Lysol Endorsement From a Crime Scene

 I just finished cleaning up. I had to scrub the wall with Lysol, you know to get the stain off of it. Lysol's the best cleaning product you can buy.

Self Bereaved Widow

 Ava Crowder

 on cleaning up after her husband

 one last time.

Justified S01E01

.

Harry Crane (Head of Media) and his Pay at SCDP in 1966

Roger Sterling pays Harry Crane $1100 to give up his windowed office in Mad Men S05E01. This supposedly equals his net monthly take home pay. Looking at historical tax rates at the (US) Tax Foundation on can calculate that Crane is making about $20K in the middle of 1966. According to Measuring Worth that has a economic value of somewhere between $200K and $350K.

The Tax foundation also has inflation adjusted numbers. Measuring Worth however has measures more than just straight inflation rates but also the relative economic value, or clout, of money in the past.

There is another thing about this scene. Roger Sterling is walking around with the equivalent of $10 grand in his pocket. For the same relative value the US should have a $1000 bill. The Euro comes in 500 Euro bills. To fight the drug war the US made handling of large sums of money difficult and expensive in time and regulation. The other reason why the Roger Sterling's of today don't walk around with wads of wads of cash large enough to wear out their pockets is because of credit cards. Today Roger Sterling would have a black AMEX and only just enough currency to tip well.

The Near Death of a Salesman

Stable, is that step backwards between successful and failing.

Pete Campbell,
 Philosopher/Pessimist/Account Executive

Mad Men S05 E01

From Room Temperture to Freezing in 12 Hours

Today's weather in Toronto showed a drop from room temperature to near freezing in the short time between late afternoon to early morning. Above is a screen scrape of the weather office's page for YYZ at about 5:38 this morning.

Looking Back on Bohemian New York

It [early '70's New York] must have seemed that absolutely anything was possible.

Donald Macleod

Well, that's true. Most everything was possible, except making a living. And we couldn't figure out how to do that.

Phillip Glass

Interview On BBC Radio  3 

Composer of the Week

20 Mar 2012

 

TAC's Road Safety Campaign

I had a little insomnia last night and ended up watching road safety videos from TAC. The Transport Accident Commission, Youtube channel, "is the statutory insurer of third-party personal liability" for vehicle accidents in the Australian state of Victoria. As such they have a vested interest in car safety. The above is a compilation of TAC's greatest hits so to speak.One of the best things about these PSA's instead the ones produced by MADD. is that there are concerned with the entire range of possible traffic accidents and not just ones concerning alcohol. There are ads on the importance wearing full leathers while on a motorcycle. There even was an ad where a minivan driving mother, with her own children, runs down a toddler despite being not drunk, not on drugs, not on the cell phone, wearing a seat belt, not distracted, just slightly faster.

MADD on the other hand has produced PSA's involving with no driving, no vehicles, no witchcraft, no watercraft except the danger of camping and beer. I agree that drinking and watercraft don't go together, but for MADD all booze is demon rum. MADD focuses on the morality of drinking, TAC focuses on road safety.

It is interesting that sometimes PSA's crafted for small parochial organizations can produce work that has a global impact. I was thinking of The Montana Meth Project, see Spooky Anti-Drug Ads; and the amazing and disturbing work that they do. The advantage that these groups have over highly funded national and international campaigns is focus and resolve.

Here is what I think is their most moving ad, "Haunted, which seems to make guilt a visible yet fleeting presence.

Panzer in Colorado

(posted on AH.com

Things that look like alternate history,
but aren't)

Dog eat Wolf in the Business World

Great Wolf Resorts is being taken over by some outfit (shell company?) called K-9 Holdings. Link to SEC filling.

Preview for CounterStrike:Global Objective

Found on a German CounterStrike site. It is good to take a look the game many of us will be inhabiting shortly.

Polar Bear Animation

The artist Greg Martin has created an animation of a polar bear walking across a polar landscape. White bears in a white landscape means line animation. The image above is taken from wiki.

