Genius!

Facebook is a pretty popular network these days. Personally, I don't use it very often, but whenever I do log in, I usually have 10 or so invitations to various groups or events, most of which I ignore without reading. Sometimes, however, a group catches my eye as intriguing: 1,000,000 Strong for Colbert, for instance, or I bet I can Find a Million People who Dislike George Bush. I was reading through the discussion board of the latter group, chuckling to myself at all the comments, when I came across a link that I just could not pass up - a site called Kill Bush.

I imagine you can all figure out the agenda of this site without much help, but what I found really funny (besides the fact that sites like this exist) was a clever grammatical device they used in one of their stories. It's pretty apparent that whoever made the site is not exactly a grammarian, as the majority of the text is wrong in some way or another. However, a phrase that I noted immediately was the figure they cited as the number of people Bush has killed, or something like that: "tenths of millions."

This is pure genius.

I actually didn't even notice when I first read it what it actually said, until, a few sentences later, it occurred to me that the entire population of Iraq is something like 30 million. I admit I haven't been keeping up on the death tolls, but I think I would have heard about it if a third of the country had died. The author of this article has come up with a way to inflate figures without actually inflating them: use fractions that sound like big numbers. The next time I complain about my tuition bill, I'm going to say that I'm in debt by hundreths of millions of dollars. Maybe I can get a tax break that way.

Either that, or the author actually meant to say "tens of millions," and just sucks so bad at writing that he/she didn't notice that they used the wrong word. That's probably more likely.

"So what are your opinions on the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the precipitation of World War I?"

I imagine if the Treaty of Berlin had remained inviolate ad infinitum, the entire issue might have been avoided. Alternatively, I suppose if the July Ultimatum was never sent, the fallout of the assassination, while still throwing Austria-Hungary into chaos, would have been significantly alleviated for the rest of the continent.

I never actually expected someone to respond to that question...

Well, I suppose in any case it's better than "would you believe me if I told you I was black from the waist down?"


Sometimes I wonder...what do normal people talk about?