Bank of last resort

I’m not saying that we’re going to hell in a handbasket, but here’s another example of the plummeting common denominator in the use of language in business:

It’s a come-on for high schoolers to open checking accounts at a Chase Bank in a supermarket in Palm Springs. Not sure how much of the smaller print you can see, but here are a few random thoughts on it:

Of course there’s the illiteracy factor—neither “can’t” nor “it’s” has the required apostrophe for proper usage in this case.

& I wonder what the “real worl” might be. I looked, & the “d” hasn’t been erased, so someone put that up & everyone else left it. Like the “cant” & “its”.

How does “they can’t overdraw” relate to “teaches them to manage money”? Wouldn’t the effects of having a check bounce be a much better instructor on how best to manage money? I mean—would the economy be in such a mess if people from house-buyers to Fortune 500 CFOs had a better grasp on the limits of finances?

Considering the trouble Chase has been in, this rather reinforces the idea that they don’t quite know what they’re doing, & would make me reluctant to put my after-school earnings in their institution.

Nuclear winter

You’ll note from this photo that there’s a great gaping hole where the microwave oven should be.

Last Wednesday evening I noticed that my egg wasn’t cooking, no matter what setting or for how long I had it in there. Thursday I called the property manager And Friday the repairman came out. (Not quite the service I had at the Apartment Megalopolis in San José; but this property management company is decidedly more down-market than that place.)

It seems the magnetron tube has died. And the repairman was exceedingly upset about the fact that I live on the third floor and there’s no elevator. Meaning not only did he have to remove the oven from the wall (“These things are really heavy!”), but had to get it down two flights of stairs.

(“How did they get the appliances in here?” he wailed, looking at the side-by-side refrigerator. I assume they schlepped them up. Unless they built the unit around them.)

I expect he won’t be the one to bring either the repaired unit or a replacement back up here.

Anyhow, I’m finding that not having a nuclear device cramps my cooking style considerably. No bacon. No quick zapping of leftover Persian food from the takeout place across the street. No heating up the coffee that’s gone cold.

Bugger getting the appliances up here. How am I going to survive until I get my microwave back? I actually considered buying a teeny one for the interim, because I know it’ll take forever for the property manager and owner decide on what action to take.

Prisoner of technology, that's me.

No kissing

February is American Heart Health month here in the US. So let me bring you a story that’s associated with heart operations: the no-kiss, hard CPR method.

And here to show us how it’s done is that master of vascular sensitivity, Vinnie Jones:

The British Heart Foundation endorses the method, and created the Jones video. We’ll have to see how it flies this side of the Pond.

The bark side of Super Bowl

Ordinarily I tune out commercials on TV, if I can’t fast-forward past them. (I’ve also trained my eyes not to see ads on web pages. All those billions of dollars spent on SEM just swirl down the drain as far as I’m concerned.)

I also don’t watch sporting events. I used to like the Olympics before NBC got hold of them & turned them into xenophobic yak-a-thons.

So the Super Bowl is a great big glob of non-interest to me. However, I do understand that this is where advertisers seriously strut their stuff, & sometimes the commercials are quite entertaining. Maybe more so than what’s happening on the gridiron.

(Well, unless Janet Jackson is involved.)

Here’s one that’s been “leaked” to the Net, from Volkswagen:

It’s not clear to me what dogs barking a John Williams piece has to do with German cars. But it’s certainly more entertaining to watch the piss being taken (so to speak) out of that pompous, self-important musically-bloviating, um, composer.

Enough, already

J.C. Penney’s new CEO is taking an interesting approach to the Applification of the retail giant. As of today, no more sales-du-jour; just consistent, low pricing.

& when I say “sales-du-jour”, I mean even more than that: last year they ran 590 sales.

I don’t know how they do that—sales on sales, I guess.

But Ron Johnson led Target for some years before moving to run retail operations at Apple. You can apparently thank him for the no-discount but really cool Apple Store ambience. (If you don’t know about Apple stores, all the customers look like they came from either Skid Row or a developers’ bullpen & the fixtures & the help are all minimalist chic.) He seems to be intending to meld the low prices of the former with the…well, the experience of the latter.

If so, he’s got a long row to hoe. I haven’t been in a Penney’s store in a while (by which I mean somewhere around 30 years), but peering into them at the mall, they strike me as seriously shabby.

Meanwhile, the company has been running commercials touting the shift in strategy. See for yourself.

 Here's what I wonder: if it works for Penney's, will Macy's follow suit? I certainly hope so, because they must run at least 600 sales per year, too.

Muppet news

Evidently it’s not enough to have Sunnis fighting Shiites, or Tutsis going at it with Hutus or Serbs taking on everyone in the Balkans. No—Fox News and the Muppets are now firing across each others’ bows.

Not watching a whole lot of TV news, I hadn’t been aware that Fox’s Eric Bolling proclaimed that the latest Muppet movie indicates a “liberal media” bias that’s brainwashing kids against big business, especially (in this case) big oil.

Actually—I hadn’t been aware that anyone named Eric Bolling exists.

Nonetheless, it does seem a bit mean-spirited to go after the childhood icons. But it turns out that the fuzzy friends are not partially armed when it comes to a battle of wits. At a press conference in London this week, Kermit and Miss Piggy had a few words of their own:

I’m just helping fulfill Kermit’s prediction that this’ll be all over the Internet. Happy to do my bit.

Calculated to bring you down

A writer for Slate has come up with a Mitt Romney comparison calculator. It’s an algorithm that uses Romney’s income for 2010 (based on the tax returns he finally made public) and calculates how long it would take the Republican candidate to “earn” whatever you made that year.

Then it tells you how long it would take you (at your income level) to amass what he does in a year.

If you’re not depressed when you start out, you are when you’re done.

Woman's best friend

This came around on the joke list at work a few days ago; seems pretty spot on:

“Man is a woman's best friend.  He will reassure her when she feels insecure and comfort her after a bad day. He will inspire her to do things she never thought she could do; to live without fear and forget regret. He will enable her to express her deepest emotions and give in to her most intimate desires. He will make sure she always feels that she's the most beautiful woman in the room and will enable her to be confident, sexy, seductive, and invincible.

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*

*

“No wait...... sorry....... I'm thinking of wine.

“It's wine that does all that.

“Sorry.”

Are you feeling lucky?

There I was, minding my own business, with the TV on—which is to say, not really paying attention to the screen, when all of a sudden I saw some personage blathering about a colonoscopy sweepstakes.

You heard me: colonoscopy sweepstakes.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at the video here. It features Ozzy and; Sharon Osbourne, so you know it’s legit.

What I wonder is: what's second prize?

Dragon year for high tech

Staying in the holiday spirit of the Year of the Dragon, here’s a story from the NY Times on why US companies are sending operations overseas. The focus is on Apple & China.

Foxconn, highlighted in the story, also manufactures the telecommunications equipment for the company I’m working for (until Friday, when my contract runs out). I myself don’t like the idea that the people in Foxconn’s factories threaten mass suicide because of the working conditions.

But I don’t know where to go, what company or industry to target, where that’s not the case. (Not mass suicide—not yet; just miserable working conditions.)

And I'm just wondering how celebratory the workers at Foxconn and the hundreds of other high-tech feeder factories are feeling about the Year of the Dragon?