Glossary of Unusual Acronyms and Terms in TT

ANFSCD Is the acronym for "And Now For Something Completely Different" which in turn is a pattern and phrase created by the MPFC for their TV-Show the title of which provided the popular name of that group of people.

Rarely there are variants of it left in this blog:
ANTS-CD. We made this up to emphasize our being ants here, where "for" is replaced by "to" which might be not completely to the point in the English language. It should be And Now To Somthing - Completely Different, but we still do not know if it works.
ANFSNSCD: .. not so completely different. From there further variants can be guessed quite easily.

BCCE is the acronym for "Bad Chinese Communist Economists", a mysterious club of gals and guys striving for absolute improvement and domination of the world (AIDW).

BOGU is an acronym from Robert Scoble's Corporate Blog Manifesto. It is derived from "Bend over and grease up" meaning in the words of Mr. Scoble "you should treat Gnome Girl as good as you would treat Bill Gates". Scoble seems to think this is cool and ethic advice.

In reality though, derived from the metaphorical association pattern the phrase uses, it means two linked things: If someone wants to fuck you, don't deny them, suppress your pride, do not protest, don't call the police, no, be a good sex worker who always keeps the lube nearby and think of your own potential benefits like, for example, surviving.

If looked at closely it is a disgusting metaphor for the principle that it's a seemingly really good idea to treat customers extremely friendly all the time. Wenn investigating business ideas, we like to go remind ourselves of first principles and so gladly quote Mr. Peter Drucker who wrote, "The purpose of a business is to create a customer and keep him." They did not gender in Drucker's days, but indeed that is what we think the purpose of a business is.

Mr. Scoble's Blog is about corporate stuff. He might think that sex work is the oldest business around and therefore an excellent model for relations in business. That thought would be a basically wrong assumption from the 19th century, when every human relation began to look like a business for a number of middle and upper class men in Europe and Northern America.

It might also be that the thought of greasing up appealed to Mr. Scoble because you could use it as a metaphor for smoothing your language. Indeed we think that in the large majority of contact and relation cases in the corporate context, it is a good idea to use friendly language. And not just towards the "higher" echelons, but evenly in all direction.

But, and its a big or rather more than one but, first of all your colleagues, bosses and subordinates are not customers. In so far BOGU is a confusion of spheres. And second, there are places and times for real conflicts that must be worked through. Although Mr. Scoble's principle stays in the business sphere and does not confuse private relations and business relations, an ideology which we encounter more and more often, it mixes up 2 sorts of relations and uses a nauseating notion of human sex that backwardly suggests that the former mosten often is a trade where one man gets satisfaction and the woman or other man gets what the trader always aspires to, namely a profit, whatsoever.

Not everybody is a customer all the time. Some people love capitalism and the lessons they learned inside its machine so much that they start to think, talk and write about human interactions and relations that have nothing to do with the purposes of a business as if these where commercial activities in a money-regulated customer-business-person relationship. From there it not far to permanently act like that really were the case. Yukky!

tinytalk plc. rejects the principle thoroughly.

Cybernetics A holistic or complex rather than linear system view. A branch of mathematics addressing issues of control, recursiveness, and information.

DMB Definitely a Move to the Better

FMD and LMA First Mover Disadvantage and Last Mover Advantage, important business success patterns that we have predicted and that have proven themselves nicely in the last few years. Not deterministic but strong.

Foma Harmless (if anything is harmless) untruths. A word/concept made up by Bokonon (Lionel Boyd Johnson) who in turn was made up by Kurt Vonnegut in his novel Cat’s Cradle (See the cat, see the cradle?) "Live by the foma (harmless untruths) that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy." - The Books of Bokonon, I:5

Gestalt As used in Gestalt-Theory. A clearly discernible pattern before a background. As in "Gestalt and field" or as in "figure and ground".

