Entertainment Break

The trailer for "Bullets Over Broadway."

A great comedy, packed with great lines.

C. S. Lewis: Mentor

David C. Downing has written a post on how C. S. Lewis was often a mentor by mail. An excerpt:

Lewis’s advice to his correspondents often took the form of quotable epigrams. To a new wife who felt guilty over her mixed emotions about pregnancy, Lewis observed about guilt feelings, “You can’t help their knocking on the door; but you mustn’t ask them in to lunch” (3, 310). To a mother who asked Lewis to write a letter to her troubled daughter, Lewis answered prudently, “I think advice is best kept till it is asked for” (3, 320). On the same subject to the same correspondent, Lewis observed in another letter, “If few can give good advice, fewer still can hear with patience advice either good or bad” (369).

17 Guidelines: When Briefing the New Boss

1. Leave all humor at the door.
2. Make sure your appearance is thoroughly professional.
3. Don't badmouth the old boss.
4. Don't criticize other managers or employees.
5. Avoid any semblance of pandering.
6. If you don't know something, admit it.
7. Don't understate the impact of past mistakes.
8. Make no assumptions regarding the boss's management proclivities.
9. Be able to discuss and recommend alternatives to current policies.
10. Know your subject area inside-out.
11. Don't overwhelm the boss with details, but have them at hand.
12. Be respectful of time.
13. Expect interruptions.
14. Know all areas of risk and all available resources.
15. Don't brag.
16. Know three things you'd like changed and three things you want to remain the same - just in case you are asked.
17. Be prepared to note what is done well and what can be improved.

Sno Wovel

Cool Tools reviews the Sno Wovel, a timely tool for some parts of the country.

Who Dat Nation

Back from the Super Bowl, Stanley Bing notes a virtue of the Saints fans:

The best thing about the Who Dat Nation is how nice they all are. I’ve been to a lot of conventions, some of them in New Orleans, but also in Houston, Miami, Dallas and of course, Vegas, and this Super Bowl was, without question, the most pleasant gathering of happy drunkards I have ever attended. Some people get annoying or mean when they’ve been sopping up alcohol and shrimp for three consecutive days. Not this bunch. This was simply a gathering of excited, happy people bobbling around like kids saying “Who Dat?” to each other until game time.

February 11: Stun Day?

"The Iranian nation, with its unity and God's grace, will punch the arrogance (Western powers) on the 22nd of Bahman (February 11) in a way that will leave them stunned," Khamenei, who is also Iran's commander-in-chief, told a gathering of air force personnel.

Read the rest here.

No word on whether Israel has a surprise planned for February 10.

[HT: Drudge Report]

ShmooCon

Bill Brenner on why security execs should care about a hacker fest. An excerpt:

The larger reality is that a lot of important talks happen here that have implications up and down the IT security food chain. It's also important to note that a lot of the young ruffians who come here are the very people who find the security holes so they can be fixed. They also build a lot of the technology CSOs lobby their upper management to invest in.

Some examples:

Tyler Shields of the Veracode Research Lab gave a talk about those BlackBerry phones security execs can no longer live without. His message: The BlackBerry is full of weaknesses an attacker can exploit to target the larger enterprise network.

Many CSOs have become equally dependent on their iPhones, and they are increasingly being used to conduct business. Guess what? Those devices are equally at risk, according to Trevor Hawthorn, founder and managing principal at Stratum Security. He gave a presentation on how the bad guys can attack through your iPhone apps and tap into your GPS to track your whereabouts.

Hooking Up Update

This is depressing. Charlotte Allen on the new dating game:

Courtney, 21, is a student at Penn State University. Tucker Max, 33, six feet tall, extrovertedly good-looking, and usually photographed latched to a girl, a bottle of booze, or a cheeseburger, is an honors graduate (in three years) of the University of Chicago. He has a law degree from Duke University, whose admissions committee was so impressed with his academic record that it awarded him an academic scholarship. Yet his only experience practicing law to date has consisted of getting fired from a $2,400-a-week summer-associate job at a prestigious Silicon Valley firm for, among other things, showing up intoxicated at the orientation meeting and complaining that he couldn’t see anything because he had lost his contacts in a hookup with a girl he had met at a party the night before; informing a female recruiter at the firm that he was “calling a porn line” when she walked into his office unexpectedly; and getting fall-down drunk at a firm retreat and shouting the F-word at a charity auction attended by the partners and their spouses. His email account of the last escapade made its way to laughs around the country.

Rules, Exceptions, and Accommodations

You study an organization. You read the rules and then look for the formal exceptions to the rules. And then you search for the informal exceptions to the rules, the unsanctioned exceptions, the "street justice" exceptions: the daily accommodations.

