Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year is …. “W00t”.
I'm not a great language purist (I'm a Webster's New World fan, and don't much care for the overly prescriptivist American Heritage), but I don't know that I would call this interjection from leetspeak a 'word' exactly.
I'd have gone with 'waterboarding' myself.
An anonymous purveyor of electronic chain letters, whom I'm guessing is Ann Bartow, has tagged me with the 'Truly bad movie meme'.
The rules of the game are to “name the worst film I've ever paid money to see”. To show I'm a good sport, I'll play along. Part way. But I don't think I'll 'tag' anyone as that might seem intrusive. Yes, I will break the chain.
As it happens, I am not a movie guy. I resist going, a source of some marital disharmony until the invention of the PC DVD player. So my universe of contenders is small, as I only go out to films if I think the probability of liking them is absurdly high. And I hardly ever watch them on DVD either…
But even in this small universe, it's absolutely no contest. A whole bunch of us in college went to a law school film society showing of a film of considerable legal importance but, it turned out, no redeeming social value whatsoever. Had I not been wedged solidly in the middle of a very long row in a large law school lecture hall I would have walked out after about 15 minutes, but as it was I stayed for the entire ugly and — worse! — boring, boring thing and kept thinking that surely at some point they'd introduce a semblance of plot. Yes, I'm talking about Deep Throat. Horrible. And very hard to see the 'redeeming social value' in it either, which may be one reason why I've never been able to work up enthusiasm for teaching the pornography line of First Amendment cases, even though I still believe that censorship is ultimately more dangerous than cultural drek.
Does this mean Ann will now disown me?
Runner up: the DePalma remake/ripoff of Phantom of the Opera, Phantom of the Paradise. Can't think what possessed me to go to that. Actually, it was the reviews. What did they know.
In the course of a snapshot of metacafe, which tries to paint the site as a happy retro-dinosaur stuck in web 1.0 of viral video — you know, so 2005 — the NYT Bits Blog has this little aside about Metacafe's evolving standards of good taste,
Viral Videos Still Rule at Metacafe: Over the last year, the site has moved from what Mr. Hachenburg describes as a European sensibility to an American one. In other words, there's now less sex and more violence.
More violence is not progress in my book. I wonder what drove this move?
It used to be that you could tell when there was a recession going on by magazine covers — in bad times the women's mags got a lot more brazen about putting SEX in their headlines. (Not sure if the same applies to lad mags — have they been around long enough?)
Is the Internet counter-cyclical?
Over at Crooked Timber, probably the only group blog I'd ever even imagine being a part of (no, that's not a trawl for an invite, I'm happy here), Henry Farrell has some fun with the GOP's logo at Starry Wisdom:
I’m sure this is fundamentally immature of me, but the new Republican National Convention logo set off a train of associations in my head (and prompted me to spend half an hour doing some basic Photoshop work to bring these associations to the foreground)
And there's a graphic to go with it….
This will be my last drugged elephant post. Until next time.
I blogged about the awful GOP convention logo the other day, with the glassy-eyed elephant doing the tango, or whatever is going on. Here it is again if you missed it the first time in Annals of Bad Logo Design:
Comes now the suggestion that there's a method to this madness, one inspired by Wilson Bryan Key:
The elephant’s trunk makes the “S”, the lines on the back makes the “E”, and the elephants crossed upper legs makes the “X” for an example of subliminal advertising applied to a political symbol.
Could be….
Maybe I've gotten to the age where you lose touch with the Zeitgeist, but from where I'm sitting there's been a rash of really bad high-profile logo design recently.
It started with the UK's atrocious logo for the 2012 games:
Then Miami got into the act with a new logo for the Downtown Development Authority. This one isn't actually as bad, but it's local so it feels worse than it probably is:
Plus, the justifications for it were just inane: “Not having the O's makes it more creative,” said one Board member. Eh?
I think it looks silly, perhaps even illiterate, and fear it will confuse foreign tourists. But I do take some solace from SNAFUed's analysis: “you really want the young people to go downtown, and they are definitely used to missing vowels from text messaging, so why not?”
Now, though, comes the winner in the lousy logo sweepstakes: The new GOP logo for their 2008 convention:
The GOP press release says that this elephant is triumphant, but I'm with Colin McEnroe, who says This Is Your Elephant on Drugs.
I do think, however, that the people suggesting that this pachyderm has a “wide stance” designed specifically for the convention in Minneapolis are going a bit far.
Jotwell Blenderlaw
