Remember when I, in an attempt to be pretentious, used to address my posts to the the Nation? It was a joke, perhaps funny only to me, that I stole from Stephen Colbert, and implied that the whole US was tuning into whatever incoherence I hammered out on here. Well, I should have set my sights a little higher. Over the past few weeks, my international web traffic has far exceeded my domestic traffic. Since I last updated you, I've added hits from Singapore, Malaysia, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Algeria, Tunisia, and Togo! At this time, it is unknown if any of these people will become repeat Slicers. I'll assume not...
Last comment on this topic. In some cases, I can tell what key words people are Googling to arrive at the Razor. Some of the entries are quite odd. How about the person who Googled "Kelli Strowd"? They were directed to my article announcing her faux-pregnancy. Perhaps it was a secret admirer! Or maybe her husband, The Strowd, was doing an E-vestigation on his wife... Rest easy Michael, Googling your wife's name leads not to debauchery, but to the relative safety of the Razor.
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How about some language, I haven't done that in a while. I learned a new word recently, Retronym. It's been around for over 30 years, but I wasn't aware of it. What does it mean? From Wikipedia, a retronym is a newly coined term, word or phrase,that provides a distinction that was previously unneeded. For example, for decades there was a musical instrument called the guitar. No other information was needed. Then someone plugged one into an amp. So the term acoustic guitar, not previously needed, was put into use. Got it?
Which brings me to my point. The Obama Administration, in a misguided attempt at political correctness, has banished the word Terrorism and the phrase "Global War on Terror" from its quite articulate vocabulary. Now we have "Man Caused Disasters" or some such ridiculousness. Imagine my surprise when I found out that when we, along with our European partners, started bombing Libya, were not engaging in War, but in Kinetic Military Action!
In fairness to The President, this phrase originated in the Bush Administration, but Bush had the decency not to insult our intelligence by using it. So what is kinetic military action? Dropping bombs and shooting bullets—you know, killing people—is kinetic. And Non-Kinetic Military Action is messing electronically with the enemy’s communications equipment or wiping out its bank accounts. Cool. Prior to the Internet, we just tried to kill em all, now we can kill em or give them a computer virus, so distinctions must be made... (Various portions of the preceding paragraphs were copied and pasted from here.)
So if we're not gonna have Wars anymore, someone in the bumper sticker industry has some work to do.
- Make Love, not Kinetic Military Action.
- Kinetic Military Action. What is it good for?
- Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of Kinetic Military Action.
Not quite as catchy as the originals, but in a post-modern society adjustments must be made.
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A couple videos. The first one is fascinating. I remember when I was a child and glass was something you looked through or drank from. The future for glass, it seems, is bright, and depending on your want, less clear. Amazing:
Last, I saw a group of grown men playing a wacky little game yesterday. It was a "Tears Challenge". Watch the video below and try not to cry. Whoever makes it the furthest wins. Most people get choked up around the 1:45 mark. I made it almost 6 minutes. It's actually a heart-warming video, but if you can defeat it with a dry eye, I don't wanna be friends with ya.
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Ok one more item. Somewhere back in the archive there is a Razor post that ends with the phrase "Carthago delenda est". Translated to English it means "Carthage must be destroyed". At the time, I was ending all my posts with Latin phrases (it didn't seem so dumb at the time). Generally, the Latin phrase would either be humourous or pertinent to that particular post.
Ancient lore allows that Cato the Elder would end all of his speeches with the phrase "Carthago delenda est" even if he had not been discussing Carthage in the speech. This always got his audience riled up, as the Romans were at war (kinetic, I assume) with Carthage. So I decided to end one of my posts Cato-style.
While reading about Tunisia, and their recent revolution, I was shocked to learn that the Capital of Tunisia is Tunis, formerly Carthage. In a near-repeating of history, had their dictator not left when he did, Carthage would have needed a good ole fashion destroying...
1 comment:
Good Job. I only made it about 90 seconds.
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