I’m a sucker for a good analogy. When I explain complicated concepts to people, I often make use of analogies, as they frequently turn a difficult or foreign concept into something that anyone can grasp. By using something that people are already familiar with on a cultural level, odd and unusual concepts can be more easily communicated.
I also appreciate when other people use analogies – the more apt, the better. For example, in the second-last paragraph of an article in today’s The Age about Melbn’s poorly-run metropolitan train network, union boss Terry Sheedy compares the train system to an institution that many Australians are familiar with, on a cultural level. He gets awarded the jurgen dot ca “Analogy of the week” award. Congratulations. Meet me at the Railway for a pint.
One of the most irritating songs of last year (and a song that was too lyrically complex for Alan Brough) was a blatant ripoff of an old medaeval scroll! Look at the lyrics from the chorus:
My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard,
And they’re like “It’s better than yours”
Damn right, It’s better than yours,
I can teach you, but I have to charge.
And now here’s proof:
A class act like Kellis, stealing lyrics from monks? Say it ain’t so!
I don’t often write about it, but I’m a music addict. I buy it by the bucketloads. My iTunes library has over 44,000 songs in it. Yeah. That’s a lot. I’ve got an account at last.fm which keeps track of everything I listen to in iTunes (iPod synchronisation isn’t working so great). Anyway. I’m breaking my musical silence right now to gush about a new band that I’ve just discovered. Apparently, it’s something that other people like too, but I don’t listen to commercial radio, so I really have no idea what the trendspinners have been shoving down peoples’ throats lately.
So the band is called Mika. Their/his new release is called Life in Cartoon Motion. I bought it 50% because of the cover, and 50% because of the really cool name. So there. It’s fantastic. It’s folky disco dancy fun happy music. Like Polyphonic Spree without the, um, something that annoys me about them.
I loooove words. Being a geeky type who knows a bit about marketing, I can generate some pretty good technowaffle: words that sound really good, but ultimately don’t mean much at all. If you’re trying to be serious, it may be better to simply type “blah blah blah”. I had occasion to do some research on a company during the course of my day here, and I discovered an amazing paragraph of technowaffle on a product page. My hat’s off to whoever wrote this; it’s absolutely brilliant.
I reproduce it here in its entirety, gentle reader, for your amusement:
The real genius of [product name] is the way it is built. (If you’re not interested in the technical summary, feel free to skip straight to the next paragraph!) [Company name] began with Microsoft’s powerful .NET framework, and built on top of that a database-independent, object-oriented persistence layer capable of complete field-level synchronization across disparate, non-permanently connected systems (for both client to server and server to server synchronization). An object-oriented domain modeler generates code specific to your system above the persistence layer, while a powerful workflow engine enables runtime customization of workflow processes attached to business rules for you to address each and every anomaly and shortcut and exception within your business. And above this domain layer is a choice of user interface layers, so you can deploy the same application as a client-server on-premise CRM, as a hosted CRM used across the web, as a CRM running in a handheld PDA, or any combination of these options.
Alanis Morissette, Canada’s Debbie Gibson, that ironic former infatuation junkie tuned Sarah McLachlan clone, does an absolutely hilarious cover of The Black Eyed Peas’ My Humps. It’s all whiney and slow and Alanis Morissettey (as opposed to just plain ol’ Alanis, who would have done a Debbie Gibson-esque cover, which would probably be funny too). Who woulda thunk that that weird girl from You Can’t Do That On Television would end up getting her butt slapped in slow motion in a YouTube video?
