Mergers

The past few months, the term "merger" has been sitting heavily in my mind. The company I am currently employed with operates on a charter from a larger entity. Last year it was decided that our company will have to merge with a neighboring franchise in order to be effective and keep up with the times.

Unfortunately, that means there were some redundancies in the staffing structure, including my position. So from my point of view, doing a full scale job search and facing the predicament of unemployment as the sole income earner in our family, the word "merger" carries a negative connotation.

Perhaps it is for this reason that I find so annoying the business of merging the names of celebrity couples to form one singular Hollywood train wreck. Brangelina. Bennifer. Tomkat. Who officially approved this style of defiling the English language? I don't remember there ever being a bill brought before Congress, or as some might now call it, the Represenators or the Senatatives. And yet it's caught on like wildfire.

It is all the rage now to blur the lines between male and female. If you are involved in a relationship you are fair game. Even those with short names are not immune. Viewers of NBC's The Office take the masculine character Jim and the feminine character Pam and turn it into the hermaphroditic "Jam". Blech. And as my NAFTAline collaborator, Winged Lion, pointed out a few days ago, even Superman is not invulnerable to these attacks on his manhood. Fans of Smallville are witnesses and sometimes even the perpetrators of the brutal feminization of the Clark name. Chlark, Clois, Clana...lets just make Superman's costume hot pink why don't we?

I don't know if I speak for my fellow NAFTAliners, or Wingoscunk, as we sometimes call ourselves, but I personally feel that this name-merging is a scourge that must be stopped. Jamming two words together never leads to an end result that is respectable. Stop the presses! Did I just imply that the celebrity marriages of Ben Afflek, Jennifer Lopez, Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes, etc. are respectable!!? What am I thinking? I'm sorry, please disregard everything I just said.

P.S. As a side note I just wanted to announce that after two years of intellectually deficient performance, I've decided to delete my Oscar the Grouch Myspace account. Anyone who kept in contact with me via Myspace can now find me at my new account, run jointly with my wife, Glory. Or as some people call us, Osclory. Or Gloscar. Whatever you prefer.