George W. Bush
Interestingly enough, in the title essay about how dogs react to human movement, George W. Bush becomes the subject of study resulting in metaphor. It is analysis of his manner of moving when giving a speech. The metaphor does not reach; it is soundly based in the firmament that the best simile is the most universally understood simile:
“He moves like a boy, which is fine, except that, unlike such movement masters as Reagan and Clinton, he can’t stop moving like a boy when the occasion demands a more grown-up response.”
A Short History of Blondes
“Hair Dye and the Hidden History of Postwar America” is an expansive overview the way in which marketing, buying and social acceptance of dying hair has changed in the decades following World War II. Some younger readers might be surprised to know that the author’s metaphorical association with dying dark hair blonde is not his own, but based on the reality of the era:
“Shirley Polykoff always dyed her hair, even in the days when the only women who went blond were chorus girls and hookers.”
The Quarterback Problem
The Quarterback Problem is a metaphor that derives its name from the impossibility of accurately predicting which high-performing quarterbacks in high school will excel in college and which high-performing quarterbacks in college will excel in the NFL. It is applicable to a number of other professions and is metaphor for the inability for any data to accurately predict how someone will do in the job until they are actually doing the job.
Haiti
Ben Fountain is a novelist looking for a subject. He begins to subconsciously develop an interest in Haiti and starts collecting information from everywhere about everything. The fascination grows to obsession and the obsession is based on Haiti as metaphor:
“It’s like a laboratory, almost. Everything that’s gone on in the last five hundred years—colonialism, race, power, politics, ecological disasters—it’s all there in very concentrated form.”
Plagiarism
The essay on the subject of plagiarism reveals a number of astonishing examples songs that sound very similar as well as plagiarized writing. But the subject is not plagiarism itself as a sin, but whether the punishment outweighs the crime because of the fluid nature of creative expression. That fluid nature is put into startlingly succinct metaphorical image:
“Creative property, Lessig reminds us, has many lives — the newspaper arrives at our door, it becomes part of the archive of human knowledge, then it wraps fish.”
