To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Fark has a Photoshop contest for Playboy covers, and as an inspiration, they link to this story. Fark inadvertently calls the March 1980 the “best ever” Playboy cover.
Au naturel contraire. The very best Playboy covers are:
Trust me. I have seen a lot of Playboy covers in my day. Ask me sometime, and I will tell you about the Great Playboy Score.
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Pardon my disgust, but I just heard a DJ for KSHE 95, “Real Rock Radio”, identify Guns N Roses “Welcome to the Jungle” as “the title track” to an album. Johnkin’ J!
For you damn kids, “Welcome to the Jungle” was the first track (on side 1, before we had CDs–and we liked it that way) of Appetite for Destruction. But this DJ didn’t know that. Back in the idealized-and-probably-inexistent old days, disk jockeys (back when the discs were bigger than dinner plates, dammit!) knew their music. But now, the Doctors of Rockology don’t know much.
I don’t so much blame public education as I do for the consolidated inifinitization of radio stations, wherein the disk jockeys are all utility infielders, plugged into whatever genre of music the home office determines needs a “resource.” This explains why drive time guys from the light hits stations suddenly find himself running the morning shows on country and western stations–no knowledge of Kenny Rogers or Hank Williams required!
Sorry, but it irks me. These guys dispense asides and information about what you hear on the radio, and they don’t necessarily know the truth, nor how the particular work or individual talent fits into the tradition of the style of music. And they don’t care to learn, because it’s not important. Not as important as their careers, which will soon take them out of this mid-sized market, and if they’re lucky, will land them in the overnights in a major market, regardless of whether they know or even like the damn music they play. It’s just a job, and where their enthusiasm and knowledge of the music leaves off, their knowledge of established sophomoric radio tricks, such as the novel prank phone call, takes up.
Welcome to the jungle, indeed.
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Did anyone else type 0 NEW at the end of high school programming class to teach someone in the next class that he or she should really clear the memory before typing in his or her own program with line numbers starting on 10 and running it?
Oh, come on. You never even thought of it?
Riiiiight.
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Michele at A Small Victory has her Vic 20 skin up.
I saw it, and I had a flashback.
In the immortal words of Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones:
10 POKE(53280,0)
20 POKE(53281,0)
You damn kids won’t get it, but you old school geeks will.
Except you Apple II geeks, but we’ll be talking to you in the playground after school.
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MSN’s dating expert offers some advice for dating a celebrity.
Hey, my beautiful wife is becoming rather popular in the cool blogging cliques, so perhaps I can pick up some tips. Here’s the points:
Man, that’s depressing. All pessimism and exploitation.
Perhaps I should wait for the advice for marrying an immortal goddess of beauty, baking, and bicyclery column.
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So last weekend we got our first real snow of the season here. I like snow and all — it’s real pretty and covers my questionable lawn quite nicely — but snow has serious drawbacks as well.
Dude, autumn already takes care of that with leaves. I mean, I had to snatch some from the brown lawn bags at the end of the neighbor’s driveway since I don’t have any trees in my front yard, and then I had to manually spread them on the lawn much more evenly than Nature would have, but it covered the weird desert camoflauge colors that Soysia takes on in August when you properly scalp the lawn to two inches in the summer drought.
So my lawn still looks good even now that the good old fashioned Wisconsin Snow has been replaced by the Missouri Snow, which is what Wisconsonites call “rain.”
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I absolutely love the Trivial Pursuit DVD Pop Culture Edition that you got me for Christmas or for my birthday next year, or maybe Christmas next year.
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Radley Balko must read my blog. The day after I link to the Gordon Gekko speech, he posts a column about how greed drives innovation.
Coincidence?
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So after reading 50 Best (and Worst) Business Deals, I had to go and watch Wall Street to get a nut’s-eye view of the 1980s and the corporate raiders and LBO artists.
Man, what a cool movie. I rather liked Gordon Gekko, who rose from humble beginnings as a city college kid to become what he was. I mean, read his speech to Teldar stockholders. It’s a pretty rousing bit.
But almost to the end of the movie, in the confrontation between Gordon Gekko and Bid Fox over Bluestar Air, suddenly Michael Douglas opens his mouth and Oliver Stone’s economic theories come out. He calls capitalism a zero-sum game and vomits forth a Paul Krugman column.
Stone’s projecting. Everything he captures right about capitalism in the movie he negates with this single speech, where capitalists are fleas and Martin Sheen’s working man is the noble dog.
