Welcome to the World, Words

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) unleashed a new collection of words into the world today. Among them:

• Buzzkill, Cheeseball and Overthink:  all are one word! As I've maintained for years!! Take that, former copyeditors!
• Muffin Top: "A protuberance of flesh above the waistband of a tight pair of trousers (cf. spare tyre n., love handle n.), which may sometimes be attributed to an excessive appreciation for muffin tops in the literal sense.")
• Rub-a-dub Yesssss!
• Wassup Weren't those Budweiser commercials airing, like, 10 years ago?
  
• Smack-talking
• Suicide door
• LOL
• OMG: OMFG, however, did not make the cut.
  
• <3: As in ♥

OED also released a list of rejected words that, for the time being, will remain unofficial slang. There's a good list of them on AOL News, but most of them are head-scratchers. (Did someone really think nudenda—"An unhidden agenda," apparently—would make the cut?) Still, my favorite reject has to be "nonversation," which is described as being "a worthless conversation, wherein nothing is explained or otherwise elaborated upon."

I [Heart] Coquette

Coquette rules, and this is why:

Will I get married?
Sweetheart, I’m an advice columnist, not a Magic Eight Ball.

My wife says my shoes need to be put away. Do I have to do this?
What are you, 12? Go ahead and substitute the word “mommy” for the word “wife” in this ridiculous question. Notice how the tone didn’t change? Grow up, dude.

My favorite, however, has to be this one:

The tone of your advice is harsh and your column runs long. 
If your sensibilities are that delicate and your attention span that stunted, perhaps you should go read Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter.

For more, visit Coquette's latest entry in The Daily, or see the archive.

Hunting For Hipsters

The hipsters descended upon Austin, TX during SXSW, but now that the annual tech/film/music fest is over, the skinny jean-wearing set of self-obsessed self-loathers is left to find their way back home.

Anticipating the reverse migration, New York's  Jeff Greenspan and Hunter Fine are doing something about the infestation. They're setting hipster traps, and trying to control the Jersey Shore population.

Cardboard bear traps have been set up in hipster-dense areas, each baited with the quintessential hipster staples: Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, American Spirit cigarettes and neon faux Ray-Ban sunglasses.

Meanwhile, Greenspan and Fine have armed the tunnels and bridges connecting Manhattan to the rest of the world with bear traps designed to catch a whole different species: Jersey Shore type swine. Those traps are armed with spray tanner, hair gel, Drakkar Noir, a fake gold necklace, a LIRR schedules and PATH tickets.

New York Metro writer Nate Jones suggests other cliché traps to control the population density in other overpopulated areas:

Park Slope: One bushel of kale, one organic fair-trade childrens jumper.
Upper East Side: One pearl necklace, one gin & tonic, one pamphlet of yacht leasing information.
Fort Greene: One issue of the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" list, one unclaimed "Bored to Death" spec script.
Upper West Side: Two discount opera tickets, one copy of The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life.
Soho and Nolita: One pair of white trousers (unisex), one pair of enormous sunglasses (unisex), one striped sailor shirt (unisex)

The Big 0-5

Today is the 5th birthday of Twitter, a.k.a. the information superhighway's favorite phenomenon and microblogging site.

Twitter may top out at a speed of 140 characters per update, but the site is still flying high, with nearly 1 billion new tweets every week. If only they could make a BlackBerry app that'd work properly, so I could read them all... #FirstWorldProblem

App issues aside, Twitter is growing by leaps in bounds. Within the past year, the average number of tweets per day has exploded, going from 50 million to 140 million. Again, that's 140 million tweets every 24 hours, folks. (For more Twitter stats, check out #numbers, which was posted to the official Twitter Blog last week)

Site co-founder Biz Stone (@Biz) spewed some interesting stats in a celebratory bday blog entry earlier today:

"Twitter users now send more than 140 million Tweets a day which adds up to a billion Tweets every 8 days—by comparison, it took 3 years, 2 months, and 1 day to reach the first billion Tweets," he said. "While it took about 18 months to sign up the first 500,000 accounts, we now see close to 500,000 accounts created every day."

To celebrate Twitter's 5th anniversary, I suggest you grab yourself a big slice of cake and check out the most recent edition of my Tweets of the Week column in Vegas Seven. :P But before that, I'll leave you with some food for thought, courtesy of our good friends at Wired:

7 in every 10 tweets sink without any kind of reaction from the world. Of the remainder, just 6% get re-tweeted, and 92% of those re-tweets occur within the 1st hour. In other words, fewer than 1 in 200 messages get re-tweeted after an hour. 

