Britan's Biden

According to Michael Kinsley, a "gaffe" is "when a politician [inadvertantly] tells the truth."

Not so much telling some objective truth, but revealing said politician's thoughts. In the United States, the preemminant practitioner of the gaffe is Senator Joseph Biden.

In Britan, now, he has a serious contender: Prince Phillip.

Savor his latest venting:

Prince Philip has branded tourism ‘national prostitution’ in his latest unfortunate gaffe.

He made the shocking comment to a professor during his State visit with the Queen to Slovenia last week.

Dr Maja Uran revealed that the 87-year-old Duke told her: ‘Tourism is just national prostitution.’

He went on: ‘We don’t need any more tourists. They ruin cities.’

His comments come despite royal aides regularly stressing the importance of tourists to Britain’s economy – with one million visiting Buckingham Palace and Windsor
Castle each year.

It follows other infamous faux pas by the Prince – including telling a British student in China he would get ‘slitty eyes’ and asking Aborigines in Australia: ‘Do you still throw spears at each other?’

Dr Uran, associate professor of tourism at the University of Primorska, was among
four groups of experts who met Philip last Tuesday at the Hotel Union in the
Slovenian capital of Ljubljana.

She told Philip she wanted to organise a network of people with local knowledge to help tourists. But she said: ‘He laughed and said, “Tourism is just national prostitution.”

‘I couldn’t quite believe he used that word and we all collapsed in embarrassment.’

All those sweaty tourists, clogging up the roads so that the Rolls is often stuck in traffic. And the well-to-do ones fill up often fill up one's favorite reasturant during The Season.

As bad as I disagree with the viewpoints of American elites, they have nothing on European elites.

Think Twice, Write Once

I haven't been very active on this blog lately. Odd, considering the just-completed Christmas season is ripe with spare time and lots of emotional and memory triggers.

But I am careful about what I write in this venue. I generally don't discuss work, family details, or specifics of my personal associations.

And here is why.

Whether they like it or not; and whether they realize it or not, nearly every person who uses the Internet creates an online reputation which reveals details and conveys an impression independent of the actual truth. I describe some of the issues associated with an online reputation at Pajamas Media. There are companies which will sell you reports describing how you "look" on the Internet. There is now an industry devoted to finding, deleting or modifying information about us on the Internet. Don't believe they can do it? Why, check out their online reputations!

Personal reputation is influenced in unexpected ways. Back in the mid-1980s I worked at a technology company in Oregon. It was a wonderful time, professionally, working in a group with a lot of people who became friends, and a couple of people that did not become friends.

At that time I occasionally wore a floppy velvet hat, somewhat like a large beret. (Please, it wasn't ghay, it was hippie. Except that hippie is kind of ghay.) It was a goof, but I thought that if you had to be known for something, better a bit of a goof than cruelty or boorishness, or any of an uncountable list of bad behaviors. If you can't leave `em laughing, at least leave `em with a smile...

...Until four years later during a market downturn when I badly needed a job. Then, during a job interview, the business owner said, with a sneering voice, "I hear that you like to wear funny hats."

What?!

I swallowed my pride and laughed it off--got the job. But the job didn't last. The owner was a big a jerk as he had revealed himself in the interview.

But I have always wondered if I was never offered interviews because of some people's big mouths.

The Incomprehensability of Wealth

Peg' O My Heart has this observation on our New Gilded Age:

The gap between rich and poor is great, and there is plenty of want, and also confusion. What the superrich do for a living now often seems utterly incomprehensible, and has for at least a generation. There is no word for it, only an image. There's a big pile of coins on a table. The rich shove their hands in, raise them, and as the coins sift through their fingers it makes . . . a bigger pile of coins. Then they sift through it again and the pile gets bigger again.


A general rule: If you are told what someone does for a living and it makes sense to you--orthodontist, store owner, professor--that means he's not rich. But if it's a man in a suit who does something that takes him five sentences to explain and still you walk away confused, and castigating yourself as to why you couldn't understand the central facts of the acquisition of wealth in the age you live in--well, chances are you just talked to a billionaire.

I write for a living. I write on-line help. Two sentences--guess I'm no billionaire.