jobs on the IM circuit :) (look familiar?) Mr. Parenthesis has not fared as well there because seemingly everyone is happy on the IM circuit—probably because they are chatting and not working :(

Please stay tuned as we ramp up for the Em--Dash mania slated for winter 05-06.

Laisser-faire Information Age

If anyone has strolled through Floydville lately, you may have seen this post about information. While a number of issues arise out of his post, specifically I have been thinking about the gatekeeper crisis in an information flood.

America is a rich culture: we are rich with cars, rich with spacious houses, rich with good healthcare, and we are rich with food. This subtle observation I made while carefully cleaning my seventh plate at Ryan’s Steak House. Then it hit me--the gatekeeper crisis is me.

Super-sized, all-you-can-eat buffets filled with flavored matter in all shapes and sizes epitomize the gluttony of our food rich culture. A family of four can pick up 27 pounds of food for less than two six packs of “good” beer, yet there are still other restaurants in business. Primarily the reason that fine cuisine competes with the “value added” food, is the reason that good information survives in a culture that is information rich.

All day I can super-size and efficienize. I can keep Wal-Mart, McDonalds, and Old Navy in business, but that is not sustainable. At some point (around about the fifth plate stretch), I suffer from the lack of quality from this gluttonous lifestyle. I may be able to have all I want all the time, but as Doug noted “57 Channels and There’s Nothing On” becomes a theme song to this excesstasy. The beauty of the free market is that I don’t have to go to Wal-Mart, Ryan’s, or pay for 936 digital channels.

Nor do I have to buy all of the information. Instead, the Internet, which is certainly information rich, is filled with many close relationships in forums, newsgroups, and the blogosphere. People form relationships through the digital divide and provide meaning in a meaningless swath of 1s and 0s. The gatekeeper, as it has always been, is ultimately me. As the free market and a little social Darwinism suggests, the good information will stay around, and the excess may not be around—ever heard of Quincy’s?