Nobody asked me, but....

"Nobody asked me, but...." is my periodic tribute to the great sportswriter Jimmy Cannon. Cannon churned out sterling prose for the old "New York Journal-American." When, after plumbing the depths of his mind, he found nothing to write, he'd put together one of these.

Nobody asked me, but....

I could give a rat's ass about the new Chief Executive Officer of the Publicis group.

I think agencies that get the trade press to write about their office space always wind up looking ridiculous.

Everybody's new office space looks like everybody else's new office space.

Wake me when I have a private office again, with a door.

The Super Bowl is nine days away. If America lasts that long.

I've never taken an online quiz or survey and not felt like I've been duped or I'm an imbecile afterwards.

Unless you sell chopsticks for a living, there's no reason to ever spend any time creating a 728x90 banner.

As Woodrow Wilson was followed by Warren G. Harding, so Barack Obama is followed by Agent Orange.

There might be good that comes from this. Perhaps after whatever disaster he brings, we will see, once again, the rise of progressive liberalism.

Trying to read someone's copy in an open plan office is even worse than trying to concentrate while writing copy.

I have a small pile of rocks on my desk at work, in case I need to throw something.

Speaking of desks, the minute I clean mine, I can't find something I need.

I'm twice the man at 9AM that I am at 9PM.

It's never good for your keyboard when you type while eating Thai food.

For all the sadness in the world right now, maybe it makes sense to go back to read William Faulkner's Nobel Prize Acceptance speech.*

His phrase "the last dingdong of doom" always makes me think of Shakespeare's line, and Orsen Welles' movie "The Chimes at Midnight."

By the way, you'd be better off reading Faulkner, or Shakespeare, or watching something by Welles, than reading this.

Of course, nobody asked me....


* Faulkner's speech, abridged by me, for the Age of Twitter:

"Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it……He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid;… I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking….I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail….The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."