FSP 1.1

Ten Minutes with Karen Hughes

Karen Hughes talks to the White House practically every day, prepares
speeches and media strategies for the president, flies to Washington every
few weeks and whistle-stops the country giving speeches. Besides all that,
she wrote this book and, once her book-tour-cum-campaign-swing ends,
will join the president in August for his round-the-clock run for re-election.

I'm not sure where the tough choice was -- to me, it looks as if she cashed
in some loyalty tokens and traded up, multiplied her pay, cast herself as a
spokeswoman for working mothers and left others to try to ''counterweight''
Karl, a thankless task. One wonders if we haven't been spun from the get-go.

So, everyone's happy. Except maybe the reader. George W. Bush remains
an enigma who guides world events by letting actions speak. And Hughes,
maybe the person who knows him best, has used our desire to know the
president to plant carefully hewn tales of the goodness and integrity of her
family-friendly boss in the public mind.

Ron Suskind, author of The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the
White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill.

Same Sex Mar(r)iage

If law were designed by information architects:

Offer marriage to heterogender couples as usual.

New idea:
Offer mariage to homogender[*] couples.

Key:
Two 'r', two genders.
One 'r'', one gender.

Simple.

[*] 'heterogender' because heterosexual refers to orientaton.
So if a lesbian married a gay man, they would form a
heterogender homosexual couple.

Spun answer

Q: Where would Howard Dean be today without the Internet?

A1: He would be pumping gas in Arkansas.

A2: I think there is no question that the new people who have been brought in
through the Internet are the real powers behind the Dean campaign. So it is
essential.

Analysis
Correct: Answer2.

The awake spinner pumps up the value of their own contribution,
without detracting from their employer or client.

Interview with Zephyr Teachout, Howard Dean's director of Internet organizing.

No Streetcar Name Desired

A moment in Silicon Valley transit history:

One of the great triumphs of San Jose Mercury News headline writing came
when Santa Clara County supervisors attempted in 1987 to name the
light-rail system SC(s2)AT (for Santa Clara County Area Transit).
Overlooking that "scat" is a word for animal droppings, the supes were
greeted with an inspired headline by copy editor Willys Peck:
"Dung! Dung! Dung! Goes the Trolley."

A postscript: When the supervisors decided that they didn't want
SC(s2)AT as a name after all, copy editor Peck came back with an even
better headline than his first: "No Streetcar Name Desired."

At long last, they seem to grasp

At long last, [they] seem to grasp is used to endorse the viewpoint
being explained.

Now, at long last, regulators seem to grasp the centrality of the board's
role. The S.E.C. forced the stock exchange (and Grasso) to seriously beef up
standards for directors. Matters like the C.E.O.'s compensation and nominations for
the board will be decided entirely by independent directors. Also, the independent
directors will have to meet regularly without anyone from management to review
the C.E.O.'s performance. This change reflects an important truism of boardroom
culture: directors speak more freely in confidence. Charles Elson, who teaches
corporate governance at the University of Delaware, calls the reforms ''farsighted.''
It is an oddity of Grasso's career, of course, that he did not reform his own
institution. He was forced to resign not so much because the board overpaid him
but because the directors who did so were those he regulated.

NYT

Sound byte on executive multitasking

Better than a tarball in the head.

While 200 top telecommunications executives and analysts met last week in
Dana Point (outside Los Angeles, Calif.), at the Vortex Conference, speakers
and panelists made their presentations on stage during the two-day affair,
outside Los Angeles, many of the audience members were, quite glaringly, doing
their own thing. Armed with laptop computers equipped with wireless Internet
connections, many executives had only one ear on the speakers but both hands
on the keyboard, checking e-mail and stock prices, surfing the Internet and
otherwise whiling away their time wirelessly.

The problem may be genetic, joked one participant, Charles R. Lax, who said it
was simply reflexes that kept him continually monitoring e-mail on both his
laptop computer and his personal digital assistant. "I have a multitasking Linux
kernel in my head," said Mr. Lax, a general partner with GrandBanks Capital, a
venture capital firm in Newton Center, Mass.

-- NYT.

Warren Ellis, comic author

Warren Ellis reflects on sterotypes vs archtypes and pop culture.

