Redonkulous, or redonk, is a term that flows around my office with disturbing regularity. It's usually prefaced by, "Jon said _____" and ends with "That's just redonk." Thanks to Freakonomics I now know at least a little of the etymology of redonkulous: it appeared as "redunculus" over 30 years ago in the Roald Dahl book BFG.
There are some scary smart people in this world and a team of those scary smart people has figured out how to zap female mosquitoes, the only ones that carry malaria, out of the sky with a laser. Oh, and they've also figured out a better way to deliver vaccines to hostile environments.
(AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)
Boston.com's photo array of birds caught in the big oil spill in the Gulf has generated over 2,990 comments at the point that I type this. If you take a look at them you can understand why.
Why, oh why, can't all business writing be like this piece from Dilbert's Scott Adams, who believes you should only invest in companies you hate:
Having absorbed all of the wisdom I have presented here so far, you are naturally wondering if I have any additional investment tips. Yes, and I will put my tips in the form of a true story. Recently I bought something called an iPhone. It drops calls so often that I no longer use it for audio conversations. It's too frustrating. And unlike my old BlackBerry days, I don't send e-mail on the iPhone because the on-screen keyboard is, as far as I can tell, an elaborate practical joke. I am, however, willing to respond to incoming text messages a long as they are in the form of yes-no questions and my answer are in the affirmative. In those cases I can simply type "k," the shorthand for OK, and I have trained my friends and family to accept L, J, O, or comma as meaning the same thing.
The other day I was in the Apple Store, asking how to repair a defective Apple laptop, and decided, irrationally, that I needed to have Apple's new iPad. The smiling Apple employee said she would be willing to put me on a list so I could wait an indefinite amount of time to maybe someday have one. I instinctively put my wallet on my nose and started barking like a seal, thinking it might reduce the wait time, but they're so used to seeing that maneuver that it didn't help.
My point is that I hate Apple. I hate that I irrationally crave their products, I hate their emotional control over my entire family, I hate the time I waste trying to make iTunes work, I hate how they manipulate my desires, I hate their closed systems, I hate Steve Jobs's black turtlenecks, and I hate that they call their store employees Geniuses which, as far as I can tell, is actually true. My point is that I wish I had bought stock in Apple five years ago when I first started hating them. But I hate them more every day, which is a positive sign for investing, so I'll probably buy some shares.
Again, I remind you to ignore me.
One of my favorite Monte Python bits:
Yarddawg offers a great review of the downtown BB&T Ballpark.
The ballpark is as nice –albeit on a smaller scale- as any Major League ballpark I have ever been in. One Chicago White Sox executive stated the players would not play in a better facility until they made the Big Leagues and I completely agree. And remember this is Class A ball, the lowest of the three classes (A, AA, & AAA) in Minor League Baseball.
Fec put together some interesting info re. unemployment insurance. He ended with a sobering sentence:
There are 5.6 workers for every job opening in this country.
Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center has benefited from the services of a world record setting volunteer. According to this article a fellow named Don Moss has volunteered over 47,000 hours of his time to WFUBMC since 1982 and has been recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records for his efforts.
If WFUBMC had paid Mr. Moss $5 an hour then it would have cost them $235,000. I picked $5/hour because it's a nice round number that makes it easy to do the math and kind of the middle range of the minimum wage from 1982 until now.
There is a stunning graph about foreclosures between 2005 and 2010 here. One of the pieces of info contained therein is that 23.3% of ALL mortgages are underwater. Not of sub-prime mortgages, or mortgages taken out during the boom, or mortgages in Florida, etc. That's 23.3%, or nearly a quarter, of every single mortgage in the US of A is underwater. The chart also shows that there will be over 1 million homes repossessed in the US in 2010.
If you want to publish something online that generates a gazillion comments then I suggest the following:
BTW I've been reading Dana Blankenhorn, the author in question, for years and I definitely understand his point of view and I get what he's saying. I tend towards his view of online content (image or word) that in the long run you generally make more money by making it readily available online, but in this specific case I think the illustrator, Chris Buzelli, made some great points.
Buzelli does work for hire and he feels like the value of his work is diminished if it appears in the wrong place, and he also worries that a work for hire might be used inappropriately without his permission. For instance if a client gives him permission to use one of the pieces he did for them as a sample on his website and then that client sees the image used elsewhere, perhaps even on a competitor's website, Buzelli risks losing a client. Another good point he made is that he doesn't want his work used to illustrate an article that he might find objectionable.
Just so we're clear I think that Blankenhorn made a mistake by not first getting permission to use the image and then did the right thing by taking down the image as soon as he heard from Buzelli. I think he made another mistake by not simply apologizing and moving on, but I also think that because of this kerfluffle content creators now have an object lesson to reference. For his part I think Buzelli really did the right thing by not lawyering up and taking care of this directly himself. Finally, I think the last group of people I want to tick off are artists. They're scary when they get riled.
Befuddled 