it’s my new favorite thing in the world right now. If you haven’t watched this show yet, then I suggest with much enthusiasm that you spend the weekend catching up. I promise you will laugh and laugh and wish you were from new zealand or that your supposed IBF from NZ would write you a lousy email or something so you didn’t think he was dead in a ditch.
you can get it on itunes. probably hbo.com, too, I don’t know for sure. I watch it old school, on my actual television.
Am I alone in not wanting to hear/read/watch people’s accounts of the bridge collapse in Minneapolis?
Fill me to the brim with tales of zombies and aliens and otherworldly forms taking over; books by Stephen King and Tolkien, The Road; movies like Children of Men and Signs and Star Wars; all that and more. End-of-world scenarios are my preferred dish, served fresh and piping hot.
But when it’s real, when it’s happening in the space that I live and breathe, when it’s not for my entertainment appetite…well, it’s all I can bear just to read the headlines. I’m interested of course, but it feels perverted, and it satisfies nothing of my apocalyptic hunger. It just makes me feel really bad and helpless.
I may be totally prepared for a zombie invasion, but my car crashing into the Mississippi River? Well, you can’t really plan for that and taking in all those videos and stories and pictures just isn’t going to help. Not that I’m saying those things shouldn’t be available to the interested parties. I can see the value in it. But for me personally, I just glance at the headlines, maybe read a brief article or two to get the basic facts and current status, then I’m off.
Although really, there is very little else for me to do online. With the past few days at work being so very slow, I have now officially seen everything on the internet. There is nothing left. I finished the whole thing.
The magazine I work for was owned by a big company, part of a huge collection of magazines labeled “enthusiast media”. A few months ago, my company sold off these enthusiast magazines to another huge company. And today, apparently, the acquisition has been officially completed. We all received an email from the new chairman letting us know. I don’t think I’m really allowed to post that email in its entirety, but I wish I could, because it’s hilarious. I think the person who wrote the email took a bunch of regular, normal words, like “hi, this is your boss! shape up or ship out! Lots of things are going to change! Watch out!” and replaced them with a bunch of words from some sort of business doublespeak thesaurus.
To avoid any possible trouble, I’ll just list my two favorite lines from the email:
“We do expect to generate synergies as we unite the businesses.” In other words: expect some of you to lose your jobs in the corporate structure (like HR, finance, legal, etc. We’re all safe here at the magazine).
“I want to let you know that leadership is committed to ensuring that change at our Company will be purposeful and value-driven.” we’re not gonna stop being cheap! that’s our #1 goal!
two of the saddest business words in all of history: synergy and value-driven.