Speak no evil

One Sunday I was driving through Missouri on Interstate 70, letting the
radio scan through the frequencies, and pausing on each station for a
minute. I heard a country station, a news talk station, another country
station, and a religious service. The commentator on the news talk station
was horrified that a grant for AIDS awareness was being used to
talk about sex (in San Francisco). His view now enjoys national influnece.

Speak No Evil

Scientists who study AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases say they
have been warned by federal health officials that their research may come
under unusual scrutiny by the Department of Health and Human Services or by
members of Congress, because the topics are politically controversial.

The scientists, who spoke on condition they not be identified, say they have
been advised they can avoid unfavorable attention by keeping certain "key
words" out of their applications for grants from the National Institutes of Health
or the Centers for Disease Control and Prion. Those words include sex
workers, men who sleep with men, anal sex and needle exchange, the
scientists said.

[Full story below]

2003 April 18
Certain Words Can Trip Up AIDS Grants, Scientists Say
By ERICA GOODE

Scientists who study AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases say they
have been warned by federal health officials that their research may come
under unusual scrutiny by the Department of Health and Human Services or by
members of Congress, because the topics are politically controversial.

The scientists, who spoke on condition they not be identified, say they have
been advised they can avoid unfavorable attention by keeping certain "key
words" out of their applications for grants from the National Institutes of Health
or the Centers for Disease Control and Prion. Those words include "sex
workers," "men who sleep with men," "anal sex" and "needle exchange," the
scientists said.

Bill Pierce, a spokesman for the health and human services department, said
the department does not screen grant applications for politically delicate content.
He said that when the department singles out grants it is usually to send out a
news release about them. But an official at the National Institutes of Health, who
spoke on condition of anonymity, said project officers at the agency, the people
who deal with grant applicants and recipients, were telling researchers at
meetings and in telephone conversations to avoid so-called sensitive language.
But the official added, "You won't find any paper or anything that advises people
to do this."

The official said researchers had long been advised to avoid phrases that
might mark their work as controversial. But the degree of scrutiny under the
Bush administration was "much worse and more intense," the official said.

Dr. Alfred Sommer, the dean of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at
Johns Hopkins University, said a researcher at his institution had been advised
by a project officer at N.I.H. to change the term "sex worker" to something more
euphemistic in a grant proposal for a study of H.I.V. prion among
prostitutes. He said the idea that grants might be subject to political surveillance
was creating a "pernicious sense of insecurity" among researchers.

Dr. Sommer said that if researchers feared that federal support for their
work might be affected by politics, whether it was true or untrue, it could take a
toll. "If people feel intimidated and start clouding the language they use, then
your mind starts to get cloudy and the science gets cloudy," he said, adding that
the federal financing of medical research had traditionally been free from
political influence.

At the National Institutes of Health, for example, grant applications are
evaluated and rated by a panel of independent reviewers. The grant application
is then given a score.

In another example of the scrutiny the scientists described, a researcher at
the University of California said he had been advised by an N.I.H. project officer
that the abstract of a grant application he was submitting "should be `cleansed'
and should not contain any contentious wording like `gay' or `homosexual' or `transgender.' "

The researcher said the project officer told him that grants that included
those words were "being screened out and targeted for more intense
scrutiny."

He said he was now struggling with how to write the grant proposal, which
dealt with a study of gay men and H.I.V. testing. When the subjects were gay
men, he said, "It's hard not to mention them in your abstract."

The titles and abstracts of federally financed grants are available to the
public on a computer database maintained by the national institutes. The
database, called CRISP, is also frequently read by Congressional staff members
on the lookout for research on topics that are of concern to the politicians they
work for. Over the years, studies on cloning, abortion, animal rights,
needle-exchange programs and various types of AIDS research have been
criticized by members of Congress.

But researchers said they feared that the concerns of individual members of
Congress were now being taken more seriously by the health and human
services department.

John Burklow, a spokesman for the N.I.H., said project directors at the
agency were responsible for "providing advice and guidance on myriad issues
related to grant applications," but he did not confirm or deny that the project
officers were cautioning researchers about the language they used.

He said that the health and human services department "from a
management perspective has a right to oversee N.I.H. affairs" but that
department officials "have not interfered with the awarding or renewing of any
N.I.H. grant."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

Flaunt flout

A google search for flount flaunt gives many links to language advice, as does bildungsroman.

