August 25, 2007

There’s still time to access

thegreatbritishduckrace.co.uk/duckday.php

and pay about five bucks to adopt a couple of rubber ducks which will be among the 165,000 to be dropped into London’s River Thames on September 2 for a 1km charity race whose winner will net $20,000. There will be 30 other prizes for leading ducks.

Psychology TODAY magazine assembled a group of experts to examine the main would-be presidents in such categories as “body language, rhetorical style, emotional tone and universal values”. No dramatic conclusions resulted, but the mag reported that the most optimistic candidate had won 18 out of the last 22 presidential elections, and that Hillary was the most optimistic of the current batch (Giuliani was the least). Other conclusions:

• Barack Obama’s language style “signals machismo..a keyword profile close to Clinton’s
• John Edwards has the highest sense of “commonality–kumbaya pulling together ‘we can do it’ type language
• John McCain’s angry, highly negative style could alienate voters
• (Mitt) Romney’s language is uber-patriotic, which usually signals a person without a platform

Pyschology Today  wrote that in the category of universal values—on which all scored fairly high—assessments were made by compiling random excerpts from the candidates’ speeches.

THE LOS ANGELES ZOO hired a Beverly Hills feng shui practitioner for $4,500 to help design their new $7.4 million monkey habitat, on the grounds that it would help the valuable Chinese Golden Monkeys—due to arrive next year—to feel at home. Writing in the Skeptical Inquirer, Jim Underdown pointed out that “there are different schools of thought in feng shui and masters advising on identical environments have been shown to radically disagree on what changes should be made.” He solicited any scholarly research on “monkey luck”, any evidence of baboon behavior changing with the alteration of a door’s location. And besides, he said, why not just recreate the look of the Chinese village from which the monkeys will come. “You don’t need all that ‘energy’ mumbo jumbo to make it look the same”.

“One notable constant in American history, is our lack of awareness of the rest of the world…the misguided belief that one’s polity is the center of the world. Today America’s narcissism has blinded its citizens to a host of looming dangers (with a) perspective that has skewed Americans into believing that we are the world’s moral center as well as its power center”—Cullen Murphy in Are We Rome? The Fall of the Empire and the Fate of America (Houghton Mifflin, 2007)

THE ERA OF THE glossy annual report may soon be over as companies realize that the million bucks it can cost to mass produce and mail them is often less effective than spending $20,000 to create a video report instead. “People want to hear management talk about their business,” says Ruth’s Chris Steak House cfo Thomas Pennnison Jr., “and the opportunity to do that in front of most investors is limited.” Videos are becoming so commonplace in the business world that some candidates are using them as resumes, and one boss is quoted telling CFO magazine that in five years “a printed annual report will be a collector’s item.”

NBC’s ORIGINAL PLAN to replace Jay Leno--still “a proven late-night winner”-- with Conan O’Brien in 2009, isn’t looking so rosy now says a columnist for TelevisionWeek. But if NBC keeps Leno, now 57, under the current format, says David Carroll, O’Brien will doubtless walk away with a $40 million buyout as compensation for a broken promise.  Carroll’s suggested solution: let Conan take over Tonight at 11:35 but precede it with a show hosted by Leno at 10:30.

THE MYTH OF CUBAN HEALTHCARE is just that, writes Jay Nordlinger—a myth, in that there are three kinds of healthcare: (i) medical tourism in which foreigners pay for treatment cheaper than they can get at home: (ii) for privileged members of the Cuban nomenclature (government officials, army etc); and (iii) the “wretched” treatment available to ordinary Cubans who must take their own sheets and towels to hospitals with them and find that even aspirins are a rarity. “The Left” says Nordlinger in National Review, “has always had a deep psychological need to believe in the myth of Cuban health care and he quotes “the Leninist rationalization” that ‘You have to break some eggs to make an omelet’ along with Orwell’s reply: “‘Where’s the omelet?’”

ROCK PAPER SCISSORS fans are infuriated by the tireless efforts of anarchist players to introduce the unwelcome fourth element, dynamite, into the timeless game. Dynamite--”a mythic throw sometimes seen in street games but banned from all respectable competitions”, explains Rod O’Connor—is expressed by a closed fist with the upward thumb representing the wick. The problem lies in the ambiguity: obviously it blows up rock, but does the wick burn paper or be smothered by it?

THE WILCOCK WEB: “Office holders sell to donors, but they don’t buy from voters” writes Dirk Olin in the New York Times, pointing out that big donors can buy pols’ votes but the pols won’t pay voters for theirs….One of Beijing’s 6,530 road signs being tidied up in preference for next year’s Olympics has been changed from Dongda Hospital for Anus and Intestine Disease to Dongda Proctology Hospital….A British reader of the Guardian defined American football as “random violence interrupted by committee meetings”….More than two out of every three items returned to big stores have been shoplifted and return for cash reports Texas A&M’s Center for Retailing Studies which notices such things….The Ford Motor Co. is said to have made a mere $2 profit on each of the early Model-Ts….. “When I was kidnapped”, Woody Allen once quipped, “my parents sprang into action: they rented my room”….Archaeologists are saddened that the famous rock art in Malawi, designated as a World Heritage Site, is being defaced by graffiti vandals. “Hundreds perhaps thousands of years of local history destroyed… by the local equivalent of ‘Leroy Was here’ comments Archaeology Magazine….Flat screen TVs, leather couches and gourmet coffee are features of Joe Moffatt’s P.B. Loco Café in Tupelo, Miss. The PB stands for peanut butter which is all the café serves in a variety of combinations….“It seems to be a law of nature that Republicans are more boring than Democrats” ---Stewart Alsop (1914-74)

08/18/07

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