Barrel Strength

An ideal business is one where you can bill the client for work that the client believes to be bespoke but which is just standard off-the-shelf boilerplate.  Lawyers are famous for working in this manner.  Now it seems a political adviser has mastered the same skill.  Please take a look at the following videos.

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David Axelrod is described as being raised in  “a middle-class Jewish household and showed a passion for politics early: At age 10 he was shuffling around his housing complex with a cardboard box filled with John Lindsay-for-mayor literature. He enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1972, lured by Chicago’s storied politics, and resolved to become a “newspaperman.”

He is the political adviser to both the candidates shown in the video above and it is obvious that he is just recycling the material although your correspondent must admit that the latter presentation in the first video is far superior given the bow and movement of the right arm.  And this is what passes for a great candidate in a post-modern age.

Everybody has words, such as surreal, literally-hit-the-roof and twilight zone, that they find annoying because of the usage.  Here is a word that your correspondent finds particularly annoying.

The Scotsman last week had an editiorial on the threat to one of Scotland’s greatest art treasures.  Namely the 200-year-old Bridgewater collection of works of Titian, Raphael and Rembrandt that is owned by the 7th Duke of Sutherland.  They have hung in Edinburgh for 60 years when they were originally moved there for safekeeping during World War II.  Unless the National Galleries of Scotland can raise £100 million, since then reduced to £92 million, to purchase the two Titians that are valued at £300 million, the collection will be broken up and sold.  The Scotsman states the following in the editorial.

Reckoned to be the finest private collection in Britain outside the Royal Family, these pictures once hung in the gallery at his home, Bridgewater House in London, which was destroyed during the Blitz.  For more than 60 years, they have made the National Galleries of Scotland an artistic mecca.

Your correspondent is certainly aware where Mecca is and its significance along with other relevant facts.  One of the key facts about Mecca is that only Muslims are allowed to visit there.  Given that National Galleries of Scotland is described as “an artistic mecca” can one assume that only artist are allowed there?  Why haven’t the PC police descended on the users of this word given that we have gone from cripple to handicapped to physically challenged during that time period?  Perhaps it is time to go from mecca to vatican.