Correction: liberal weenies

An article in Business Day yesterday about the influence of Rupert Murdoch on the
News Corporation's properties misidentified the Fox News Channel commentator
who accused competitors of dwelling on casualties in Iraq and misstated the term
he used for them. He was Fred Barnes, not Bill O'Reilly; he called the competitors
"weenies," not "liberal weenies". New York Times 2003 April 08.

Theater of War

When space is filled with satellites, all the world becomes a proscenium arch, the
narrator of the Marshall McLuhan movie suggested. The phrase "theater of war" becomes
literal. -- Sarah Boxer.

NorthWest Airlines: New Livery

I think these new planes look fine, but the logo suggests
a doomsday clock at 10pm.

More like this: Frequent flyer blog, design blog.

[Picture credit: justplanes.com ]

How to argue: it's healthy issue to debate

Beside being able to keep their homes, many of the mobile home park
residents wanted one more thing: a traffic signal at their driveway.

But Bill Burton of Korve Engineering, the company that performed the
traffic study, said the need for a signal hasn't been proven.

"The traffic study shows there aren't enough cars going in and out
of the parks to satisfy the 100-car-per-hour warrant for a signal,"
Burton said.

City Manager Mark Joseph pointed out that traffic warrants are not
the only determining factors for a signal. He said the city council
could simply decide it wants one.

"Even though signals aren't warranted, you have a healthy
issue for debate," he said.

[2003 Feb 15, Napa Register:
American Cyn road widening plan aims to save frogs]

Talk like a Canadian

The biggest challenge is hiding the Canadian accent. Nancy Helms, one of the
dialect coaches at TheaterWorks, spent her first 30 years in South Carolina, so
she has an ear for the subtle differences between American and Canadian
speech patterns. Like Mr. Schaap, she does a lot of private coaching, often faxing
drills to clients who have moved to Los Angeles.

"Tawking is one thing, but speakin' is another," Ms. Helms said. She uses the
International Phonetic Alphabet and recommends the David Stern voice manuals.
"But the ear is fallible, and manuals have limitations," she said. "Canadians have
upward inflections at the end of sentences and stress different syllables. You can
really hear the difference in words like mobile, resource, adult and contributed.
Canadians stress the first syllable, making the word sound longer."

Many New Yorkers speak out of the front of their mouths, so the gum-chewing
trick helps, Mr. MacCabe said, adding: "They also tend to emphasize verbs, while
we emphasize pronouns. The tongue is more concave for Americans. It's not the
queen's English that we're used to. The tip of the `t' that you hear in Canada is
from our British influence."

[The Guy in That Canadian Film Sounds Like a Noo Yawka, Eh?
-- JOANNE LATIMER, NYT.]

Goats, Sheep, Rams

I've seen this Chinese New Year described as,
Year of the Ram, as Year of the Goat, and as
Year of the Sheep.

In STL, it will be known as Year of the Ram.

Want a hyphen

Short shameful confession:
Staphangers: I thought this was some obscure word for
rider on public conveyance. Pronounced Staffangers.

Actually it's just strap-hangers, meaning people hanging
on to straps as they ride the streetcar, subway, or bus.

Sequel: Etymology of DO, just for Vince's entertainment.

How to argue: crack = mother's milk

Critic: California's vehicle license fee (VLF) is the crack
cocaine of local government.

Apologist: VLF isn't crack cocaine. It's more like the
mother's milk of local law enforcement, fire safety,
public health, parks and libraries.

Cites: 1, 2, 3, 4 .

Precision speaker, tense

Scene: The Anheuser Busch Brewhouse in Saint Louis Lambert airport,
Terminal A.

Waitress: Who had a brat ?
Waitress: Did you have a brat ?

dc: No.

[Waitress walks to next table.]
Waitress: Who had a brat ?
Waitress: Did you have a brat ?

[Waitress walks to another table]
Waitress: Who had a brat ?
Waitress: Did you have a brat ?

[Waitress returns to my table.]
Waitress: Who had a brat ?

dc: [Supposes that waitress recalls serving a bratwurst,
but fails to remember to whom.

For some reason, the waitress now needs to identify who had
this bratwurst.

