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You’re So Fine, And You’re Mine

October 30, 2009

For no good reason, here’s me at age 4, dressing up as Madonna. I’m still wearing my pajama top — but not, apparently, the bottoms. I am also, apparently, wearing one elbow-length glove, while the other is tucked into my “belt.” I may have had Madonna slightly confused with Michael Jackson.

What Happens When I Don’t Blog For a Week

October 27, 2009

Dear Everyone,

I’m great! How are you?

When I don’t blog for a week, my mom emails me to ask if I’m either very happy or very sad (the only reasons my mom can fathom for my not taking photos of subway advertising and dissecting the grammatical foibles therein). My friend Gene kindly emailed to ask if I was “puking.” Far from it! Think of all the things you can think of that are better than puking, and there is a probability of 1 that I have been doing some of them!

Over the last month, I have scored a perfect 1600 on the GRE and a 780 on the GMAT, and have been teaching numerous other people to do the same. I also attended an anti-global-warming march — or was it pro-global warming? I forget. (Note: Nothing rhymes well with “renewable energy.”) I also shot a Public Service Announcement for Books for Africa. (Hear that? Some people want books and cannot afford them! I spend altogether too much time tolerating people who can afford books, yet choose not to read them! I am hoping to counterbalance the universe!)

I have now memorized 54 or so digits of pi.

I have more posts coming soon — as long as subway advertising is stupid, I’ll be here for you.

Sincerely,

Jen

Real Genius

October 16, 2009

The other day, I clicked on something on Facebook and ended up on Mensa’s page — yes, Mensa is on Facebook! But:

Due to the recent complaints of profane and unacceptable behavior, the status of this group is [sic] changed from Open to Close [sic].

(I don’t know if the above solecisms are Facebook’s or Mensa’s).

Oh, those crazy Mensans! Stabbing each other with their compasses! Insulting your mother in a sesquipedalian (but nevertheless excoriating) manner! Arguing about whose IQ is three points higher than someone else’s in vituperative encounters that inevitably devolve into bludgeoning one another with Richard Dawkins tomes!

Of course, Mensa has little interest in maintaining a Facebook presence, because it is still a members-only “club” that collects dues and mails out paper membership cards with membership numbers on them! It is as though I have joined the Shirelles Fan Club in 1963!

Mensa mails me a magazine every month; the latest one looks like this:

At first, I thought this was High Times magazine. Note the article being advertised on the bottom left:

What to do when someone talks down to you (Page 11)

Not a great endorsement for genius as measured by IQ tests, hmmn? I think if you’re a “genius” over the age of, say, nine, you should have this one all worked out.

By the way, the title of this post is also the title of the official movie of my college co-ed fraternity (when I try to explain it to people not from my college, I usually say “co-ed computer science fraternity,” just to give the right impression). You must now go watch Val Kilmer in this film, immediately.

And What a Party It Must Have Been!

October 15, 2009

Can you find the hilarious misplaced modifier in the Daily Mail?

Just in case anyone was still under the impression that the British are more erudite than we are.

Our Tax Dollars At Work

October 14, 2009

I think the New York Public Library is turning me into a fiscal conservative.  I saw this sign on the door of the Kips Bay Branch:

Pimp your MySpace!  Or just play on the laptops!  

Um, no.  Read a fucking book or get out of the fucking library.  

Kids: my tax dollars are giving you Kafka and SAT manuals, or nothing.  I really, really, truly don’t care whether underprivileged children have equal access to thinly-veiled come-ons from webcam whores.

Not How Apostrophes Work

October 13, 2009

 

34th St near 7th Avenue

Thinking about apostrophes reminded me of an article I read in my alumni magazine about a Dartmouth alum, Jeff Deck, who went around the country fixing typos on public signage. I discovered that the Typo Eradication Advancement League (TEAL) had been “compelled by federal court order” to replace its usual website with “a faintly propagandistic statement mandated by the judge and approved by the prosecutor,” apparently as part of a court case involving the vandalism/improvement of signage in a National Park.

This statement rather hilariously points out that the penalties for vandalizing a sign in a National Park can include “a year or more of banishment from all National Parks and public lands”!

Do people even say banishment anymore? Are we the Catiline to Yosemite’s Cicero?

D’Zura!

October 12, 2009

This was in People magazine; apparently, there is an actress whose last name much resembles my own.

According to Wikipedia, she is of Irish, Italian, and Polish descent (it’s the Polish bit that gives us those names).

Her D’Xena trick, above, is pretty cute — there’s no good analog for “Dziura” (I mean, “D’Zura” is an accurate pronunciation guide, but Zura is not the same of a completely awesome Sapphically-inclined ’90s action heroine).

Sometimes, Polish people inform me of the correct pronunciation of my name (my family started pronouncing it more or less phonetically sometime in the last century).  My grandmother, who was not Polish (but had married my Polish grandfather) liked to whip out the correct pronunciation for kicks.  ”You know how you really say your name?  ZHOO-ra!”  This was sort of mystifying to a kid who had at that point had the ability to say and spell her own name for, say, less than five years.

