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I received an email newsletter today from Relevante containing this memorable passage:

Relevante is pleased to invite you to attend our 2007 Internal Audit Symposium. We have a great lineup of cutting edge topics … which are important to the internal audit world in today’s environment.

Internal Audit. Cutting Edge. Whoa, my oxymoron advisory system spiked all the way up to Krakatoan lava orange. Someone who thinks internal audit is cutting edge probably watches C-SPAN on their video ipod. I don’t know how I got on this email list. It must have been a practical joke. Then again, I have had an email account since the second Reagan Administration, so my addresses are scattered throughout the telecosm like Caesar’s last breath. But an accounting symposium for me? You can say “Accounting” and I’ll be asleep before you get to the “ing”. Go ahead and give me a root canal. It’ll take one of those 911 recordings of O. J. Simpson screaming expletives to wake me up.

As oxymorons go, the “cutting edge internal audit conference” might be the best one I’ve heard since I saw a “clean coal” billboard while I was driving my Fry-O-Diesel-fueled 1984 Mercedes 300SD across the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Did you know that my car is really “PZEV”, a “partial zero-emission vehicle”? What the hell kind of Orwellian nonsense is that? Partial zero? You can’t divide by zero folks. Anyway, I consider my old tank to be PZEV—it does not emit anything when it is parked and turned off. I guess it’s kind of like clean coal.