The Guardian comes to us with a little article called “From hell,” which explores the worst movies ever made. It was written in part to discuss a recent movie made by a certain socialite who will remain nameless — it contains an absolutely fabulous sentence:
But to make a movie that destroys a studio, wrecks
careers, bankrupts investors, and turns everyone
connected with it into a laughing stock requires a
level of moxie, self-involvement, lack of taste,
obliviousness to reality and general contempt for
mankind that the average director, producer and movie
star can only dream of attaining.
The best part is when you get to read about what the author considers the worst movie of all time:
This is a movie that stars Isabelle Huppert as a
shotgun-toting cowgirl. This is a movie in which Jeff
Bridges pukes while mounted on roller skates. This is
a movie that has five minutes of uninterrupted
fiddle-playing by a fiddler who is also mounted on
roller skates. This is a movie that defies belief.
A statue called The Motherland Calls, (Родина-мать зовёт) stands atop a large hill overlooking Volgograd, Russia. Thing is, at 279 feet (that’s over 20 stories), it’s absolutely enormous.
Look at the person next to it in the picture! Of all the really tall statues in the world, this looks to be the only one endowed with such a sense of sweeping motion befitting its grand scale. (The YouTube video is pretty interesting).
University of Virginia figures show that 25 percent of this
year’s freshman class are toting an Apple laptop. This is up
from about 20 percent last year. In 2003, only 4 percent of
the freshman class admitted to owning a Mac.
So, in 4 years, Apple has grown to over five times the sales in subsets of the collegiate demographic. Guess when you form your strongest opinions about brands, (music, philosophy, etc.) — that would be college! Let me tell you this much: after I get rid of this current Windows machine (in about 4 years)… that will be the last Windows box I ever buy ever ever ever ever. Never ever again. No thank you. No more Windows. Blech.
M.I.A. rhymes with the swaggering bravado of a
street rapper, only she favors bandoliers over bling.
Parse the songwriting though, and the sensibility
awkwardly falls somewhere between party girl and
guerrilla fighter. The message lacks cogency, but
her hooks do pack potency, even when they sound
nursery rhyme-inspired.
“Hands up (a nee nee nee nee) represent the world town!” And yes, “World Town,” a track from her newest release Kala is recommended listening.
And, of course, what you discover is that other than
the speeches Obama has written for himself, the last
time a major speech was written without the aid of
a speechwriter by a president or presidential candidate
was Nixon’s “Great Silent Majority” speech delivered
on October 13, 1969.
Now that was a good speech. Evil, no doubt, to its very
core, and designed to proliferate the feelings that
allowed the great Southern Strategy success, but a
good speech nevertheless.
In other words, not in my lifetime. And I am oldish.
I have kids and wear dark socks with slippers and
complain about the quality of my lawn and get
hungover way too easily. But in the last 37 years
there hasn’t been a speech like this written by the
man himself. Not like this.
Here is a chair. Regardless of who you support, or
what you think of Obama, I want you to sit here, right
here on this chair and consider something wonderful.
We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every
channel, every day and talk about them from now until
the election, and make the only question in this
campaign whether or not the American people think
that I somehow believe or sympathize with his
most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe
by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing
the race card, or we can speculate on whether white
men will all flock to John McCain in the general
election regardless of his policies.
We can do that.
But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election,
we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And
then another one. And then another one. And nothing
will change.
That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this
election, we can come together and say,
“Not this time.”
Leave it to your mildly deluded host to write a post about a topic on which he has almost no specific information. Nevertheless, if I can’t brainstorm at tumbledry, where can I brainstorm? (“In your own head, you’re saying” I know, but that’s not the point we’re debating.) The topic today: business. My qualifications: slim. Forecast: stormy, with a chance of incorrect conclusions.
I’ll begin with an analogy of stars… many stars burn happily throughout their lives, and then expand to a giant blob that is lower in density: a red giant. As the cycle continues:
The star then evolves into a degenerate form, recycling
a portion of the matter into the interstellar environment,
where it will form a new generation of stars with a
higher proportion of heavy elements.
I think this is the life-cycle companies should follow. Join me down this crazy theoretical road, won’t you?
