Of All the Words We Should Ban…Really?

So the latest word we can’t use for females is the ‘b’ word.  No, not that ‘b’ word; that one is still okay.  The other one.  ‘Bossy.’  Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (no relation to Andy Samberg) has started a campaign to ban the word ‘bossy’ from our absurdly language-dependent culture.  She claims that the adjective discourages girls from pursuing leadership rolls wherein they can actually be bossy and tell people what words they can and cannot use.

If you ask me, which nobody does for obvious reasons, this whole thing is kind of like the anti-bullying movement that is bullying us into not bullying or congresspersons staying up all night and burning the midnight oil to tell us to stop using so much energy or Al Gore flying around in his private jet to get us to reduce our carbon emissions or Al Sharpton making $5 million a year by telling us how oppressed he is or….You get the idea: we are being bossed into banning ‘bossy’.

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Mission Opossum-able

As the year-end approaches, the internally redundant question that is often asked and repeated by the likes of Johnny Mathis, Harry Connick, and Rod Stewart is: “What are you doing New Year’s…New Year’s Eve?”  A popular New Year’s activity is to watch people drop things.  This is usually done while consuming copious amounts of alcohol and so the most commonly dropped item is one’s inhibitions, but there are any number of more tangible items to watch being dropped all around the world.

Perhaps the best-known dropped item is New York’s Times Square ball.  This is a tradition that started over 100 years ago and has more recently come to symbolize how many times Mayor Michael “Compared To Me Scrooge McDuck Is A Pauper” Bloomberg has himself dropped the ball during his administration.  Continue reading

Jumping on the Banwagon

It has been reported that New York City Mayor Michael “So Rich Nothing Really Matters Anymore” Bloomberg intends to seek a ban on selling soda in containers larger than 16 ounces. This of course is a ban on drinking soda and not baking soda, which is not to be confused with baking powder, which is almost like cornstarch, but not really. And of course, when I speak of cornstarch it is not to be confused with ironing starch, though I’ve heard you can use cornstarch to iron your shirts which goes a long way in explaining why the leaves on corn stalks are so crisp and wrinkle-free. Continue reading