Is she just trying to determine to which table she should bring
the bratwurst check ?]

dc: I ordered a bratwurst, but I haven't had it yet.
I am still waiting for my order to be served.

Waitress: Aggh. It's yours. Sorry, here is your meal.

Rule: A waitress who does not remember a food order gets a less
than 20% tip.

ups

I needed to ship a package, and I didn't want to sit around all day
waiting for Mr. Brown to stop by. I looked at www.ups.com and
looked for drop locations.

Do they have a phone number, and can they confirm that
they can accept a package bigger than a standard letter
pounch ?

1-800-pickups is also for dropoffs.
It's actually 1-800-pick-ups.

Ah, the value of a hyphen.

So Good, So Bad Amtrak

1. Things are going well, we have success,
and we need to support a successful system.

2. Things are going poorly, and need help,
and we need to support a needy, insufficient system.

These are the two faces of Amtrak.

0911 requiem

The dead and the guilty

Simon Schama, professor of history and art history at
Columbia University, New York writes in The Guardian on the
questions Americans should be asking on the anniversary
of September 11.

How to argue when facts and logic are against you.

How to argue when facts and logic are against you,
another installment in the series.

When presented with authoritative evidence, backed up by
references and citations, ask,

Do you always let other people do the thinking for you?

Also of note:

Phil Agre's tale of discovering talking points:

The arguments were, in common parlance, rhetorical "ammo".  

The metaphor is apt: ammo doesn't have to make sense; it just 

has to disable or kill.

Public relations reading list.

Business ethics

Doing things you don't like, or doing things you oppose:
which is more unethical ?

Metropolis' designer's ethics scale.

Anderson gets interesting.

Most company re-brandings from English names to nonsense words,
eg, from Western Electric to Lucent and Avaya
struck me as silly ways to through away decades of good will.

But one lucky company, Anderson Consulting had the fortune
to rename itself to Accenture before the meltdown
of its like-named accounting firm.

Accenture's branding campaign is still silly though. For example,
one print ad states:

Chinese to be the number one Internet language by the
year 2007; now it gets interesting.

The implication is that Accenture has the vision and unique capabilities
that are essential to this exciting, yet demanding, future.

Update: 2003 Jan 23

alternate link.

For print ads from this campaign, see back issues of from year 2002 of
The Economist, or Harvard Business Review.

blog spam: splog or blam ?

blam, noun.

The new phenomena of jamming gratuitous links to a blog
into the comments of other blogs.
synonyms: splog.

actualized

Professionalism, as a lifetime aspiration, is a rather limited goal.

Milton Glazer piece in Metropolis or This is what I have learned [.PDF] by Milton Glaser.

Adverts

According to Todd Gitlin, there are eight strategies we use to
navigate the ceaseless flood of media.

The Fan develops a visceral, emotional attachment to certain
genres or celebrities. This attachment requires a choice
(I'll pay attention to New Wave and ignore folk music),
and it leads to membership in a community of connoisseurs,
or believers.

Where the fan works by affirmation, the Content Critic works
by aversion. He is on the lookout for all the crappy songs
and biased news, all the ways in which the media fail politically
and aesthetically. If the content of the media could somehow
be improved, the world would too.

The Paranoid believes that They are programming Us.
Television (the usual culprit) is an addiction, a hypnotic agent.

If we are at a loss, drifting or suffering, it must be because
They – the Government, the Liberal Media, the Media Monopoly,
the Zionist Occupation Government – are pushing the buttons.
Though it is extreme, paranoia is a warped version of
legitimate fear.

The Exhibitionist glories in media exposure – the cast of
MTV's The Real World, the painted spectators holding NBC signs
at sports s, those who broadcast their intimate lives
via 24/7 webcam. Commanding the attention of spectators,
the exhibitionist achieves some exemption from the anonymity
of the torrent, some power apparently without risk. But
because this power is risk-free, it is trivial.

The Ironist knows that media are nothing but weightless
contrivances, so she surfs with ease and without commitment,
amused and amused to be amused. She can enjoy the spectacle
on two levels – as a faux-naïve fan (who always liked the smile
of that faded star) and as a knowing insider (who knows that
the faded star started touring again because she was broke).
The media have adopted, or co-opted, the ironist's style, with
the glorification of kitsch and ads that wink knowingly while
they continue their pitch.

