In Case You Were Wondering What I Was Thinking
• Watching multi-millionaire football owners negotiate with multi-millionaire football players at the cost of canceling the 2011 season prompts me to hope that they all lose.
• There were 10 million people stranded in Tokyo recently who couldn’t get home. We watch with detached amazement, but that amount is larger than the population of any U.S. city, and almost ten times the population of Dallas.
• There is more talent than ever this year on American Idol, and the judges are better.
• Why do restaurant servers memorize your order and then race to the computer? Why can’t they make some notes, so that I’d stop getting olives in my martinis and my streaks at the wrong temperature? Is this a sign of some kind of mistaken elegance?
• Mayonnaise on pastrami should be a felony subject to a year’s incarceration and the suspension of the food license of the establishment that agrees to permit it.
• On average, the U.S. has, ironically, the industrialized world’s best universities and worst secondary schools.
• For some reason, only the Germans and Italians know how to design and build truly exciting cars.
• When we didn’t do well in school as kids, we were told to study harder, use more discipline, and get some help. Today, the test in unfair, the parents aren’t doing their job, and homework is too severe. Instead of raising the educational bar, we’re doing the limbo. How low can we go?
• Some day there will be only three newspapers—probably the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USAToday—and you’ll simply get the local editions of your choice. The rest are stegosauruses.
• Small businesses in the U.S. create more new, net jobs (not replacement jobs) than the sum of the Fortune 500 companies.
• Every week there’s another silly diet, and people get heavier and heavier. Why does eating less and exercising more not seem like the right idea?
• The biggest dolt by far portrayed in the movie Social Network was former Harvard president and director of the National Economic Council, Larry Summers.
• I’m still getting “Dearly Beloved” spam from Nigeria, asking me for thousands of dollar to help them send me millions. Are people really that stupid? The solution to all this spam is to charge a tenth of a cent per name in mailings. It would cost most of us next to nothing but put the spammers out of business.
• The secrets to a successful auction: Obtain highly desirous gifts; attract high rollers; have an open bar.
• Before you fear that you’re a failure who can’t compete, I have just three words for you: Spiderman, the play.
© Alan Weiss 2011. All rights reserved.
