One of my favorite figures of speech—one I describe in my latest book—is what I call the Mr. Potato Head. This cataloging figure breaks down a person or object into constituent parts, and then pretends that those parts came from elsewhere.
Bored with a cliché-ridden conversation? Want to turn the worst second-hand language into gems of cleverness? Well, you came to the right can of worms!
The most important speech airing this morning is, of course, Obama’s (see our last post). But the best one—on NPR’s morning edition—was delivered 10 years ago.
If you’ve flown Southwest Airlines recently, you may have seen your fellow passengers engaging in one of the greatest interactive entertainment systems ever devised.
Unlike the Internet—which, by the way, has been around for an entire generation—this interactive system is light and flexible, usable during takeoff and landing, and battery free. Plus, its user interface is as intuitive as it gets. We call the interface “turning pages.”
You know what magazines get right, and the Web doesn’t? Serendipity. You pick up a magazine on an airplane or in a doctor’s office, flip through it, and see great stuff you weren’t looking for. While I’m a fan of the social bookmarking sites like Digg, they don’t quite cut it, serendipity-wise.
My favorite line in the Pixar movie, Up, comes near the beginning, when the little girl explains South America to her young friend: “It’s like America…but South!”
That line came to my head when Santa gave me a Kindle for Christmas. Amazon brags that its e-reader uses “virtual ink” to make text show up against a gray background. In other words, it’s ink…but virtual!”
Jay Heinrichs
Jay is editorial director of Spirit.