The Culture Jammer, like the critic, believes that images are
power. The difference is that he will directly attack those
images, defacing or refacing them. In order to redistribute
power he's an active transmitter rather than a passive receiver.
Whether he's hacking into a corporate site or unfurling
anti-consumer banners in the Mall of America, offense
has become the jammer's defense.

Because the media are politically pacifying, life-throttling,
mind-sapping, even physically damaging, the Abolitionist
refuses to accept their existence as a good argument for
their continued existence. Only one valid question about
the media torrent remains: How do you launch the revolution
to dry it up?

The Secessionist knows that media steal our time, and
therefore our lives and human capacities. Because the media
are beyond reform, she does not bother to displace, jam,
supplement, or critique them. She rations television, planning
one day to get rid of it, and abstains from cell phones and
e-mail whenever possible. She knows how the media can
seduce if you let your guard down.

Read more in
Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds
Overwhelms Our Lives, by Todd Gitlin. (Metropolitan Books, 2002).
Gitlin is a professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University.

Fishes

Look at the fish swimming here and there. Such is
the pleasure that fish enjoy! -- Lao Tzu

software economics

What's the value of fixing a software bug ?
What was the value in testing to find such a bug in the first place ?

These questions are difficult to answer with real data.

"..the reluctance to publish such data is the ongoing and escalating
fear of litigation by class action lawyers and/or harassment by militantly
activist lawyers and muck-raking members of the trade and general press.

If one accepts the above unfortunate realities of the software industries,
it is clear that a call for detailed statistical data of a proprietary nature,
is unlikely to be successful, is out of place, and more aimed at discrediting
than at informing." -- Boris Beizer, software quality consultant.

F1

The success of Formula One is that it follows the rules
of classical theater. It has unity of place, unity of action,
unity of time. It's a race that lasts one and a half to two
hours. It's always the same distance. It's always at the
same places. And it always has the same actors.

--Gilles Pernet of France's TF1 television network.

pun du jour

Research into vehicle emissions not exhaustive -- headline.

Google Spelling test

Google Spelling test:

Belle de Jour vs Belle du Jour.

Don't call it a comeback.

Meme du jour:

Don't call it a comeback.
Call it a relapse.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

The men's magazines that continue to storm the
newsstand — Maxim, Stuff and FHM
(and Loaded, Ralph)— are unapologetically
formatted for people who do not read.

Publications that exalt the visual have always done well.
But the vast middles of many magazines — the feature wells,
where the reading matter used to be found — have
morphed into annotated photo magazines.

In this world, everything can be objectified and rendered
desirable. A $2,200 faucet gets the kind of lavish lighting
and styling treatment that used to be reserved for skinny
17-year-old models.

--deep captioning in postliterate publishing,[NYT]

Update. (2002 July 30)

Papers. Get your papers.

"If you want to sell papers, make it a paper people have to
open every morning to find out what's been done to them."

-- J. J. Goldberg, editor of the Jewish weekly newspaper
The Forward.

How to argue, (part one of many)

The Facts:

A bill passed by the Senate that would have stripped the
Northern Mariana Islands of their exemption from the United States
minimum wage and immigration laws.

The main industry in the Marianas is textiles. Inexpensive clothes
are made there, mostly by immigrant Chinese women who work
for low wages in substandard conditions, and the garments are
shipped duty-free to the United States with a "Made in the U.S.A."
label.

Pro:
With Mr. DeLay's help, Mr. Abramoff managed to get the legislation
defeated in the House, using the argument that the Marianas
represented low taxes and free enterprise and should be left alone.

Con:
Representative George Miller, a California Democrat who sponsored
the legislation in the House, is still furious about Mr. Abramoff's
action. In a recent interview, Mr. Miller said, "He spent a lot of
time, effort and money to protect a system that was a growth
industry for sex shops, prostitution, abuse of women, slavery,
illegal immigration, worker exploitation and narcotics, and he did
it all in the name of freedom."

Rebuttal:
Mr. Abramoff replied: "Congressman Miller has an agenda, and
he wants the facts to fit his thesis. No lobbyist could have
convinced Congress to support the system he describes."
[NYT].

AOL

AOL: With customers so easy to use, no wonder we're #1!

