Are you a motivated multitasker with extensive experience that has helped you become a results oriented team player?
Does your online resume say you have a dynamic and innovative skill set which has led to a proven track record of being entrepreneurial in a fast paced world?
Then congratulations, you’ve successfully used all 10 of the most overused buzzwords on LinkedIn in just two sentences.
[. . .]
And just so you know we tried, we did manage to get all 10 buzzwords into one single colossally cringe-worthy sentence sure to make any human resources manager’s skin crawl.
Heaven help the poor guy who has this phrase on his LinkedIn profile:
“Hi, I’m a motivated multitakser with extensive experience as an entrepreneurial and results oriented team player whose innovative and dynamic skills have helped me become adept at working in a fast paced world with a proven track record.”
Ta-da!
Matt Hartley, “The 10 most overused employment buzzwords on LinkedIn”, Financial Post, 2010-12-14
December 14, 2010
QotD: Buzzword Bingo, resumé edition
No surprises at all in Gawker’s 50 most-popular passwords
An article in the Wall Street Journal has the 50 most popular passwords from the Gawker data heist:
Recognize the pattern? Here’s a word cloud from my last post on passwords:
Other posts on this topic: Passwords and the average user, More on passwords, And yet more on passwords, and Practically speaking, the end is in sight for passwords.
Christopher Hitchens on the real Henry Kissinger
I must admit that I never understood the adulation Henry Kissinger has attracted. I started paying attention to politics in the early 1970s, and Kissinger was one of the main players on the world political stage at that point. His connection to the deeply repugnant Richard Nixon should have been enough to keep him out of the limelight after his boss was forced out of the presidency. Yet he somehow managed not only to stay in the public eye, but to increase his popularity.
Christopher Hitchens thinks that the latest revelations from that era will finally bring Kissinger the odium he so richly deserves:
Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded. No more dinners in his honour; no more respectful audiences for his absurdly overpriced public appearances; no more smirking photographs with hostesses and celebrities; no more soliciting of his worthless opinions by sycophantic editors and producers. One could have demanded this at almost any time during the years since his role as the only unindicted conspirator in the Nixon/Watergate gang, and since the exposure of his war crimes and crimes against humanity in Indochina, Chile, Argentina, Cyprus, East Timor and several other places. But the latest revelations from the Nixon Library might perhaps turn the scale at last.
Chatting eagerly with his famously racist and foul-mouthed boss in March 1973, following an appeal from Golda Meir to press Moscow to allow the emigration of Soviet Jewry, Kissinger is heard on the tapes to say:
“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”
(One has to love that uneasy afterthought….)
In the past, Kissinger has defended his role as enabler to Nixon’s psychopathic bigotry, saying that he acted as a restraining influence on his boss by playing along and making soothing remarks. This can now go straight into the lavatory pan, along with his other hysterical lies. Obsessed as he was with the Jews, Nixon never came close to saying that he’d be indifferent to a replay of Auschwitz. For this, Kissinger deserves sole recognition.
It’s hard to know how to classify this observation in the taxonomy of obscenity. Should it be counted as tactical Holocaust pre-denial? That would be too mild. It’s actually a bit more like advance permission for another Holocaust. Which is why I wonder how long the official spokesmen of American Jewry are going to keep so quiet. Nothing remotely as revolting as this was ever uttered by Jesse Jackson or even Mel Gibson, to name only two famous targets of the wrath of the Anti-Defamation League. Where is the outrage? Is Kissinger — normally beseeched for comments on subjects about which he knows little or nothing — going to be able to sit out requests from the media that he clarify this statement? Does he get to keep his op-ed perch in reputable newspapers with nothing said? Will the publishers of his mendacious and purloined memoirs continue to give him expensive lunches as if nothing has happened?
Megan McArdle’s annual Kitchen Gift Guide
I don’t cook, except for very basic things, so this isn’t the sort of list I’d be able to compile for myself. Megan has been doing it for several years:
Yes, it’s that time of year again. Back by popular demand, expanded with the accumulated bounty of one moderately large wedding, it’s the kitchen gift guide. As usual, I am organizing by price, since everything on this list is something that I specially like having. [. . .]
