Reality Based Community: The Logo

The proprietor of Hairy Fish Nuts (yeah, I don't know either) has come up with a logo for that Reality Based Community:

Meanwhile, others have already put the meme to cotton.

Comments

[Matthew]

"Hairy Fish Nuts" is a reference to something Opus the penguin in Bloom County said.

[dhex]

shouldn't that be "Reality-Based" with a hyphen?

[J]

Yeah! "...pear pimples for hairy fishnuts...." The hare krishna guy was really pissed off. Oh, that Opus....

[joe]

"Pear pimples for hairy fishnuts!"

"Just cough up some dough, mack!"

[Evan McElravy]

shouldn't that be "Reality-Based" with a hyphen?

[Jason Bourne]

Reality Bites? 🙂

[Jason Bourne]

My favorite Bloom County series involved Opus searching for his mother in Antartica. He happened to catch a ride there with a Greenpeace boat. Breathed savagely satirized Greenpeace in that series.

[Lowdog]

What is this 'reality-based community' stuff?

[Elf Sternberg]

Ron Suskind quoted a White House wonk as saying:

"[You're all in] the 'reality-based community'. You all believe that answers to solutions will emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. Well, let me tell you how we really see it. You see, we're an empire now. And when we act, we kinda create a reality. Events flow from our actions. And because of that, what we do is... essentially... we act, and every time we act we create a whole new set of laws of physics, which you then judiciously study for your solutions, and while you're doing that we'll act again, promulgate a whole other set."

I can't vouch for Mr. Suskind's memory, but it does seem to correspond with what the White House believes.

[R C Dean]

Hah. An anonymous source, a quote that makes the White House look bad, the NYT. You do the math.

[TWC]

Hold me back! Where can I get one of those slick tee shirts?

'Reality based community' is beltway bullshit for "I don't live in reality".

This is but another manifestation of that peculiar affliction that descends on almost everyone in the general vicinity of DC regardless of political, sexual, or gender persuasion.

I summoned the sheer will and determination to read the entire Suskind article. The only thing that is an absolute given is that Suskind never strays far from the hookah either.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html?oref=login&oref=login&pagewanted=all&position

Asselonians, all.

[salvage]

TWC you can get 'em here.

Three woots for the on-demand world!

Hairy Fish Nuts is from Bloom County's best punchline and the first time I realized that I wanted to be a penguin when I grew up.

It is also, probably the only good idea for the site I've had so far.

[dhex]

so the dems are mad because they want 4 years in the reality-maker?

i still think that shit should be hyphenated. i want some grammar-based community members up in here.

[Bill]

Not that it's really important, but reality based community should be hyphenated--reality-based community.

[Slag]

dhex,

You are correct, sir. Sort of.

The "reality-based" in the phrase "reality-based community" is a compound adjective and so should be hyphenated. Generally, adjectives should be hyphenated if they're modifying each other and not the noun. For example: "the quick brown fox" is not hyphenated because the fox is both quick AND brown (both adjectives modify "fox" and not each other), but "the light-brown fox" is hyphenated because it is not a light fox but rather a fox that's a particular shade of brown; "light" modifies "brown," not "fox."

However, some style guides (including Chicago, I believe) do not hyphenate compound adjectives if the first word in the compound ends in "y." I'm not sure why this is, and I think it's stupid.

[kevrob]

There's always "reality"-based community, for when you aren't quite convinced it is at all real. 🙂

Kevin

[dhex]

thank you slag.

hypens are our friends.

ok, now let's move onto the logo. what the fuck? someone was playing katamari damacy stoned and decided to have a go at illustrator?

[TWC]

Sal, thanks,

Bill, dhex, grammarians et al, I think the key is clarity rather than implementation of strict rules. Sometimes we need hyphens to be sure what we write is interpreted correctly. Sometimes, if the concept is clear, maybe it isn't as important. Hyphens are cool though.

But how do you do double hyphenated feminst style last names? If Andrea Lopez-Jones marries Ricardo O'Neal-Andreotti would you then hyphenate the two hyphenated last names? What about the kids?

My worst offense is an overuse of commas. I love commas. I hate using periods, but I love connecting run-on sentences by using lots of commas.

I also love to start sentences with "and" (drives English teachers and proper user's of the King's English stark raving bonkers). But hey, that's how a lot of people talk.

Bloom County. Good stuff. Wasn't he libertarian? Or at least libertarian leaning?

[Earl]

Suskind is a former Wall St. Journal reporter and has a pretty good reputation, actually. Nobody's been able to knock down anything in the book he did with Paul O'Neill.

The more disturbing thing in that story is how Bush didn't know the difference between Sweden and Switzerland and stubbornly insisted he was right.

Apart from the inelegant phrase "reality-based community" -- the logic of the source's argument is interesting to me. The winners do get to write history, that's the main point, and hard to disagree. Let's say LBJ had put enough troops in Vietnam early enough and won the war, the history of that time would not be dominated by My Lai and defeat and so forth. If Hitler had conquered Europe, the Holocaust might be a forgotten footnote.
If FDR had not taken us to war, he might have been impeached for lend-lease. When you succeed in a bold move like this, things that might get you in trouble otherwise go down the memory hole. I think that in some sense, this is the genius of the Bush administration, the one big idea they have -- do something and do it loud, even if it's a little bit crazy. Clinton spent all his time on small improvements and so you can't really point back at his time in office and point to one big thing that he did. That won't be true of Bush.

God help us.

[kevrob]

Andrea Lopez-Jones marries Ricardo O'Neal-Andreotti

And becomes Andrea Lopez y O'Neal, como no? Though I think you skip the conjunction in most of Latin America.

Grammar, like ettiquette, is a convention of consensus, arrived at to make life go smoother. An example, the French Acadamy accepted, of spontaneous order.

Kevin

[salvage]

ok, now let's move onto the logo. what the fuck? someone was playing katamari damacy stoned and decided to have a go at illustrator?

Yes.