'Hip' writers making use of 'hipster'

Few things cause my eyes to roll back into my head like reading the word "hipster". Nobody uses this word in speech, and only stupid writing makes use of it. Its use is a dead giveaway that the writer wants us to think he's writing a cool, groovy story about cool, groovy youths, when he is really trying to convince us that he, the writer, is cool and groovy.

A search for "hipster" returned no less than 1,208 stories at The New York Times, and each, to a story, is dumb. Check out these excerpts:

The persona behind Mr. Murphy’s free-form singing is his theatrical incarnation of a late-’50s-to-early-’60s hipster who stubbornly goes his own way. [I can't think of a better way to tell the world a singer is a dumbass.]

When this jazz legend barks out “I Got Rhythm,” she turns this great Gershwin standard into a hipster’s credo. [Only a hipster would have a credo.]

...Amanda Blank, a nasty-mouthed M.C. from Philadelphia who is associated with the hipster male hip-hopper Spank Rock...

She is drawn to hipster clothing brands like Preen and Comme des Garçons... [What a moron.]

A few gun lockers remain, but now the place is just another hipster hangout. [This one is interesting. 'Hipster hangouts' are so common they're not even hip! So it must follow that the writer is hip for pointing it out!]

People who use "hipster" in writing are low forms of life, although not quite as low as movie critics. Perhaps worse than people who use the word are hipsters themselves, who Merriam Webster define as "a person who is unusually aware of and interested in new and unconventional patterns (as in jazz or fashion)." I'd like to get through the rest of my life without meeting anyone who is unusually aware of or interested in any unconventional patterns.

Shoot It: useless frog

The BBC tries to pull heartstrings with a piece about a frog that "communicates with other frogs by semaphore in the form of gentle hand waves." Gentle hand waves? The thing is probably stricken with indigestion and is motioning for a Pepcid.

Hilary Jeffkins added: "The whole species is now extinct in Panama - this was one of the last remaining populations. It's final wave was in our programme."

I almost cried until I remembered we were talking about a frog. Hmmmm. One type of frog is no longer found in Panama, and the BBC thinks we should mourn. No, thanks. As icing on this weird cake, the hyper-emotional final sentence has "It's" used incorrectly.

The story claims the frog is dying out because of a fungus. I'm surprised the BBC didn't try to pin the blame on global warming or George Bush. Surely this must be the first innocent, cute creature to vanish because of something other than capitalism?

Shoot It™ series here.

Microsoft offers $44.6 billion for Yahoo

Microsoft has made another offer for Yahoo, and this time they're serious. From Fox Business:

The deal, which, at $31 a share represents a 62 percent premium on Yahoo shares, is an unsolicited offer, coming a year after Yahoo rejected a similar combination.

It would be one of the largest technology acquisitions ever, and certainly the largest for Microsoft, dwarfing the company's $6 billion deal for aQuantive last year.

I would LOVE to see Google step in with an offer for Yahoo. It would get really ugly and really cool, really fast. At a minimum Google will challenge on anti-trust grounds.

Three Myths of the US election campaign

It figures a German is needed to explain US politics. Gabor Steingart has written an interesting piece for Der Spiegel, about three myths of the presidential campaigning. The third myth he mentions is the myth of a divided nation, or rather that being divided is somehow bad.

Democracy thrives on differences of opinion, which translate into differences between parties. Promising to put an end to this ongoing dispute makes about as much sense as a supermarket manager announcing plans to combine the meat and produce departments -- and justifying his decision by saying that the management wants to overcome the decades-long polarization between steak-lovers and vegetarians.

Krauthammer on Clinton (Bubba)

Charles Krauthammer writes about Bill Clinton's legacy, or lack thereof, at RealClearPolitics:

By comparison, Clinton was a historical parenthesis. He can console himself -- with considerable justification -- that he simply drew the short straw in the chronological lottery: His time just happened to be the 1990s which, through no fault of his own, was the most inconsequential decade of the 20th century. His was the interval between the collapse of the Soviet Union on Dec. 26, 1991, and the return of history with a vengeance on Sept. 11, 2001.

This part explains Clinton's legacy perfectly:

Clinton is a narcissist but also smart and analytic enough to distinguish adulation from achievement.