The accommodations are tacit understandings. If you do this, I'll do that and if you don't do this other thing, I won't do this other thing. They are part of a game in which the parties appear to be playing separate roles and yet also share a role. It is that shared role that can be fascinating. The common goal is a zone of comfort. The guard and the prisoner, the teacher and the student, the cop and the speeder, the boss and the employee - all quietly accept certain boundaries in order to avoid mutual unpleasantness. There are some things that must not be done and, in exchange for that acknowledgement of boundaries, some formal rules will be overlooked.

One of the secrets to success in organizations is knowing what is frequently overlooked and what is never overlooked. That knowledge reveals a great deal about the place.

Quote of the Day

Do not wait for extraordinary circumstances to do good; try to use ordinary situations.

- Jean Paul Richter

Saints

Great game. Great winners. And some Louis Armstrong to celebrate.

Audi's Nitwitted Super Bowl Commercial

Did anyone at Audi think for two minutes before approving this Super Bowl commercial?

Who gets the sympathy? The people being arrested by the intrusive Green Police or the toady driving the Audi?

Question

Is there a football game today?

Leisure: A Poem

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

Read the rest of William Henry Davies here.

And the Sequel Should Be: How to Distinguish "Art" from "Scam."

Neatorama: How to distinguish "Art" from "Trash."

Game Info

New York magazine on all you might possibly need to know about the Super Bowl. For example:

Brees once threw 73 passes in a college game and then apologized afterward for not throwing more.

Even more on the TV day that never ends.

Professors

Cultural Offering remembers his college days:

Reagan had just "survived" the economic recession and was preparing to blow up the world. My professors reacted to conservative views with attitudes ranging from puzzlement to disgust. In my Capitalism Versus Socialism class the socialist viewpoint was ably represented by a former SDSer; the capitalist viewpoint was butchered by a professor with views barely to the right of the socialist prof. It wasn't that they couldn't understand conservatism; they had no interest.

My experience was similar. I never had a problem with decidedly left-wing professors - one of the best teachers I encountered was a Marxist teaching assistant - but their knowledge of conservatism was cartoonish.

Albert Brooks and His Horse

Back by popular demand: The party scene from "The Muse."

Sex Week at Old Boola Boola

The idea behind the program, which will fittingly run through Valentine's Day, is to promote sexual health awareness and sexuality. Programs range from speed dating to tea with a transsexual porn star.

Read the rest here.

[Well, that certainly addresses a major issue: Getting college students to think more about sex.]

With Assistance from Edgar the Leadership Pug

Mary Jo Asmus with leadership lessons from The Dog Whisperer. An excerpt:

Use calm, assertive energy: Caesar teaches humans that screaming, yelling and anger only serve to escalate the energy of the dog to that level; they are ineffective at best and can be destructive. Organizational leaders who use these techniques must also find a way to stop using these emotions that can be “caught” like viruses in the organizations they lead.

Five Best Cookbooks

Alton Brown gives his "five best" list of cookbooks.

I'd add an excellent book that I represented in a very brief moment as a literary agent:

Gourmet Gringo by Mari Meyers

Quote of the Day

Never assume that you are smarter or more sophisticated than your customer. If you think you need to explain your business to the customer, perhaps you need the customer to explain your business to you.

- Michael Levine

Music Break

Loreena McKennitt with:

• Marco Polo
• Never Ending Road

Miscellaneous and Fast

• Costa Tsiokos points out some creative catering to the vampire trend.
• Carly Fiorina: The "demon sheep" ad.
• Gizmodo: Everything you need to know about the iPad.
• Fouad Ajami on the Obama charisma.
• Pre-emptive intimidation at The Met.
• Alexandra Levit: When lawyers switch careers.
• The Twist has turned 50: An interview with Chubby Checker.
• Reason: Rahm and the R word.
• Not to be sung at your next job interview: The Mule Skinner's Blues.

Tarantino and Company on the SuperBowl

Marvelous.

From Slate: If famous film makers directed the SuperBowl.

Rosy's Back!

To finance the deficit, the Treasury will have to issue more debt—trillions of dollars worth of it. Between 2010 and 2020, according to OMB’s figures, the amount of federal debt outstanding will rise from fifty-three per cent of GDP to seventy-seven per cent, a level not seen since the aftermath of the Second World War. The White House’s numerical projections stop at 2020, but, largely due to an explosive growth in Medicare and Medicaid spending, the fiscal outlook thereafter is even more bleak—something Tea Party sympathizers, devotees of Rubinomics, and progressives can agree upon.

Read the rest of John Cassidy in The New Yorker on the return of Rosy Scenario.

