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Carlos Silva Costa forwarded to me a supposedly true story. I thank him for the welcomed laughter it induced... here it is:
A little old lady from Wisconsin had worked in and around her family dairy farms since she was old enough to walk, with hours of hard work and little compensation.
When canned Carnation Milk became available in grocery stores in approximately the 1940s, she read an advertisement offering $5,000 for the best slogan. The producers wanted a rhyme beginning with Carnation Milk is best of all.
She thought to herself, I know all about milk and dairy farms. I can do this! She sent in her entry, and several weeks later, a black limo pulled up in front of her house.
A man got out and said, "Carnation LOVED your entry so much! We are here to award you $2,000 even though we will not be able to use it'"
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My New Word(s) For Today
bmpf - Toilet paper; Useless papers; especially official documents and standardized forms, sales and marketing print material etc; junk mail; spam
The word trope is another term with which I have always been somewhat unfamiliar.
trope: language used in a figurative or nonliteral sense
trope: In linguistics, trope is a rhetorical figure of speech that consists of a play on words, i.e., using a word in a way other than what is considered its literal or normal form. The other major category of figures of speech is the scheme, which involves changing the pattern of words in a sentence.
trope: metaphor, often ironic, using words other than dialogue in their literal sense
It was difficult for me to find simple examples of a trope. Here are three:
Dear John letter
A taste of the lash
"Nuke em"
Please advise me if I am mistaken . . .
(sometimes I need things spelled out)
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The Dancing Shiva
It's the illusion that all of us scientific types suffer from, that there is nothing more to the Universe than the mindless gyration of atoms and molecules, that there is no deeper reality behind appearances. … It is the logical delusion that after death there is nothing but a timeless void. Shiva is telling us that if you destroy this illusion and seek solace under his raised left foot (which he points to with one of his right hands), you will realize that behind external appearances (Maya), there is a deeper truth.
From: The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human by V.S. Ramachandran. 357 pages. W.W. Norton & Company. $26.95.
because I have nothing worthy to add
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Finally, someone beside the abysmally deluded conventional Powers that be is addressing the fact that education begins with presenting actual facts to the very young.
Richard Dawkins
The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, born on March 26, 1941 in Nairobi, was a professor at Oxford University until 2008 and is a fellow of the Royal Society. He is considered one of the most influential evolutionary biologists of our time and has broadened understanding of Darwin's theory of evolution. His ability to explain complex scientific concepts have made him one of the most widely read scientific authors in the world.
In a SPIEGEL ONLINE interview Richard Dawkins finishes with:
I am halfway through writing a children's book which is called "The Magic of Reality." Each chapter is a question like: What is an earthquake? What is a rainbow? What is the sun? Each chapter begins with a series of myths seemingly answering those questions, and then I counter that with explanations about the true nature of things. There is something very cheap about magic in the supernatural sense, like turning a frog into a prince with a magic wand. Reality has a grander, poetic magic of its own, which I hope I can get across.
Finally some true, solid education.
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"I want to be in Kentucky when the end of the world comes, because it's always 20 years behind"
--Mark Twain.
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