And the Award for Most Insipid Comment Goes To...

For some reason Westwood is currently full of tour groups consisting of (I assume) incoming foreign students.  I understand the tour part, but it's still a month until classes start, so it seems early.  I couldn't pass up mentioning one comment I heard from one of the group leaders, which was, close to verbatim:

Here in America, we don't have phones anymore, everyone has a cell phone.  In fact, the only public phone I know of is this one right here.

This was, of couse, delivered in an loud, slow monotone, the time-honored method used by all monolingual Americans for communicating with foreigners.  NO...I WANT A HAMBURGER.  HAM-BURG-ER.  Okay, it's a tour group, maybe she wasn't overly loud.  But moving on to the content, this is the most insipid comment I have witnessed in ages.  You have to admire it in a way, the craftsmanship, the compact efficiency, the multiple layers of idiocy.  Go ahead and try to say something this stupid in fewer syllables.  You can't.  Unless you're Katie Couric, who still holds the world record for her 2004 Olympics comment that "Swaziland is called the Switzerland of Africa, not only because of it's similar sounding name, but because of it's mountains and neutrality."  And before you jump all over me, I put that erroneous apostrophe in "its" because that's the way Katie Couric said it. 

I mean, "all Americans have cell phones"?  Really?  And I love the implicit assumption that foreign students must be, at best, only dimly aware of the existence of cellular communication.  Yes, they all left their mud huts a few months ago and hopped on bamboo rafts, floating to California while subsisting on a diet of twigs and beetles.  Plus, the bonus "only public phone I know of" comment is great.  You just know there's some story there, that her parents' BMW broke down late one night in Westwood, a whole mile from their home in Beverly Hills, while her cell phone's battery was dead, and she wandered the mean streets until she found this one pay phone.  She might have had to walk otherwise, and someone from high school might have seen her using the sidewalk, like a poor person or something.

Still, an attempt was made to top her when a different tour guide I passed (I tells ya, they're all over the place today) referred to California Pizza Kitchen as a "great pizza place."  He tried his best, but I don't think he topped his colleague.  I almost want to wander about and hear some more.  Will anyone call Jerry's Deli "my favorite restaurant?"  Will anyone try to explain the concept of crosswalk signals, which of course are far too sophisticated to exist in the students' home nations?  If one of the students says she is an Indian from Mumbai, will the guide apologize profusely for "stealing all your land?"  How do these people get in to freakin' college?

Comments

[amy]

I like the fact that the tour guide thinks that cell phones are not phones. I think the real advantage goes to people who don't have cell phones because they actuallly know peoples' phone numbers. When I got locked out of the Lamont phone banking office with my cell inside (yes, irony) the only person I could call was my mom -- I seriously didn't know ANYONE else's phone number. (Thankfully I knew *her* cell and she was at a different Lamont office so she could tell her people to call my people and let me in...)

But more to the point, CPK is not great pizza. Even though it can now be found on the East coast. That's all. Oh, and congrats DR. Codswallop!

[Susan Owen]

To give the second tour guide the benefit of the doubt, CPK could be accurately called a "great pizza place". If you look up "great" in the Merriam Websters online dictionary, here are the first three definitions of "great"

1 a : notably large in size : HUGE b : of a kind characterized by relative largeness

CPK's are HUGE. Amongst the relatively largest pizza places I have been in.

2 a : large in number or measure : NUMEROUS b : PREDOMINANT

CPK's are large in number, even on the East Coast now.

3 : remarkable in magnitude, degree, or effectiveness

Considering the quality of their pizza, it is remarkable the magnitude of their chain.

Actually, I find CPK pizza perfectly edible...but I agree that it is not *great* pizza, where here I will specify that I am using Merriam Webster's 5th definition of great:

5 a : EMINENT, DISTINGUISHED b : chief or preeminent over others.

Anyway, I'm just saying...maybe the second tour guide wasn't so off. :-)

Sue

[thebizofknowledge]

It really is amazing to hear the types of ignorant, ill-informed, or just plain erroneous statements those in the public eye make without seeming to realize how stupid they make themselves appear by doing so!