grylliade.org Free minds. Free markets. Free beer.

FTR - AFAIK Kerry Howley never took any action against anyone. Like all smoking hot babes, she never had to. There was always a swarm of men ready to jump to defend the honor she didn't seem to take any interest in herself.

Rana, it means the point in a work or institution where it only goes downhill afterwards. It's named after the shark-jumping moment in Happy Days, at which point the show was on a downhill slide.

The decline of H&R (and reason in general) saddens me. reason and H&R (and by extension a lot of people here) played a big role in me becoming a libertarian.

Some people understand the "jump the shark" meme to refer to the shape of a shark's dorsal fin (gradually going up before dropping precipitously), which makes more sense to me. But yes, it was originally in reference to the Happy Days episode.

Sorry, this thread just sounds like a bunch of grumpy seniors complaining over the crib board about "how thinks were better in the old days."

People aren't talking about "culture" in general though.

Jumping the shark is applied to specific instances of culture. You can't just invoke the general cyclical nature of culture when talking about specific manifestations of culture. To place it in its original context, there are, for example, television shows that were good to a point then got worse and never reached their original heights. If the US ceases to be a major power and then rises again in seventy-five years to be great, it doesn't mean that the latter parts of certain shows will suddenly get better. Not to mention in many cases, the reality of death kind of seals the deal. A performer who ends up going down hill for whatever reason has a finite time to get their quality back before the Reaper comes calling.

In regards to specific manifestations of culture, sometimes things really were better in the old days.

Good point bzial. In this case the specific manifestation of culture, is the quality of discourse at Hit and Run. I'm tempted to say that it has suffered from an abundance of trolls. However, thinking back, H&R has always had it's resident trolls. The level of conversation was improved by the better commenters engaging with each other. I think what has happened is not so much that the board has been taken over by bad comments, as cluttered by mediocre comments. I think it's an illustration of my Theory of Life: Nothing Ruins A Good Thing Like Success_TM

*shrug* All I am suggesting is the idea that a given thing can get worse with time and in the case of something narrow in scope may never recover its quality. The overall implications for that may vary from person to person and situation to situation.

Well, I still think HnR is great. It doesn't have the pull on me that it did when I stopped lurking the boards(I started in 03) and started posting(I started that in 08), but I understand that my perspective has changed.

If you didn't know about the Happy Days episode, how could you understand the reference? The other one is universal and transcends cultural, linguistic, and hygenic barriers to join humanity in a warm fuzzy embrace of cynicism. I would suggest that we try to use the concept of jumping the shark to communicate with extraterrestrials as well, but communicating with extraterrestrials itself jumped the shark sometime in the early 80s.

If you don't know about the Happy Days episode, you aren't worth talking to. And eventually it'll take on meaning independent, largely already has. It will be an expression that no longer makes sense.

When Jennifer chased off Linguist in that age of consent thread.

I "chased off" nobody. I just got tired of accussations that, since I oppose certain age-of-consent laws, that means I think it should be legal for people to rape twelve-year-olds. (Or rape anybody, for that matter.)

So who drove the speedboat that towed the lion that jumped the shark that lived in the house that Jack built?

Incidentally, I'm never bitter about English usage, nor do I have a tendency to drive things into the ground.

For all intensive purposes, I suppose so.

What's all this about tense porpoises wearing Supp-Hose? [/Emily Litella]

I could care less, irregardless.

While I do think that H&R has gone downhill (and so has Reason Magazine to a certain extent), the use of the term "cosmotarian" by the Lew Rockwell crowd is amusing and sort of ironic considering they often take the stereotypical cookie-cutter/Beltway libertarian view on issues like corporations, transportation and labor. By contrast, you'll see more varied and nuanced opinions on these issues in the magazine as well as among its readers. But I suppose they don't like that very much.