Question Time? No Thanks.

Peggy Noonan on why we don't need to import Question Time:

The American version might not translate so well. The Brits have a certain tradition of elegance in debate, and enjoy insulting each other. American politicians are more conflicted about obvious aggression, not about feeling it but showing it—it might not play well!—and so they tend to go under or over the line. "You lie!" "Yeah? Well you're blankin' developmentally challenged!" We will miss Fritz Hollings, the former Democratic senator who once said to then-Sen. John Glenn, in a presidential primary debate, "But what have you done in the world?"

[Execupundit note: I love watching Question Time in the House of Commons but seriously disagree with the implied notion that the ability to spar with opponents is a sign of good leadership. Truman or Eisenhower would not have fared well during Question Time but they were serious and substantive leaders.]

Quote of the Day

Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.

- Robert Brault

D'Souza Talk

A late night. Part of the evening was spent sitting with a large crowd Grand Canyon University listening to Dinesh D'Souza talk about Christianity and the new atheists. I missed his earlier talk about his new book on the afterlife.

He gave an interesting and entertaining speech. It is easy to see why he is a worthy debating opponent of Christopher Hitchens.

Power Rankings: Talent Management/HR Blogs

Fistful of Talent gives its list of the top 25 talent management/HR blogs.

Meetings: When It is Time to Flee

The meeting was supposed to be exclusively on Topic A, then slowly drifted into Topic B.

Was that by happenstance or has someone moved the goal posts? If it is the latter, you need to determine if you are prepared for the adjustment and whether the switch makes sense.

Changing the topic is a favorite strategy of office weasels who lure their victims in with one subject and then clobber them with another. It can be entirely appropriate to say, "I'm not prepared to address that subject at this point. I was told this meeting was to be on an different topic and I'll need some time to reflect."

All well and good, but once you say that, you must not linger and get seduced into discussing the subject you said you would discuss. You must leave. Politely. With regrets. But out the door.

Off you go!

Shining Shoes

One of my trenchmates was a former English major named Dennis who processed manuscript for release to the compositors (typesetters). I handled the next stages which were galley and page proofs. We sat next to each other in separate small offices, working quietly, until one or the other needed a break.

One afternoon, especially worn, I dragged myself into Dennis’ office and slumped down in his chair for a bit of philosophy and conversation. I was having a particularly hard time getting up the energy for another set of proofs and complained that I could find no good reason why I should spend as much time as I did since traffic was always pushing me for more and faster.

“Do it for that old lady,” Dennis said, “do it for the old lady in Kansas.”

Read the rest of View From the Ledge here.

Warm-Mongers

Mark Steyn on Himalayan glaciers and melting credibility:

That’s it? One article from 12 years ago in a pop-science mag? Oh, but don’t worry, back in 1999 Fred did a quickie telephone interview with a chap called Syed Hasnain of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. And this Syed Hasnain cove presumably knows a thing or two about glaciers.

Well, yes. But he now says he was just idly “speculating”; he didn’t do any research or anything like that.

But so what? His musings were wafted upwards through the New Scientist to the World Wildlife Fund to the IPCC to a global fait accompli: the glaciers are disappearing. Everyone knows that. You’re not a denier, are you? India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, says there was not “an iota of scientific evidence” to support the 2035 claim. Yet that proved no obstacle to its progress through the alarmist establishment. Dr. Murari Lal, the “scientist” who included the 2035 glacier apocalypse in the IPCC report, told Britain’s Mail on Sunday that he knew it wasn’t based on “peer-reviewed science” but “we thought we should put it in”—for political reasons.

Totally, Totally Global

The latest entry in Nicholas Bate's novel is here. An excerpt:

Sally is back. Nobody dares ask her where she has been the last couple of business days as she is then unlikely to help them with the economy to business class up-grade work-around for trans-Atlantic flights. She had an epiphany this morning in her local Starbucks on discovering that her zero-cal, syrup and milk free ambient-temperature super-short latte was actually called a doppio espresso and is delighted with its zen-like simplicity. So much so she has decided to go super-simple for everything. Consumerism is out. Boyfriends are out. And clubbing, too. At least until the week-end. Or maybe just Thursday.

Quote of the Day

If you want to understand democracy, spend less time in the library with Plato, and more time in the buses with people.

- Simeon Strunsky

Poetry Break: Longfellow

SpokenVerse with Longfellow's "The Children's Hour."

Lessons in Love

From a 2008 article by Ben Stein on lessons in love, by way of economics:

High-quality bonds consistently yield more return than junk, and so it is with high-quality love. As for the returns on bonds, I know that my comment will come as a surprise to people who have been brainwashed into thinking that junk bonds are free money. They aren’t. The data from the maven of bond research, W. Braddock Hickman, shows that junk debt outperforms high quality only in rare situations, because of the default risk.

