Fascinating, from Alex MacLean, each in their own way. Click them all…
Category: Culture
-
The Comments Section
I was reading this post, Lefsetz’s Business Rules on The Big Picture, when I happened to notice the instructions above the comments section:
Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off topic discussions, it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
Hilarious.
-
Flowers
With Valentine’s Day approaching I have to tell my florist story.
A million years ago when I worked at Marsh we sent our administrative assistant (who was fabulous) flowers. We ordered them from 1-800-flowers. They died the next day. But 1-800-flowers was excellent and sent replacement flowers the next day.
These were gorgeous and lasted two weeks. Our admin told me she’d never had such beautiful flowers and gave me the card of the place that sent them.
My wife has never received flowers from anywhere else.
It never dawned on me before to ask what flowers are fresh. Since that episode, if I’m ordering roses my first question is “what colors are fresh?”. I’m sure not every florist is honest, but these guys tell me what arrived that morning. And I order accordingly.
At Valentine’s Day prices, they better last.
My other tip would be if Valentine’s Day is Friday and you are sending flowers to the office, why not send them early? Do you think you wife will not like getting flowers two days before her friends? And if bringing them home is a pain, you want more days of beautiful freshness.
I don’t know much, but I haven’t screwed up flowers in a long time…
-
Am I Allowed to be a Dick?
A blog post explaining the comment moderation policy of said blog had the title, “Because Flowcharts Make Everything Clearer”.
-
Happy New Year
From Healthcare Triage and the Incidental Economist…
-
Pizza War
If you haven’t seen the Daily Show rant on Chicago Style pizza vs. NY pizza, Barry Ritholtz consolidates all the Daily Show videos for you. They are hilarious.
But you have to watch the one at the bottom first. That started it all. Then go top to bottom.
Here’s how I know I’m right. You call it Chicago Style pizza, you call it deep dish pizza, stuffed pizza. You know what we call it? (pulling out a NY slice) Eh? You know what we call this? Pizza.
-
Brilliant
Sure, they’re getting old, but this is fantastic news. Monty Python has influenced my sense of humor (insert joke here) more than anything.
If you aren’t familiar with Monty Python, feel free to stop reading at this point.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail is still my favorite movie (and I can still quote pretty much the whole thing, including deleted scenes (“Dennis, have you seen the cat’s front legs?”).
Some classics from the original show:
From The Holy Grail:
-
Running with the Blind
This is a touching, uplifting article about a guy running the NYC marathon with a blind person, helping her achieve her goal.
About 15 years ago, I volunteered with the Achilles Track Club, which is for disabled runners, at the NYC marathon. My story is neither touching nor uplifting. It’s moderately amusing though.
Pre-kids I was a runner. I ran several marathons, but this was an off year (I forget the exact year). A friend asked if I could help the Achilles Track Club. They had a legally blind runner doing the marathon, and he was pretty fast (3:10 was his goal). They needed volunteers to run with him along the course.
If you think about it, this is quite tricky. Nothing would be worse that having a disabled runner not meet his goal because the runner assisting him hit the wall. So they always have multiple people assisting. In this case, since he was fast, they split up the course so there would be two people running with him for about 6 or 7 mile splits, then pass him off to the next two.
So me and one other guy were going to assist him from miles 14 – 20. We waited at the 14th mile marker. But we had been told that the mile marker was in a certain spot. It was actually a little farther down the road and on the other side. Not a big deal.
Time passes. We know the guy’s pace. He should have been here by now. This is 15 years ago, people aren’t running the marathon with cell phones. We have no way of knowing where he is. There’s one other volunteer from Achilles there. He suggests that the two of us sprint ahead to try to find him. The concern being that if they missed the mile marker (since it wasn’t where we were told), the people running with him are going longer than expected and may tire.
So we sprint off. This is actually one of the best parts of the marathon. When you come across the 59th street bridge into Manhattan around mile 15 the crowds are simply amazing. But we can’t find the guy.
At mile 16, the guy I’m running with says, “hey, I told my kid I’d be assisting a blind guy. He’s watching up ahead a bit. Can you pretend to be blind?”. Why not? I run a mile with my hand on the guys shoulder as though he’s guiding me. We get a ton of “Go Achilles!” cheers, which makes me feel somewhat fraudulent, but the kid cheers his dad so it seems worth it.
We make it to the 20 mile marker where the next two runners are waiting and still no one has seen the blind runner. There’s really nothing we can do at this point. The guy asks me, “what do you want to do?”. “Finish the race?”. Again, why not?
It was a great way to do it. You get the crowds of the NYC marathon and we only had to run half of it. But the finish wasn’t nearly as rewarding as when I did it for real.
What about the blind guy, you ask? We would later find out that he didn’t connect with the very first group of runners who were helping him. He was legally blind but not totally blind, so he just talked to other runners who helped him along the way. He finished around 3:15.
Go Achilles!
Steve Fischer's Random Blog 