Dichotomy...

Congratulations to Emily, who finished the last classes of her undergraduate career today!! Now just a brutal week of final exams to get though, and then it's all over! Except for the 3 hour commencement ceremony with Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin... Whee! Gameboy/mp3 player to the rescue! I don't understand why GT can't get someone better, or more, I dunno, influential? I'm sure they Mayor of Atlanta sounds impressive, much as Georgia Governor sounded impressive at my graduation. But let's face facts: you're delivering a commencement speech to what basically amounts to a group of young engineers (and other technically-minded inviduals who may not be engineers) who aren't going to care what most politicians have to say. Either get someone from the 80s that we can all identify with (Mr. T, MC Hammer), someone who's become succesful with technology in the late 90s and didn't get obliterated by the dot-com bust (Google founders, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos), someone more-or-less universally revered and/or a national hero (John McCain, Willie Nelson, Neil Armstrong). How about Jimmy Carter? A public university in Georgia really can't book Jimmy Carter for 3 hours? He was just on the Daily Show... If Comedy Central can get him, I'm sure Georgia Tech could. Oh well, at least Shirley Franklin was never a dawg... (I'm still bitter about Sonny Purdue, can you tell?)

Posted by Rev. Adam on Thursday, December 08, 2005 at 4:33 PM | Permalink