My Wall Street Journal tribute to the highway department is spurring some incisive comments. I will revise my Blurb List later tonight.
William Gomes, commented posted at WSJ:
The real failure of Mr Bovard’s summer job was, it seems, making him into the bitter and cantankerous individual he is today…. I cannot imagine his colleagues have enjoyed his company in his subsequent jobs.”
[There’s a reason I’ve been self-employed for the last few decades…]
From L.G. in Pocatello, Idaho:
Bovard shares a youthful data-point about learning laziness from a highway department slacker job and draws a downward sloping line through government training experience in general. He learned laziness well. I peeked at his web site photo and note he’s too lazy to shave. Even Bovard’s journalism is low energy.
[Too fatigued to reply to this comment.]
Dang, Jim. You know you barbed their saddles when they talk about whether you shaved and suggesting the absence of a shaved face means something about the points you made!
Okay, so maybe I won’t by a razor.
Jim, consider yourself fortunate that these serious readers of the serious Wall Street Journal only found out that you are bitter, cantankerous and lazy. Had they done further research, they might have discovered that you are a dangerous malcontent hellbent on destroying the America they love and cherish – especially if they work for the highway departments of their respective states.
You’re not bitter. Otherwise….:D
Remember – if you can’t attack the message, attack the messenger. cf. “ad hominem.”
I still wonder if that one critic was secretly getting kickbacks from Gillette.
FWIW, I’m also too lazy to shave, although I occasionally grab some scissors and take a few whacks at it when I think it’s getting too bushy.
I was once asked by an old lady — who was apparently reaching an age where she no longer felt any need for a censoring mechanism between her brain and her mouth — why on Earth I wanted to grow that thing on my face. I tried to explain that it just started growing on its own.
What, you don’t get no points fer keepin the top o the crown clean as a whistle? Growing a big beard aint a result of laziness, it demonstrates restraint.
Kevin, that’s a hoot. I’ll have to remember that answer the next time I encounter some anti-hair fanatic.
Dirk, maybe if I had used some of the same polish on the top of my head that is used for old-fashioned car bumpers – maybe that would have mollified my Idaho fan.
I’ve seen this ‘too lazy to shave’ complaint before in the WSJ. Apparently hair doesn’t fit into their brave, new, neoconservative world – it’s certainly not chic for the average Wall Street bankster/huckster. Now if you’re trying to sell and IPO for head hair transplants, hair replacement goo, etc., that’s probably the crowd you’ll want to talk to.
(Now that I think about it the Romans had a thing against beards (and other body hair). And who doesn’t want to be imperiously clean shaven like the sons of Romulus and Remus.)
The current hip style seems to be the hairless girly-man. That’s probably one reason I don’t shave my beard. Or anything else.
Bullseye. I am amazed at how the culture has shifted on this issue. And unfortunately, it is not just the East Coast…
Forgive me for not wallowing into the entirety of the WSJ comments to your article but may I assume the “incisive” ones are in the “vast minority.”
I would expect such story, unabashedly unflattering to government, to be very warmly received at that particular publication.