Tell me a joke.
A joke. Crikey. Okay, wh…
A joke about badgers.
Crumbs. Don’t know any jokes about badgers. I know a joke about a lemon though.
Okay, a joke about a lemon please.
Right-o. What’s yellow and flickers?
A lemon.
Damn. You’ve heard it then.
That could have been about badgers.
Ah. Okay. What’s yellow and flickers?
A badger.
Damn. You’ve heard it then.
Guffaw.
Chortle.
In response to Bob Parsons’ 16 Rules For Survival
1. Chill the fuck out. Despite what you may believe, life is not a competition. There is no prize for the person who dies with the most money. We all decompose in pretty much the same fashion, and we all smell the same amount of bad while we are doing it.
2. Sometimes you have to know when to stop. The advice “Never Give Up” can only go so far and smacks of ignorance or fanaticism. Sometimes, YOU WILL BE WRONG. This is a fact. Unless you’re one of those people who is always right, and knows it, goddamnit.
3. World domination isn’t the be-all and end-all. Being the most successful entrepreneur in the world and doing whatever it takes to get ahead is not the only path to happiness.
4. Be nice to people occasionally. You never know, you might need a friend when the rest of the world tires of your self-righteous pontification. What’s the point of making yourself happy if you make 100,000* other people miserable?
5. Don’t assume that what works for you works for everyone else. Life cannot be boiled down to sixteen simple rules. There’s always an exception, and as such, you’d need an infinite number of rules to capture all eventualities.
6. It doesn’t matter if you do it wrong. In a million years when mankind has died out and the Earth is the property of the mutant badgers with telepathic abilities, they won’t be pointing and laughing at any of those dumb humans.
7. Don’t introduce yourself as an entrepreneur. I can’t explain why, it’s just a thing that I have.
Though I agree with some of Bob Parsons’ points, I confess that I immediately scanned through the comments looking for the people who disagreed with him (always much more enlightening than the streams of “oh bob you are god”s). The results of my hunt were disappointing, so I have taken it upon myself.
* This is a random number. Though not as random as 0.2349782143054
Periodically, Karen and I gather all the CDs in the house into the sitting room. We then go through them all, selecting a dozen to go in the kitchen, a dozen to go in the bedroom, a couple of dozen to go into my room of great wonder and magic, and about 40 to go in the sitting room. The remainder are tucked away on the bottom shelf of the bookshelf, where the sofa prevents access.
This afternoon, we did it slightly differently. As we have ripped every single CD album in the house to MP3, our needs are slightly different. There is no need to have any CDs in the sitting room (as we can plug the iBook into the hifi and play MP3s over the network (as we are doing right now)) or the room of great wonder and magic (as that’s where the MP3 server is).
So we added a new category – “Discard”. This is generally for (a) duplicates, from before we met and (b) stuff that we have ripped to MP3, but which we wouldn’t miss if the MP3 archive went for a Burton. The process has resulted in a Discard pile of 100 CDs (about 20 of which are singles).
It’s a very liberating feeling. You should try it sometime.
UPDATE: One of the CDs which we (I think) decided should go for the “Discard” pile is 23rd Street Lullaby by Patty Sciatica Scialfa. So I’m upstairs, hitting the random button on CrazyGoat until it chooses an album that I want to listen to, and this album comes up, so I figure why not listen. At least every other song is about New York. It’s making me incredibly awaysick.
The Line of Beauty, by Alan Hollinghurst
My boss was reading this when we set off for New York, and still struggling with it a month later; she said it bored her to sleep, and being a non-native english speaker, there were nuances that she knew she was missing. Still, Mike forgave it in the end, and I thought I would give it a go.
Personally, I secretly like over-decorative prose, and really Hollinghurst has nothing on Iris Murdoch’s six-long strings of adjectives. For me, the pretentious element was the overuse of daft words that your average reader has to look up in the dictionary – no wonder my austrian boss struggled. The characters are drawn with a sort of contemptuous affection that suits the subject matter; filling out a plot plucked straight from the News of the World. This is a sad, witty book; a literary Spitting Image with significantly less latex and an unfunny ending.
4/5
I’m a few days late with this news, but it strikes me as bleakly ironic:
Wristbands made to raise awareness of the Make Poverty History campaign have been produced in Chinese factories which violated ethical standards
Two factories have been audited, and found to pay less than the local minimum wage, require deposits from their staff [this is considered to be forced labour], make deductions from wages for infractions of the rules, and have inadequate health and safety systems. These are basic violations of the Ethical Trading Initiative; these are bad, bad factories.
It’s amazingly difficult to get British companies interested in this sort of thing. Around these parts, corporate responsibility means not polluting the nearest river; clearly, charity begins at home.
There’s quite a heated discussion about the wristbands thing here. Would you buy one?
I’m sure you will be delighted to learn that Sevitz has taken it upon himself to organise a summer blogmeet, to take place on 30 July, somewhere in London. The venue appears to be a relative secret, but details can be obtained by leaving a comment here or on sevitzdotcom. The more the merrier, I say…
Now THIS is comic book style. Gruesome, gritty, noir, lots of gravelly voices, the sparkling rain lashing down at an angle against the silhouette of a very wide-shouldered man, blood bursting from bullet wounds whilst the hero soldiers on, bent cops and benter cops, bad guys that are so recognisably evil that you feel no remorse when their limbs are hacked off or their head pummelled into a puree.
Oh yes, there is violence present. But it’s “stylised”, which means that it’s so far fetched as to be a little bit ridiculous – I personally found the shark scene in The Beach to be more disturbing.
Clive Owen is pretty mediocre, and most of the female actresses do their duty as broads and prostitutes, but Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke and Benicio Del Toro are all fantastic, with their compulsory identikit gravel voices. Elijah Wood also puts in a great performance as Brodo Gaggins, the halfling hobbit with spirit.*
Bring on the sequel, I say.
*Not really – more of a (highlight for slight spoiler) bespectacled psychopath with cannibalistic tendencies and great powers of stealth (spoiler ends).
UPDATE: Another thing that occurred to me: Brittany Murphy. I don’t think she’d ever read a comic book before. She was most incongruous. I expect that after the film was finished and she saw it for the first time, she probably sighed and said “Oh, so THAT’S the effect that I was supposed to be going for. Doh!”
24. No Logo by Naomi Klein
This is a worthy educational tome about global corporate domination, that is required reading for my job; I found it interesting because I could relate it to the reports I read every day. I also learned what an Export Processing Zone is, and why they are bad things.
It was pretty heavy-going, though; and really very putdownable. I don’t generally read a lot of non-fiction, and I started to yearn for something that didn’t labour the point quite so much.
Also it’s quite out of date by now, which I know in particular from some of the examples given about factories where women are forced to have abortions, pre-teens are making shoes, people are routinely fired for refusing to work overtime. Perhaps my clients just choose good factories, but I haven’t seen an audit that was quite that bad, yet. Although my colleague did today come across a factory that employed monks, who are paid in food because they won’t accept money; hard to assess whether they are receiving minimum wage.
Celebrated the end of the book by watching Supersize Me, which is about both corporate and personal greed, and would certainly put us right off McDonalds, if we ever ate that sort of junk in the first place.
3/5
