Dave Friedman's Soul of Wit

If Celebrities Were Emoticons...

Celebrity Emoticons.

Read and laugh.

Funny

For some reason, this strikes me as funny:

Following last week’s announcement that Donald Trump and wife Melania Knauss are expecting, New York has discovered these exclusive excerpts from the Donald’s forthcoming best seller Trumphood: A Guide to the Toughest Business of All, Except for Real Estate—Parenting. It’s gonna be huge. Huge.

From Chapter 2: What is a Baby?
Everything about your baby will delight you. You will think it is the most beautiful baby in the world. And, as long as its mother is a supermodel who has been on the cover of British GQ like my baby’s mother, you will be right. She was also in Vogue. And trust me, she is not even the hottest model I’ve banged. I’ve had Cosmo girls, Elle girls, you name it. What I am trying to say is, babies are wonderful.

From Chapter 3: Naming Your Baby
A handy time-saver is to just add a letter to one of the parents’ names, as Ivana and I did when naming our daughter Ivanka. Is your name Karen? Name your child Karmen. Gary becomes Garby, Daniel becomes Danpiel, Roger Rogerw, Cindy Ciindy, etc. You can use the time you save to purchase a hotel, or declare bankruptcy.

An Odd Web Site

Who knew that dental floss had its own advocacy organization?

Quarantine Senator Clinton

Slick Willie's wife should be quarantined, argues Reason's Jacob Sullum:

Hillary Clinton is worried about sex and violence in popular entertainment. "It is a little frustrating when we have this data that demonstrates there is a clear public health connection between exposure to [fictional] violence and increased aggression that we have been as a society unable to come up with any adequate public health response," the junior senator from New York said at a Kaiser Family Foundation forum this week.

Leaving aside the fact that the link to which Clinton alludes is anything but clear, the quote illustrates how meaningless the phrase public health has become. Why would a connection between, say, watching The Sopranos and whacking people in real life be a "public health connection" requiring a "public health response"? (Isn't violent crime a public safety issue?) In this context, the phrase gives Clinton's dislike for certain forms of entertainment a scientific veneer and obscures the government remedy she has in mind (some form of censorship, presumably).

It is a little frustrating when we have these data that demonstrate a clear public health connection between fuzzy collectivist thinking and bad policy that we have been as a society unable to come up with any adequate public health response. Maybe we could quarantine Clinton.

The Feminine Mystique?

I suppose, in this instance, at least, Friedan was incorrect about a mystique of women. Asymmetrical Information on Carly Fiorina's failed tenure at HP:

The first woman to head a major technology company has been forced out. The highlight of Ms Fiorina's tenure was, of course, the disastrous merger with Compaq, in which Ms Fiorina demonstrated that women are every bit as good as men at senseless, megalomaniacal empire-building.

Slate has more:

Ultimately, what made Fiorina such a media darling may have made her ill-fitted to be the CEO of H-P in an environment of slow growth and relentless cost competition. "Fiorina is also extraordinarily and amazingly articulate in all settings," Carol Loomis wrote in Fortune. "But there is also a downside to her verbal skills in that what she is saying so fluently sometimes wears thin with people, coming off as short of substance, overly aspirational, and lacking in spontaneity."

I consider myself "extraordinarily and amazingly articulate in all settings." Therefore, this blog must be "short of substance, overly aspirational, and lacking in spontaneity."

I suggest you stop reading immediately. Go do something productive.