Jealousy on Sesame Street

The other day my cable services died and it took beaucoup de hours to get everything back online (unplug, wait, re-plug, cry). The first service to be restored (ironically since I could care less) was the television. Since it was now Tuesday I suppose I was happy that I wouldn’t miss my Sunday night show. While testing the television service I flipped through many channels with satisfactory results (see disclaimer above) and uncharacteristically left the television on, in case the fix was only temporary. I went into my office to work on my Internet connection and could hear that Sesame Street was playing on the television. I thought I had left the room with HBO playing so I went back into the living room to be surprised that Sesame Street was now on HBO (it left PBS?).

ARnold Conan It’s been a long time since I read Lakoff and Johnson’s book Metaphors We Live By, but I was recently thinking the internet has surely added a lot of good material for some of its central themes. The the notion of argumentation as warfare comes to mind. In that book, they advanced the notion that a lot of the metaphors people use for argumentation are those associated with warfare and violence in general. This is certainly born out by a number of things you can see on the net.

To see what people say about argumentation on the internet, it would seem that the world of debate is tremendously violent. Everywhere one looks, one finds destruction in the wake of a rhetorical flourish. Case in point? “Pres Obama Brilliantly Destroys a Loaded FOXNews Question” in this clip. Go Bama! But wait a minute? Is that an accomplishment?…

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Do You Believe In Maroon?

I recently stumbled onto an avid reader who openly stated that she enjoyed “poetic prose.” Is this like “military intelligence”? I unhesitatingly dashed off a snide request for an exact definition of “poetic prose” but to be fair, I knew what she meant and her opinion was reasonable, but her word choice was faulty: what she should have said was that she enjoyed “figurative prose.”

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