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So you're Michael Dell. You're a billionaire. You're at a fancy conference with lots of other bigshots in Davos, Switzerland, the Russian Prime Minister has just finished speaking and is now taking questions, and you ask, innocently enough: How can we help to expand information technology in Russia?
To which Valdimir Putin replies, in front of all the other bigshots: "We don't need help. We are not invalids. We don't have limited mental capacity."
I don't think he's gettin' a Dell, Dude.
My 12-year-old son succeeded Tuesday night in getting school canceled on Wednesday due to snow (and lots of it). The three keys, he explained to me, were making sure that the night before, you:
Worked like a charm. If you're dreading tomorrow's budget meeting, you might give it a try tonight.
....is ready to take on bad guys and bad economic news of all kinds with included microphone, American flag, blue and red neckties, and interchangeable hands to use them (as well as weapons from other sets, e.g., swords, pistols, lightsabers, etc.). Oh, and a picnic set to relax with afterward.
Really, you can't make this up.
Hillary Clinton was sworn in this week as Secretary of State, and not a moment too soon: Another international crisis has erupted between the U.S. and a major ally. Wars that won't cease in the Middle East, you ask? More strain in the Ukraine? Au contraire! The French (referred to by the TimesOnline as "cheese-eating surrender-monkeys") are outraged by the outgoing Bush administration's move last week to triple duties on Roquefort cheese. They demand that newly sworn-in President Barack Obama — along with closing Guantanamo, re-outlawing torture, ending two wars, fixing U.S. health care and restarting the global economy — rescind the tax on especially moldy cheese with a fancy name. Said Michel Barnier, France's Agriculture Minister: “I hope that he [Obama] will avoid mediocre little measures such as the one just taken against Roquefort." A member of the French Parliament even called for retaliation, in the form of a "super-tax" on Coca-Cola.
Sacré bleu!
As Treasury Secretary nominee Timothy Geithner is demonstrating during his confirmation hearings this week, nothing concentrates the mind on correctly filling out your 1040 — or asking yourself, four to seven years after the fact, "Gosh, did I forget to pay $34,000 in taxes from 2001 to 2004?" — like the prospect of a bunch of senators asking you about it on national television. (Geithner remembered and paid in November, just about the same time he learned that he would be nominated. Doh! Hate it when that happens!).
Geithner's not alone; the same thing has happened to nominees in nearly every administration, across a list of names ranging from Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood to Bernard Kerik. So why not take advantage of the "Nominee Effect" on Americans' willingness to pay taxes and randomly nominate, oh, 10% of taxpayers for a cabinet position each year? We wouldn't really let them serve — how many Secretaries of Transportation do we need, after all? — but they would all cheerfully pay their back taxes and get a nice certificate (Official Nominee for Secretary of [insert department name here]), a box lunch and a photo op with the second-tier senator of their choice. Honestly, it sounds a lot more civil and a lot more fun than an IRS audit, and would probably be twice as effective.
Sign up today!
A friend of mine just got squeezed out of his senior executive position in a recession-related merger (He's sharp and talented, his business unit has been very successful, but since his parent corp was run by nincompoops, the whole shootin' match was forcibly acquired. Turns out it doesn't matter how smart you are, if there's a guy with the same job title on the other, more-equal side of the merger (i.e., the side that's bringing cash), you're out, finita la commedia). So he lost his job. And he had to tell a bunch of the successful people that he'd recruited over the the last several years to join his successful unit that they're out of jobs, too. And that to get their severance packages, they'll all have to work another month, to help the new nincompoops make a successful transition (whatever that means, when you're firing a bunch of smart, successful people who made this part of it work in the first place).
All of which is bad enough. But to add insult to injury, the new nincompoops have moved all the employees who are keeping their jobs to a different floor of the building, away from my friend and his laid-off team. Because... it would be upsetting for the workers who still have incomes to be confronted by those who won't? Because the the newly terminated might trip the still-retained on their way to the coffee pot? Because the soon-to-be-exers have cooties? Nobody will say. But it's spooky for the about-to-be-departed... almost as if every time you dragged your tired, resentful, just-fired ass to the elevator, trying to be a professional, trying to help out with a numbskulled "transition," you could hear someone behind you, whispering: "Dead Man Walking..."
I kid you not: There are now more than 70 applications available in Apple's iTunes Store that offer the sounds, if not the full effects, of flatulence. Along with amazing names (iFart Mobile, Fart for Free, Fart Cushion), they offer a stunning variety of the noises that are their raison d'être; one popular program features such aural pleasures as Jack the Ripper, Bombardier, and Burrito Maximo. Cleverly designed for the 12-year-old boy in all of us, many include such useful options as time delays (so that you can place your speaker-enabled iTouch or iPhone near an unsuspecting victim and perform ventriloquistic flatulence), ringtones, and the ability to, um, record your own, well, self-expressions. Even more hilarious than the apps themselves are the hundreds of reviews, in which the relative volumes and "realistic sounds" of various programs are debated by devotees of the genre.
And you thought American ingenuity and culture were dead.
