The Weekly Meat

True Sport

As we near the start of the 2008 Summer Olympics, we must give propers where propers are due. In recent years, U.S. women have cornered the market on Olympic gold in each of the major team sports: softball, basketball, soccer, and ice hockey. And they have done so with discipline, teamwork, grit, and class that has all but eluded their male counterparts.

Admittedly, some of their drive, and subsequent success on the world stage, is due in part to the fact that, sadly, they have few other stages on which to compete. With the exception of basketball (and to a lesser extent, softball), these women have little chance for professional competition.

Perhaps because of that (rather than in spite of it) the women seem to have more fun playing the games they love, appreciate the concept of a team, enjoy playing for one, and are grateful for the Olympic opportunity to prove their mettle against the world's best. We'll continue to have our obligatory men's "dream" teams with their oversized wallets and matching egos, but for my money I'd rather watch the women. And I don't mean that in a beach volleyball sort of way. (Oh, but bless your honed glutes, Misty....)

Whereas a guy like, say, Shaquille O'Neill has nothing in common with anyone I've ever met (he's a 7'2" 300-pound multi-jillionaire comic book superhero), I can relate to the women. They're human. They'll leave the Olympics and return to their everyday lives and, yes, day jobs.

Further, in our recent cases of team gold, the women were able to accomplish what they did because they all understood their roles on their respective teams. And let's face it, few of us get the chance in life to be anything but role players.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not looking to toss off misogynistic backhanded compliments or to oversimplify the issues. And I don't think for a minute I could touch any of that insanely nasty softball pitching — or, admittedly, even stand in there against it.

I do still love watching men's sports. I'll never give up the speed and checking and the fights of professional hockey. And there may never be another victory as momentous as 1980s "miracle on ice."

But like that tightly knit and focused men's team in Lake Placid, who became media darlings because they were untainted and believed in the world, and in themselves, their teammates, and their goal, so too do these women's teams epitomize all that is good in sport. They take us back to when we were young, when backyard sports were all we had; a time when we, like Willie Mays, "played to love the game."

For that, the ladies should be championed and honored. It's wishful thinking, of course, that — up against America's golden boy swimmer, or even his much discussed new Speedo — they might, as a team, win the covers of our weekly magazines as well as medals, but they deserve it.

The sneaker and sports drink ads are right, these women are breaking ground for new leagues that may well give them equal opportunities to earn a living having as much fun as the guys — and giving our daughters cause to dream.

So when the olympics start next week, give the women some of your time. We could see medals for our basketball, softball, and soccer teams. This is an extended golden age for U.S. women's team sports. Game on.

The Long and Winding Tail

Internet Search, as we have been reminded recently, is a multi-billion dollar industry. It serves as our map for, and often our portal to, the Internet. And indeed, it is a brave new world that we Googlers inhabit.

Inherently, Search has a sharp “peak” and a long “tail” — meaning there are relatively few terms that people search for a lot (e.g., “Paris Hilton sex tape”), and loads of obscure things that are searched for far less often (e.g., “Brandon Wheat Kings 1978–79 roster”).

The world of the the sharp peak is filled with predictable pop culture and political nonsense. The world of the long tail on the other hand, can be a fascinating, if extremely dark, place.

Occasionally, thanks to this brilliant blogging software, I get to see a slice of what folks type into their laptops when they think no one is watching. Among other things, it allows one to see the links that folks click through to arrive on our pages. Some are indeed looking for The Weekly Meat, and then there are searches clearly related (tangentially at least) to some of my admittedly long-tail topics, such as "hockey player hand smells" and "coed hockey showers". But tossed in with the light fare and satisfied customers are bombshells like "how long would I have to stop eating to have a miscarriage?"

I don't imagine that person was in fact looking for this blog (in particular, this or this piece of information), but that's what they got. That search came via Google, at 3:05 pm on a Thursday afternoon, and I deflated when I later saw it, as I couldn't help but picture a supremely distressed and desperate high schooler, her natural language search in the form of a first-person question, with, perhaps, little idea that her predicament had been captured anywhere.

Despite a similar "vicodin abuse and miscarriage," most oddities are the result of a juxtaposition of words, often relating to the name of this blog. Like "meat art" (via Germany). Perhaps they were looking for something more along the lines of this or this but who's to say, really? Meat art is such a subjective thing. Me, I'm a sucker for those faux landscape. Meatscapes, if you will.

But I digress.

