Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Oscar Picks

My Oscar picks column is up over at the 'Porter. A word of warning: if you liked The Aviator, don't read it. My friend Jenn can barely stand to look at me now.

Comments:
How would one rank bad decisions if one were to take severity and consequence completely out of the equation?
 
If you knew before you did something that it was a bad idea, and still did it; let's say you were trying to decide between two hotels on your vacation; one was ranked marginally higher, but the other was marginally cheaper. So, you chose the cheaper one (even though you could have afforded the other one; you just decided to be a bit miserly), and, pretty much everthing that can possibly go wrong ends up happening, and your vacation, to which you've been looking forward for ages, is ruined.

Now, let's say someone whom you happed to know is a terrible cook offers you some food; you smell it, and it smells awful. Still, you eat some. And it tastes just god-awful; you have to have a glass of something to drink just to get the horrible taste out of your mouth.

The consequences of the hotel decision were much more severe, but, you could be forgiven for choosing the cheaper one; it's tough to call that a horrible decision as opposed to a decision that worked out badly.

The food decision, however, was a terrible, terrible decision, because the food looked bad and smelled even worse, but you ate it anyway, and sure enough, it was wretched.

That's sort of what I meant.
 
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