Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Tell Us Another One

by Ken Houghton

They don't have "Hedge Fund Manager" on the short list, but the glorious and respectable CNN in cooperation with fellow TWX property Fortune, excerpting from a book by Stanley Bing published by non-TWX-property (Murdoch-owned) HarperCollins, reports that Economist is among the top fifty b*llsh*t jobs:
Generate conflicting opinions

$$: Academics make professors' salaries, in the high five or low six figures. Those who work for Wall Street firms or other fiduciary institutions can make enough to force Eliot Spitzer to sit up and take notice.

Skills required: Write very poorly, or at least so obliquely that no matter what happens in reality, the theories and prognostications you offer can never be called wrong, exactly.

The upside: People think you're brilliant, and you may be!

The downside: Your mother leaps off the side of a cruise ship when her retirement account goes south.

The dark side: Your ideas are adopted by the ruling class of a third-world nation, who then use them to exterminate the entire middle class.

There are so many inaccuries in that writeup that Roberta Rogow may lose her greatest claim to fame:
Meanwhile ace reviewer John Clute was poring delightedly over his latest task, being Futurespeak: A Fan's Guide to the Language of SF by Roberta Rogow (Paragon House $24.95). `This entry has more mistakes than words,' he marvelled:

SLANS (literary): Superhuman successors to homo sapiens in a series of stories by A.E.van Vogt, beginning in 1925 with Galactic Lensman....

Credit Where DueIt Gets Worse Department: The writeup on "Blogger" is Just too Precious:
$$: Relatively small, but prospects for high-paying bullshit job in the future are virtually assured.

I'm ready for My High-Paying Bullshit Job now, Messrs. Bing/Murdoch/Parsons. Can start immediately.

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// posted by Ken Houghton @ 11:11 AM
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