Search algorithms work best in tandem with the user's own skillful phrasing. But few of us know our Boolean logic or how to use quotation marks properly, so our "garbage in, garbage out" queries give us far more results than we need, with fewer substantive results. (But thankfully, more Weekly Meat.)

So, I'll continue to see and smile upon half-haikus like "the bone and meat of my index finger extremely painful" or "meat to me smells like hot death"or "wearing boxers in morning with female roommate". Salient concerns, all.

"Did Billy carter pee on a building ?" Despite this post, I didn't know, but it sure sounded like him. So I turned the tables and did some of my own searching. The answer I came up with seems to be no, not per se, though he had a purported predilection for such behavior.

And now, somewhere else on the Net, someone else is looking over their own website stats, and having a good laugh at my expense.

Corporate Doublespeak

Note: This piece was originally published in The Boston Globe, in slightly different form.

There is a virus rampant in the business world that has slowly infected our lives outside of the office. It's not an e-mail worm this time. It's not a Microsoft bug. It's not spam. It's the babble we all use in our attempts to communicate with each other.

Or, to put it in a language we all think we understand: In our rush to ramp up our skill sets and partner with new media companies for value-added, win-win business solutions that leverage our knowledge base to maximize customer take-away, we've forgotten how to explain ourselves clearly and concisely.

In his great essay "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell argues convincingly that sloppy language allows us to have foolish thoughts. And we use sloppy language and have foolish thoughts now more than ever in the business world. Further, we propagate both.

The fact is, we have come to accept the obscure muddle of business-speak, and in doing so, we accept mediocrity itself. I'm not talking about poor spelling and grammar — though they're certainly not beside the point — I'm talking about our favorite adjective-turned-noun: content.

The folks in Marketing like to call it verbiage — that is, when they're not mispronouncing it "verbage." Ironically, verbiage is the perfect description of what too many of us are guilty of in the workplace. It doesn't simply mean "content," as most assume; it means "a profusion of words usually of little or obscure content." Yes, we do love our verbiage. We use pre-fab word bundles where one word will do. We say job function instead of "job," or top-line growth instead of "sales."

As George Carlin said, ''People add extra words when they want to sound more important than they really are.''

Words or phrases become clichéd through their use and misuse. But many of the buzzwords we use every day mean little to begin with. One well-respected new media company has since become more exacting, but in an earlier published incarnation of their mission statement,  billed themselves as a ''digital solutions provider that helps organizations generate competitive value by leveraging the power of technology.'' Sure, it sounds good, but what is it such a company does?

This corporate doublespeak turns adjectives into nouns, nouns into verbs, verbs into nouns, and humans into resources — all of which slowly converts our workplace into the cartoon world of Dilbert, and fills business meetings with the sweet nothings of executing on our strategy and bringing critical mass to our efforts. But the yes-men create value by yes-ing, and generally keep their jobs by simply regurgitating whatever text fills the latest PowerPoint slides, and the cycle repeats itself.

Much of our failure to communicate is the fault of consulting groups, who feed us their own rich sub-genre of euphemisms such as sub-optimal and developmental opportunities to downplay corporate inadequacies. Coworkers are never laid off; they are affected by a reduction in force, as a result of global sourcing (read: sending American jobs to India, China, etc.) or synergies (read: redundancies) due to acquisitions. Not to worry — layoffs help us become more agile in the marketplace.

My argument is bigger than semantic nitpicking. I taught college lit long enough to know that Orwell's 1984 illustrates the fact that for great ideas to exist, we need precise language with which to express those ideas. And too many know-nothing managers and VPs have yes-ed themselves into positions as the overmatched CEOs of today. Part of the reason many companies are tanking is that so many foolish thinkers hold positions of power. While high economic times allow poor management to hide behind the smokescreen of verbiage, difficult times do not.

Case in point: George W. Bush — our first MBA president. Face it, he had some of the best consultants and spin-meisters in the world working for him, and his well-spun jargon on the heels of the dot-com boom made him sound credible to nearly half of American voters back in the fall of 2000. Needless to say, those same folks eventually began to wonder when we were going to see any of the purported "compassion" in Bush's conservatism, and whether we would ever find enough palpable "evil" in Iraq to outweigh the continuing loss of American lives.

This is not to single out President Bush — though he deserves it — as there are plenty of politicos on both sides of the aisle who play fast and loose with the English language that we would all be well-advised to mind the flashy but nonsensical sound bites this election season. Unexamined, they will only serve to reward and further mediocrity — and what a waste, in a country founded on revolutionary thinking and the clarity of a few strongly worded documents.

