Friday, January 25, 2008

The bestest and greatest

Granted I'm a person who values the power of words, but this seems like a rather silly waste of time, doesn't it?

I'm more concerned that we have the appropriate guidelines for growth and development in our comprehensive land use plan rather than whether or not we're 'great' or 'the best.' I hope there's more to this discussion than merely wondering how we're going to phrase a generic description of Athens-Clarke County because it doesn't make much sense to roll back the vote on this in order to sort out semantics which are pretty much unrelated to the plan itself.

10 Comments:

Blogger jmSnowden said...

We're the best....around......no ones going to ever bring us down.....we're the best ....around!

10:58 AM  
Blogger jmSnowden said...

Unless you're poor,of course.

10:59 AM  
Blogger David Hamilton said...

Silly waste of time? No. There is a lot more to it than the semantics of great vs. best.

The Mayor was gracious and concerned enough to allow more time to possibly hammer out some of the substantial differences between the two documents.

12:01 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

as I've said many times before, if all you know is what you read in the paper and hear on radio then, you don't know much - not nearly enough to understand what is really going on.

However, the part they printed is the part that most people would rather read so, they are doing what any good business should do - give the customers what they want.

Al

12:19 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Yeah. I'd love to give people an in-depth look at the comp plan, but unfortunately, their eyes would glaze over pretty fast.

Case in point: the only people at the drop-in Wednesday were John Rogers and Sue Custance, who are both on subcommittees.

2:37 PM  
Blogger jmSnowden said...

If people are so unclear as to the big master plan, then do a better job making people aware. Here is your 15 minutes. Tell everyone here how crucial the semantics of this language construction is. I don’t believe the paper, radio and majority of citizens are too stupid to know “nearly enough to understand what is really going on.” I think you’ve done a crappy job of justifying actions and keeping hiding under this BS position of "you just don't understand".

2:40 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

hmmm...where to start...?

My point was that the semantics thing was really the most nothing part of the whole thing so I'm not going to try to justify/explain that - it's mostly irrelevant.

I'm actually not trying to explain or justify anything at all - just point out that the way the story was headlined and started off was just "candy" for the average reader (which I think is what Blake is also saying). Honestly, I think Blake can write some really good stuff and has most all the info he would need to do it but, why bother? Ain't nobody gonna read it. He does a fine job of managing to sneak in a little info while his readers are looking for the sensational, infotainment bits. I mean that as a sincere compliment.

And, nope. It ain't my job to try and explain it - especially to an audience that really doesn't care and even if they knew and did care, it wouldn't have any impact on the outcome.

It is wearisome to see that the "hot topic of the day" is usually not really the nut of the matter - just one of the more interesting asides. Can't lay it all on the MSM, either. Most of the blogs are just comments on what is reported by the MSM.

The truth is really just this: the truth is really boring! The details of the truth are deadly boring!

Besides, I don't write that well. ;-)

Al

3:33 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

So what do you do? Blake tries, Tim Bryant tries, but time and space are limited.

Reggie

3:36 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I don't know. I think if I had the answers, I'd be considered one of the smart guys.

In fact, I can't honestly say that I think anything should be done because, in the end, it's really not having a huge impact on anything.

I suppose I was really commenting on the sorry state of the typical reader/consumer of news because, believe it or not, I really do not fault the MSM (other than my annoyance with headline writers whom I think really don't even try to do better).

We have a "short attention span" society and it seems to me to be trending towards even shorter. It's both funny and alarming at what we have chosen to care about - is Britanny really pregnant with Mitt Romney's baby?!

I mean, I like to talk about this but I have not yet come to any significant conclusions. And, it's my day off, it's too cold to fish, and I've been working on sanding and staining some wood around my house so I've got all these little snippets of time on my hands. You know what they say about idle hands.

Al

4:48 PM  
Blogger jmSnowden said...

Actually, research shows that many people's attention spans are lengthening. Former Clinton pollster Mark Penn has a book out called Microtrends where he records the return of long literature. You might pick up a copy and read it, if you have the attention span.

9:14 AM  

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