Bad analogies in the Washington Post

An oldie but goodie from the Washington Post. The best worst analogies ever!

1. Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.
2. He was as tall as a 6′3″ tree.
3. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
4. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
5. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
6. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
7. The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
8. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
9. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
10. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
11. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM.
12. The lamp just sat there, like an inanimate object.
13. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
14. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
15. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at asolar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
16. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
17. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.
18. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.
19. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
20. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
21. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.
22. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.
23. Even in his last years, Grand pappy had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it hadrusted shut.
24. He felt like he was being hunted down like a dog, in a place that hunts dogs, I suppose.
25. She was as easy as the TV Guide crossword.
26. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.
27. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
28. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
29. “Oh, Jason, take me!” she panted, her breasts heaving like a college freshman on $1-a-beer night.
30. It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.
31. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.
32. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.
33. The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the period after the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can.
34. Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser.
35. Her date was pleasant enough, but she knew that if her life was a movie this guy would be buried in the credits as something like “Second Tall Man.”
36. The thunder was ominous-sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play.
37. The red brick wall was the color of a brick-red Crayola crayon.
38. She caught your eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from screen doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door open again.
39. Her pants fit her like a glove, well, maybe more like a mitten, actually.
40. Fishing is like waiting for something that does not happen very often.
41. They were as good friends as the people on “Friends.”
42. Oooo, he smells bad, she thought, as bad as Calvin Klein’s Obsession would smell if it were called Enema and was made from spoiled Spamburgers instead of natural floral fragrances.
43. The knife was as sharp as the tone used by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) in her first several points of parliamentary procedure made to Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton.
44. He was as bald as one of the Three Stooges, either Curly or Larry, you know, the one who goes woo woo woo.
45. The sardines were packed as tight as the coach section of a 747.
46. Her eyes were shining like two marbles that someone dropped in mucus and then held up to catch the light.
47. The baseball player stepped out of the box and spit like a fountain statue of a Greek god that scratches itself a lot and spits brown, rusty tobacco water and refuses to sign autographs for all the little Greek kids unless they pay him lots of drachmas.
48. I felt a nameless dread. Well, there probably is a long German name for it, like Geschpooklichkeit or something, but I don’t speak German. Anyway, it’s a dread that nobody knows the name for, like those little square plastic gizmos that close your bread bags. I don’t know the name for those either.
49. She was as unhappy as when someone puts your cake out in the rain, and all the sweet green icing flows down and then you lose the recipe, and on top of that you can’t sing worth a damn.
50. Her artistic sense was exquisitely refined, like someone who can tell butter from I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.
51. It came down the stairs looking very much like something no one had ever seen before.
52. Bob was as perplexed as a hacker who means to access T:flw.quid55328.com\aaakk/ch@ung but gets T:\flw.quidaaakk/ch@ung by mistake.
53. You know how in “Rocky” he prepares for the fight by punching sides of raw beef? Well, yesterday it was as cold as that meat locker he was in.
54. The dandelion swayed in the gentle breeze like an oscillating electric fan set on medium.
55. Her lips were red and full, like tubes of blood drawn by an inattentive phlebotomist.
56. The sunset displayed rich, spectacular hues like a .jpeg file at 10 percent cyan, 10 percent magenta, 60 percent yellow and 10 percent black.

Privilege 101

If you pay any attention at all to the news, you've probably seen plenty of footage from the Occupy Movement. Or perhaps something about higher education. Or something about marriage. Race? Probably, check.  More likely than not, you've heard the word "privilege" tossed around.

I recently found one of the best essays explaining privilege that I've ever read. On a blog. Here's the post. Read it and think. Dare you to engage someone and have a little tete-a-tete about privilege.

Stay Creative

I like the last one most - Finish something. [=

Response to Amy Chua's Article in WSJ

Just in case you all haven't had a chance to read "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior", here's the link:


The woman gives new life to the term Hard-Ass Asian Parent through her own accounts of her parenting style. She weakly prefaces her discussion of the "Chinese Mother" and subsequent parenting style with the following:

"I'm using the term "Chinese mother" loosely. I know some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian parents who qualify too. Conversely, I know some mothers of Chinese heritage, almost always born in the West, who are not Chinese mothers, by choice or otherwise. I'm also using the term "Western parents" loosely. Western parents come in all varieties.
All the same, even when Western parents think they're being strict, they usually don't come close to being Chinese mothers. For example, my Western friends who consider themselves strict make their children practice their instruments 30 minutes every day. An hour at most. For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part. It's hours two and three that get tough."

So even the Western mothers that are considered "strict" evidently do not have the endurance to be a Chinese Mother. Nor do they have the guts to go the extra step to shame their children into obedience.

In another part of the article, Chua mentions that her father used to call her "garbage" when she was disrespectful - a tactic she says she used on her own daughter, in English and at a dinner party. Lovely. Had I been in that position (and I have been in similar situations), I would simply pocket that horrible memory, only to have it re-surface in a very self-destructive way.

This then brings up the point that many people have reacted to this article - including blogs such 8Asians and Racialicious - and brought up the fact that Asian Americans are more likely than those of any other racial group to fall into depression, attempt suicide, and resort to the multitude of self-destructive behaviors and disorders.

Chua claims that the article was a mishmash of different excerpts from her book, which she is currently schilling - Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Of course the editors at the WSJ did not consult her about the edits or the article title and of course they would choose some controversial sections! I'll take that statement as fair, since during my amateur dabblings in writing for my University's newspaper, it would be rare that I would be consulted for edits in my column or stories for the news section during the production process.

However, this anecdote is no better:
"My kids were maybe seven and four and my husband had forgotten my birthday so at the last minute we went to this mediocre Italian restaurant and he said “O.K., girls you both have a little surprise for mommy.” And my daughter Lulu pulls out a card, but the card was just a piece of paper folded crookedly in half with a big smiley face and it said Happy Birthday Mom. And I looked at it and I gave it back and I said 'This isn’t good enough. I want something that you put a little bit more time into.” So I rejected her birthday card. People can’t believe I rejected this handmade card. But she knew as well as I did that it took her about two seconds to do it. That’s the story that’s coming off as the most outrageous, which in our family is like a standing joke.

Clearly, I'm not in on the joke because I don't find it funny... Again, if I were in that situation, I would undoubted cry myself dehydrated and then some from the shame. I wonder if Chua's daughters will really turn out to be as happy as Chua claims herself to be.

And on another note, this is strike two for me personally from the esteemed Wall Street Journal. Perhaps the WSJ has it out for Asians/Culture, or for publicizing Chinese/Asian parenting in the most awful ways possible. Making the model minorities scary..again? The editors and the publication earned strike two with the 2005 article "The New White Flight", which insinuates that Asians and aspects of Asian culture, that promote extreme to impossible pressures on youth to academic success, is driving Caucasians out of Silicon Valley. My own high school was named as one of the sites that the writer cites as evidence to her thesis.
href="http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB113236377590902105-lMyQjAxMDE1MzEyOTMxNjkzWj.html">

No bueno, WSJ, no bueno.