New Poll: Last Call for a Meaningful Result of Some Sort

We find ourselves oddly committed to having just one successful poll here in the DoD.  We decided that our previous failures in polling may issue from our neglecting to ask sufficiently deep and compelling questions.  So we thought we’d give it just one more go and ask something with real significance and urgency.  To wit:

                  What is that thing in the departmental fridge?

A)    The Ding an Sich

B)    A chicken killed with an ox cleaver

C)    Bodhidharma’s eyelids

D)    The fermenting tears of our department chair

E)    Laozi’s uncarved block (block of what, we still don’t know)

F)    Jeremy Bentham

Poll “Results” – Top 5 Living Deviants

We here in the DoD apparently do not know when to stop making bad worse and decided to try running one more poll.  As readers will recall, we asked you to send along your selections for our list of the Top 5 Living Deviants.  After seeing what came over the transom, we were going to pretend like this never happened, but then decided to go ahead and look foolish for asking.

With great sheepishness but no further ado, the results:

#1:  What do you mean by “living?”  Readers wanted urgently to know whether the qualifications for being a “Top Living Deviant” entail that one needed merely to be biologically alive or whether some more vivid and ambitious specification is in order.  Sure, lots of deviants are living, but how many, they implored, are LIVING?

#2:  The ones with the tallest ladders.  Some readers, still unsatisfied with our use of “top,” decided to treat our height metaphors for quality literally.  To them, we say, what about the deviants with bucket trucks?  The bucket truck blessed would look down on your puny ladders if only they weren’t so busy kissing the clouds.  Take that, you literal minded chain-yankers.

#3:    Zhuangzi.  As readers well know, Zhuangzi has been dead for a couple of millennia.  But apparently for some, no matter how long he’s been dead, Zhuangzi abides.

#4:  Does it come with money and research leave?  Apparently several respondents mistook our poll for a fellowship application.  At any rate, their interest in who is “top” diminishes radically once they find out there’s no money or leave in it.  To them, we can only say, sorry.  We here in the DoD have nothing to offer but our love and affection.

#5:  If this poll was a person, I’d punch it in the face.  Must you folks in the Zen contingent continuously invoke traditional Zen practices of short-circuiting hyperanalytical thinking with blows?  The rest of us have only words to work with, and you’re making us jealous and resentful. 

Top Deviant Journals Poll Results!

Readers will have been waiting with bated breath to see the results of our first go at running a poll here at the DoD.  To recall, we asked readers to weigh in on how to rank journals of Deviance, with the hope of identifying those journals we should consider “top” or, when we should be super impressed, “top notch.”

Without further ado, here are the results:

#1:  It Depends.  This, for the uninitiated, is not the name of a journal (though it really should be), but apparently our readers thought that given the radical breadth of deviance, it is unlikely that any one journal will excel in deviance, full stop.  So what journal will be best largely depends on what flavor of deviance you pursue.  (Defeats all other possibilities in a condorcet bloodbath of unimaginable proportions.)

#2:  What Happened to your Vocabulary?  Alas, this too is not a journal, but apparently a way of readers registering dismay with our use of simplistic and, we must face it, imaginatively impoverished words such as “top” and “top notch” to refer to wildly complex judgments of quality regarding journals.  Still, we think our readers are top notch for pointing this out and henceforth resolve to try to be better.

#3:  The One that Accepted my Paper.  Here we are convinced that readers are just yanking our chain.  But since they are our readers, we’re confident that any journal taking their work must indeed be the bomb.

#4:  I Like Taking Polls as a Way to Escape my Paid Work, but have no Real Opinions on This.  We were hoping to get more detail from correspondents who selected this option but before we could ask any additional questions, they had navigated away to take a Buzzfeed quiz on hipster hairdos.

#5:  I Would Like to Whack you with a Stick.  Still not an actual journal, though here too we’re thinking someone should get on that.  For now, however, let us take a moment to appreciate the Zen contingent of Deviance.  Thanks for taking our poll, Zen Deviants, and consider us whacked.