“What’s a red herring?”
A red herring is an idea. A red herring is a hundred ideas rolled into one. It’s a fifty foot high idea ball made up of regular-sized ideas. But more importantly a red herring is a concept.
“What sort of concept? What more can you tell me about red herrings that hasn’t been said a million times before?”
Hundreds of thousands of things. There are so many, many things about red herrings that have not yet been said. Countless things. Our western media has largely ignored red herrings because of industry pressure from Big Oil. But that ends today.
“I have a successful small business and I’m looking to expand but don’t know where to start. What can red herrings do to transform my fledgling company into a top earning success story?”
Today there are a lot of cliche, ambiguous and vague phrases thrown around in the business world: synergy, thinking outside the box, paradigm shifts, six sigma, scalability. Through a top-down integrated approach, the red herring can do all those things and more.
“What does a red herring look like?”
A red herring is small but it is also fifty to sixty times larger than love or hate or indifference. It’s bigger than you and me and your sister, Sally. Sally doesn’t even come close to the size of a red herring. Your sister Sally could drive all the Sally’s of the world around town in a red herring station wagon honking at cute boys. And yet a red herring can fit behind your sister’s left cornea and go unnoticed by the world’s best ophthalmologists. A red herring is benign.
“Should I be afraid of red herrings? Is there cause for alarm? Are red herrings something I should fear?”
One question at a time, good sir.
Red herrings are always more afraid of you than you are of red herrings. That being said, the opposite is true: a red herring is a gun in the hand of your worst enemy. A red herring will cut you down in your prime. A red herring will squeeze the life out of your children, it will decapitate your lover and throw you in a cage with thirty screaming baboons. A red herring will crawl into your head and molest your hopes and dreams.
Keep in mind red herrings are nothing to be feared.
“Did red herrings support various coup d’etats in Latin America in an attempt to establish puppet governments and further a modern imperialist agenda?”
No, red herrings did not do that. A red herring did invent guerilla warfare, back when guerillas were mostly peaceful creatures.
“Should I consult a second doctor about the spotted growth on my thigh?”
The red herring is a constantly expanding greyish blob, immeasurable in size. It has three enormous human arms on the outside of its amorphous body. Two of the arms gently rock a colossal baby back and forth while the other controls an assault rifle. With its assault rifle, Caroline, the red herring mows down unsuspecting crowds of people as it slimes its way from city to city. The “tack-tack-tack” of the assault rifle makes the giant baby laugh.
The red herring has no conscience, it has no emotion. It has never felt love or hate. This is what makes a red herring strong! It does not feel remorse as it absorbs the bodies of the fallen. It does not stop to smell a warm pie in a windowsill. It isn’t even aware of pies. The red herring is something of both fantasy and science fiction.
The red herring is a balloon. The red herring is a space shark. The red herring is a blue cheese Ferris Bueller statue speckled with emotion and dialed to four million different settings.
The red herring is Tom Hanks.