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Well I’m gonna be forgiven
If I wanna spend my living
With a long cool woman in a black dress
Just a 5-9 beautiful tall
With just one look I was a bad mess
‘Cause that long cool woman had it all
Had it all, had it all, had it all…
Day two thousand, four hundred, and seventy-nine two. Surviving on beer, popcorn, and cherry flavored Craisins.
Hurry home, honey. I miss you.
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I picked up this book on one of the book-buying binges Heather and I shared last month. I found it in the business section of A Collector’s Bookshop, Sheldon’s new hole in the wall in Maplewood. He doesn’t have much on hand, yet, but I expect that to change. Regardless, this looked interesting. So it is.
Craig has structured the book around 10 common sense rules, with each chapter containing a capsule analysis of several deals that epitomizes the rule, or proves how ignoring the rule can break a deal. For example, one rule is “Take advantage of your adversary’s weakness” (Chapter 2). Essentially, it boils down to buy when the seller has to sell. France needed a hunk of money to finance its European wars, so the United States got the Louisiana Purchase at the bargain basement price of three cents an acre.
Because of Craig’s background as a big dog attorney means he focuses a lot on the leveraged buyouts of the 1980s. To be honest, all I really remember about them is the mythology handed down as received wisdom, mostly from people who disapproved of them. However, as encapsulated in these vignettes, it makes sense in some cases. Even breaking up companies that are underperforming. Call me a capitalist.
The book weighs in at under 200 pages, and the easily digestible chapters and sections make it a book you can put down. And pick back up. I read this book at work, during lunch breaks, without missing beats. Some books are good for that.
So this book is worth a read. The rules are common sense, but the rewards for following them, as well as the negative sanctions for not following them, offer concrete illustrations that The Art of War does not.
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Fark links to a story about an incident at a party wherein one person spilled a beer upon another, which led to a person getting shot in a rather Orient Express manner–the original shooter passed the gun onto friends who proceeeded to put a slug into the offender.
Man, I am glad the Atari Party never gets out of hand like that. With all those offended people throwing a superball at each other to break down the defenses and destroy the corner icon of the other, someone could put an eye out!
Crap! Should I have included a “spoiler alert” above when I mentioned how Murder on the Orient Express turns out? Man, I suck!
My apologies to my newbie Agatha Christie fan demographic. (Wait, no such demographic exists? To whom will I appeal?)
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I think the St. Louis Major Case Squad is summining a posse. That’s what I get from this headline, most of the way down the page:
Man, I love those interns who write the headlines for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s Law and Order section.
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Well, friends, I have gotten my second perfect score on a philosophy test. My beautiful wife led me to a test that rather simplistically asks a dozen questions to determine how your thinking relates to those of profound thinkers from ages past. And I got 100!
I would have to explain my seeming embrace of utilitarianism as a recognition of the tension between assuming rational people will follow the rules and the embrace of the rule of law to ensure that everyone minds a handful of codified manners. Which also explains why I won’t vote Libertarian for an executive branch position, sort of. While I’m sure that you, a reasonable person, will understand that theft is wrong, I’d rather have the pooled power of the State to enforce it in case you forget.
Also, there’s the problem with shoehorning my thought into a radio button answer, and the interpretation of the questions. However, let us recognize that the greatest good for the individual is also the greatest good for the greatest number. Some will fall through the cracks willfully or not, but that’s the nature of the statistics. All the children cannot be above average.
What about my other perfect score? Funny you should ask. My only perfect score on a college exam was my sophomore year in my Philosophy 104: Ethics. Man, I wonder how well I would have done in that class if I had bought the textbook? (Ask me sometime about paying your way as you go through a prestigious private university, and I will tell you how to get around niceties like textbooks.)
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The META Group, a bunch of people marketing themselves as people you can pay to think for you, alerts us to this great danger – Camera-Enabled Phones Pose Significant Liability for Most Enterprises, Warns META Group:
STAMFORD, Conn. (December 9, 2003) — With the cost of adding cameras to mobile phones becoming marginal ($2-$5 per phone), META Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: METG), expects the majority of phones to include this capability within two to three years. However, for many organizations, cameras represent a significant liability or security risk — such as inappropriate candid shots of employees, pictures of production lines.
