Acronym Deployment Services

I am at Microsoft's TechEd conference in Orlando this week, where you can learn about XML, ADO, SPS, WSS, MOM, AD, or SMS, but there is really only one thing they are all about: ADS, or, Acronym Deployment Services.

There are many hundreds of vendors and it is a bit like Halloween for techies, because they are all giving out t-shirts, free CDs, slick handouts, squishie-balls, baseball caps, frisbees, staplers, calculators, blinking badges, expensive laptop bags and if you are very lucky an iPod Shuffle. I am politely listening to what each vendor says but I am also looking out of the corner of my eye to see if they have any good freebies. I have listened to a few schpiels for products that I had no intention of buying nor any understanding of what they did, but because they had cool t-shirts. By the end we will all look like race car drivers, enlogoed from head to toe.

For the plural project: A Convention of Techies. Some would say a Convention of Nerds but I maintain that the proper plural for nerds is a Dungeon.

The Plural Project #3

Another entry for the Plural Project.

There's a park nearby that has weekly lawn bowling, a strange outdoor pastime where everyone wears white or else. Previously this struck me as the sort of quaint activity that might be enjoyed mainly by an elderly set, but one Sunday I was corrected in this thinking when a group descended on the field that was, to a man and woman, extremely perfect and young and shiny and totally hot.

So uniform was the perfection of these college kids, with their beautiful hair, their perfect breasts, their tanned and toned muscles, their expensive sun glassery, their skill at making the all-white fashion stricture just really work for them, that at first I assumed a magazine shoot was going on.

There were not even a few token homely people orbiting this group. This was a carefully screened outing.

So either lawn bowling is the hip thing for rich kids to do in Santa Monica or this was a roving social group that actively seeks out kitchy things to do the summer before they go to Yale. If they weren't lawn bowling again the next week then I bet they were down at the bowling alley or having a fondue party at one of their parent's mansions.

And it was grating to watch their social dynamic, because 1) it was so predictable, and of course 2) I could never be one of them. Even though there can't be much exertion required to lawn bowl, the males of the species were hooting, brachiating, and strutting at levels I'd have thought reserved for that Scottish sport where you pick up and throw trees. And yep, you can always spot the Alpha because in no time he'll go shirtless, revealing his dedication to the art of the sculpted chest. The girls slyly drank beer out of plastic cups, conferred with one another, and were not shy about getting out there and playing the game. Most came pre-paired with a male but I sensed a bit of interchangeability in the couples, or maybe I had been staring too long and my imagination was running away.

There were a lot of other people in the park, but the college kids were all completely engrossed in themselves. And to be fair, the rest of us were obviously on a much lower social plateau, as evidenced by our comparitively ugly appearance. The beautiful lawn bowlers acknowledged only their own, as nature intended. They were so aggressively preening for one another that after an hour I wished they would just go somewhere lavish and mate, for the love of God, and leave me alone to wallow in my crapulence.

There was nothing particularly inappropriate with their youthful self-absorption, and we all do it to some extent. But it occured to me as that pocket of privilege and beauty moved through the park that they would probably, for the whole of their lives, do all their socializing and breeding and interacting in that same exact social group. Like all cliques, they were a little island to themselves.

What I was witnessing was a very expensive, very rarified strain of DNA making arrangements to pass itself around, but not very far. In 100, 200 years this group will have produced the most breath-takingly gorgeous, wispy, well-educated and well-spoken child, but little Dakota will have to be careful on the playground because her blood will have lost the ability to clot. So I coined today's plural:

A Galapagos of hotties.

It doesn't roll off the tongue but it fits perfectly.

Previous entries in the Plural Project:

A Hysteria of Project Managers & others

An Explosion of Lesbian Kissing

An Irritation of Telecom Techs

Please Do Not Speak to the Telecom Tech

I have a new entry for the Plural Project:

An Irritation of Telecom Guys.

Who knows what those guys with the vans and hardhats and fancy phone equipment are doing? They sure don't seem happy about it, whatever it is. I'll give you some insight: they're NOT. I just had to go ask one a question down in the phone room of our building, and they really don't like it when you do that.

He had his Fancyphone clamped to his ear the whole time, so I waited to ask him my question. When it was clear after several minutes that he was just holding it there and not really "toning the line," I went ahead and spoke. He didn't like it.

PLEASE DO NOT SPEAK TO THE TELECOM TECH, THANK YOU.

An Explosion of Lesbian Kissing

Just read the review of the "abhorrent" film "The Girl Next Door" over at Movieguide.org, where they cite

Now, I'm fine taking a pre-teen to a movie that has, say, 80 or so mostly strong obscenities. But 83? Forget it.

I'm all for guides that lay it out for parents like this, because the MPAA rating system is hopeless, but I always wonder how someone goes about getting such an accurate count of a film's transgressions this way. It's no small task for the reviewer! They've got to be able to make an instantaneous call of whether something is strong vs. light profanity, whether that was an obscene gesture or just lewdness, be able to scribble it in the dark in what must be a very detailed shorthand - and scribble QUICKLY because those obscenities are coming fast and furious! - all the while retaining some memory of the plot and whether it conforms with the teachings of Christianity.

Maybe there's no shorthand at all. Perhaps Michael Medved has marketed some sort of Obscenity Abacus, and when a character discusses "safe sex" without condemnation in the film, you just clack another red bead over a notch.

Probably less difficult than making split-second calls on the severity of a profanity is determining just how the long arm of Bill Clinton's corruption has manifested itself in the film. Since the answer is basically, everywhere:

The review goes on to describe two other celebs that have contributed to corruption in Our Youth, but since they are not Clinton, they obviously only rank as ordinal threats:

(That's another one for my Plural Project - an "explosion" of lesbian kissing.)

Predictably, the review ends with the complete contact information of the studio head, to make it easier when sending the reflexive letter of protest.

A Crash of Rhinos

I just read on the elevator Captivate system that a group of Rhinoceri is called a "crash." How cool is that? This prompted a bit of a look-up, which lead me to: http://www.stalking.co.uk/group.html and http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/help/faq/animals/names.htm.

Other favorites: a "lounge" of lizards! An "intrusion" of cockroaches!

This leads me to look up other group names, or "noun collectives," because I am in a lull at work: http://biobase.dk/Embnetut/Personal/venereal.html

An "eloquence of lawyers" indeed. That sounds like something the lawyers would LIKE for us to say. I suggest instead a "smarminess" of lawyers. Or a "fee schedule" of lawyers. No offense, anyone.

Other collective nouns I suggest:

A Hysteria of Project Managers

A Myopia of Conservatives