Incidentally, I’ve recently discovered at least two other Jennifer Dziuras on Facebook.  Please don’t go looking up the high school one; that’s creepy.

The other day, a Starbucks barista with whom I am friendly commented that it was “ironic” that a Polish person could work as an SAT tutor.  Whee, my very first ethnic slur!

Badvertising: Synecdoche, New York

October 9, 2009

As the final installment in Badvertising Week, allow me to share this photo I took on E 27th St:

(Here’s a better photo).

I don’t actually object to this. In fact, it is an excellent example of synecdoche (just as was the name “Hot Lips” on M*A*S*H).

Badvertising: Descartes Abuse

October 8, 2009

René Descartes famously wrote, “I think, therefore I am.” Actually, he wrote “Cogito ergo sum,” because in 1637, important things had to be said in Latin.

Notice how “Cogito ergo sum” isn’t quite as catchy as “I think, therefore I am.” It takes this little bit of parallelism in English to convince Coach Kelly from Dumbfuckville, North Carolina to print up team t-shirts that say “I cheer, therefore I am!” Dumbfuck spirit award!!!!

Never has a philosopher been more abused!

Observe this ad, which I photographed at JFK airport:

Not even a verb.

Descartes was not suggesting that our existence is predicated upon whatever hobby we might happen to best identify with; it wasn’t simply the case that he really loved thinking, and that made him feel most like himself, and therefore he posted “I think, therefore I am” as his Facebook status update, where it remained for 16 hours, until he changed it to “Dude, I am so wasted. Imma discourse on your MOM’S method!”

Descartes was attempting to build a case — using deduction alone — to justify belief in God. Like this:

Perception cannot be trusted!
• I doubt everything!
• However, even when I am doubting absolutely everything, I am engaging in the action of doubting!
• If I am doubting, there must be someone doing the doubting!
• It’s me!
• I’m here! Hi!
• Okay, now we know exactly one thing about the universe. I will now start doing the actual philosophy, by reasoning from the one thing we know for sure! You guys are still building on a foundation of shifting sand, but I’m founding modern philosophy! Eventually Roberto Rossellini will make a movie about it! In this movie I will get the chambermaid pregnant.

Let’s see more ads:

I Modern Art Therefore I Am (a Douchebag!)

This is a bit like extracting the “I have a dream” quote, noting that you yourself have the dream of winning American Idol, and printing yourself an insipid t-shirt suggesting that your dream of corporate superstardom must necessarily be fulfilled as a matter of social justice.

I eat food. I am a special snowflake!

Haha. Sex and the City! I totally watched that whole show and I exist! Amazing! Haha.

Badvertising: The Tremendous Literalists

October 7, 2009

This installment of Badvertising Week is just cute.

This sign has been up for years (in the E 30s). I think these laundromat entrepreneurs received a promotional sign from one of their suppliers (Vend-Rite, apparently) and didn’t understand its hyperbolic promise: Do your laundry in only 4 minutes! 2 minutes to drop it off! 2 minutes to pick it up!

Sure, that’s not exactly it. You have to bag up your laundry and carry it to the laundromat. And what if there’s a line? That might take 4 — or even 6 — minutes. It might not be convenient to stop by when the laundromat is open — and once you’ve picked up your laundry, you really need to go straight home with it. So it’s really more of a 15-20 minute errand. But we get it. You’ll do our laundry for us. It’s fast!

I wonder if some obnoxious customer actually demanded his laundry back, clean and dry, within 4 minutes. It seems unlikely. Did the laundromat owners simply think the sign had a typo? They actually crossed out the “2 minutes” business with a thin-tip Sharpie marker!

You’d think that someone who disapproved of so much of a sign’s content would’ve simply tossed the sign, and just made a new one: Your Wash Done in 40 Minutes! That would be impressive — perhaps impossible. Are they drying your clothes in a wind tunnel? Washing them at the speed of sound?

Badvertising: When Poor Grammar Meets Innumeracy

October 6, 2009

Thanks to Jamie for sending this along:

Okay, let’s take as a given that the Starbucks coffee is the one “made from 3% of the world’s best coffee beans.”

So you’re saying that that cup of coffee is so special that, after making it, only 97% of the world’s best coffee beans remain? I wonder who will be among the lucky 32 individuals who get to drink the remaining cups of coffee made from the world’s best coffee beans before the rest of us are forced to drink coffee made with subpar beans.

Or, Starbucks, are you perhaps saying that Starbucks coffee — in general — uses up 3% of the world’s best coffee beans? Doesn’t it then seem that, if we listened to your advertising and bought more of it, we’d dilute the bean pool? That is, the 3% would be spread out over more cups of coffee? How abysmal. We’re American — give us our weak-ass coffee!

