Language in the service of snarky irony…

____

Back in February, Lambert over at the blog Corrente worked up some anagrams for the Bush campaign’s 2004 slogan -

"Steady Leadership in a Time of Change."

If you rearrange the letters you get these –

· I'm a hypertense, death-dealing fiasco
· I am a deathless deafening hypocrite
· I am a tone-deaf, highly-paid erectness
· I'm the fanatic, grandiose sleepyhead
· Oafishly indecent pig's ear meathead
· Slimy, cheapish deafening toadeater
· Oedipean cheating defames trashily
· Flag hype, eh? Administration decease
· I feel anger! I say, shitcan the mad dope
· The famed ace is lying, Oedipean trash

You might want to drop by this anagram server and work out some of your own.

Invoking Roland Barthes can make you famous and respected and all that stuff…

______

I see that the Los Angeles Times won five Pulitzer Prizes this week, the second most ever won by a newspaper in a single year, for coverage that included wildfires, wars and Wal-Mart.  Note this - Dan Neil won the Pulitzer for criticism. 

Andrew Bridges of the Associated Press adds detail:

Auto critic Dan Neil won after joining the paper in September.  He previously had been a freelancer and wrote promotional stories for the advertising department of a North Carolina paper. 

Neil, 44, said the Times was required to submit 10 columns to qualify for Pulitzer consideration, but at the time he had published just 16. 

"They didn't have a lot to choose from," said Neil, whose reviews were singled out as "one-of-a-kind" by the Pulitzer board.

Hey, a star is born. 

My readers might remember his riff on semiotics and SUV ownership and much else from reading this from Volume 2, Number 8 (Monday, February 23, 2004) - and the guy is a hoot!  You might recall he progressed from a discussing the Kama Sutra to an HBO series to the Toyota Prius being a both the automotive equivalent of corrective shoes and a clear declaration of sexual security. 

That February item also has photo of a car Barthes philosophized about, with the appropriate irony, courtesy of Ric Erickson over at MetropoleParis, as he had just visited the Rétromobile show over at ParisExpo, Porte de Versailles.

Neil on pickup trucks vis a vis Roland Barthes:

"America's love of pickups: Like the soft-handed Parisians who bought up Millet's peasant paintings, pickup poseurs would find rural virtue a different thing entirely if they spent a day in the fields. 

"Barthes loved to flog the petite bourgeoisie with their own illusions."

I’m glad he won.