Our word of honor makes an appearance at CNN.com today.
Buried down in the fifteenth paragraph of an article detailing the escape of the FARC hostages in Colombia, some real FARC guards were cuffed and blindfolded by their erstwhile comrades who were actually Colombian agents sent in to rescue them. It's actually a pretty good article...for CNN.
Link
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
June 18, 2008 Erstwhile Sighting
I'm not dead yet!
Our favorite word appears in Time Magazine of all places! An article dealing with the Senate investigations into torture talks about some of the methods used by our erstwhile enemies - The Soviet Union and North Korea. Aren't we still enemies with North Korea? Can't tell the players without a scorecard.
Link
Our favorite word appears in Time Magazine of all places! An article dealing with the Senate investigations into torture talks about some of the methods used by our erstwhile enemies - The Soviet Union and North Korea. Aren't we still enemies with North Korea? Can't tell the players without a scorecard.
Link
Thursday, May 8, 2008
May 8, 2008 Erstwhile Sighting
Erstwhile made the headlines...in Salt Lake City. Our favorite word appears in a Salt Lake Tribune headline about a former High School football player now a race car driver. Sports and a headline today.
Link Removed
Link Removed
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
May 7, 2008 Erstwhile Sighting
Angie Everhart, a former Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, was arrested for DUI recently. E! News referred to her as an erstwhile swimsuit model. I imagine that she could still model swimsuits if she wanted to. Hell, for that matter I guess we all could. Some of us would just look better doing it.
Link
Link
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
A Very Scary Documentary
Cripes, I know I'm getting old when I'm posting PBS documentaries on here. Next week it'll be a retrospective on ABBA. Anyway...
The following link is to a PBS documentary on the discovering and marketing of what's cool. It's the scariest thing I've seen in while.
The usurpation of what finding an identity in our youth today may be the biggest contributor to the vapidness of the teenagers that I am starting to encounter. And the scary thing is that I didn't pick up on this before.
I just sort of assumed it was the usual as I get older they seem dumber kind of thing, that parents have been saying since Og watched his son, Thag, bang two black rocks together instead of two white rocks. I suspect that this is different. Finding your identity as a youth used to be more about a slow process of trial and lots of errors. It was painful at times but instructive and served as a good training ground for the roles that you would play later in life. Now there are no pecking orders in adolescence. There is only a morass of moderate coolness.
With the pre-packaging and marketing of identities now it is almost too easy to catch the tail end of a "cool trend" and be able to acclimate it to your life. The fact that it is being marketed as heavily as it is is the scary part of it. It is said that the marketing exists because it is a $150B industry. I imagine it is a $150B industry because it is marketed so heavily.
Where I am encountering it is in seeing young people come out of high school and college and enter the workplace. I regularly run into people who have little initiative and imagination in projects because they seem to simply be waiting for someone to tell them what to do in each and every step. If you never have to go out and impress someone with a new idea or a peculiar variation on an existing idea because all of your imagination forming years are being spent processing marketing you stand little chance of success in modern business. We may not be falling behind China and India because we lack engineers; it may be because the cool kids in Manhattan and Santa Monica are having Madison Avenue market the wrong things to the rest of us.
PBS Frontline Documentary
Oh, and while your watching it...stay off of my lawn.
The following link is to a PBS documentary on the discovering and marketing of what's cool. It's the scariest thing I've seen in while.
The usurpation of what finding an identity in our youth today may be the biggest contributor to the vapidness of the teenagers that I am starting to encounter. And the scary thing is that I didn't pick up on this before.
I just sort of assumed it was the usual as I get older they seem dumber kind of thing, that parents have been saying since Og watched his son, Thag, bang two black rocks together instead of two white rocks. I suspect that this is different. Finding your identity as a youth used to be more about a slow process of trial and lots of errors. It was painful at times but instructive and served as a good training ground for the roles that you would play later in life. Now there are no pecking orders in adolescence. There is only a morass of moderate coolness.
With the pre-packaging and marketing of identities now it is almost too easy to catch the tail end of a "cool trend" and be able to acclimate it to your life. The fact that it is being marketed as heavily as it is is the scary part of it. It is said that the marketing exists because it is a $150B industry. I imagine it is a $150B industry because it is marketed so heavily.
Where I am encountering it is in seeing young people come out of high school and college and enter the workplace. I regularly run into people who have little initiative and imagination in projects because they seem to simply be waiting for someone to tell them what to do in each and every step. If you never have to go out and impress someone with a new idea or a peculiar variation on an existing idea because all of your imagination forming years are being spent processing marketing you stand little chance of success in modern business. We may not be falling behind China and India because we lack engineers; it may be because the cool kids in Manhattan and Santa Monica are having Madison Avenue market the wrong things to the rest of us.
PBS Frontline Documentary
Oh, and while your watching it...stay off of my lawn.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
On Tears
We recently had a death in the family. Following is what I wrote to help some people who were having a little trouble letting their emotions out.
