Some Random Spring Humor from 1999

Because of the Easter reference, here's a resurrected WCA mailing from 1999.
Enjoy, and don't, along with Don Imus, visit the Ho Ho Home Page.

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19990414

RANDOM NOTES FROM THE SPECTACLE

OH, CHEER UP, DAMMIT

Ann Arbor: The ever-insightful Free Press had the following to say, the Monday after Easter:

"Police were searching for suspects Sunday in a Detroit restaurant massacre that left three members of one family and a teenager dead, casting a pall over Easter celebrations."

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SIR, YOU ARE IMPERTINENT

Ann Arbor: After a while, most college instructors get their patter worked out, and the better ones learn to read their audiences and to pitch rhetorical questions at individuals who will play ball. This isn't as easy as it sounds, though; recently, a very new professor got well along off his subject, wandered into a kind of irrelevant, babbling talk about how company networking can be dodgy, and then, feeling the need for an affirmation or something, tried to get his older, more experienced students to agree. Unfortunately, he picked a grumpy gentleman who manages a test lab for Marathon Oil. The instructor asked, :"So you have an intranet, right? Does it always work? How well does it work?" Our colleague said, "We have billions of dollars; it works great."

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CORPORATE MALAPROPISMS

Ann Arbor: There's a fascinating master's degree in comparative linguistics waiting out there for someone, centered around the incidence and propagation of strange, incorrect usage in companies. Just as one example, the phrase, "straw man," (somewhat questionably(1)) used to mean a tentative version of something, is commonly rendered "straw horse" in a large tape drive company of our acquaintance -- apparently a conflation of straw man and stalking horse -- and less commonly but even more strangely as "straw dog" in another corporation. And just yesterday, a manager admitted, right in front of everyone, that "You sent me that file, and I went down like a dead balloon!"

If we weren't such upstanding corporate citizens ourselves, we'd be inclined to mess with this thing a bit -- perhaps trying to introduce such terms as "straw woman" or "barley boy"; "I think we should go off-base, here, and have a conflab, maybe punt around the straw woodchuck and see if we can reach a census."

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AND FINALLY ...

"And any place I flang my cat was home ..."

Cafe newbie: "Do you have, um, diet birch beer? ... What _is_ birch beer?"

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The Wood-Charles News Service has been brung to you by the straw bartenders at Ann Arbor's Odd Town Tavern, and by Ken, "Right Wing Ideologues Don't Waste Your Tax Dollars, The Special Prosecutor Law Does," Starr.

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(1) The book definition of straw man is: "a weak or imaginary opposition (as an argument or adversary) set up only to be easily confuted 2: a person set up to serve as a cover for a usually questionable transaction;" not really, I believe, what most people have in mind when they use the term. The possibility for confusion is increased by the existence of "straw vote," a kind of running-up-the-flagpole of something, and of "straw boss," basically, a project leader.