Moral of the story: You've got 140 characters. Make 'em count—today, especially.

American Idiots

Newsweek asked, and America answered... incorrectly. In fact, 39% of the 1,000 U.S. citizens polled failed the standard U.S. citizenship test.

According to Newsweek's poll:

• 29% of Americans don't know who their vice president is. (It's Joe Biden, in case you fall into that percentile.)
• 73% of Americans—that's roughly 3 out of 4 people, folks—aren't sure why the U.S. was involved in the Cold War. (Need a quick refresher? Here's a link to the Cold War Wikipedia entry.)
• 6% of Americans couldn’t circle Independence Day on a calendar. (That's the Fourth of July, helloooo!)
• Just 58% of Americans can identify the Taliban. Holland beat the U.S. by 10 points, scoring 68%. Meanwhile, Brittan beat that 75%, and Finland finished slightly ahead of them, with 76%.
• Most Americans think foreign aid represents 27% of the country's budget, and suggest cutting it to 13% of the budget. However, foreign aid represents less than 1% of the nation's budgetary spending. 

More than a quarter of the country doesn't know who's second to the throne in the Oval Office? Really?! And 3/4 of the nation doesn't know what the big deal about the Cold War was?That's almost as depressing as hearing 6% of Americans don't know what day to celebrate, um, America on—and it's a national holiday. With fireworks and BBQ. Even the dumbest drunken Nascar fans know when the Fourth of July is.

Where did they find these people?

"Hey there! Have you been living in a cave since 1963? Yes? Great! Come take this survey..."

"Howdy, ma'am. That's a nice bonnet you're wearing. Do you by chance live on a commune with no access to books, newspapers, magazines, radio, television, the internet, or any other contact with the outside world—other than this chance meeting with me, that is? You do? Great! Come take this survey..."

"Excuse me. Judging from your grizzly, bewildered appearance, it looks to me like you've been living in a remote cabin in the woods since childbirth. What's that? You were raised by wolves? That's incredible—and perfect! Come take this survey..."

... sadly, the people who responded to Newsweek's poll are card-carrying, flag-waving citizens of modern day America. They have access to news, politics and civic information; what they don't have is an excuse for their ignorance. (Think you can do better? Take the test for yourself.)

Details of the poll—and the implications of the results—are explored in Andrew Romano's story, "How Dumb Are We?" in this week's Newsweek. It's a short, snappy and fairly depressing read.

The piece finishes with a quote from Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker: “The problem is ignorance, not stupidity,” he says. To this, Romano aptly replies, "Whether that’s a treatable affliction or a terminal illness remains to be seen. But now’s the time to start searching for a cure."

The Aunt I Never Knew I Had ... and Now Love

The Aunt Eeee I never knew I had

I don't subscribe to or read much of Elle, but an old column of "Ask E. Jean" was recently featured on the Daily Beast (my new guilty pleasure! Follow DB on Twitter!), so I read it and, surprisingly enough, I liked it.

I don't usually care for the fluffy, superficial and useless chatter in womens magazines, but this one was good. It was real, it was well-written, and it was useful—even though it was months old.

In the column, 17-year Elle veteran columnist Ms. Eeee outlines the 25 things every woman should know. (Read it! It won't take long, I promise.)

The crucial Cliff's Notes:

• Regarding men: "Tell him what you want him to do, reward him when he does it, and ignore him when he doesn’t do it."
• Do onto others as you'd do onto them. Ask yourself, "What would happen if everyone in the world believed this idea and behaved as I’m behaving now?" I.E.: "If you’re considering lying to your boss to save your job, imagine a universal law that says everyone must lie to his or her boss."
• Always choose action over words. She was referring to actions under the covers and pillow talk, but it applies beyond the bedroom, too.
• Don’t expect a man to give you multiple orgasms. "Indeed, you’ll live a more fulfilling life if you don’t expect a man to give you multiple anything."

Although it's chock-full of useful gems and cheeky wisdom shared, I didn't agree with everything dear Aunt Eeee had to say in her column—toward the end of the list, especially. For example, I firmly believe that grades do matter (#15), even though they aren't everything (if you want to work for Google, they will look at your college GPA—so it better be good). Also, I don't give money to panhandlers (#18) but, in my defense, I do offer to buy the occasional sandwich for someone who's truly hungry for lunch and not just another fix; I would never introduce a boyfriend as my fiancé, no matter how badly I wanted him to propose (#18); chasing men is not the highest purpose in life (#23), and I'm friends with nearly all my exes (#25) because they are great people and, while sure, things between us fizzled, that doesn't mean they can't be fun, interesting, smart friends.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a bed to prop up (#6)...

