Ha, yes, I did it all for you, folks! I wonder what will have to happen next week! Maybe I can get attacked by a shark.
Happy Tuesday and welcome to the chat! Have you picked your bracket yet? If not, you should! But after the chat, of course.
Rush, I had no idea you were a frequenter of the chat. Why haven't you responded to my sandwich offer? If you gave them up for Lent, or something, we can work around it!
Really? The name Madison (sorry, any Maddies in the chat) was one of those girls' names that leapt into vogue when I was old enough to notice whether a name was in vogue or not, and I always thought it was a more pretentious way of just naming someone Madeleine. I just can't get behind it conceptually. Then again, men named Ashley are invariably milquetostes who lose the girl to Rhett in the eighth act.
I'd be less worried that he'd eat the teleprompter than that he'd send it in his place, or that it would get stuck mid-sentence and leave him trapped in a feedback loop.
Ha to the roll of cash. I'll consider it a success if the ghost of Seamus doesn't show up in the spot where President Obama is supposed to be sitting and leave Romney in an awkwardly Macbeth-like position, yelling "Never shake your gory locks at me!" or whatever the Romney equivalent of that is.
But back to the subject of the teleprompter. How do we feel about them? On the one hand, if unhinged yelling were a commodity, it would be at an all-time high, but on the other, make one gaffe too many and you wish you'd been repeating carefully vetted words in a somewhat varied monotone.
To be honest, this is always something that gives me pause when it comes to writing in other media. I still have the somewhat antiquated idea that words in books are supposed to have a certain permanence to them. Writing online every day reminds me of Robbie Ross's epitaph, where he quipped "Here lies one whose name was writ in hot water." It tends to evaporate quickly, or, alternatively, to evaporate never, leading people decades later to send you emails about What You Meant By That Strange Poem. But a book should be a set of words that are willing to stick together and be seen in public together along with your name for decades to come. It's different.
But that also brings in the point that we're doing vast, vast amounts of reading every day and the follow-up question of how much it's actually worth -- and the other question of how on earth you're going to get through Anna Karenina on your Kindle Fire when TVTropes remains a possibility.
Last year, I picked Butler, because I had family there and I believed in them, and I very nearly won the pool! But then UConn had to come along...
This year, no such luck.
Honestly, I reached the point where I was skimming/making my friends read me the comments, because my old adage is "If there's more than 40 of them, they aren't saying anything good." That being said, I think the crude monosyllables have a certain up-frontness and charm to them, because you can instantly write someone off as a troglodyte if he wheels one out while criticizing you. Pumpkin, and most gourd-based endearments, are the ones that really get my goat, if only because they're condescending rather than outright insulting, like the four-lettered-friends on my voicemail. I know what to do when I'm insulted. But when I'm condescended to, every fiber in my being begs me to respond and indicate to the person through conversation that he erred in calling me a yam derivative. Which, of course, you can't really.
Someone described Romney's Grit Adventure as like being "on safari in his own country." Then again, it's the same sort of thing you often see from Media Types marveling "What's a cheese curd?" on visits to Real Electoral Destinations. Not exactly a great way of establishing common touch bonafides, but I think he may have passed that point and his aides may simply be urging him to "take the lovable automaton thing and run with it."
Ah, open marriages.
Well, it's -- slim and electronic and people mistrust it, and it can't blow away, generally.
This is probably not the answer you wanted.
Oh aha! I thought it was a strange way of reverencing the Founders.
I love it!
Romney enthusiasts remind me of people who show up with bare, painted chests and kegs at croquet matches. Or Episcopalian Zealots. Or people who are adamant about liking things tepid. It seems almost like a contradiction in terms. And even when you find a real Romney enthusiast, try asking him if he'd prefer Mitch Daniels. In my experience, this approach has never failed to produce a heavy sigh and a, "But you can't really expect a brokered convention this time around."
I hope so.
But unlike books/movies, movies/radio, YouTube/movies, which are really apples and oranges, the change in the technology of reading itself has me putting an asterisk on your optimism. I know New York Times trend pieces are generally to be cited repeatedly in cocktail conversation and then ignored altogether, but the experience with some of the fancier eReaders is like trying to read a book in a movie theater -- a set of circumstances that would not have kept the book alive. Maybe I'm misunderestimating our capacity for focus. But as bookstores close and libraries become places you go for wifi and instant gratification -- MUST HAVE BOOK NOW! CANNOT WAIT FOR ARRIVAL OF PHYSICAL BOOK IN MAIL! -- continues to be the order of the day, I'm just a little chary to see how we make the jump. I think ultimately you may be right. But I worry anyway.
All classics.
I put the picture in, using the logic that seems to animate every woman in every movie ever made, that If It's Going To Be The Alamo, I Might As Well Wear Mascara. I figure, people are shouting strange obscenities into the Internet at me, I might as well have a flattering picture with stormtroopers.
