It takes a Santorum to make a spillage.

Rick Santorum complained this week about a "Google" problem that he has had since 2003. Naturally, I went to Google to see what was troubling, the also-ran candidate for the GOP nod.

Here is what I found.

For santorum....

The top three...

http://blog.spreadingsantorum.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_for_%22santorum%22_neologism


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Santorum

There were better results for the former Pennsylvania Senator when I tried Rick Santorum.

The first and third results flip and Santorum's wikipedia page is #1. Santorum's official campaign site comes in at #6.

Santorum's real problem is more related to #2.

In 2003, Dan Savage, angered by Santorum's slurs against gay people, asked his readers to coin a definition for "santorum"  which would offend the Senator.


Today, "santorum" is known as the "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex". 

Awesomely brilliant strategy.

The more Santorum grouses about Google, the more basement dwelling trogs view the page he finds so morally repulsive.

T S Eliot and irony of cheese and a poet who is not afraid to talk about cheese

"What was peculiar to TSE in this sort," wrote I. A. Richards, "was the delicately perceptible trace, the ghastly flavor of irony which about his manner as though he were preparing a parody"--as when Eliot declined Richard's invitation to visit with him in Peking in 1929 on the grounds that he did "not care to visit any country which has no native cheese"

T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide, by David E. Chinitz, University of Chicago Press, 2005

Winklevoss

CHEESE (a letter from T. S. Eliot)
Sir – Mr. David Garnett (reviewing Mr. Osbert Burdett’s book [i.e. A Little Book of Cheese, London: Gerald Howe, 1935, which was intended "to aid the reader in the choice of cheese"]) is in error in supposing that there is no tolerable American cheese. There is a delicious Port Salut type made by Trappist monks in Ontario. But Trappist monks, like their cheese, are the product of “a settled civilisation of long standing,” and I fear that there is little demand for either. Americans seem to prefer a negative cream cheese which they can eat with salad: and American salads are barbaric. I wish Mr. Garnett would take the initiative in founding such a society as he suggests; and I for one would be glad to buy a Double Cottenham, if he could put me in the way of it.
Oxford and Cambridge
T. S. Eliot
University Club
Pall Mall, S. W. 1
http://cheesepoet.wordpress.com/

Bowling: Ironic, Post Ironic, or Belief System

Tyler Stout’s The Big Lebowski poster [via Slashfilm]

The End of Irony?

One good thing could come from this horror: it could spell the end of the age of irony. For some 30 years--roughly as long as the Twin Towers were upright--the good folks in charge of America's intellectual life have insisted that nothing was to be believed in or taken seriously. Nothing was real. With a giggle and a smirk, our chattering classes--our columnists and pop culture makers--declared that detachment and personal whimsy were the necessary tools for an oh-so-cool life. Who but a slobbering bumpkin would think, "I feel your pain"? The ironists, seeing through everything, made it difficult for anyone to see anything. The consequence of thinking that nothing is real--apart from prancing around in an air of vain stupidity--is that one will not know the difference between a joke and a menace.

Roger Rosenblatt, Time Magazine, September 24, 2011  

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1000893,00.html#ixzz1XfB9aCeL

The New Yorker, September 5, 2011

how improv training helps you to play with your grandchildren or children or a nice nephew or niece

1. Agreeing with a two year old is better than asking questions. If you ask questions, they answer and the game stops. Example. Do you want Elmo to go to the park?
Child will say yes or no and then what.

If however you say, "I'm taking Elmo to the park"
The kid says,"Let's take him on the swings."
Now, you've got a narrative.

2. The "game" in improv world is what happens that is unique, strange, or remarkable about the interaction between the people on stage. Example...a senior partner at a law firm is so arrogant that he can't even compliment a junior partner without it being a put down. He just gets worse and the junior partner quits the firm.

With a child, the game is less complex. Examples....giving Elmo and non-branded dolls a bath. The game....shampoo in their eyes...they either get shampoo in their eyes and they cry or you are careful to keep shampoo out of their eyes. That is the centerpiece of each bath scene.


3. Props can work. My granddaughter  (2 1/2) picked up a ukulele. I suggested that she play "Twinkle, Twinkle little star." She played that. Then she became a song leader and made up words to the tune of "Twinkle, twinkle" and had the doll students standing up, sitting down, dancing and singing.

FYI...there 57 million google results for Elmo and and 6.5 million image results.

Here is Joe Pesci, playing with Elmo,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ05oOZiZOA

                                          Elmo in Don's Basement

Rebranding