Makes sense

Having sat through a 45-minute presentation yesterday, let me toss something out to the universe:

Can we all agree to banish this interjection from all discourse: “Does that make sense?”

Inevitably the utterer is not actually asking for your opinion on the matter, and in fact would be shattered if you were to suggest that no, indeed it does not make sense, since there’s never even a pause before s/he runs on to the next point. It’s nothing more than a drawn-out filler phrase, an attenuated “you know”.

Which makes it utterly meaningless, a waste of breath and just up-my-nose annoying. So let’s enucleate it from the language. We’ll all be the better for it.

Bon appétit, I guess

I love playing “imagine the meal” at supermarket checkout lines. For example, the other day the guy ahead of me at the cash register was buying these items:

One banana, two bottles of Château le Plonk red and a tub of Fiber One® cottage cottage cheese.

I mean—what will that dinner look like?

When you're not the only one with Photoshop...

Oh, dear—Photoshop is getting quite the workout over the Unity march in Paris on Sunday.

You’ll recall that French president François Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel led the procession, and that they were joined by ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, to the amusement of everyone in the world with an Adobe subscription.

Well, it turns out that a Haredi (ultra-Orthodox Jewish) newspaper in Jerusalem thought it inappropriate that the actual participants in the demonstration be shown with men arm-in-arm with women not their actual, you know, wives or blood relations, so they excised Merkel, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo and Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt from the shot. (They also cropped out the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas as well.)

I’m not going to comment on a Weltanshauung that is so terrified of very thought of images of actual women appearing in the representation of an historic event that they falsify photos. We saw it a few years ago when Hasidic newspapers in Brooklyn Photoshopped out Hillary Clinton and another woman from the iconic situation room photo during the takedown of Osama bin Laden, and I already didn’t comment on that. Much.

Instead, I’ll give you the response to HaMevaser from the Interwebs:

Sic semper anyone who thinks they can get away with dicking around with women on the web. That horse done left the barn.

Where in the world is Nico Sandiego?

Dear Lord, former French president Nicolas Sarkozy totally lost the Interwebs. On Sunday he’d joined the unity march in Paris somewhere in the scrum behind the leaders.

But as the procession moved, he maneuvered his way into the front line with the actual heads of state and miscellaneous dignitaries.

I wonder if his cleverness was worth it, though, because people noticed and social media lit up like a Grateful Dead concert. The hashtag #JeSuisNico exploded and everyone with a graphics package and a Tumblr account started churning out “where’s Nico” shots at a rate of knots.

I mean—Nico takes a twerk for the team:

Nico joins the Beatles:

Nico, Nixon and Elvis:

Nico takes down the Wall:

Nico and Ike see off the D-Day troops:

And two appearances at the Tehran Conference:

It’s a wonder to me that any work at all gets done with this sort of thing going on. It’s also a wonder to me how pols all over the world pull this kind of crap repeatedly, when there’s ample evidence what social media can do to them.

It's like they don't know Twitter exists.

Perhaps that’s what our own leaders were concerned about when they decided to take a pass on sending anyone of consequence to represent us at that march?

Gratitude Monday: Unintended consequences

Capping off an absolute bastard of a week in Paris, today I am grateful for the response of people all over the world, in high places and low, as they flooded the streets of cities yesterday, clad in black as though attending a family funeral. In their tens and hundreds of thousands they witnessed for the 17 men and women murdered in attacks Wednesday and Friday: journalists, police officers and supermarket shoppers.

I mean, really—it was Everyman in the sights of those Kalashnikovs, and it was Everyman who gathered silently in Paris, London, New York, Cairo, Tokyo… They carried placards proclaiming “Je suis Charlie”, “Je suis Juif”, “Je suis Ahmed”, and they raised pens and pencils. It was stunning, and so heartening.

I’m not saying there wasn’t posturing or hypocrisy evident in these events, but today is Gratitude Monday, so I’m going to let that crap slide.

Because I’m hoping that demonstrations like these will lead to continuing resistance to thugs of any stripe who think it a glorious thing to gun down people armed only with newsprint and grocery lists in the name of any god.

One of my favorite images from yesterday’s gatherings is this one: the French tricolor is projected onto the National Gallery at Trafalgar Square, smack under the nose of Admiral Horatio Nelson.

Is this a jihadist’s worst nightmare? I fervently hope so.