It's a bad thing. The effort to be smartest person in the room often
leads to reasonable sounding but utterly asinine, or at least
uninformed, conclusions. I know this because I'm recovering from the
syndrome, acquired during my tenure as newspaper columnist and
editorial writer. I go to meetings where I stand up and say, "Hi, I'm
Bob, I'm the smartest person in the room." Everyone else then says,
"Hi, Bob, you're full of shit." And so it goes. Because everyone in
the room says, "Hi, I'm ____, I'm the smartest person in the room,"
you know someone isn't being truthful, or at least that someone is,
ah, wrong. It teaches humility, which is a good thing for persons
with an abundance of hubris.
Which compels me to confess that I didn't read the Slate article
carefully, but concluded that the writer was mostly writing in his
familiar ruts. The collapse of the business is more systemic than
rich folks deciding to eat Spam instead of lobster. That said, I
noticed no reduction in the price of lobster rolls during the latter
stages of this year's season, so the spirit of greed and avarice is
still alive and well. On the up side, we now can go get our own
lobsters very cheaply and make our own lobster rolls. A bit more
messy and time consuming, but infinitely more rewarding.
And it is nice to know that even with falling gas prices, a lobster
is still cheaper than a gallon. <g>
--Bob Whitmire
www.bwp33.com
On Oct 31, 2008, at 2:37 AM, siddiq@xxxxxxx wrote:
> Sorry, don't quite follow--is that a good thing or a bad thing?
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