What were the "dumbest moments in business" during the newly departed annus horribilis, asks Fortune Magazine, which lists their choice for the top 21 feats of stupidity in 2008. Was it the beggars from Detroit arriving in Washington in private Jets or the Man from Chrysler arriving the second time around in a bloated SUV hybrid scheduled to be cancelled? Can any of that compete with investing money with BernieMadoff , ( number 17) or be more laughable than John McCain telling us the "the fundamentals of this economy are strong."only hours before the Dow fell 500 points on news of the Lehman bankruptcy? (number 13) Maybe number 21; PhilGramm's calling non-optimists a "nation of whiners" and his condescending dismissal of a troubled economy as a "mental recession" deserved to be on top.
It's hard to rank blunders so gross on any kind of scale. It's hard even to count them when the road to Black Monday was so long and so well paved with politics and patriotism and of course, funny as such pratfalls usually are, nobody can afford to laugh.
January may be a rough month "There's going to be a massive sea change in the retail landscape," said Nina Kampler, executive vice president of Hilco Real Estate, which advises retailers on their property management. and the likelihood is severe enough that even the mixed metaphor won't draw many giggles. All in all, this is not a good time to ask the mirror who's the dumbest of them all. It reflects us all equally.
Yikes, the Bader Madoff gang. First, we had neo-cons. Then theo-cons. Now, econo-cons (with the emphasis on "con"). But I've been a perfect angel, own a hybrid, live well within my means, insured my investments, and voted PC. I don't see my image in the mirror. Does that make me a ... vampire?
ReplyDeleteNo, maybe smarter than me though.
ReplyDeleteVoice Of Conservative America
ReplyDeleteA "sea change"? Perhaps, 8pus you can get some of your under water compatriots to do the wave and "flood" that retail landscape...
ReplyDeleteSome interesting commentary by Andrew Leonard at Salon.com:
ReplyDeleteWe now know that dereliction of duty ran rampant at every step of the chain. Mortgage borrowers lied about their income. Mortgage lenders failed to check the credit-worthiness of borrowers. Banks restructured loans into derivative instruments that obscured the underlying liabilities. Credit rating agencies -- dependent on fees from the very institutions whose products they were supposed to be judging -- gave the newfangled securities gold-plated ratings. Government regulators looked the other way. We now know that the incentives built into the system encouraged every individual actor to act in defiance of economic rationality …
Instead of redistributing risk to make us safer, they tied the whole world up into such a tightly wound ball of interconnections that when one piece of the system broke, the repercussions spread everywhere, immediately …
- - - - - - - -
More to the point, free-market Republicans, Reagan-era supply-siders, advocates of deregulation such as Phil Gramm, The Chicago School of Shlockonomics such as Milton Friedman … they have been thoroughly disgraced and discredited. But they won’t go away quietly. There will be pockets of whack-a-mole resistance everywhere, so keep a club handy.
JARNCO5, our ad rates are $524,582,391 per comment. Next time, cough up or we'll send a collections shark who speaks neither English nor Engrish.
ReplyDeleteEvery step of the chain??? You see - this is what I mean. Every record is a track record, every length is given in football fields, every swoop is fell and someone can talk about sea changes in a landscape and still get published. Nobody thinks about what they're saying; they snap together little bits of language like Leggo blocks -- and I'm an elitist for thinking that the unexamined word is not worth writing.
ReplyDeleteCaptain Fogg: they snap together little bits of language like Leggo blocks
ReplyDeleteOne day, my friend Lizardbreath at unfogged.com announced a ban on the use of analogies and similes. Do you know how hard it is to write without one itsy-bitsy "like" or "as!"
There is hardly one post or comment in all of Swash Zonia that has passed the Microsoft Spell-and-Grammar-Check program. When I think of Bill Gates as ultimate arbiter of proper English usage, it maketh me want to ink the aquarium, and I do try hard to be an easy-going 8pus.
Whatever you do, leave my mixed metaphors alone!
I prefer my metaphors with lime and salt - drats, that's a mixed-drink metaphor of sorts, isn't it? You can't get rid of them, but if we resolve not to use them more than a few times each, perhaps our literary arteries wouldn't get so clogged -- damn it -- I'm metaphorical and I can't stop!
ReplyDeleteIt's an amusing game to run your favorite literature through any grammar grinder and perhaps it offers a clue as to what good writing is and isn't. Even literary Olympians like Eliot don't come off well, although Hemingway seems to pass smoothly through Microsoft's bowels like - damn it, I can't stop.
For what it's worth, I never had an English teacher who liked anything I wrote, with one exception, but that was long ago and in another country and besides, they're all dead -- or perhaps writing grammar programs.
For what it's worth, whether you are creating a grammatically correct article or fracturing sentence structure while mixing metaphors, the real measure of anyone's writing skills -- ARE YOU GETTING YOUR POINT ACROSS!
ReplyDeleteSo, Fogg, continue to produce your concisely correct, blistering commentaries and 8pus continue to swing those tentacles across the keyboard producing your own brand of chaotic verbiage - and remember, words made both Mark Twain AND Yogi Berra famous!
Of course you're right. I think anything is permissible as long as you understand what you're doing.
ReplyDelete