"What is madness? To have erroneous perceptions and to reason correctly from them"
Voltaire
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There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965)
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Claimant complained that Crunchberry cereal contains no berries and she was therefore deceived.
"The survival of the instant claim would require this Court to ignore all concepts of personal responsibility and common sense. The Court has no intention of allowing that to happen."
--May 20, 2009
MORRISON C. ENGLAND, JR.
UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE
JANINE SUGAWARA, Plaintiff, v. PEPSICO, INC., Defendant.
No. 2:08-cv-01335-MCE-JFM
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF
CALIFORNIA
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Lynn Greiner:
"When author Isaac Asimov turned 60, he announced he had just entered his late youth..."
[And since he went on to write another 50 books before dying in his 90s, he may have been literally right.]
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Maureen Down:
The AP is not a relationship counselor.
[regarding public officials holding confessional press conferences about their cheating ways.]
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The Novel as Lie
For [novelist JG] Ballard, as he explained in Salon in 1997, the novel is "the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader and at every point offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters. This whole notion was advanced by Mary McCarthy and many others years ago, that the main function of the novel was to carry out a kind of moral criticism of life. But the writer has no business making moral judgements or trying to set himself up as a one-man or one-woman magistrate's court. I think it's far better, as (William F.) Burroughs did and I've tried to do in my small way, to tell the truth."
-Quoted in Reason Magazine, June 2009, Joanne McNeil.
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The Bigger Picture
Human Intelligence consists of:
-A repertoire of concepts (objects, space, time, causation, intention) useful in a social, knowledge-intensive species
-A process of metaphorical abstraction; conceptual structure bleached of its content, applied to new, abstract domains
-Stephen Pinker, "On Language and Thought, at TED, July 2005
http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_language_and_thought.html?ga_source=embed&ga_medium=embed&ga_campaign=embed
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I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic and a progressive religious experience.
--Shelley Winters (1922 - 2006)
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I've gone into hundreds of [fortune-teller's parlors], and have been told thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman getting ready to arrest her.
--New York City detective
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Tech theorist Linda Stone famously coined the phrase “continuous partial attention” to describe our newly frazzled state of mind.
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"If everyone's going to get news items from AP as soon as they're out, on their Blackberries, and so on, then what's the net gain that newspapers can provide?," asked Twohig. "You do have the commentary, you do have the beat reporters that really understand the marketplace and provide a thoughtful point of view. You have to add value."
-- Marketwatch, David B. Wilkerson, May 20, 2009
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In fact, the Residence Inns, Hyatt Places and Holiday Inn Expresses are perfect examples of disruptive technology. They are newer, cleaner and easier to use. They have a simple mission and they fulfill it. They are well-priced and hit the market bulls-eye. Do you really want to pay an extra $200 per day for turn-down service and a chocolate truffle on the pillow ... romantic getaways excepted? Whenever I hire a Residence Inn, Hyatt Place or Holiday Inn Express to do a job, I am pleased.
These new mid-market motels are the Charles Schwabs of the hotel world.
Now let us consider a few American industries that are broken or in need of a refresh: health care, banking, automobiles, energy, to name four.
The way to improve all of these sectors, seems to me, is to ask: What is the equivalent of a Holiday Inn Express? In health care it might be clinics with kiosks that take your temperature, sample your blood and ask you 20 questions before you see the nurse or doctor. In autos, it might a way to configure your car as you do a Dell computer. In banking, it might be using social networks like LinkedIn or Facebook as a platform for new lending cooperatives.
--Forbes, blog, Digital Rules, 'The Holiday Inn Express Solution,' April 2009
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Fm Scientific American, quoting the 'year-end (2008) issue of the British Medical Journal, well known for its unusual array of offbeat articles':
"In a short item entitled 'A Day in the Life of a Doctor: The PowerPoint Presentation,' two British physicians reveal that 'the main purpose of a PowerPoint presentation is entertainment. Intellectual content is an unwarranted distraction.'