Although I do like the caricature!
I think if we've learned anything about Major National Issues in the last few weeks, it's that literally nobody wants to discuss them. Instead, we've opted to refight many women's rights battles, yelp about teleprompters, and go through every word Rick Santorum and Rush Limbaugh utter with a fine-toothed comb. So, teleprompters? Why not!
Ah! Well, basically, Rush Limbaugh denounced me on the air for a piece I wrote in which I said that his only enthusiastic advertisers were famed Life Is Short Have An Affair site AshleyMadison and Seeking Arrangement, a site for folks looking for sugar daddies. It turned out that they only wanted to advertise with him, so I apologized for the overstatement and we updated the piece. However, in the process of denouncing me, Rush managed to call my writing "b-i-itchy" and "snarky" and "full-of-holes" and execute some variant of Order 66 that resulted in dozens of enraged calls -- which I think is where you came in. I find it fascinating that some people can't simply criticize something you've written without first establishing as a vital point of their argument that you are a hideous blimp whom they would never bang, an airheaded fool, or some variant of the b-i-you-get-the-idea. I would say it's obnoxious to resort to ad hominem arguments, but these never seem to be directed against the male of the species, somehow.
About 8?
No kidding! Learn something new every day.
Interest, mind you, but not expertise.
I also am curious about this fairly virulent meme (if that's the word I want) going around that All Liberal Girls Are Ugly. As a moderate, I'm not sure where that puts me ("All Moderate Girls Are 5s" doesn't really have the same ring to it) but it seems an odd line of argument, to say the least.
Very, very slowly, by candle-light, with father reading aloud and doing hand motions.
And Dickens' women, as Kate Beaton points out, are uniformly annoying. Except Biddy, that is. I liked Biddy.
That's a good question. I think the underlying idea against it is that 1) it stands between you and the people, but also between you and the thoughts you're expressing 2) somehow, if it were removed, you'd be incapable of going on with the speech and would wander around gaping-mouthed and senseless, gaffeing everywhere 3) you're being fed words, which seems dubious somehow. 4) no Real American has a teleprompter 5) Abe Lincoln didn't use one 6) without them, speeches would be much shorter and the intonation you used when delivering them wouldn't imply that you couldn't see to the end of the sentence but were trying to sound excited about it anyway.
Anyone have better thoughts? This can't be it!
I feel compelled to point out that you actually went through and carefully capitalized TelePrompTers. Am I disrespecting them if I don't? Their defenders in the chat all seem to be doing the correct capitalization, so I worry I've just offended the next generation of robotic aids.
Oops! Er. Yeah, better get rid of that Yavin medal.
Sidenote, I think there's someone who believes this about absolutely every issue that other people consider "a pointless distraction."
Anyway, it's worth a try!
Yes! But I only say that because a giant white whale once personally insulted me, biting off my leg and leaving me here in New Bedford cradling a harpoon and muttering about revenge.
Absolutely!
Actually, every week the PBS website has a feature where you can rate them by likeability, which always struck me as an odd metric for the folks at Downton. Anna invariably prevails.
I used to want the campaign to continue until June for the high drama. Now I want it to continue so that I can hear the one, slightly off, canned remark that Romney has prepared for each state in the union. They are uniformly delightful! Someone should make a quilt.
Someone's a chat regular!
Aw yeah.
You have great ice cream, though. And the Onion.
Although I'm not sure either of those are hipster magnets, specifically.
Ha!
I like the amount of logic that went into this. Sounds right to me, although I haven't had time to check any statistics.
I always pick teams based upon the principle of existential disappointment. A religion teacher I had in high school explained that if you root for a terrible team and eventually they win, there will be a massive, massive payoff compared to rooting for a good team. And then it will all be over and you will have to confront existential disappointment and gaze into the abyss and so forth. But the first clause really stuck with me. Still, I'm a Nats fan, if only because DC is full of transients and they deserve one person who is not there to represent Philadelphia whenever they play.
One stray observation on this point is that, while everyone seemed extremely enthused to leap in on Rush while admitting that they hadn't listened to him for years/ever, then large swaths of people demanded that Bill Maher be given the same degree of looking-at, then my brief effort to contemplate Bill Maher instantly met with "HOW CAN YOU SAY THAT YOU'VE NEVER LISTENED TO HIM."
But that's fodder for another week.
I don't know, but I can't wait to find out!
Dean? I hope not Dean.
I thought we gave Bobby back after the 1950s.
Nuts, I used a Powerpoint Saturday night!
That sounds like a euphemism, but isn't.
Could it be that we've reached the end of his gaffe reel? I think the War on Teleprompters is the only thing he's had to offer lately. Which is fine, but would be stronger coming from someone like Rick Perry with real Clearly Not Prompted Speaking cred.
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