Wallow in silliness here
Yesterday I visited Marketenderiet, a seriously hip meeting- and event venue in Copenhagen. On one of the walls, I saw this wonderful painting of a chicken with a shark fin strapped on it’s back.
Which immediately reminded me of the corresponding cast iron sculpture I saw at the Danish National Art Museum a while back. That just HAS to be the same artist.
Great art! And it made me laugh :o)
What a weird and wonderful idea: A daily planner spanning not one year but 82 years – the average life expectancy of people in the western world. Look how thick that thing is! So what exactly is it you don’t have time for?
Via Kottke who went to a design conference and saw a presentation by Stefan Sagmeister on happines and design, which included the following excellent life advice:
* everything i do always comes back to me
* trying to look good limits my life
* everybody thinks they are right
* money does not make me happy
* thinking life will be better in the future is stupid. i have to live now
* complaining is silly. act or forget
* having guts always works out for me
Funny parody of a consulting company website:
Our creative team will come up with design and marketing ideas you never even thought of. How could you? You don’t have the talent we do. Don’t take it personally. That’s our job. That’s what we do. We do stuff.
Most consulting companies just provide regular marketing solutions. Not us. We provide groundbreaking solutions. Our marketing solutions are newer than anyone else’s, and they sound better because we give them cool titles like “Global Awareness Paradigms,” and “Market Consciousness Philosophies,” and “Creative Product Re-development Support.”
When we deliver your new designs and business strategies to you, they’ll be in really snazzy binders that look nice sitting on big, round meeting tables, so you’ll think you got your money’s worth. When your project has been completed, we’ll give you several follow-up phone calls to give the appearance that we even remember who you are or what we sold you.
From huhcorp.com.
I have now rated 1000 movies on imdb. That site probably knows more about my movie preferences than I do :o)
There is currently a rather active movement in the US that seeks to find fault with evolution and to promote creationism or the newest version of it, Intelligent design. One of the arguments often used, is that more and more scientists are coming to doubt evolution. This is probably not true, and the National Center for Science Education came up with a wonderful, wacky response. Eugenie Scott of the NCSE put it like this in an interview:
Well, you know, we were bombarded by irritated and irate scientists who said we could get 100,000 scientists in two weeks to sign a statement on evolution, let’s counter this nonsense. And we kept saying no, that’s not the way science is done; we don’t want to further mislead the public; you don’t do science by plebiscite, this is really silly. But on the other hand, we then got to thinking about the great American journalist H L Menkin who once said that, a good horse laugh is worth 1000 syllogisms, and we’re pretty big on the syllogisms. You go to our web page we’ve got straight science, we’re a serious organisation – but damn it, we’re tired of this.
They went for the horse laugh, hence Project Steve. You can get on the Project Steve list only if you’re a scientist, your name is Steve (or a variation thereof) and you agree with the following:
Evolution is a vital, well-supported, unifying principle of the biological sciences, and the scientific evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the idea that all living things share a common ancestry. Although there are legitimate debates about the patterns and processes of evolution, there is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism in its occurrence. It is scientifically inappropriate and pedagogically irresponsible for creationist pseudoscience, including but not limited to “intelligent design,” to be introduced into the science curricula of our nation’s public schools.
So far they’re way past 500 Steves. The name Steve represents about 1% of all scientists and was chosen in honour of the late Stephen Jay Gould.
A group of “baby-faced MIT students, hyper-geniuses and anarchistic whiz kids” figured out how to cheat casinos efficiently at blackjack.
Fifty thousand dollars strapped to each thigh. A hundred thousand dollars, in 10 bricks of hundreds, taped across my upper back. Fifty thousand more Velcroed to my chest.
I try to control my breathing as I stroll through Logan International Airport. Terminal C is buzzing and chaotic, an over-air-conditioned hive of college students escaping Boston for a long weekend. I am dressed like everyone else: baggy jeans, baseball hat, scuffed sneakers. But in my mind, I have as much chance of blending in as a radioactive circus clown. There’s enough money hidden under my clothes to buy a two-bedroom condo. And to top it off, there’s $100,000 worth of yellow plastic casino chips jammed into the backpack slung over my right shoulder.
I think it’s nice to see students putting the stuff they learn into practice :o) Read the entire article on Wired.
* Has anyone had to cut off their tongue because it frozen to a flagpole?
* DRIED PIDGEON MANURE IF IT MAKES CONTACT WITH YOUR EYE, WILL CAUSE YOU TO GO BLIND?
* I just read a blurb that pre-packaged foods can cause people to turn gay because of too much estrogen. If I was only allowed one question for snopes, I would ask if this is true. Is it?
* I’ve heard that it is impossible to take a lightbulb out of your mouth once one puts it in, without either breaking the bulb or dislocating the jaw. Do you know if this is true? I’m counting on you – my husband is really curious, and I don’t want to have to drive him to the hospital…
These are just a few of the sillier email questions sent to snopes.com, the primary web reference for urban legends. They exhaustively research many of the legends and myths making the rounds on the net and post a “True”, “False” or “Undetermined” status for each.