There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief...and unspeakable love.
Washington Irving
Think on what a remarkable thing our human bodies are. They are self-contained powerhouses that, with a little input and very little maintenance, give us seventy or eighty years of experience and emotion and life. Think on the complexity of our bodies. Think on the complexities of our mind.
Imagine you work with a man and you just found out that a proposal for a small project he had worked on wouldn’t be awarded to him. You know he is about to go to lunch with his wife and rather than tell him before lunch, you wait until afterwards so that you don’t spoil his time with his wife. It was a simple little decision over a small triviality in the course of your day. All of the computing power of all of the machines ever assembled by man from the dawn of time to the most advanced computing system today, combined, could not have made that decision. And your mind did it while also controlling your walking and monitoring the input of all your senses.
We are the most wonderful and complex and intelligent machines to ever exist on this planet.
And what do we do when we are quickly overwhelmed with too much anguish or grief or joy or surprise?
We leak.
We cry. We have an uncontrollable response that makes us clog our sinuses up and create pressure in our eyes so that we literally have to cry. And as soon as we start doing it we usually get mad at ourselves for crying; for not being able to control our emotions. We tell ourselves to stop it and to start acting sensibly. In other words we try and tell our bodies to stop doing what we naturally do and to try and start doing something that our “culture” and “society” tell us to do.
We tell these beautiful machines, machines that can effortlessly and seamlessly control the countless little parts of our lives, to stop doing what they naturally do and start doing something that we think it should do. That seems very peculiar.
In the quote above, Washington Irving, the first American man of letters, explains that there is something noble and sacred in our grief and tears. He writes that there is the ability in our marvelous bodies, naturally, to express what all the words we say and actions we do never could.
Perhaps in all the eons that it took our bodies to get this way, to become so perfect that they can easily make a decision that would confound all the machines together, they also figured out perfectly how to grieve. They figured out how to stop us from trying to think too much and express ourselves properly over our loss or our joy and just, simply, cry.
So let your body use the mechanism that it has so perfectly crafted and honed to allow you to express the emotions you could never write or say. Over the next few days, I say let your body do its job. It will do it much better than you ever could.
April 15, 2008 Erstwhile Sighting
We're back. After a month-long hiatus because of some family issues we are back up and running. Erstwhile has not taken any time off though. Our favorite word is back on the sports beat, with the Boston Herald calling the still pretty damn good quarterback of the New England Patriots, Tom Brady, an "erstwhile gridiron god."
Man, if he is an erstwhile gridiron god I'd hate to see what the rest of the schlubs in the league are.
Link
Man, if he is an erstwhile gridiron god I'd hate to see what the rest of the schlubs in the league are.
Link
Monday, March 3, 2008
March 3, 2008 Erstwhile Sighting
Friday, February 29, 2008
The Wittiest Thing I Ever Said
My better half recently finished a long, long telephone conversation with her sister. Upon hanging up, my sister-in-law realized that, somehow, she had forgotten to tell my wife something. She immediately picked up the phone and called back hoping to catch my wife. Instead I answered the phone.
"I didn't want to talk to you," my sister in law said after I answered hello.
"What a coincidence," I replied.
"I didn't want to talk to you," my sister in law said after I answered hello.
"What a coincidence," I replied.
February 29, 2008 Erstwhile Sighting
Who says that American entertainment media is shallow and vapid! They still use big words sometimes.
As a case in point, E!News is reporting that Michael Jackson's Neverland ranch may go up for auction soon. The article refers to him as the Erstwhile King of Pop.
Link.
As a case in point, E!News is reporting that Michael Jackson's Neverland ranch may go up for auction soon. The article refers to him as the Erstwhile King of Pop.
Link.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Secret Santa
The guy, whose name I picked out of the hat at work for Secret Santa...asked for Forgiveness.
February 27, 2008 Erstwhile Sighting
Erstwhile has the lead in an article from the folks at Motley Fool about Dell Computer no longer being the leading computer maker in the United States.
Better to be the erstwhile king then never a king at all.
Link
Better to be the erstwhile king then never a king at all.
Link
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
A Bridge Abutment
Nobody's problems are as bad as mine.
Except my friend Leo's.
If I had his problems I'd drive into a bridge abutment.
February 26, 2008 Erstwhile Sighting
A gay prince in India is going to adopt a son so that his royal lineage can continue. Apparently his kingdom or state no longer officially exists in India so it was referred to as the erstwhile state.
The prince, Manvendrasinh Gohil, recently appeared on Oprah, becoming the first male Indian to do so. That seems peculiar. You would have thought she'd have interviewed Gandhi.
Link
The prince, Manvendrasinh Gohil, recently appeared on Oprah, becoming the first male Indian to do so. That seems peculiar. You would have thought she'd have interviewed Gandhi.
Link
I Think She Heard Me
I overheard the old hag in Human Resources the other day reading a security question from her computer screen.
"What was the model of my first car?"
I think she heard me say, "T."
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
