You may question whether I have the credentials to teach, gentle reader, and to this end I’ve prepared a two-part series on my professorial background. The first installment, unveiled below for your scrutiny, is the transcript of a recent interview aired on NPR’s All Things Inconsiderate.
—–BEGIN TRANSCRIPTION—–
NPR: I’d like to welcome Fortune Magazine’s Man of the Year and foremost authority on educational policy, CEO.
CEO: Thanks. I’m happy to be here.
NPR: As are we. I know you’re a busy man, so–
CEO: Not at all, not at all. You know, I looked my boss in the eye this morning and said, “I really need to share my ideas with the public at large. Can I leave early?” And he said, “Why not? Heck, I’ll give you time-and-a-half.” What a boss, right? Oh, wait. I am the boss.
NPR: [strained laughter] Right. Now back to the topic at hand. Education: does it begin at home or abroad?
CEO: Wait, so this isn’t Gambler’s Anonymous? Because I’m giving up three-legged cat curling championships. For good this time, I swear. Come to think of it, how did you know my name?
NPR: No, no, no. This is NPR. And you must be kidding about the name. I mean, who in their right mind would name their child “CEO”?
CEO: Why, the gall! First of all, I never knew my parents, you insensitive prick. Second of all, how is CEO any different from NPR? I mean, I know NPR stands for National Pubic Radio, and that’s probably why you hide it under an acronym. What if I have something to hide as well, huh?
NPR: Um, that’s National Public Radio, sir.
CEO: I heard you the first time, bucko. Natural Pubic Radio. Got it. Look, can we start over again?
NPR: [sighs] Sounds good to me.
CEO: Great. Hi, I’m Fortune Maga—
NPR: We can skip that part.
CEO: Fine. Let’s talk education.
NPR: You’ve no doubt noticed how many companies are turning abroad for labor. Do you think education will follow suit?
CEO: How do you mean?
NPR: Well, take college education, for instance. Studying abroad has traditionally been ancillary–
CEO: Ancillary! He said the “A” word, folks. I love that word. So dirty.
NPR: Ahem. As I was saying, studying abroad has traditionally been ancillary to a liberal arts education. Do you think the presumption will shift? Will studying abroad become the tradition?
CEO: How do you mean?
NPR: I just explained myself. Will education be rooted abroad?
CEO: Do elaborate. This is fascinating.
NPR: You don’t know what that word means, do you?
CEO: Huh?
NPR: Abroad.
CEO: Oh, sure I do. It means flying to Canada. Or Guam.
NPR: You moron! There’s a whole world out there. What about Thailand, India, China…?
CEO: China? I’ve heard of it, sure. I think my alarm clock came from there, along with most of my other possessions. I think my pants came from Honduras, though. Have you heard of that place?
NPR: [silence]
CEO: And India? I heard your job is flying there for the winter. Not that a single Brazilian treefrog and a crack team of Belgian gerbils couldn’t handle it, of course.
NPR: Get him off the air.
CEO: Hey, do you know how a DWeeD works?
NPR: Get him off the air!
CEO: Fine. Get ready to be bought out and fired, chump. In that order.
—–END TRANSCRIPTION—–
Unfortunately, dear reader, that’s the only transcript I have for you. It’s not the best one by any stretch of the imagination, but all my other transcripts were lost in the Great Fire of Fifteen Minutes Ago.
Although I receive pounds upon pounds of correspondence on an hourly basis, gentle reader, many pieces of mail are suspiciously shaped like bombs or other incendiary devices. Every once in a while, however, I receive a gem of a letter, a missive so articulate it makes me appreciate my investors all the more.
Dear Professor,
I very much enjoyed your latest entry. I think the DweeD is definitely marketable in the same vein as abridged versions of classic novels. For example, you don’t need to read all of The Grapes of Wrath. You just need to know that there are some rotting oranges in the beginning, a lot of dust in the middle, and a woman breastfeeding a grown man in a barn at the end. The same editing technique could be applied to the film version of the novel. Though for younger or more sensitive viewers, the ending could be lopped off entirely and replaced with more shots of rotting fruit.
Plus, with today’s ever truncated attention spans, no one wants to sit through a 2 hour movie anymore. I mean, I for one —
Lost my train of thought. Time to hit up the vending machine!
Kind regards,
Gentlest Reader
I couldn’t agree more, Gentlest Reader. Like your namesake, your theories are indeed superlative. If I may, though, I’d like to elaborate, not that you could’ve stopped me in the first place. My stable of graduate degrees allows me to wax metaphysical at the drop of a hat.
Literature–or, as I like to put it, litterature–wastes both time and paper. Why did Steinbeck fill his treatise on rotting fruit with inconveniences such as personimification? I propose we synthesize your two ideas and produce a book with naught but a few images of rotting fruit, dust, and breastfeeding. Cue endpaper. If you think that’s profound, consider splitting the title into two parts. You’d have The Grapes on the front cover and Of Wrath on the back cover. It’s like getting two books in one, but that’s just my advanced marketing degree speaking.
I know the folks at Cliff’s Notes are probably frothing at the opportunity to write a study guide for this truncated classic, so I’d like to preempt their enthusiasm. I plan on releasing my own guides under the label TruncaNötz. While they may resemble single sheets of paper with pithy lines of text scrawled on them (Don’t even try, punk. You’re going to fail the English quiz tomorrow.), they’ll also be affordable and pocket-sized.
It is also imperative that I scold Gentlest Reader–I suppose they’re just coarser down in Buenos Aires–and my PR Department for introducing “breastfeeding” to the exchange. This concept may be too graphic for our younger readers, so allow me to paint it in rosier terms. Breastfeeding, to play it euphemistically, simply means to nourish someone. From the tit.
A cashier at the local supermarket asked me whether I am a professor, a piercing question that only confirmed my mission to pollinate the Webiverse with hypotheses unbounded. The most pressing matter on my mind right now, gentle reader, is whether a market exists for shortened movies. I started thinking about this while attempting to watch Lost in Translation a second time, and as a side note I failed to do so. Chalk one up for being too uncultured, I suppose.
Now what if the movie–and most movies in general–were only, say, 50 minutes in length? Instead of a DVD, instead of a major time investment, you would have a DWeeD, a new standard that would give films the punch of a trailer and enough medium to house a profound message. Or just some really fiery explosions. What if you priced these DWeeD’s at $5.99 and distributed them through convenience stores, supermarkets, and the Targets of the world? Hey, I would buy one. That’s all the market research I need. I am Jack’s entrepreneurial spirit.