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.

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.