Cartoons: of tweets and tyrants

Silly me, I thought when the election was over Trump would fade away and I wouldn't have to look at his cartoony orange hair any more. So guess I'll have to bite the bullet and follow the Big Man more. What got me most about Trump this week was the news that he will continue as President to be Executive Producer of "The Celebrity Apprentice."

Yes, Trump has been named Person of the Year by Time Magazine; no, it's not more fake news. The Washington Post has this to say about it: Donald Trump is (finally) named Time’s ‘Person of the Year’.

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RJ Matson, The Week

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This is just wishful thinking.

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David Fitzsimmons, The Week

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A thumbs up to the Kellogg Company for saying last week that "ads for its brands would no longer appear on Breitbart." This is quoted from an article in the New Yorker about Breitbart's response. Has the former Executive Chair of Breitbart really been designated by Trump as his chief strategist in the White House? Answer: Yes.

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Steve Sack, The Week

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I ran across a large volume of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, published in 1835, this week. He spoke of the "tyranny of the majority," a concept the founding fathers understood well. It's ironic that

The Electoral College was created for two reasons. The first purpose was to create a buffer between population and the selection of a President. The second as part of the structure of the government that gave extra power to the smaller states. (Marc Schulman, History Central)

and the Electoral College is what put Trump in office. This article at Vox is to me most illuminating: "The people’s tyrant: what Plato can teach us about Donald Trump."

-- Marge

Twitter: soundless sound, meaning evolving

Tomas Castelazo, "Birds on the wire," Wikimedia

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Linguists are finding untold treasure in the twitterings of Twitter.

According to an article (subscription needed) in TIME magazine, "What Twitter Says to Linguists:"

For researchers studying the use of language in today's networked world, social media is an invaluable tool.

...Gone are the days when a language researcher had to interview subjects in a lab or go door to door in the hope of gaining a few insights about a limited sample of people. Academics in the U.S. and Europe are using the seven-year-old microblogging platform to put millions of examples under the microscope in an instant. "It's unprecedented," says Ben Zimmer, the executive producer at Vocabulary.com "the sheer amount of text you can look at at one time and the number of people you can analyze at once." Hidden in tweets are insights about how we portray our identity in a few short sentences. There are clues to long-standing mysteries, like how slang spreads. And there is a new form of communication to study. If language is the archive of history, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, social media should get its own shelf.

If you're fascinated by language and how it evolves, take a look Ben Zimmer's (producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com) Language Log, which documents and discusses Twitter's lingual developments and news about the phenomenon.  For a primer on Twitter usage, there's Lauren Hockenson's article, "The complete guide to Twitter’s language and acronyms."

And speaking of language, how about Pixar's "For the Birds:"

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-- Marge

April Fools' pranks 2013

Now that the air has cleared, and the infamous day is over, here are some of the "15 Best April Fools Pranks From Around The Web 2013." They were identified by We Know Memes, a meme generator.   Here goes --

Google's latest product:

A treasure hunt in San Francisco from Google Maps:

Twitter's new service(s):

Deviant Art's DeviantHeart:

Reddit's new acquisition:

If you notice, one of Reddit's comments cites BBC's 2012 April Fools' prank as a favorite.  Since the article is no longer available at BBC (because it never existed there), here's Gothamist's update on it.  The original article is titled "The Earth has exploded, killing everyone."

What would Grandma say?

-- Marge