Readers not yet in the tertiary stages of Alzheimer’s Disease will recall that a couple of months ago I conducted a contest where comment box participants were invited to nominate how long Tim Blair could last without mentioning his bete noire Margo Kingston.
Sadly, all my records on entrants’ nominations for the contest were sucked into a cyber netherworld with the demise of the “cyberfuddle” version of Troppo Armadillo shortly afterwards, so I have no way of knowing definitively who actually won the contest (assuming there’s only one contestant left). Certainly, I haven’t noticed a single reference to Margo (even obliquely) on Tim’s blog since he swore never to mention her again. On the other hand, I don’t read his comment box very carefully at all, because it’s so full of contributions by the sorts of appalling people anyone sensible would do almost anything to avoid. Nevertheless, unless any reader can refer me to a specific instance of a Blair infraction of his Margo resolution, I propose to judge the contest without further ado.
Gummo Trotsky nominated the “high field” (i.e. higher than the highest specific number of days or weeks nominated by any other contestant). After some hesitation about whether this was the type of devious, smartarse tactic I should endorse, I decided I could live with it.
As far as I know, the highest specific nomination was Ron Mead, who reckoned Tim B would last 6 weeks. As that period has well and truly passed (the contest was initiated on the old blog, and the new blog commenced operations at its present “digs” on 4 June, which is in itself more than 6 weeks ago), I now declare Gummo the winner. I thnk I’ll make the prize a bottle of reasonably respectable wine valued at $15-20 retail or so, although how I’ll actually get it to Gummo without spending even more on postage is another question.
As a matter of natural justice, given that Gummo’s “high field” nomination was essentially dodgy (if brazen enough to merit being rewarded), I also award a consolation prize to Ron Mead of a bottle of slightly less respectable wine (valued at $10-12 or so). In Ron’s case I’ll be in a position to award the prize personally, because I’m coming down to Sydney in early November for my dad’s 80th birthday.
Now for a new contest. I’ve been inspired by Christopher Sheil’s Bullshit Bingo post immediately below. The new TA contest is a challenge to readers to fit all 25 “bullshit” words or phrases into a single sentence. Naturally the sentence will need to be compound, even convoluted, but that’s entirely consistent with the pretentious bullshit tradition. The sentence must, however, be grammatical. Should there be more than one correct entry, the winner will be judged by the TA team (myself, Chris, Geoff and Wayne) based on our subjective assessment of (1) elegance and (2) humorous content. The judges’ decision will be final. Entries will close one week precisely from the date of this post.
PS – Any of the nominated judges are at liberty to enter the contest, but a judge who does so will be required to stand aside from the judging panel. Nemo debet esse judex in propria causa.
“The moment of truth has arrived, with our mental models going forward to achieve a strategic fit, our core competencies reaching touch points of synergy, but the bottom line of our best practice is still the value-added benchmark; let us revisit that proactive win-win situation and fast-track the implementation of that 24/7 knowledge base, remembering always to think outside the box to achieve result-driven empowerment, so that at the end of the day we can take that off-line without falling out of the loop, and continue to touch base with a client-focused paradigm, and use our mindset to gain leverage for our game plan.”
How was that? I can’t remember the last time I spouted quite so much bullshit…
James,
Your opening entry is certainly succinct (considering the number of concepts you had to embrace), and brevity is part of my definition of elegance. On the other hand, the use of a semi-colon in mid-sentence is a negative feature for me. Your sentence is also a bit light on humorous content (unless you were too subtle for me, which is entirely possible).
BTW I think I’ll pre-emptively outlaw the use of parentheses (despite the fact that I employ them all the time).
This ought to a pushover for a practicing IT person, but I reckon someone from sales and marketing could go one better and produce a single sentence that uses each word or phrase twice over. Anyway here goes:
“If the major benchmark of a result-driven paradigm is a win-win game plan and pro-active, 24/7 client-focused mindset empowerment then it’s now the moment of truth and we need to start going forward to revisit the main touch points of our mental models, to achieve synergy between our knowledge base and core competencies; best practice and value-added leverage unless, at the end of the day when we touch base on the bottom line the only way to get good strategic fit is to take that off-line fast track out of the loop and think outside the box.”
BTW – last time I was here there was a comment that gave a little much needed context to my opening joke. Guess it’ll just have to stand on its own two feet.
