A few weeks ago I had over 1000 unread items in Bloglines. Since I knew I wouldn't get around to reading the backlog I marked them all as read and promised myself I would do better at keeping up with my blog reading if I could start again with a clean slate. So far I've been pretty good and I've managed to find various curiosities along the way.
These aren't in any particular order:
After scrawling 'awk. exp.' in the margins of many an essay lately, this list of 'Fifty office-speak phrases you love to hate' compiled by the BBC proved particularly resonant.
Passive Aggressive Notes is dedicated to sharing 'painfully polite and hilariously hostile notes from shared spaces the world over'.
I discovered Zigzigger, a blog by a media studies academic in the US. He's very readable and you know you want to go and read a post with this title: "That cat who lives in a garbage can should be out demonstrating and overturning every institution, even Sesame Street...". There's a link there as well to an excellent mash-up show-down between the Teletubbies and Oscar the Grouch.
I'm most pleased about being diligent in my reading of TV Tonight. Sometimes there are up to 11 posts per day, which might sound a bit overwhelming, but they're brief enough. TV Tonight suits my purposes well; it lets me know what's going on in television in Australia covering institutions (business and government), audiences, and texts. I like that the writer appreciates television and has an opinion too.
/Procrastination 102
3 comments:
Thank you so much for the link to the list, 'Fifty office-speak phrases you love to hate'. I love it. I'm looking forward to playing my first game of meeting jargon bingo next week.
My favourite ones to hate are truly viruses in Australia – 'going forward' and 'at the end of the day' – yeah, like, what, at sunset?
But I shudder at another one that's new to me: 'cascade' – or for tautologically compulsive, 'cascade down'. What?
for me, it's the beer under that brand name, and the stuff that comes out the other side an hour later.
Glad to oblige Mark. I love the bingo card concept too. I'm sort of jealous that you'll have the opportunity to play it. Sort of. And I share your abhorrence for 'at the end of the day'. I'd add 'it's all good' too, but perhaps that's just inarticulate young people rather than office-speak.
I hadn't heard the 'cascade' one before either. And then I read it in a student essay after I'd read the BBC article and guffawed out loud. Well that's what we get for encouraging them to look at literature on team work.
All this talk of cascades has left me thirsty.
Unless it is a 'cascading event horizon', in which case we may as well jump into our beds, cover our heads with the doona and wait for the world to end.
Oh. obscure sci fi jargon. hmmm. Bingo.
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