I guess if Julie Bishop won’t be my neo-con sex kitten, I’ll have to settle for Bill Maher’s Neo-Con Dating Service.
The tyranny of the ideal
A spot-on observation from Dave Snowden:
…autocratic managers and the dark side of management consultancy have discovered how to keep their penny and still eat the bun.
The way it works is this. You spend a lot of money putting in control systems based on idealised process flows and ways of working. This applies in customer relationship management and health & safety alike along with many other fields. It looks really good on the flow charts. However the day to day reality of dealing with customers, or doing the job (say on an oil rig) means that people have to break the rules. Your business depends on their doing so and as long as it has a good outcome you ignore it. However if something goes wrong, you bring out that rule book and the idealised model and now you have someone to blame: the poor schmuck who has been making your business work for you.
Thanks to Johnnie Moore for the pointer.
Oops, I missed the Lolcats!
OK, I’m obviously so over-committed that I’m now officially Out Of Touch. I didn’t know what a “lolcat” was until I stumbled across this article.
At the risk of completely ruining my credibility as someone who’s supposed to Know Stuff About Teh Intertubes by summarising something that’s already been reported in the mainstream media — which means the Sydney Morning Herald‘s “Stay In Touch” column will run it next week — here’s the skinny…
Eric Nakagawa was “between jobs” in January when he found the picture at right. On a whim he and a mate created a website around it, I Can Has Cheezburger. Six month later, they’re getting 500 new submissions and 200,000 unique visitors every day.
Mr Nakagawa doesn’t need that day job any more.
Read the Wall Street Journal article explaining the history of the lolcat, and Anil Dash’s fantastic essay on the linguistic aspects, Cats Can Has Grammar.
“Every parent’s nightmare”
I’m guessing the folks at The Bulletin magazine wish they’d thought longer before adding this tag to the front cover this week.
Even more troubling when you remember this week’s news and Mr Jones’… erm, incident.
Friday childish humour
This is really pathetic, I know. But when I received this invoice from a supplier this afternoon I just had to laugh. And then share it with you.
US newspapers pull “offensive” cartoon
Newspapers across the US have pulled this Opus cartoon by Berkeley Breathed, afraid of offending people. Yet as I read it, the only people it’s making fun of are people like character Lola Granola — people who jump onto bandwagons because it’s “fashionable” instead of holding genuine beliefs.
Dan Gillmor says it’s a case of puritan prudishness and political cowardice. Salon have written an editorial. Thanks to BoingBoing for the pointer.
Now watch this cartoon spread across the blogosphere faster than you can say “Danish pastry”.