Fifty Hours of Rain

Enjoy for fifty hours.

Prairie Dog Behavior On Mad Men

(Dilbert 7/24/1992)

(Mad Men S04E04)

Thinking About Chairs

Chairs. Young designers design chairs earlier in their careers. It not their fault it is how they were trained. I am so convinced by this tutorial that I will not design a chair this year.

NO-CHAIR-DESIGN Year 2012! from Eero Y on Vimeo.

Is this Email Necessary? - Flowchart

During WWII railroads were militarized. At the same they were allowed to continued operating under existing management. The nationalization the British railway companies happened after not during WWII. Rail companies were placed in a ticklish spot, they were still private corporations, they didn't want to complete annoy the traveling public who were past and future customers. So advertising was done by both government and railways to discourage consumer traffic.

Here is a flowchart that discourages email. It is not that email is such a bad thing but because it so useful. But too much email is sometimes worse that no email at all.

 (Alex 9/29/2000)

Flow chart after the jump.

Star Wars Yoga

Not everybody wonder what types of yoga poses various Star Wars characters. practice. Rob Osborne has wondered that.Found at The Laughing Squid. Found after looking at alternate route designs for the Bay Area's BART.

Front Organization Leader for a Terrorist Group Says Sorry but Cause was Righteous

Sinn Fein chairman: IRA should say sorry for hurt caused

Belfast Telegraph Saturday, 3 March 2012

Shameless 

Chicom Hothead Defines the Rule of Law

Peking University professor Kong Qingdong is being interviewed after a video of a mainland Chinese woman eating  in Hong Kong subway went viral. Apparently it is against the rules to eat in the Hong Kong subway and many in subway car were appalled by her bold faced misbehavior and this led to flame war between Hong Kong and the chicom netizens.  

The good professor rants on about all the things about Hong Kong that he hates. But then he shows an interesting insight in the thought process communists. Western businessmen should remember that China is not Hong Kong writ large. Communist China lacks the rule of law. For Kong Qingdong this is okay because the rule of law is only for degenerates. 

At the  5:55 mark

• Interviewer: But I heard that the environment of hpng kong is cleaner than us [Beijing].
• Kong Qingdong: That is because the rule of law, not because of (human) quality.Just like Singapore the fine for smoking is 5000. That is rule of law, right. The reliance on rule law shows the people have no quality.

(taken directly from the English subtitles) 

(from a link at China Droll)

Pop Culture Knowledge or My Lack Thereof

For me it is the other way around. I have no idea about the American pop culture "characters" mentioned with out googling I have to have to assume they are made up names.

These are my guess for the meanings of the names/nonsense terms mentioned in panels 3-6.

• Tiger Woods: Protected forest game reserve with large cats, usually tigers. As opposed to Lion Veldts, protected grassland game reserve with large cats, usually lions.
• Snooki: Common name for a toy poodle.
• LeBron: Brand of baby shoe. Name derived from the concept of bronzing shoes, the "ze" was dropped and the "le" added for some sort of pseudo foreignness, see Häagen-Dazs. 
• Lady Gaga: Childhood nickname of some aristocrat.

The cartoon is by Jen Sorensen, her weekly comic is Slow Poke.

Flying Robot Musicians

Three years ago I came across a video of Mario's Theme done with beer bottles and a R/C car. The music was "programed" by varying the spacing and liquid level of the bottles. In the above case it was created by programing robot quadrotors to interact with modified musical instruments. Bond's and Mario themes have seeped into pop culture's unconscious so need no introduction.

Why Some People Don't Like FPS's

"Build Your Skills to Fit Your Preferred Form of Violence"

Ad copy for the game
PAYDAY™ The Heist, on Steam.

This may some people ask, "won't somebody think of the children". This phrase is a "thought-terminating cliché", a term coined by Robert Lifton in his Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. A book I am going to look up after discovering it wiki link.