I counted 29 terms there, but it’s a damn long sentence regardless:
“At the end of the day, the mindset of the pornographic industry means one often finds oneself getting into trouble with the proactive game plan of mental models who like to revisit and touch base when there’s no synergy or strategic fit present and enjoy trying to fast track some leverage, with result-driven implications affecting everyone 24/7, meaning that any attempts to think outside the box to create some empowerment end up out of the loop and the value-added benchmark of the industry’s knowledge base, including all the core competencies we know and love, fail to be client focused resulting in an unerotic paradigm where no one is getting to touch points, especially on the bottom line and the moment of truth can never arrive as we’ve forgotten our best practice and have stopped going forward meaning we now have the exact opposite of a win-win situation and unless we fast track some nakedness soon our audience is going to want us to take that off-line.”
I’ve just done a recount on the list, and there are 29 words and phrases in Chris’ list. Hmm – it might be time to revisit the rules, Ken.
Bloody historians! It must be that po-mo relativism again: 25 can have any number of meanings. Norman will have something to say about this, I’m sure. I’m afraid I’ll have to revise the rules and insist that the sentence must include all 29 expressions. I haven’t done a checklist exercise on either James’ or Gummo’s entry, but if either of them is missing some of them I’ll let them lodge a revised entry in view of the rules confusion.
It’s only because I’m agin’ protesting on principle that I shall refrain from such a dastardly act, and graciously accept “runner-up”. Congratulations, Gummo!
I don’t want to give a running judge’s commentary, but I can’t help noting that Nick’s introduction of the sexual element brings a certain delicious ambiguity to several of the expressions. Thinking outside the box, for instance. A formidable entry (so to speak).
Thanks Ron. And t othink that on Wednesday night I was thinking of E-Mailing Ken to withdraw my entry, just to get the waiting over with. Nothing to do with good sportsmanship – I’m the official “Behind the Play” coach for the local Under-12s.
‘s not all lost, Ken (I guess that’s a negative to “can you open the zip file I sent you?”?). I’ve just found and opened the old post (I hadn’t deleted my copy of your archives, fearing that you hadn’t been able to access them).
Here we are:
http://donotuselifts.net/kpta_e604.php
Ron went for six weeks, Gummo went for the “high field”, and “Andjam” went for “until she features on Media Watch”, which although not yet having occurred is even dodgier than Gummo’s bet, so good on you for ignoring it :-)
Nick’s attempt beats mine. I bow to his superior bullshit.
Mark.
To be honest, I haven’t even tried. I suspect I could unzip them, because Windows XP seems to manage that almost automatically. Trouble is, I have no idea how one would then go about importing them into the current MT blog. I’ll certainly never have time to do it manually one by one. I’m sure someone like Bailz (or maybe yourself) could tell me how to do a bulk importation from one huge file comprising everythng froma dead MT blog, but I just haven’t had time to worry about it up to now, and I doubt I will in the very near future. It’s bound to be fiddly and confusing, and I’d rather spend what time I’ve got actually blogging rather than trying to resuscitate old posts. That said, it would be nice to be able to access the archives for that period. Maybe it’s something I’ll look at when the pressure’s off (Christmas?)
Margo has appeared on Media Watch. They did an item on her diary entry on not flushing the loo, and switching to environmentally friendly rollies instead of tailors (no filters, so the butts can be composted more easily).
Oh, and the humour lay in the sheer density of bullshit phrases compressed into a such a small space. Insofar as there was any humour in it, anyway.
Before we get to the moment of truth at the end of the day with Ken’s game plan, I feel empowered to touch base by benchmarking a judge’s comment about the knowledge base, to wit incorrect honest use of the bullshit ‘going forward’.
Entrants seem to have missed the bullshitter’s trick here; which is that a pro-active 24/7 results-driven bullshitter will not say ‘our win-win client focus is going forward’, but only ‘our win-win client focus is in a good position going forward’, or, exploiting synergy, ‘our win-win client focus is to think out of the box and not strive for a strategic fit going forward’, etc.
Given that I’ve decided to touch base, remember, when it comes to the bullshit paradigm, the bottom line touch point of best practice is that leveraging off core competencies is value-added. Those whose mental model was out of the loop may take that off line, and feel free to fast-track a revisit going forward.
I’ll treat the foregoing as a non-entry (and a non-disqualification from judging), because Chris made no attempt to fit all the expressions in a single sentence.
