Friday 30 October 2009

Word of the day

Sometimes I think that rather than a word of the day (and its been a long time between days) I should have a metaphor of the day. I love metaphors, and yesterday The Australian provided several examples of a wonderful metaphor, "not out of the woods yet". The Cut and Paste column in the newspaper provided examples from Agence France Presse, the Wall Street Journal, Wayne Swan and the New Brunswick Times and Transcript. Needless to say, the out of the woods website tells us more about the wonderful industry which has arisen to monetise domain names than about the metaphor. To find out about that, you need to go to something like the Free Dictionary, and poke around amongst the advertising for a definition.

Thursday 29 October 2009

The Economist

I have read The Economist pretty much every week for the last 25 years or so - ever since I thought I could afford it, rather than having to sneak a look at the State Library of Victoria copy. So I was engaged by the piece in The Australian today about the new movie Dead Man Running, where the main character (played by the rapper, former drug dealer and multi-millionaire 50 Cent) is seen reading The Economist. If you are a serious liberal, a radical liberal, with a real-world approach to economics, it is for you. If even 50 Cent reads it . . . what did The Economist pay for that brilliant piece of product placement, I wonder? Or was it done for love? I would have.