Here are a few of my favourites. See if you can guess which are true or false before you look it up:
* Japanese thieves send a ‘thank you’ note to a bank after robbing it.
* Consumers need to be cautious that water boiled in a microwave oven can suddenly “explode.”
* Golfer is poisoned by chewing on his tee.
* Eating carrots results in improved vision.
Ronald Culberson visited Southwest Airline’s people department and came away with some really great stories including this one:
…a senior executive spent a day working at the ticket counter and with the ground crew to have a better understanding of their roles.
While she was helping direct a plane to the gate using those long orange directional devices, one of the seasoned ground crew members told her to rotate her wrists in a circular manner.
When she did this, the plane did a 360 degree turn! She began to scream thinking she had sent a confusing signal to the pilot.
In reality, the ground crew had contacted the pilot and told them they had a “greeny” directing the plane and that they wanted to have some fun with her. The pilot enthusiastically agreed to play along. Very cool.
That has to be one scary moment – when something you do makes a fully loaded airline jet pirouet right in front of you.
I’ve gotta see The Aristocrats movie that’s coming out soon. Devised by Penn Jillette of Penn&Teller, it consists of 100 comedians telling the same joke – in wildly different ways.
Jillette writes:
With “The Aristocrats”, Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette have made the funniest movie ever, because it has more funny people than have ever been in one movie before. A labor of love three years in the making, encompassing more than 100 comedians and culled from over 100 hours of footage, Provenza and Jillette shot the documentary holding DV cameras in their own hot little hands and edited it at home on a Mac. As fellow comedians, Provenza and Jillette got their cameras rolling where no real filmmaker could ever go. They let us see how professional comedians talk after their sitcoms have wrapped and the audience has gone home.
The result is a heartfelt, private, unprecedented backstage look at famous comedians playing around. Provenza and Jillette got superstar comedians being funny for other comedians, and that is really no-kidding funny. They also captured a performance portrait unlike any other – the art of comic improvisation.
“The Aristocrats” has no nudity, no sex, and no violence, but it’s one of the most shocking movies you will ever see. Take a deep breath. This is the power of language spoken by professionals. Professionals trying to outdo each other with the most hysterically disgusting, offensive, f**ked-up verbal images they can spit out. You’ll hear descriptions that will stay with you the rest of your life, whether you want them to or not.
Sounds juuuuust fine to me.
Appearing in the movie: Penn Jillette, Chris Rock, Robin Williams, Jon Stewart, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Eddie Izzard, Hank Azaria, Drew Carey, George Carlin and many, many more.
I’m back from a 3 week trip to the US and the Bahamas, and with all the stuff we managed to cram into the trip, it feels like we’ve been gone for 3 months. No kidding. One reason is probably, is that we had 4 distinctly different sections of the trip. They were:
1: 2 days in Manhattan.
2 days is about as much Manhattan as I can take in one go, and after that we were all New York’ed out. We walked all over midtown, saw two Broadway shows, found a great cheap Sushi place of Bleecker and happened by chance to be on Times Square as they were announcing Michael Jacksons innocence. As for the Broadway shows: Slava’s Snow Show is a wonderful, poetic, funny, touching clown show with some great special effects in a theatre just off Union Sqaure. See it if you get a chance!
2: The Bahamas
We flew down on JetBlue for only 99$ a person. Amazing! I attended Roosevelt Finlaysons conference on Festival in the workplace, and Patricia lazed by the pool (a divison of labour that suits us perfectly). The conference rocked and I met some very interesting people there, including Peter Block, the author of two of my favourite books: The answer to how is yes and Freedom and accountability at work.
3: Washington DC
Visiting a city is so much nicer, when you know somebody there, and I have the great fortune of having a friend in DC. Traci Fenton lives in a wonderful house on 14th street a few miles outside central DC, and let us stay in the guest room for as long as we wanted. Traci is putting together a conference on democratic organizations in october at which I will speak, and seeing her plans for the event I just know it will be great. We also went tubing on a lake in Manassas and did DC as tourists.
4: Touring
I want you to imagine a Roller Coaster that goes like this: You accelerate from 0 to a 190 Kph horizontally in 4 seconds. You go 130 meters straight up. You go over the top and then go 130 meters straight down. The you break, the entire ride having lasted 22 seconds. That’s Top Thrill Dragster, and we did it. 3 times. It rawks! For the last week we rented a car which turned out to be a Ford Mustang – niiiiice. We started by driving down to Williamsburg and seeing Busch Gardens there – which was OK. Then we drove to Cedar Point in Ohio and that seriously rocks. They have some of the tallest and fastest roller coasters on earth, including Top Thrill Dragster. All I can say is, that the extra wait to sit in the front row is totally worth it. We also drove around Pennsylvania and New Jersey for a couple of days, and I startled the people in a small bookstore in Andover NJ by buying 23 business books.
You can see the best pictures from the trip here.
It’s great to be getting back into gear in Copenhagen and enjoying the quiet summertime in the Happy at work project, before we hit what I just know will be a very busy and exciting autumn.
Just to make it more exciting, we’re planning an international conference/forum on happiness at work in september – more news will follow very soon.
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