Butter boat This uses evaporative cooling to keep butter at room temperature without spoiling. There’s a well for water, and then a butter dish that rests on top of it, and slowly wicks water through the ceramic. The upshot is that as long as you change the water every few days, you can keep butter in the dish for weeks — longer than a stick of butter usually lasts in our house, anyway. I have two, a white one for unsalted, and a green one for salted. It’s really a nice little present — who doesn’t like nice, soft, fresh-tasting butter?
We’ve got a couple of these, and they’re very useful . . . when we remember to refill them after using up the last of the current stick of butter.
Rabbit Corkscrew I’m a big fan of this — it makes opening a wine bottle basically foolproof. I feel it’s especially good for people who are losing hand strength, although you might also want to consider an electric corkscrew, which gets decent reviews. We’re also extremely pleased with the wine aerator that a friend got me for a bridal shower gift; it allows you to rapidly aerate red wine that you don’t have time to decant, improving the flavor. It would be a lovely gift paired with a corkscrew.
I’ve heard mixed reviews about the Rabbit — some people really love them, while others think they’re vastly overrated. I’m still happy with a simple lever-style corkscrew I picked up at the Williamsburg Winery on a trip to Virginia several years ago. The aerator is a good idea for those of us who don’t remember to decant the red wine far enough in advance. It won’t miraculously change the quality of the wine, but it will make up for a bit of the time you forgot to allow it to have for breathing.
Conservatives now still pushing corporate welfare
Okay, they’re not even pretending to be fiscally conservative any more:
The Conservative government has announced it is loaning aerospace giant Pratt & Whitney Canada $300 million for a $1 billion research project to develop the next generation of aircraft engines.
Industry Minister Tony Clement made the announcement on Monday saying it will create 700 high-skilled jobs in the GTA and more than 2,000 over the 15-year lifespan of the project. He also claimed the firm is in the process of hiring 200 engineers.
[. . .]
‘Create and maintain Canadian jobs’ has been the Conservative mantra during their recent shift to Keynesian economics and massive long-term deficits for the next half decade. The same political party that once decried government largesse and inexplicable corporate subsidies (also known affectionately as corporate welfare) is now a major player in the ‘too big to fail’ macroeconomics game.
This is nothing new: under former minister Maxime Bernier, the current darling of the small-government wing of the Conservative party, Pratt & Whitney got $350 million in corporate welfare just four years ago. That debt hasn’t been repaid.
Jackson fails to impress in relief of Favre
It may have been Tarvaris Jackson’s best chance to prove his value to the Vikings, but he was unable to generate much of a passing game:
It would be nice to say that the transition from Brett Favre to Tarvaris Jackson was smooth and seamless. It also would be untrue.
Finally getting his chance to lay claim to the quarterback position, Jackson played poorly against the New York Giants on Monday night. Save for an early first-quarter drive that resulted in the Vikings’ lone three points, Jackson was terribly erratic, and the offense seemed helpless virtually all night. There were fumbled snaps, trip-ups in the backfield and the usual ghastly interception.
Overall, Jackson completed 15 of 30 passes for 118 yards. He was sacked four times and finished with a 46.2 quarterback rating. The worst part of it was that the Giants were daring him to throw. They were putting eight men up front in an effort to stop Minnesota’s running game. That often left single coverage on the wide receivers.
“We all would have liked for him to play better,” coach Leslie Frazier said gingerly.
It would be unfair to put all the blame on Jackson, however, as the Minnesota run defence allowed two running backs to gain more than 100 yards (after allowing only two 100 yard rushing games since 2006). Between no rush (Adrian Peterson was held to 26 yards on 14 carries), no passing game, and no run defence, the game wasn’t much of a challenge for the Giants.
The roof of the Metrodome turns out to have been a harbinger of the whole Vikings 2010 season: caving in.