In love, the data is even clearer. Stay with high-quality human beings. And once you find that you are in a junk relationship, sell immediately. Junk situations can look appealing and seductive, but junk is junk. Be wary of it unless you control the market.

(Or, as I like to tell college students, the absolutely surest way to ruin your life is to have a relationship with someone with many serious problems, and to think that you can change this person.)

Toyota: Premature Burial?

At this point, I'm skeptical of any declaration that Toyota is going down the drain. Consider this quote from a Business Week article:

Toyota's "reputation for long-term quality is finished," said Maryann Keller, senior adviser at Casesa Shapiro Group LLC in New York, a strategic adviser to the auto industry. "People aren't going to buy Toyotas, period. It doesn't matter which model. What's happened is sufficient to keep people out of the stores," she said in an interview yesterday.

Of course, all optimism may be gone in a month.

Dirty Harry Turns 80

'When I was growing up I wasn’t an extrovert. If anything I was an introverted kid, and a very average pupil at school. I was very quiet. My dad, though, he was the opposite; he was very outgoing. People really loved him. He was spectacular, in fact, and he would have been a great actor. That would have been something to see; he would have enjoyed every minute of it.’


Read the rest of the Telegraph interview with Clint Eastwood here.

Fresh Eyes

The ability to look at things with fresh eyes should be in every job description.

So often we think we are adopting a new approach when all we have done is to take an old one, that was discarded for whatever reason, off the shelf and try it again.

Maintaining a fresh perspective, of course, is hard work. Time and convenience hound our days and conspire to squelch innovative strategies. They are aided by those who regard anything new as profound and by the proverbial 500-pound gorilla, Inertia.

How do we gain fresh eyes? One approach is to pretend that what appear to be successful programs have failed and then ask, "What could have caused this?" Do the same with the reverse and pretend that a failure (or a weak competitor) has succeeded.

I bet the executives at Toyota are wishing they conducted this simple exercise a couple of years ago.

Quote of the Day

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

- George Santayana

Entertainment Break

The trailer for The Mask of Dimitrios.

Space Exploration and Budget Cuts

Scientific American looks at the NASA budget: privatizing manned launches?

Oscar Nominations List

Here's the list of the Academy Award nominees.

I'll go out on a limb and will duly eat crow if this prediction is wrong:

Avatar will not win Best Picture.

[HT: Drudge Report]

Office Speak

Employment attorney John Phillips, who has encountered a paradigm or two in his day, with a Memo from The Man:

At the risk of redundancy, it’s necessary to cascade this baseline template throughout the matrix of integrated, granular, and socialized benchmarking caused by the drill down into the metrics of next steps toward a transparent clarity sourced to call out the passion of a lock and load, value-added global marketplace now in our line of sight.

Secrets of Great Teaching

After a year in Mr. Taylor’s class, the first little boy’s scores went up—way up. He had started below grade level and finished above. On average, his classmates’ scores rose about 13 points—which is almost 10 points more than fifth-graders with similar incoming test scores achieved in other low-income D.C. schools that year. On that first day of school, only 40 percent of Mr. Taylor’s students were doing math at grade level. By the end of the year, 90 percent were at or above grade level.

As for the other boy? Well, he ended the year the same way he’d started it—below grade level. In fact, only a quarter of the fifth-graders at Plummer finished the year at grade level in math—despite having started off at about the same level as Mr. Taylor’s class down the road.

Read the rest of Amanda Ripley's article on what makes a great teacher.

[HT: Arts & Letters Daily]

Great Moments in Advertising Trivia

We've had a running discussion in our office on the name of the naturalist who did the old ads for Grape-Nuts ("tastes like wild hickory nuts").

Rodarte thought it was Wilford Brimley, but now the mystery has been solved. (I could remember the book the guy wrote but not his name).

Be sure to read the comments at the link.

A New Day

Some key questions:

1. Which projects, including those that seemed so bright and promising three weeks ago, need to be picked up and injected with new enthusiasm?
2. Which old programs can be modified to create a seriously improved product?
3. What will give us the most bang for the buck now as opposed to several months from now?
4. What should be communicated to a portion of, and perhaps all of, our clients today?
5. What should we be tracking that we are not?
6. Which changes in the marketplace need to be acknowledged?
7. Aside from the components, which relationships are in need of attention?

Quote of the Day

Half an hour's meditation each day is essential, except when you are busy. Then a full hour is needed.

- St. Francis de Sales