For more than 20 years, I’ve been playing the song Dead Man’s Party by Oingo Boingo repeatedly on Halloween. My tradition started in 1996, a year after Oingo Boingo last played the song at their farewell concert on Halloween 1995. I’ve been doing this for so long that the song has become synonymous with Halloween…
If you were to ask people in the technology industry to name the best commercial ever made, the majority would likely cite “1984” from Apple. That commercial, which aired during the 1984 Super Bowl, introduced the Macintosh personal computer. In fact, Advertising Age ranked “1984” as first on its list of the 50 greatest commercials….
On a recent trip to Ireland, a local told me that Ireland had lots of unusually named towns. His favorite was Bastardtown in Wexford County but a close runner up is the difficult-to-pronounce and spell Muckanaghederdauhaulia. Seriously? After I returned home, a close friend reminded me that unusual names for towns wasn’t just an Irish…
As my mantra is “Words Matter,” I’m fascinated by the etymology of words, how different cultures use language, and when people accidentally/purposefully misuse English. I’ve covered spelling bees, written about mondegreens and eggcorns, and advocated for the banishing of overused words. So, it’s probably not surprising that a friend caught my attention when he recently…
I stumbled on an insightful definition of being stupid from Adam Robinson: Stupidity is overlooking or dismissing [conspicuously] crucial information. Robinson argues stupidity is not the opposite of intelligence. Instead, stupidity is impaired judgement due to one or more factors: Rushing or urgency Information overload Physical or emotional stress Intense focus on an outcome Being…
Struggling with the pun in the title? I’ll start with some background… SEAT is an annual conference for sports & entertainment professionals, focused on whatever is top-of-mind in the industry. It distinguishes itself from other conferences by strongly emphasizing networking and relationship building. This year’s event was held at the Daytona International Speedway, the first…
During a recent catch-up, a close friend pointed out another person in the restaurant and commented that it was a little early for him to be two sheets to the wind. I was amused – not because 7pm was indeed early for someone to be drunk in a restaurant – but because I had always…
A common misconception about school is that it teaches us how to learn. However, in my opinion, school doesn’t teach us how to learn, it teaches us how to pass tests. We pull all-nighters, cramming information into our brains, to ensure we have facts memorized. Often, we forget what we “learned” as soon as the…
As an eighth-grader, I decided to take Latin as an elective. Openly, it was more of an impulse choice than a carefully-constructed decision. Not surprisingly, my friends questioned my decision and I found myself defending learning Latin. In fact, the class was much more interesting than I expected it to be. At the bottom of…
Have you heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect? The term derives from a 1999 article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology which showed low performers tend to overestimate their abilities. It’s not that low performers think they are better performers than higher-skilled people (that’s the illusory superiority effect); it’s just people think they’re better…