1) Women. Please, if there is any love in the world and you hope to align yourselves with that love rather than with the soul-sucking sinkhole of sun bleached bones and rendered fat that you seem so desperate to make allegiances with, do yourselves (and those who care for you) a tremendous favour. Stop calling your husband or other women's husbands "hubbies."

Really. Trust me. Your husband doesn't like it and the universe doesn't like it.

The fact of the matter is that hubby is a dumb word. Dumber than a bag of hammers, one might be tempted to say—though that barely scratches the surface of what an appalling term hubby is. Even inane terms of affection like Lumlums or Snookiewoozums come off as highfalutin technical jargon in comparison to what may be the stupidest word to get tossed into that vat of language stew we call English.

Seriously. Knock it off with the Hubby business. You make the angles cry.

2) If you're the kind of person who really feels the need to adopt interthing-speak into daily conversation, i would highly recommend choosing carefully the terms you employ. Some might sound cute or hip or ironic, while others just sound like you're a fifth-grader who's trying to hard.

Case in point. The Monk has recently heard two individuals actually pronounce "meh" in real conversation. This is where you, the reader, should be shaking your head, deep in the throes of pity. For my own part, I have actually heard people say in earnest, things like "oh em gee" and "el oh ell." This stuff hurts me. It hurts me right in the soul. This is what our great nation has come to. Even Obama doesn't offer enough hope to bring back our innocence.

Other awkwardlies I've heard? Powned. Gee two gee. Laugh out loud. And other stuff I have purged from my memory through the delicate and persistent use of strong licker.

Labels: dumb, marriage, pop-culture

14 fruitless beatings

My black Chuck Taylor's are nearly ready to give up the ghost. Or maybe they're almost ready to become haunted. I don't know which, but I do know that for some time friends and foes alike have been telling me that its time to sport some new kicks. I think I bought these shoes sometime around 2001. Since then, Nike purchased Converse and changed the shoe. So far as I'm aware, the shoe is no longer canvas* and is now built by the sweat of shops.

So I've been researching alternative shoes. One's that are both canvas and not made unethically. But this post is not about my shoes.

While scouring the Interthing for an appropriate piece of footwear, I stumbled upon something uberfascinating. A book called Design Anarchy. With free chapter samples.

The book looks interesting and has some good things to say - along with some stuff that doesn't quite approach that pleasant adjective. I'll talk about its content in another post, but in this one, I'm simply going to make fun of the title and concept.

While the book's goal of liberating designers from the bonds of pop sensibilities bears some positive attention, its title is confused. Design anarchy just isn't really possible. If the book treated the aspects of design closely tied into the pop-anarchy sub-culture, that would be one thing. But even though the book's design looks like that, it purports to bring anarachy to design rather than vice versa. But it can't work.

The thing about design is that it is absolutely governed by the designer. It has defined teleology.** To bring anarachy into design is to make it no longer design at all. Without rules, standards, guidelines, governance, design is impossible. And as these things are antithetical to any real anarchy, the book's idea is impossible. In fact, the book itself sets up its own government, not only by its own use of pop-anarchy design but by its advocation of particular stylistic elements over others.

In any case, the book seems to be a mix of compelling ideas and over-inflated self-importance, so I'd really like to read it.

*note: some sort of synthetic instead.

**note: even if only a telos developed in the vague and sub-vague consciousness of the designer.

Labels: design, pop-culture

5 fruitless beatings