"Thank You for Showing Me the Futility of Human Endeavor"

Actually a Swedish bartender's response to Bart Simpson's prank call, but also a good thing to say if you ever called-out in a seminar.

In the presentations and workshops I attend, there is no shortage of egos who desperately need their pomposity deflated, and to gain the perspective that ultimately the work they do matters very little.  Remind them that "...All is vanity; What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?"

Reminder: All is Vanity.  Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

The failed handshakes of French president François Hollande

Les défaillances... Mon Dieu!

In high school we agreed that the worst possible diss is when you offer out your hand but the other guy makes no move to take it, so that you have to withdraw rejected.  When the other person just doesn't notice is mostly devoid of insult - just that you're not important enough to have their attention - but you feel as sheepish with your hand out unmet.  Much worse is when your whole country world sees this happen.

Deep Dark Fears, Illustrated

The website Deep Dark Fears illustrates (often irrational) fears than readers submit.  It's someone reassuring to see that some of my common worries aren't mine alone. Especially now in Cambridge's icy season, I've had enough almost-slips to totally have this one, too:

Another variation of this fear is that I'll slip and my leg will fall out into the street - oddly just my leg - and be run over by a truck.

If I were to submit, I'd send my long-had fear that when I see an unfamiliar insect, I worry that it's actually a pregnant alien queen beginning an invasion.  I imagine Earth overrun with giant insect hordes and feel the regret of having not squashed it and prevented all that misery when I had the chance (I usually squash it).

Younger me would send in the fear that swallowing a watermelon seed would cause a melon to grow inside of me, and I'd either die from as the vines growing into my throat suffocate me or the growing watermelon stomach cancer bursts me out from within like Alien.

W.M.B.s

Back in grad school our first-semester macroeconomics professor assigned William Easterly's critique of development efforts, The Elusive Quest for Growth.  I so appreciated his accounts of failed efforts due to unintended consequences that on my own I later read Easterly's follow-up book, The White Man's Burden, with titled borrowed from Rudyard Kipling's poem.  I read a chunk of it during an airline flight - I took my seat and pulled it out, and minutes later my definitely non-white seatmate joined me.  If you ever have to explain a title like that you've already lost, so I spent the entirety of the flight consciously hiding any trace of the book title (else, "Oh, so I'm your burden now??!" )

Over this past long MLK weekend I read Stanley Karnow's In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines about (obviously) the American experience in the Philippines, which I've always wanted to learn more about, particularly the Philippine war immediately after American took possession.  Karnow mentioned several times that Kipling's poem was actually written to encourage American imperialism in the Philippines after the Spanish-American war which won the islands for the U.S. (with the subtitle the poem is actually called "The White Man's Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands").  Karnow included a knowing vignette touching the ironies of black U.S. soldiers sent to fight in that war: 

By the summer of 1899, straining the levels set by Congress, some sixty thousand Americans were serving in the Philippines, and a year later their number had grown to more than seventy-five thousand - three quarters of the entire U.S. Army.  They included two Negro regiments known as "buffalo soldiers," a label pinned on them by the Indians, whom they had fought in the West.  "What are you coons doing here?" a bystander shouted as they landed in Manila - the which one of the blacks replied, "We've come to take up the white man's burden."