We should not feel so threatened by such concise language, at work and at home, nor by novel ideas, by smart people. We need to hold accountable our managers, our VPs, our CEOs, when they start tossing around rhetorical cotton candy. I'm sure they have more to offer than they're currently able to express.

For that matter, we could all be a bit smarter and more creative, and certainly more intelligible, if we were not so apathetically liaising with our colleagues and having, as Mr. Bush the younger might say, important discussions about topics in regard to which we're speaking.

But not to worry: a consultant friend of mine assures me that though our situation may appear sub-optimal, ultimately, it presents us all with tremendous developmental opportunities.

So we've got that going for us....

Letter to the Former Homeowner

First, let me just say that we found your dog, Butch. Quite by accident, actually. I'd love to be able to tell you that he's in a better place now, but the fact is that he's still very much in the backyard — right where you buried him.

Thanks for that.

I don't know, but I think if you bury a family pet in the yard, you ought to either A) not be lazy about it, and dig down below the frost line, or B) have to exhume it upon sale of said residence. I mean, old Butch was still a bit, well, leathery when stumbled upon. Sure, the collar — with his nametag still attached — spiked to the fencepost should have tipped us off, but back in that shady corner of the yard, we didn't exactly notice it until after shovel struck carcass.

Also, I found the handgun in the basement. You left that too. Boy, you forget how heavy those things are. It scared me for a bit, until I looked at it closely enough to break it down and realize it shot BBs, not bullets. Which explains not only all of the BBs rolling around the third floor, but the pockmarks in the window molding as well.

What else? Oh. Newspaper does not insulation make. Darn stuff is flammable, see. Inside the walls of an old balloon construction wood-framed house it's called tinder. We've since added real (read: that with both a far greater R factor and ignition point than newspaper) insulation.

And the aerosol can of DAP foam you left inside the bathroom wall. Boy, glad I didn't hit that sucker with the Sawzall. God-awful mess that would have been.

I know it wasn't you who notched the first floor joists so deeply, but thanks for knocking out that pesky 8-by support column in the basement. It's not like the foundation couldn't support the extra weight. Oh right. Yes, it is like that. Well, I put up some steel lally columns to alleviate the over-stress.

The threat of an impending slow collapse of the house was perhaps what caused you folks to stow so many crucifixes around the place. We found all manner of them in hallways, and closets, and cupboards, and crawl spaces  — and not a damn one glow-in-the-dark.

The flowering pear tree out the back door. Maybe you could not have foreseen it growing to its 30-foot height when you planted its root ball. In a half-barrel planter. But, see, growing is what trees do.

Don't get me wrong. We do, ultimately, love the house, despite its often frustrating 1880's character. We paid you fair market value for it. (And we do want to thank you for letting us know the dead tree out back hid a live electrical conduit. Because we got the electrician out here before the tree removal guys, and that saved us a possible wrongful death lawsuit.) It's just that, well, you could have at least left behind the stack of vintage late-'70s and early-'80s gentlemen's magazines we spied in the basement during our initial walkthrough. I was looking forward to reliving much of my youth. And then selling them on eBay for a tidy sum. But of course you took those. Bastards.

Barbecue

There's no better time than July 4th to light up the backyard barbecue and singe off your arm hair. This year, let it be some pork shoulder, cooked slow and low, with my loose interpretation (meaning I improved the hell out of it) of the "Rickyard Ribs" recipe from the Jack Daniel's Old Time Barbecue Cookbook. It's a great starting point for further experimentation — a tasty middle of the road sauce, with some tang, some sweet, some bite, some depth, and a little something extra.

BK Kine Cue Sauce

1 C  ketchup
<1/4 C  molasses
1/4 C  red wine vinegar
1 oz shot  bourbon (so, in fact, not Jack Daniel's)
1 T  lemon juice
1 T  Worcestershire sauce
1 T  soy sauce
2 t  brown mustard
1 t  horseradish
1 t  pepper
1 clove  garlic, minced
hot sauce to taste

(Big T for tablespoon, small t for teaspoon.)

1. Combine in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 10 minutes.

2. Put that sauce to use. (Note: There are hundreds of folks here on The Internets to teach you how to properly cook meat and who provide you with the requisite, crystalline food porn pictures, so go visit them. Some are quite worthwhile. Perhaps the ancient race of Druids over at Meathenge.)

Enjoy.