She said, he said.

Question of the day: Filter or seive ?

Advice

Most people on the list have offered sensible advice,
I was actually looking for more encouragement.

Mr. T

Which is the commonest misspelling ?

Search for morgage to find mor t gage [google]

I can read

Another e-mail I received today:

My prescription was labeled with Avoid prolonged exposure to sunlight.

It was a year -- and several skin rashes -- before I realized that these instructions applied to me, not to the medication.

I can read

Another e-mail I received today:

My prescription was labeled with Avoid prolonged exposure to sunlight.

It was a year -- and several skin rashes -- before I realized that these instructions applied to me, not to the medication.

Speech

The words of Giuliani: 30 paragraphs about 35 observations [NYT].

I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and, doggonit, people like me

Meme du jour:
Excess self esteem [NYT].

What is the risk if one over-estimates ones self worth and has
too much self-esteem ? Smugness.

Chattering classes, UK

"There's a new political divide," said Richard Sambrook, director of BBC News. "It's no longer `left and right.' It's now `us and them.' With `them' being politicians, the establishment and the broadcasters and media. Our research says they see politicians as dull people more interested in careers than constituents. And they see broadcasters and journalists colluding with them." -- [NYT]

what's in a name

What's in a name ?
Shoe bomber: Muslim convert Abdel Rahim or British citizen Richard Reid ?
Tampa suicide pilot: Mr. Bishop or Mr. Bishara ?
Quebec mass murderer: Gamil Gharbi or Marc Lepine ?
Inspired by a Ben Johnson cartoon in the Kingston Whig-Standard. Headline 1: "Canadian Sprinter Wins Gold in 100 Metres!" Headline 2: "Jamaican-Canadian Athlete Tests Positive for Steroids!" Headline 3: "Jamaican Athlete Stripped of Gold Medal."

Focus Group

I was browsing through toiletries-cosmetics-medicines in Target, looking for a Braun shaver cleaner, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a display for FACE CUT razors. En passant I rationalized -- those are not Braun -- and continued browsing. Then I realized that FACE CUT is a rather improbable brand-name for razors. I retraced my steps to see upon closer inspection, the display I saw was actually some Gillette multiblade contraption. But subliminally this episode tells me I must not like dragging razors across my face, and prefer instead the gentle Braun. Or long live the Miami Vice look.

www.edu

Cisco paper on Building a Web Vocabulary.

mmm pop music

Through most of the year, best-selling hip-hop acts competed to depict the most garish visions of hedonism: designer labels, call-brand drinks, easy women. They celebrated Mercedes-Benzes and platinum-and-diamond jewelry, gleaming with the onomatopoetic flash called bling-bling. Rappers,
whose job has always been to be immodest, also escalated their rhetoric of self-adoration; recently Jay-Z, the year's dominant rapper, renamed himself Jay-hova. Too often, the raps had less to say than the innovative electronic free-for-all of the top producers' backing tracks.

-- By JON PARELES

THE YEAR IN POP MUSIC: Blasted From Its Self-Absorption, at Least for Now
NYT, 2001 December 30.

NYC School of Thought

The transformation required a repudiation of all responsibilities and an
ever-growing tendency to react by being domineering or playing the victim
when reminded of them. In this, and his constant self-promotion and carefully
created persona, he may have been ahead of his time, something akin to
the first New York artist.
The Artist as Bully and Self-Described Sex Machine By ROBERTA SMITH:
review of ((PAUL GAUGUIN:An Erotic Life) By Nancy Mowll Mathews).

index

In her book on indexing, Nancy Mulvaney suggests that an indexer
is a sort of query translator, mapping between the categories and
vocabularies employed by the author and those used by a variety
of different readers. What's a "drive" to me might be a "disk" to
you, so let's point at the discussion on disk drives from two entries.
Or, there may be multiple ways of coming to the same issue, and
this can affect how topic hierarchies are constructed. If I'm trying
to solve problems capturing audio to a digital file, will I look up

"Audio: capture" or "Capture: audio"?

Indexers are quite savvy about these things.

freeter

Word of the day: freeter.

You saw it here before you saw it on FastCompany
or from Dan Pink.

red rock eater jargon

Word of the day

eine Verschlimmbesserung -- trying to make
things better but making them worse in the process.