Thursday, January 25, 2007

The Public Record.

First of all, I would like to point out that the chef from Schnack has posted a response to my earlier post about his establishment. My response is there, too. One of these days I'll learn that the InterWebs are public and freely searchable, and stop being surprised when someone whom I don't know personally manages to unearth something I've written pertaining him or her.

The Web, in fact, probably contains more than a few items that I would prefer to have expunged from the record, or at least altered in my favor. One such item appears in a music review that I wrote for KQED.org. It is yet more evidence that when it comes to "street smarts," you can count me out.

Here is the embarrassing part. I wrote:
I have no idea what a head shop is, but after hearing the song of the same title, I keep singing "Meet me at the head shop/Forget yourself and leave it all behind..."
If pressed to guess at the time, I'd have said maybe "head shop" was some kind of European slang for a corner store. I was later informed that I'm pretty much the only person in the world older than 10 years old who does not know what a head shop is.

Even after having it defined, I'm still not sure I understand the term. It doesn't help that I've never smoked anything, not even a cigarette, in my life. When it comes to drugs, I was scared straight before I ever got crooked by the film My Bodyguard, just as I was going into seventh grade.

I begged to correct the review, which had already been published, but my editor thought the naivete was cute. So there my idiocy remains, preserved for all to see. My only consolation is that the page views for some unknown reviewer's opinions on a low-profile artist are likely to be very scant.

Please feel free to share any instances of your own naivete here. As everyone learns in school, the ridicule of others can help distract from one's own shortcomings.

4 comments :

  1. Anonymous12:54 PM

    There was a phrase I used to use wrong, and one of my sister's genius boyfriends laughed and corrected me, it was...

    ...shit I can't remember, too much pot smoking.

    My Bodyguard was a great movie.

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  2. Anonymous2:04 PM

    as a kid i once told somebody "don't cut off your nose in spite of your face." which elicited howls of laughter .... but i'm sticking with it.

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  3. Anonymous11:40 PM

    recently I used the (admittedly obvious) metaphor of New Coke in a blogpost title to describe the complete failure of the new NBA Game Ball. It was a quickie, a toss-off, but I was satisfied with it.

    Then on firejoemorgan.com the next day they were ridiculing a hack sportswriter about his own NBA Game ball column, and their post included this exchange:

    Hack Sportswriter Excerpt(HSE): Everybody makes mistakes, but not everybody admits them. And, when you get high enough up in a hierarchy, getting someone both to admit to a mistake and then correct it can be like spending your days down at the docks waiting for the Titanic to come in.

    FJM response: That's the opening paragraph. Yikes. "When you get high enough up in a hierarchy?" "...getting someone both to admit to a mistake and then correct it can be like..." Is that English?

    And what is that analogy? The Titanic? Seriously? The only thing hackier than making a reference to the Titanic as a classic disaster is making a reference to New Coke.

    HSE:That’s why it was so refreshing to hear NBA commissioner David Stern not only admit that his beloved high-tech synthetic basketball was a bigger mistake than New Coke

    FJM: Oh my holy Lord.


    That made me feel dumb. That and everything else I ever put up on my blog.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Everyone has their go-to failure analogy. The Hollywood ones I can think of are 'Ishtar' and 'Howard the Duck' and 'Waterworld.'

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