Can Mondays be the new Fridays?

(Credit: The Diagram)

Here's an infographic map from thediagram.com that charts any number of occurrences of the ubiquitous marketing buzz phrase "is the new" from throughout the year 2005.

Among them: South Korea is the new Hong Kong, nepotism is the new polio, Samsung is the new Sony, RSS is the new WWW, Karl Lagerfeld is the new Steve Jobs, and cocoa is the new red wine. (No, it isn't.) Tuesday is the new Thursday, but everybody knew that already. And knitting is apparently the new rock 'n roll, a trend which thankfully appears to have disappeared with 2005. No offense to hardcore knitters, but the "I'm going to knit because it's so ironically cool" thing just didn't float.

At the center is a sort of vortex composed of everything that's supposed to be, naturally, the new black. Click here for the big version.

(Via Information Aesthetics)

[mikele11111]

Are you kidding?

Karl Lagerfeld the new Steve Jobs? Somebody is smoking crack.

[devbost]

And by that, you mean...

...that fashion is the new crack. Right? :)

[DavyBoyWonder]

Canada the new Estonia?

Third world? Just wait for this whole sub-prime mortgage ball to get rolling. We'll see whose the new Estonia.

[albertsoler]

Smart is the new Stupid

Too many bloggers and so-called real journalists (Is there such a thing anymore?) are competing to be the "smartest" or "cleverest" writer on the planet. Any second rate programmer can write a "dumb" program to automatically fill in the phrase:

%s1 is the new %s2.

Even that simple bit of code would be considered to be rather insipid. So, bloggers and journalist beware, whenever you conjure up a new "...is the new..." phrase, we're laughing at you.

[thedreaming]

Doesn't Microsoft...

...already use the words, "The Social" for their zune marketing?

[_t3h]

Done (in 3 lines)

Any second rate programmer can do it of course, but how short? (moving the open() line into
"words" on the next line does work, but makes it much slower as the wordlist is reloaded for
each print). Now somebody put this in as a CGI on a webpage and let them crawl it :)

#!/usr/bin/env python
import random
words = open("/usr/share/dict/words",'r').read().split("
")
for a in range(10): print "%s is the new %s" % tuple(random.sample(words,2))

(kill the top one if you want 3, but then you can't execute it from the shell)