I have never before heard an adult call him- or herself a genius. Never, and especially including the people I’ve been lucky enough to know who arguably really are.
Except ironically, say after driving through a closed garage door.
We have surely entered a new and very strange world.
Author: Michael O'Hare
Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, Michael O'Hare was raised in New York City and trained at Harvard as an architect and structural engineer. Diverted from an honest career designing buildings by the offer of a job in which he could think about anything he wanted to and spend his time with very smart and curious young people, he fell among economists and such like, and continues to benefit from their generosity with on-the-job social science training. He has followed the process and principles of design into "nonphysical environments" such as production processes in organizations, regulation, and information management and published a variety of research in environmental policy, government policy towards the arts, and management, with special interests in energy, facility siting, information and perceptions in public choice and work environments, and policy design. His current research is focused on transportation biofuels and their effects on global land use, food security, and international trade; regulatory policy in the face of scientific uncertainty; and, after a three-decade hiatus, on NIMBY conflicts afflicting high speed rail right-of-way and nuclear waste disposal sites. He is also a regular writer on pedagogy, especially teaching in professional education, and co-edited the "Curriculum and Case Notes" section of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. Between faculty appointments at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, he was director of policy analysis at the Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs. He has had visiting appointments at Università Bocconi in Milan and the National University of Singapore and teaches regularly in the Goldman School's executive (mid-career) programs. At GSPP, O'Hare has taught a studio course in Program and Policy Design, Arts and Cultural Policy, Public Management, the pedagogy course for graduate student instructors, Quantitative Methods, Environmental Policy, and the introduction to public policy for its undergraduate minor, which he supervises. Generally, he considers himself the school's resident expert in any subject in which there is no such thing as real expertise (a recent project concerned the governance and design of California county fairs), but is secure in the distinction of being the only faculty member with a metal lathe in his basement and a 4×5 Ebony view camera. At the moment, he would rather be making something with his hands than writing this blurb. View all posts by Michael O'Hare
Wikipedia entry for Gröfaz:
"German soldiers' derogatory acronym for Größter Feldherr aller Zeiten, a title initially publicized by Nazi propaganda to refer to Adolf Hitler during the early war years; literally, the "Greatest Field Commander of all Time"."
I don't however think the megalomaniac Hitler coined this himself.
Leo Rosten (The Joys of Yiddish, 1968) also had his number, but Rosten misspelled his name:
trombenik
trombenyik
Pronounced TROM-beh-nik, to rhyme with "Brahma kick," or TRAUM-beh-nik, to rhyme with "brawn the pick" From the
Polish, and/ or Yiddish: tromba: "a trumpet," "a brass horn."
1. A blowhard, a braggart, a blower of his own horn. "That trombenik can drive you crazy."
2. A glutton.
3· A lazy man or woman; a ne'er-do-well.
4· A parasite.
5· A fake, a phony, a four-flusher.
Any way you look at it, trombenik is not a word of praise. A trombenik is part of the raucous gallery of nudniks, sbleppers, and
paskudnyaks.
__________________
"I," boasted the trombenik, "have been to Europe three times in the past two years."
"So? I come from there."
So, are you suggesting "Trumpenik?" As a bonus, it has a kind of Russian ring to it.
Well, there was Muhammad Ali, neé Cassius Clay, who called himself "The Greatest", etc., the athletic equivalent to "genius". Man, I miss that guy.
He backed it up. Watch a few of his fights before being exiled to Canada. I mean, The three Frazier fights were epic (Thrilla in Manila one of the top five all-time), and the Rumble In The Jungle was wonderful theater, but as a slender young cobra in 1965, 1966, he was just RIDONKULOUS!! And a genius, in his own way, though kinda dumb in other ways. Trade-offs.
I don't follow boxing, but I was a fan since before he turned pro.
It has to be said that in his own misguided way, Trump has backed it up, too. To me, his more questionable claim is to stability.
I don't follow boxing either. But …. have you watched _When We Were Kings_? It is only tangentially about boxing (the Ali-Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle"). It's -really- about following this young -prince- as he prepares for the fight. And Ali *was* a prince. The man had a way with words that is even today stunning, thrilling, awe-inspiring.
He was a prince. It staggers the imagination, that a man with his mind (and hence with his brain) had it smashed into mush just so he could earn a living.
So yeah, he was The Greatest. Or at least, there's *no* way that you can compare Tangerine Trombenik (h/t Mike Maltz) to Muhammad Ali.
Oh, yes, I've seen WWWK. Great stuff.
Agreed.
I know a few middling intellects who will regularly mention their membership in MENSA. To which I invariably reply: "ewwww, you like North American man love with young boys????"
Did you know that Trump works the TV Guide crossword puzzle? In pen? Not only that, he's way smarter than the puzzle and frequently has to add boxes to fit the correct word. And the misspellings! If the TV Guide can't spell the words in the clues right — and they can't — you can imagine how many of the boxes are wrong because TV Guide didn't know how to spell something as simple as "tapp." (And by the way, "covfefe" is a crossword puzzle word, which you would know if you were as smart as Trump.)
"Him or herself.."
It looks as if the use of the plural pronoun they and derived forms as a gender-neutral singular is gaining ground and is now standard in some circles. Like genuine grammar expert Geoff Pullum at Language Log, I can go along with this as long as the antecedent is a gender-neutral noun like "adult". Pullum ran into a dreadful PC assault for declining to use the form with a proper name like "Patrick" as antecedent. Insensitive to transgender people! That is, the tiny subset of transgender people who don't know which of the traditional two they really are. Those who undergo sex change operations are not in any doubt.
To be clear: everybody should try to avoid needlessly offending people they (see!) encounter. The amount of effort it is sensible to devote to this depends on the estimated frequency of the potentially offended group in one's circle of acquaintance or audience. The case of safe spaces in academia is parallel. A teacher of criminal law is very likely to have victims of sexual assault in their (see!) class, and should therefore give advance notice of potentially painful discussions of the law of rape. Adherents of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster will be rare, and it's up to them to advise the teacher of their no-go areas. Common sense goes a long way here.
Oh, come on. The smarter you are, the more loudly, urgently, and repeatedly you need to tell people around you how smart you are. Everyone knows that!