Consider a large multinational corporation: like a star, it had to begin somewhere… usually with a great product (a star makes light, but can not sell it… this is the biggest joke on the star ever). Great products: Sandpaper. Model-T. Television broadcasting. Light bulbs. Selling a product rapidly, the business expands and goes through a growth period. Quality of management then becomes crucial, and the business can be grown another couple orders of magnitude beyond its successful start. Like the star, the company burns brightly. Cash on hand then funds new business units, and the array of products grows and grows and grows. The multinational corporation ends up with huge number of OK products. Suddenly, General Electric owns NBC, and you’ve got a red giant — it’s a gargantuan obstreperously bright object in the sky, but it doesn’t burn very brightly.
Clearly, this is a problem. You have a lumbering giant of a company that pushes on sheerly due to inertia — the numbers are bigger, but the innovations are smaller. The truth is (and just ask why giant IBM was beaten by tiny Microsoft), true innovation must be coupled with an agile business environment (easily moved, cheap to run, limits on formal training, with highly qualified individuals), which is antithetical to many (most?) corporate environments. What’s the solution?
As stars do: Expand, then contract. I think that’s the path for a giant of a business to remain successful, yet this does take some accepted practices and tosses them out. I’ll explain: consider Ford Motor Company. Beaten into the pavement for years by fierce competition from companies producing a higher quality product, Ford is struggling to get back to profitability. They’ve expanded, that’s true. I think that now they need to contract. I don’t mean layoffs and meaningless restructuring. No…
I mean dismantle. No “spin-offs,” segmented acquisitions, unfair lay-offs. Dismantle.
What are you left with? The agile business I cited before. You’ve got an R&D lab or two, folks with years and years of experience, and no shareholders to answer to. You’ve got all the pieces of a successful start-up. Oh, and billions of dollars in cash. See, there’s this idea that businesses should grow, grow, grow… and then just keep right on growing until they collapse under their own weight. This is unsustainable. Sell it off, fund the pensions of the good people who put in the years, and break the thing up. Instead of paring down the enormity just to allow the business to crutch on for a few more decades, the business could radically constrict just as a star does, thereby seeding future enterprises.
So you’ve got this enormously well-funded laboratory in the shell of an old Ford building — and they say “what’s the future of transportation?” They’ve got a good shot at figuring it out. If they think it’s electric, well then they can innovate like crazy people and push out a product ASAP. There’s no “core business” crap to fall back on — sink or swim.
I don’t know, there are some big holes here and this technique wouldn’t work everywhere (perhaps not even in the example given), but the part of the message I am confident in is the need for a paradigm shift in philosophies about large businesses — they needn’t go on forever, and crashing into the floor of the market isn’t the only way for them to disband.
An American woman’s body had became attached
to her boyfriend’s toilet after she sat on it for two
years, police in Kansas said.
“She was not glued. She was not tied. She was just
physically stuck by her body,” said Bryan Whipple,
the sheriff of Ness County.
It appeared Pam Babcock’s skin had grown around
the toilet seat, he added. “It is hard to imagine. …
I still have a hard time imagining it myself.”
In the annals of weird news, this one rates pretty high up there. Incidentally, I already had a tag for “toilets.” I wonder what else I’ve blogged re: toilets.
Because of its egg shape and bubble-like windows, it became known as a bubble car—a name later given to other similar vehicles. Other countries had other nicknames: In Germany it was das rollende Ei (the rolling egg) or the Sargwagen (literally “coffin on wheels”; the name apparently came from the small (or rather nonexistent) distance between the passengers and oncoming traffic). In France it was the yogurt pot. In Brazil it was the bola de futebol de fenemê (football (soccer) ball of a truck), and in Chile it is still called the huevito (little egg).
I’ve tried to reproduce the inflection present in this actual performance by comedian Mitch Hedberg:
I eat a lot of sandwiches, who doesn’t man, sandwiches
are easy to eat. But I hate sandwiches at New York deli’s,
too much fuckin’ meat on the sandwich. It’s like a cow
with a cracker on either side.
“What would you like sir?” “A pastrami sandwich.”
“Anything else?” “Yeah, a loaf of bread and some
other people.”
“What kind of bread?” “Rye… no, fuck, banana… you
got banana bread?” “What kind of cheese?” “Cottage.”
“Get the fuck out! I’m not makin’ a banana bread,
pastrami, cottage cheese sandwich. That will severely
ruin my reputation.”
You’ve just got to hear this to get the full effect. I’ll go look up an audio file… aha, this should do it. Brings back memories of hanging out in Dan’s dorm room, playing Burnout 3: Takedown, and listening to Mitch on the stereo.