Granfalloon A granfalloon is a formation of humans who claim to have a shared identity or purpose, but whose association is factually meaningless. According to its original discoverer, examples are: "the Communist Party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company —and any nation, anytime, anywhere." In Europe and historically correctly we could additionally name the Catholic church, most Protestant churches, the Cartellverband, probably the European Union, maybe the free masons and many many more.

GUVAIT To Be Defined

Karass Yet another important Bokononist concept – a formation of people who really work together - as opposed to a granfalloon, an association of people who just believe they work together.

Oh a sleeping drunkard up in Central Park
And a lion hunter in the jungle dark
And a Chinese dentist and the British queen
All fit together in the same machine
Nice, nice, very nice
Nice, nice, very nice
So many different people in the same device

KTMIFO pronounced kay-tee-myfo. Is the acronym for "The Krill that the Media Industry Feeds On". Intellectually deprecated and an endangered species. From Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson, his only really relevant book (1993), the exact quote being "You've probably heard the expression that the Industry feeds off of biomass like a whale straining krill from the ocean."

MPFC Monty Pythons's Flying Circus

OMPFs This one was created by CHL by copying a spontaneous expression of ours to his frozen blog: Overlapping Micro Publishing Fields.

PFKAA pronounced pee-eff-kaa, meaning: The People Formerly Known As The Audience, replaces the deprecated KTMIFO (see there).

RAT-RACE As in "the rat races the labyrinth", meaning the stimulus is so high, the rat does not walk or run the labyrinth, which it can do perfectly well, but is urged to race.

__self__ To Be Defined by __self__

RBTAMLGDL The Real Banking Tax Avoiding Money Laundring Grand-Duché of Luxembourg

Wampeter A wampeter is the pivot of a karass. No karass is without a wampeter, Bokonon tells us, just as no wheel is without a hub. Anything can be a wampeter: a tree, a rock, an animal, an idea, a book, a melody, the Holy Grail. Whatever it is, the members of its karass revolve about it in the majestic chaos of a spiral of nebula. the orbits of the members of a karass about their common wampeter are spiritual orbits, naturally. It is mind projections and not bodies that revolve. As Bokonon invites us to sing:

    Around and around and around we spin,
    with feet of lead and wings of tin.

And wampeters come and wampeters go, Bokonon tells us. At any given time a karass actually has two wampeters - one waxing in importance, one waning.

YAGCIG Yet Another Gutlessly Copied Image Grid. An Image Grid is one in a row of computer media designs that was a rare species in the nineteen nineties and seems to find more and more followers in the last few years. It needs to be done meticulously and with attention to detail, which seems to be hard to understand. We do not know why. In the mobile first social world it has become obsolete while the timeline has taken over.

BOGU

is an acronym from Robert Scoble's Corporate Blog Manifesto It is derived from "Bend over and grease up" meaning in the words of Mr. Scoble "you should treat Gnome Girl as good as you would treat Dave Winer" or, more prosaically, it's a good marketing idea to be extremely friendly to everybody all the time.

5WS: Five Word Speeches

FPP (Former Popstar Prince) got a webby award for his lifetime achievements. Played acoustic guitar too.

Award winners had to hold 5 word speeches. Amongst the slightly crampies from Bob Kahn, the Gorillaz, Tom Friedman and others his "Everything you think is true" seems to be slightly overphilosophical.

We did not look through all of them but still like to mention "I proposed, elizabeth said.. YES" and "In your face, my space" as standing out.

A Granfalloon

is a group of people who believe they work together, claiming to have a shared identity or purpose, but is actually meaningless in terms of fulfilling God's design. As examples, Vonnegut cites: "the Communist Party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows, the United States of America or any other nation."

Karass

Yet another important Bokononist concept - a group of people that really work together as opposed to granfalloon, a group of people that believe they work together.

Oh a sleeping drunkard up in Central Park And a lion hunter in the jungle dark And a Chinese dentist and the British queen All fit together in the same machine Nice, nice, very nice Nice, nice, very nice So many different people in the same device