Ken, WinXP certainly seems to handle .zip rather well on its own, which I’m currently finding bloody annoying actually, so no problems there. Re getting it into a format which MT can import, I’m not actually running MT myself so I’m not sure how to go about it. Perhaps if you were to “export” your current archives and send them off, I can use that as a template for putting together something you can use. You can then ask Scott nicely to import them for you :-)
(That is, if you think it’s worth the effort at this busy time: I’m guessing teachers have a much harder time of the start of a semester than we students!)
Gummo, I was momentarily distracted by the closeness of “butt” to “loo” and initially assumed those two were on the same topics. So when we leave off our butt-filters to help things compost more easily (presumably why we’ve forgotten to flush the loo, eh?), the mind, naturally, boggles.
Ken, that’s right, it was strictly a judge’s comment … but more importantly, would you be up for a beer in Sydney Town come early November?
Chris,
Or three. I was intending to solicit catching up with Sydney bloggers while I’m there, especially my 2 Sydney-based co-armadillos. I’m trying to organise my teaching commitments so I can get away for a week or so.
What, no Canberra visit? :-)
Who the hell would want to visit Canberra?
For another competition see wbb.
The result-driven, bottom line game plan of my client focussed
contest is to think outside the box and leverage the 24/7 blogging
paradigm to fast track a proactive, strategic fit between core competencies
and value-added, win-win browsing experiences which going forward will achieve synergy
with a mindset of best practice mental models to empower the out of the
loop reader, at the end of the day, in a benchmark moment of truth, to
revisit and touch base with certain op-ed touch points of The Australian, to take that
off-line knowledge base as an example.
At the end of the day, being out of the loop empowers one to think outside the box, so before we touch base to revisit our best practice game plan I’ll just warn you to take that off-line because unless our mental models sufficiently benchmark the value-added touch points of our 24/7 results-driven paradigm, a fast track, proactive, win-win client-focused mindset is the only way going forward to leverage our core competencies into synergy with our bottom line, provided our knowledge base doesn’t chuck a strategic fit.
Whoops, forgot one. I guess sometimes you just can’t see the bullshit for the turds.
At the end of the day, being out of the loop empowers one to think outside the box, so before we touch base to revisit our best practice game plan I’ll just warn you to take that off-line because unless our mental models sufficiently benchmark the value-added touch points of our 24/7 results-driven paradigm, a fast track, proactive, win-win client-focused mindset is the only way going forward to leverage our core competencies into synergy with our bottom line, provided when the moment of truth comes our knowledge base doesn’t chuck a strategic fit.
Whoops – one piece of crap almost escaped the inspectors.
At the end of the day, being out of the loop empowers one to think outside the box, so before we touch base to revisit our best practice game plan I’ll just warn you to take that off-line because unless our mental models sufficiently benchmark the value-added touch points of our 24/7 results-driven paradigm, a fast track, proactive, win-win client-focused mindset is the only way going forward to leverage our core competencies into synergy with our bottom line, provided in the moment of truth our knowledge base doesn’t chuck a strategic fit.
testing…
As he approached his moment of truth going forward, Jeannette told him to revisit and touch base with his 1950s and 1930s mental models, to keep them in mind as his pro-active 24/7 touch points for best practice value-added wedging, his benchmark to fast track the distractions of international affairs, his bottom line for their game plan of dividing and polarizing the nation, his win-win for keeping Labor completely out of the loop, his knowledge base that at the end of the day will always take off line the idea of his government being results-driven or having non-core and core competencies, empower his woeful commercial client-focused front bench, create a synergy with the mindset of the rat-bag political fringe, enable him to leverage off latent prejudice, to pretend he has invented a new paradigm and could think outside the box and, most of all, deliver the two of them a delicious strategic fit on that first Sunday afternoon of every second month.
No Prime Minister:
At the end of the day, the proactive issue of Iraq is a moment of truth and a test of core competencies while best practice must be our touch point when faced with difficult, perplexing, results driven challenges as we are on one hand and on the other a problem that will empower our knowledge base not only in Australia but around the world by benchmarking and touching base to fast track stronger synergy of our mental models, to have strategic fit while leaving for the moment, Iraq out of the loop, and that is not surprising because how to respond to Iraq in the current circumstances is the very first test of leverage for the world going forward in the new international paradigm in which we must think outside the box as a result of the terrorist attacks on the United States on the 11th of September, which have so changed not only the mindset of Americans towards their game plan but how other liberal democracies must view their bottom line and client strategies without taking the off line around the world, notwithstanding I expect a win/win outcome from the Invasion on the first play 24/7.
I am claiming the lemon polka dot shirt for the slowest up the hill or the last to reach Nantes. (My apologies for even writing this stuff.)