"They go on to advise that 'the more lines of writing that can be coerced onto a slide and the smaller the font, the lower the risk of anyone criticising any data which has accidentally been included' and that 'the number of slides you can show in your allotted time is inversely proportional to the number of awkward questions which can be asked at the end.' "
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If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going.
--Professor Irwin Corey
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Rewriting history to fit current ideologies (i.e. Columbus as native killer) is called “presentism.”
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10 Newspapers That Will Survive The Apocalypse
Nicholas Carlson|Mar. 28, 2009, 6:30 PM
http://www.businessinsider.com/10-local-newspapers-investors-want-to-acquire-2009-3
Believe it or not, there are investors who still want to buy local newspapers.
Our favorite person of this stripe is an investor who has already plunked millions into the industry and is in the process of spending much more.
"I might be running head first into the buggy-whip business, but I'm not sold on the death of print quite yet," he tells us. (He's asked us to keep him anonymous because many of those deals remain under non-disclosure agreements.)
So what does this investor see in the newspaper industry that the rest of us don't? Lots of room for improvement, for one thing.
His view:
*For most of their existence, newspapers were steady sources of revenue that required little management -- "cash cows that you put your brother in charge of."
*This led to bloat at the large, public conglomerates that now own many of our best local newspapers.
*Then came the Internet. It brought some competition yes, but more devastatingly it brought the perception of a paradigm shift.
*Suddenly, the bloat-tolerant managers at the top of the newspaper chains couldn't turn left without hearing from an equity analyst threatening to slap their company with a "sell" rating if it didn't invest enough in the Internet.
*After a decade of investing in the Internet -- but doing little to fight the bloat -- the conglomerates are collapsing under a weight of debt.
*This debt remains and online ad revenues aren't helping reduce it. The LA Times claims its online ad revenues pay for its newsroom, but our source doesn't buy it. "You had to pull out the duct tape and rubber hoses to make [their formula] work," he says.
Our guy is convinced that underneath the mess, there are plenty of local newspapers that, after cutting newsroom bloat and R&D costs, would be plenty profitable. He says these local newspapers just need to stop "spending on trying to find their way out" and "instead run their current good business."
What does our source think of newspapers on the Web? Not much. He says local papers should have a Web site run by two people that links to international and national news and keeps all local content behind a pay wall or off the Internet entirely.
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I believe in God -- but I can't stand his fan club.
My favorite prayer: "Lead me to those who seek the truth, and deliver me from those who have found it."
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[Newspaper failures]
Mono cultures spawn simultaneous failure
The problem is not the new business model, as I wrote in my DaniWeb post, it's the way the business has changed. Instead of concentrating on what they do well, newspapers have become monolithic and brittle. In his Keynote speech last week at AIIM, Andrew Lippman, Founding Associate Director at the MIT Media Lab [7] was talking about the issues related to mono cultures: "I think the institutions are out of scale, past the point of their design," he said "Another problem is they are mono cultures. They are all the same." This means, Lippman pointed out, that when it goes south--as happened last year in the financial sector--all the businesses fail at the same time because they are all doing the same thing. What he said applies to the news business.
--http://www.fiercecontentmanagement.com/node/2358/print
--Ron Miller, Apr 8 2009
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The original name of the movie Amelie was "Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain"
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Guaranteed Solution to Our Economic Crisis
[I regret to say that I don't know where I got this.]
"Leave it to a brainy Indian to come up with the cheapest and surest way to stimulate our economy: Immigration.
"All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese, and Koreans," said Shekhar Gupta, editor of 'The Indian Express' newspaper. "We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate -- no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans."
Problem solved! The real joke is: He's almost certainly right! And of course, it will never happen, which underlines the constraints that prejudice, nutty economic theories, and shortsightedness place on our future.
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The key to success for Obama, if he can figure out how:
"You gotta give 'em HOPE!"
-Harvey Milk
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'Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. '
Philip K. Dick (1928 - 1982) "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" 1978.
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