While the quality of most cameras in current phones is poor, it nonetheless represents a potential channel for leaks of sensitive data or other images that can produce unintended consequences. META Group recommends setting up a clear policy of no camera-enabled phones.
While META Group invites any of you with change in your pockets to visit its Web site for a vigorous upturning and shaking called its “high-value” approach to generating quotable blather, META Group does not address the similar dangers of disposable cameras, regular cameras, or human memory that can also capture and transmit proprietary information to your world-class, best-in-class, best-of-breed enterprise caliber solution’s competition. But none of these buzzwords would yield hits in a current search for “relevant” news. Which is what META Group’s really trying to do, to get you, a key decision maker in your organization, to look at them like a precocious child who can recite poetry it doesn’t understand.
Look in wonder, friends. I wonder who pays these guys, and if I can get in on the grift.
(Link seen on Hans’s site.)
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Trey Givens, Deuce’s older brother, leads me to the following self-awareness:
Which Class of Federation Starship are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
I feel pretty.
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And a special tip of the hat to the media, who’ve apparently discovered that the national health industry does not routinely order two doses of flu vaccines for every man, woman, child, cat, and dog in the country. So when the media whips the populace into a frenzy because of the dangers of influenza, and then hits them with the headlines
it creates a run on the flu vaccines. A run by able-bodies and healthy adults who aren’t risk. Good work, fellows. So then elderly and exteremely unelderly (children) people don’t get a flu shot because Joe Athletic Yuppie got it instead and those at-risk members of the population start dying, the media can run the headlines
Oh, the humanity!
Not that I want to plant a seed in your heads, dear journalistic activists, but did you know that the local branch of the bank down the road from you doesn’t have enough money to give to all its depositors if they all came at once? That’s right. Why don’t you run a headline like
It’s your duty to bring this to the attention of the public. They have a right to know about scarcity and allocation without understanding the reason why so they can decide to panic mindlessly as needed.
Thank you for your prompt attention to this oversight.
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Neil Steinberg relates wisdom in his latest column:
Elias wrote an excruciating book about surviving Auschwitz. I heard her five years ago, so can’t quote her, directly, but she ended her speech by saying something like this:
I have this dream. I dream I am walking up to my family’s home in Czechoslovakia. The windows are all lit up, and I know that everybody is well, and there, home, waiting for me. And then I awaken, and it’s so sweet, because they were all there, clearly, and so sad, because it was only a dream. And that is what I’d like to tell you today — if you are lucky enough to be going home later, and the lights of your house are bright, and your family is all there, waiting, you should stop and savor it as the precious gift it is, because someday it too will be just a dream.
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OpinionJournal.com reports:
ALL THAT JAZZ: In the film “Erin Brockovich,” Julia Roberts played a working-class mom with a penchant for short skirts who, despite being constantly underestimated by men, ultimately manages to secure the largest class-action settlement in American history. But according to the Wellesley News, an all-female jazz band hired locally during the filming of Ms. Roberts’s latest film has filed a gender discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against the actress and her production company, saying that they were paid half what an all-male band was getting in the same film. As band member Jeanne Daly told the paper: “I find it amusing that we have to ‘Erin Brockovitch’ Erin Brockovitch for [the] hypocrisy of gender discrimination.”
I find it amusing that the band member confuses Julia Roberts, the actress who portrayed a real litiguous activist in the movie Erin Brockovitch, with the title character and real person Erin Brockovitch. Since Jeanne Daly also confused proper noun ‘Erin Brockovitch’ with a verb, I’d say she’s probably a confused individual.
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The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports on the Ricky Clemons scandal at University of Missouri, and relates this anecdote about Ed Stewart, an assistant athletic supporter or something:
“Ed come home, every time he come home, he be like, ‘Them crackers shaking. They going crazy. They don’t know what to do. They shaking. They can’t talk to Ricky. They’re like some crackheads running around there.'”
How sweet. He lets out some racial epithets, and the johnking St. Louis Post-Democrat publishes it.
Heaven forbid a white person say any six letter word that begins with n, ends with r, and has a double consonant in it. Were I to say I like Nutter Butters, certain segments of the population think I am deni-oppressing not only members of a different race, but the women therein.
Where’s the sensitivity for my easily-bruised feelings? Why are cracker, gaijin, bleach blood, and haole allowed and nigger isn’t?
Rhetorical question. It’s because we’re crackers and deserve the abuse. I matriculated with a degree in English. I learned these things in college.
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