Air Canada: Take Off, Eh

Air Canada should stick to what it does best: flying airplanes.

Canada’s national airline is meddling in Canada’s national game, and it’s ridiculous. AC is a major sponsor of the NHL, but after witnessing Boston Bruins defenceman Zdeno Chara’s massive hit on on Montreal Canadiens forward Max Pacioretty, the airline says the game is getting too violent, and is threatening to pull their ad dollars.

“From a corporate social responsibility standpoint, it is becoming increasingly difficult to associate our brand with sports events which could lead to serious and irresponsible accidents,” Air Canada warned in the letter. (as reported by CBC.ca)

This is like Cover Girl calling up the editors of Cosmopolitan saying the stories are too sexy, so get more conservative or we’re pulling our ads. Hockey is a rough sport, and Cosmo is a saucy magazine. Get over it!

Now, let me be clear: I’m not saying Chara’s check was fair game; I’m saying advertisers have no place in league policy discussions.

Everyone knows Air Canada’s customers love hockey. If they didn’t, the airline wouldn’t be advertising with the NHL in the first place. And those same customers are still going to games and tuning in to Hockey Night in Canada—they love the game, violent as it may be. So if Air Canada wants to market their services to them, they should go right ahead—but stay out of the politics and inner workings of the game.

Final thought: Instead of wasting time trying to fix imaginary problems for the NHL, perhaps AC should address their own problems, starting with their notoriously bad customer service.

Victoria's Secret Revealed

Not a paradigm shift, per se, but a torso shift

Victoria, we know your secret—and it's brutal, heavy-handed airbrushing and digital re-imaging.

We're in the midst of a recession (or recovery), yet the hacks working in the Victoria's Secret graphic design department are still willfully employed—despite repeated, embarrassing flubs.

I'd think competition for graphic design positions at Victoria's Secret would be stiff—VS being the holy grail for [male] designers. (Imagine, being paid to stare at bikini and bra-clad supermodels all day.) Still, Vicky has some mighty shoddy designers on staff.

Models frequently are shown in brochures with their arms totally airbrushed off their bodies; their torsos (and legs and other limbs) shifted in atomically impossible ways, and more. There are several sites and news stories dedicated to pointing out these flubs, including this one (Brittan's Daily Mail) and this one (HuffPo). Yet somehow, the incompetent VS designers still have jobs.

May I carry that for you? On second thought,
let me delete your handbag altogether.

HackerFactor has a great page dedicated to breaking down the various manipulations in this photo (left), in which the model is holding what appears to be the remnants of a handbag strap in her right hand, but the rest of the bag is missing. Oops! Body By Victoria, indeed. And By "Victoria," we mean Photoshop.

Altered Reality

What happens when parallel realities collide? Apparently, roads look like fettuccine noodles, as bridges and overpasses droop down in a scene that looks like what you'd get if there was a Hot Wheels version of The Sims.

 This comes to us courtesy of Brooklyn-based artist-programmer Clement Valla, who studied "the intersection between art and computer programming" at the Rhode Island School of Design.

"My work focuses on socio-technical systems that raise a number of interesting questions about authorship and human/computer relationships. I explore digital technologies that are not simply new tools to create and distribute copies of things but that also enable new social relationships through which people produce multiples," he says on his website.


The warped images are the product of Valla's vast collection of Google Maps images, which he scraped from the search giant's mapping tool, as it attempts to transition from standard views to Google Earth's 3-D perspectives. Google Earth is good—even amazing at times—but, as Vallas collection shows us, it's not perfect.

The surreal images made HuffPo headlines earlier this week, and two of my favorites are here. Still, I highly recommend you click through the entire collection here.

Revisiting WWII

I love this: Russian photog Sergey Larenkov took images of modern day Europe, then photoshopped parts of WWII pics taken at the same locations on top of the newer ones. The results, as you can see, are both beautiful and powerful.

There is so much history in Europe, it just boggles my mind. Simply trying to try to grasp all the events that have happened at any one location a over the decades (or centuries) gives me a headache. Yet these photos transcend time, and in high, dramatic fashion.

A few of my favorites are below, but I highly suggest checking out the full collection here.