October 2003
Monday 27 October
- Britney not Brightney - From E! Online News: "[I've] been into a lot of Indian spiritual religions," Spears told Newsweek. When the magazine's correspondent asked if Hinduism might be one of them, the singer replied: "What's that? Is it like Kabbalah?" Jeezus. Why would...
Posted in
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Friday 24 October
- Neuromarketing gonna get your mama - Jeezus. Neuromarketing is well underway already, brought to my attention only by this great NYTimes Mag story. Basically, marketers are starting to look at actual brain activity to see what people -- i mean, consumers -- like, and how to...
Posted in psychology & consciousness
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| 368 Comments
Tuesday 21 October
- You may find yourself: Wondering why I'm posting this stuff - Why do I post this kind of stuff [like the previous post about Randy Moss] on the site? Why post this basically meaningless shit about how people overuse the 'shocked, shocked' line? Why post this stuff about Randy Moss' Bush-like...
Posted in language
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Monday 20 October
- Moss does time warp [again] - This Sunday, Randy Moss, the most exciting man to ever catch a football, completed a phenomenal and outrageous play at the end of the first half in the Vikings' game against the Broncos. Moss absorbed a long bomb from Daunte...
Posted in language
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| 200 Comments
Tuesday 14 October
- Floating on exaggeration - Heh. I saw this article that committed one of the funniest fallacies I know of, and I see it everywhere. ''I'm not worried about a military quagmire,'' says a congressman. ''People worry about a financial quagmire in a country literally...
Posted in language
, the lethal literal
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Wednesday 8 October
- Searching for that perfect pear - My mom, in an email consoling me about the unfathomable world of romance, says she recently saw a plate that said, in Italian, 'When the time is right, the pear falls from the tree.'...
Posted in color
, language
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| 213 Comments
Tuesday 7 October
- Ministry of Obfuscatory Nomenclature - Corporations have been using greenwashing and related lying schemes for a while in order to hide from people what they're really doing. [Sometimes their puppets are branded as 'astroturf groups', vis a vis the bona fide grass roots ones.] Now...
Posted in language
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| 240 Comments
Monday 6 October
- Husbandry makes a husband's world - Interesting New Scientist article about how societies seem to become patrilineal [and patriarchal and male-dominated] when the people start holding cattle. It has to do with when wealth comes in a form in which it can be concentrated highly in...
Posted in evolution
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| 110 Comments
Friday 3 October
- Everyone doesn't know how right they are - A couple days ago I came across the most interesting article I've seen since that Scientific American one about synesthesia a couple weeks back. This new one was so rich that I had to let it settle for a couple...
Posted in language
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| 81 Comments
Thursday 2 October
- Shocktopus III - A few months ago, I started cataloguing people's [over?]use of the Casablanca quote "shocked, shocked!" It's all over the place. Today: The overlapping power circles of government and journalism were shocked -- shocked! -- this week by reports of yet...
Posted in language
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| 117 Comments
Wednesday 1 October
- Look out, Scott, it's contagious - White House spokesman Scott McClellan accomplished the rare feat of a doubly-mixed metaphor -- three figurative references in one brief comment, none of which actually fit together: "I'm drawing a line here. I'm not going to play the game of...
Posted in political currents
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