Don't go there

Shortly after the Islamic terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in Paris early this month, those whacky guys at Fox News extruded a huge steaming pile and jumped straight into it. Since then, the hits just keep on coming.

Some self-styled “terror expert” named Steve Emerson on Fox proclaimed that Western Europe, and particularly the UK, is swamped with Muslims, and that there are many “no-go” areas within these countries, places where non-Muslims fear to tread.

Among these he named Birmingham as being so “totally Muslim” that no one else will even enter the environs.

Well, the Twitterverse lit up like a Grateful Dead concert with the hashtag #FoxNewsFacts. The tweets were flying so fast and thick it was like machine gun fire on Omaha Beach. Like:

(I also read that they'd changed the name to Birming, on account of ham isn't Halal.)

(Cleverly combining the cat meme with the #FoxNewsFacts hashtag.)

I mean—you get the drift, right?

After my first beverage snort onto the keyboard I stayed away from liquids and just laughed until tears came. I found about six new people to follow in just a couple of hours.

Even British Prime Minister David Cameron, who is somewhere in the Attila the Hun range of the political spectrum (If Attila wore Savile Row) got it right. “This guy’s clearly a complete idiot.”

Cameron was educated at Eton College and Oxford University (Brasenose College). He has mastered the use of language.

Eventually Emerson apologized (although I don’t believe the phrase “talking out my ass” was used), but clearly their target audience lapped up the fear mongering like frat boys at an open bar. And clearly he's still clueless about Birmingham:

(Also, other Foxoid “experts” named several European cities as being no-go zones. The mayor of one of them, Paris, has announced her intention to sue the network, which should be interesting.)

But wait—there’s more. Because on Monday, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal (right up there with the Attila crowd, though not as well-spoken as Cameron) flapped his hands about at a speech at a British think tank and re-declared that Europe is rife with Muslim-dominated enclaves where Christians fear to tread, including parts of London.

When asked for clarification on where, exactly, these no-go areas were, Jindal got a little vague, brusquely insisting that he’s talked with people (you know—people) who assured him that there are parts of London where women don’t want to walk alone.

Well, yes indeed there are. And parts of Los Angeles and parts of Buenos Aires and parts of Brooklyn and parts of Seoul that I don’t really want to walk around alone in. But my reluctance has nothing to do with the religious or even necessarily the ethnic makeup of those areas. They’re really mean streets and I’m not equipped to deal with them. (Like I wouldn’t want to walk the halls of JPMorgan Chase, one of the most alien and alienating environments I can think of.)

Jindal—like Fox—is unapologetic. They operate on the well-established principle that if you make a lie big enough and repeat it often enough, it eventually becomes the truth.

Meanwhile, plan on staying upwind of them. That pile is still steaming.

Twitter logic

If you use Twitter at all, you’ll know that when you follow a lot of tweeters they send you an automated “Thanks for following me” Direct Message (DM).

Usually it includes an invitation to go to their website, Facebook page or some other so you can buy their product or service. It’s essentially as meaningful as a commercial on any basic cable TV channel; the appearance instead of the substance of engagement.

But here’s one I found kind of interesting:

  

Apparently my new bestie Hans (whom I only followed because he followed me and when I checked his profile he didn’t look like a spammer or someone wholly devoted to selling crafts) does not see the irony in using a DM to tell me he doesn’t respond to DMs.

Not even the Amighty escapes

If you haven’t worked in the arena of gathering requirements from customers—or, really, dealing with clients in any capacity—you may not find this as hysterical as I do. It’s “Client Feedback on the Creation of the Earth”, from a San Francisco-based humor site.

The language is so…”communications-y”. The sort of thing you’d get from focus group facilitators or anyone in any marketing department anywhere. Actually, from anyone with an MBA.

Viz. point 4: “Right now we’re only seeing two great lights in the sky… a greater one for day and a lesser one for night? Thinking that maybe we weren’t clear in the original briefing. Definitely need more than just two great lights. Need to make this a memorable, high-value experience for our users. Please revisit slides thirteen and fourteen in the deck. Shout with questions.”

And then there’s the “Please consider the environment before printing this email”.

Well—have a look (especially at slides 18 and 27; there may be showstoppers.

Thoughts?

Excess iPadding

There’s a widely-acknowledged phenomenon here in the US known as the “freshman 15”. It refers to kids going off to their first year of college gaining some measurable amount of weight, generally due to the quality of student dining hall food and increased alcohol consumption. (Also, I expect there’s a certain amount of comfort eating going on.)

I’m wondering if there’s such a thing as the “tablet 10”? Because I swear that since I got my iPad in November I’ve put on six pounds.

My general eating habits didn’t change over that period, so I’m thinking it has to be from turning into such a complete slug that I don’t even get up from the sofa and walk across the room to check something out on my laptop. I just pick up the iPad and run my query.

Can I be the only person suffering from this? Can I get a research grant to study it?

Gratitude Monday: Shaking it off

Here’s what I’m grateful for today: a dash-cam video that’s gone viral, as they say: a Dover, Delaware, cop on patrol, getting jiggy with Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off”. He's now #DashCamDiva.

I was a little worried about the parts where Officer Jeff Davis has both hands off the wheel, but apparently no animals or anyone else was harmed in the making of this video.

What particularly appealed to me was when Davis went all “cool-cop pro” when he motioned someone to cross in front of him, and then got back into the groove when the coast was clear. This is indeed a man who knows his Swift—he doesn’t bungle one syllable that I can tell, and he’s got all the music-appropriate hand gestures that anyone can have behind the wheel.

Yeah, it was staged, and yeah, I hope to God perps or other passengers are not subject to that sort of thing in the normal course of events, because if they are, I see lawsuits in Dover’s future. But what fun.

Seriously—if you can watch this without a gigantic grin on your face, I do not want to be riding with you anywhere.