Might I suggest “made from the top 3% of the world’s coffee beans”? (While I enjoy my public pedantry, this ad achieves the rare feat of leaving me not only irked at the poor use of language, but also genuinely confused! Does Starbucks use 3% of the world’s best beans, or does it use only the top 3% of all beans? I literally visit Starbucks every morning, and I was one of the pilot members of the black card program; Starbucks’ computers contained a detailed history of my purchasing and preferences! I don’t dislike Starbucks. But — if I may be so colloquial — WTF?)

Please see previous post on Starbucks’ use of the word “artisan.”

Badvertising: What Not to Call Your Product (Hint: Rats and Periodontal Disease Are Out)

October 5, 2009

Welcome to Badvertising Week: five days of photo posts about grammatically incorrect, mathematically incorrect, and otherwise unwise advertising.

***

Once, in one of the myriad and largely unnecessary business books I consumed back when I ran a floundering dot-com, I read an anecdote about a company that introduced a product addressing the fact that most cat foods contained — quite frankly — rats.

The product was thereby called: No-Rat Cat Food.

Despite the fact that this cat food was the only one in the store with no rats whatsoever, no one bought it. People just prefer to purchase items in packaging that does not evoke thoughts of rats.

So, I humbly suggest that this is not a very good name for a product:

I’ll end on a rerun of a photo I took in a Buenos Aires drugstore back in January:

Mmmn, your hair smells like ASSY.

Jennifer-a-Trois

October 5, 2009

My best friend Molly Crabapple (born Jennifer Caban) and I went last week to see the magnum opus that is Jennifer’s Body. We like to look at Megan Fox (cannibalism optional).

Oh, and Molly was in the freaking New York Times, being amazing. She even has an audio slide show!

Here we are at the theater:

Hell yes!

Pedant Party: The Answers! (Also: Stevia has no idea what it’s talking about)

October 2, 2009

I’m a bit late with the answers to Thursday’s Pedant Party Quiz, but Rich really nailed it in the comments. Here we go!

1. Going out OF business, obviously. This was just a warm-up. I do feel for these entrepreneurs, losing their porn enterprise as well as having trouble selecting the correct preposition in English. Prepositions are one of the hardest things to get in a new language (and English speakers might be the only ones who claim to stand IN the street, rather than ON it).

2. WHOSE. “Who’s” means “who is.” These people weren’t even trying. Maybe they thought their ad would get a few extra clicks from people wanting to complain about their grammar.

3. Just as the Pussycat Dolls should have said, “Don’t you wish your girlfriend WERE hot like me,” this ad should use “were” instead of “was.” When in the subjunctive mood (i.e., anything beginning with “if,” “I wish,” “you wish,” etc.), use “were” instead of “was” or “would.”

Also, “It grows where your cravings meet your conscience without compromise” makes no fucking sense whatsoever. “Without compromise” appears to be an adverbial modifier modifying “meet.” So the cravings are not compromising — fine, it’s advertising, and I’ll accept that. But wherever the non-compromising cravings and conscience are meeting — which is presumably inside my body (almost certainly inside my mind, or perhaps at some suitable rendezvous point between my mind and stomach) — is where the Stevia grows? INSIDE THE CUSTOMER? If so, why do you need to advertise at all?

Also, Stevia tastes terrible.

4. If you can count it, you have FEWER. If you can’t, you have LESS. I make FEWER grammatical mistakes than most people, but as a result of my incredible pedantry, I have LESS joie de vivre.

5. Every cardmember WHO registers. People are not objects. Not even the sexy ones.

6. Here’s a fun one. “Tact” is a caring about others’ feelings, or a keen sense of what is appropriate; that is not what was meant here. “Tactic,” as Rich noted, would work. However, I think the writer meant “tack.” A tack is a ship’s course; to “continue a tack” is to remain on the same course. Of course, if you write “continue on the same tack,” many people would think you had misspelled “track”; the metaphors have the same meaning, but you would have been foiled in your attempt to evoke a nautical feeling.

Also, “if” should be “whether.” Here’s how to know which one to use: if you could add “or not,” use whether; if you could add “then,” use if. For instance:

I don’t know WHETHER it’s going to rain (or not), but IF it rains, (then) I’ll have to stop grilling.

7. And finally, “that may be monitored and/or recorded at any time” is a modifier that is currently modifying “video surveillance.” The video surveillance may be monitored? You’re going to surveil the surveillance? What’s the point of surveillance if it’s not monitored and/or recorded all the time? In fact, if the sign just said “This building is under video surveillance,” the sign would serve its intended purpose better, since people would assume that, of course, the surveillance is continuous; specifying that the default setting of the surveillance is that no one watches or records it really defies the very nature and purpose of surveillance.

This error is similar to the one covered in the post Lindsay Lohan and the Misplaced Deodorant Modifier.

Food Quiz! Also, I’ve Been Published in a Free Magazine That Arrives in Mailboxes in Manhattan Sometime Around Now

October 2, 2009

Hey look!  I have an article in City Scoops Magazine.

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