This newspaper clip made the internet rounds about six months ago, but it’s new to me:
I look forward every day to working the jumble, unscrambling jumbles to make “ordinary” words, which then provide an answer to the picture drawn.
On Thanksgiving Day, R U S U Y was one of the jumbled words. My 9-year-old grandson and my sister worked for hours. He became so frustrated because he could not figure it out.
The next day the answer was “usury” – no ordinary word, not even in the dictionary.
I think you should stick to using “ordinary” words.
Here’s a great scene from a Judge Judy case (never thought I’d write those words) in which a high school student learns about rhetorical questions the hard way: in front of millions of viewers!
And technically speaking, it’s astronomers and cosmologistswho find out things about space, and what we think of as “rocket science” is really rocket engineering.
Forget whether or not you think Arizona State University’s decision not to give President Obama an honourary degree because he hasn’t achieved enough yet was a mistake. The real lesson to learn from the whole affair is that you should never do an interview with a journalist, even a “fake news show” journo, unless:
You’ve given a lot of thought to the one message you want to get across
You are sober
You have an IQ of at least 100
It would appear from this Daily Show clip that very few people from Arizona State (they call it “the Harvard of Date Rape”, which is probably a reference to this recent case) would be able to meet conditions 2 and 3:
(In case you were wondering, no, Alexander Hamilton was not a President.)
Even people with three-digit IQs from real universities, such as my alma materCrazy Go Nuts University, have fallen prey to this trap. I remember a student couple who complained about being featured in a “Sex on Campus” article in Macleans magazine even though they were interviewed about sex on campus (the young woman even boasted of her “European attitude towards sex”, which probably made her quite popular at the pub) and consented to being photographed together in a bed.
As for dealing with the media, I would recommend that at the very least, you should read a book like Media Training 101. If you have a little more money and you’re in the Accordion City area, I would also suggest taking some training from someone like my friend Michael O’Connor Clarke, who’s forgotten more about dealing with the media than most people have learned.
CP24 reporter George Lagogianes is reporting from the protests outside the Israeli Consulate near Bloor and Avenue Road. He keeps alternating between calling it “the Israeli Consulate” and “the Jewish Consulate”. For his benefit, I now present a quick primer:
An Israeli is a citizen of the country of Israel.
A Jew is a member of the Jewish ethnoreligious group.
While Israel is a Jewish nation-state and three-quarters of Israel is Jewish, not all Jews are Israelis. According to Wikipedia, there are about as many Jews in the United States as there are in Israel.
Here’s a Venn diagram that should simplify matters:
Calling it “the Jewish Consulate” is like referring to the American Consulate as “the Christian Consulate” or the Indian Consulate as “the Hindu Consulate”. People at the homegrown TV news station of one of the world’s most multicultural cities should know better.
Back in high school, after reading Space-Time and Beyond for the umpteenth time and drinking one too many zombies with my friend Henry, we came up with a theory:
In the infinite set of universes, there had to exist a particular universe in which the events in our lives were being watched as a TV show.
We then made a solemn vow to live the kind of life that got high ratings.
