Mitigating the madness

This post is dedicated to my wonderful husband, because as soon as Korean Air 214 went down a few days ago, I said to him, "Gladwell is sitting in some Manhattan apartment with his furry head bobbing at his TV set as he's thinking to himself, 'Uh-huh. Yup.'"  And then I forced my husband to sit and listen to me read aloud part of Gladwell's corresponding essay in the same manner as I had inflicted on our daughter just two months ago. 

"Mitigating the munchies" was a post in which I scrounged up a link to a copyright-questionable PDF of Gladwell's "The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes". 

My purpose with that post was to draw stark analogy between the crash-and-burn mentality that had previously characterized certain air carriers based in strongly-mitigated cultures, and our own all-American crash-and-burn mentality that characterizes our en masse over-consumption of food. 

Screengrab from "Mitigating the munchies".  We, too, could realize substantial gains if we dispensed with the distorted table manners that have strangely come to see as normal. 

Now with the crash of Asiana 214, there is renewed interest in Gladwell's original essay on the deleterious impacts of speech mitigation.  Dollars to donuts (don't eat too many), the fact that this recent crash involved a Korean airline is not an accident, and the investigators are going to find a speech mitigation component to that tragedy. 

But who'da thunk in the midst of all of this that I might have ever risen to such stratospheric search engine heights as to come in #3 on anyone's Gladwell Google??  I'm a microscopic blog star in my own unmitigated eyes.
:-)