-
There's an off-color joke in here somewhere (I kid! I kid! My wife is 3/4 Polish!)
-
whoa 1982 hi
-
In the movie "Strange Days" Ralph Fiennes' character's voice mail asks, "What's on your mind?" I tried it on my answering machine for awhile and got complaints that it was freaking people out
Page 45 of 129
-
Yes, that's about right
Sometimes I wonder, as I pursue (gradually) healthier eating habits and begin shopping for food for my son, whether buying “natural” foods makes a difference. I’m fairly progressive, but I’ve never fallen hard for organic foods or shied away from processed sweets. The difference doesn’t always shout out at me.
And then I read some labels.
Consider the ingredients in the Skippy peanut butter in my kitchen. I grew up with Skippy, my wife eats Skippy, it’s peanut butter! But take a peek at the ingredient list, reprinted verbatim:
Roasted peanuts
Corn syrup solids
Sugar
Soy protein
Salt
Hydrogenated vegetable oils to prevent separation
Mono and diglycerides
Minerals
Vitamins
I always assumed, well, that’s how peanut butter is made, right? But then I got into Cream-Nut, the old-fashioned peanut butter made in Michigan and purchased at my local Fairway market. Its ingredient list:
Peanuts
Sea salt
The difference is a revelation. So, too, is the nutrition that comes from each–the Skippy has four and a half times as much sodium, two and half times the carbohydrates and four times the sugar.
In fairness, Skippy now makes a Natural line of its own, so this isn’t really about how Unilever is evil. It’s a reminder to myself that the processed foods of the past half-century do, indeed, come from worse places, no matter how good they taste. The current trend away from these foods is a bandwagon I’m going to try to stick with.
I doubt I can do anything to help Nate’s sweet tooth, which I inherited from my grandmother. But at the very least, I can get him hooked on the right kind of peanut butter.
-
What I learned today: Joe Leeway of the Thompson Twins is now a certified hypnotherapist in California
-
Countering the article I linked to re K-Rock: WHTZ, the good ol' pop station, is #2 in this market, and it caters to the tween-and-teen crowd just like it did when I was that age. Although it's not a good sign that the station I like, WRXP, is doing worse than K-Rock, which is getting yanked (maybe RXP will inherit some listeners)
-
K-Rock is becoming "Now FM." I wonder if it will do as well as Jack did before they brought CBS-FM back. There's room in New York for rock radio, by the way; it just has to not play the saaaame soooong allll daaaay
How to Get Hired on aiaio, the Ai blog.
I have long been an observer, commentator and course-corrector when it comes to job interviews. Many moons ago I published a series of job-hunt best practices in this space. Titled “Interdon’t,” many of my pointers are just as relevant today as they were a decade ago.
I am continually amazed by the flagrant violations of basic job-search protocol. Among the things I’ve seen the past two weeks:
- Cover letters with our company name in a different font, copy-pasted
- Saying “this position is a great fit” while having a background in, say, high finance
- Chatty letters with no resumes attached
- Emailed resumes with no accompanying text at all
People expect to (and do) land work like this? How? I suppose they’re hired by people with similar approaches, but that’s not me.
Anyway, read the two links above if you’re looking for a job, and good luck in your search.
-
If you had a pair of pants with the same fit as the Wall Street Journal and a sports section, you wouldn't wear them
-
delectably evil
-
I could have told you numbers 1, 3 and 4 would be atop the list… the only surprise is that #2 worked its way into the mix
-
Andy's article makes it into the Time (as does Andy, as an author, congrats to him)
-
Congratulations Joe! This is a signal that it's time to get you back to the poker table
-
Ewww… makes me reconsider whether my love of Tropicana Pure Premium is really all that healthy (but hey, at least they're fixing the packaging)
-
Not new, but always worth noting. Good summary and observations, too
-
The day after my post on GM, The Economist weighs in, and shares my exact opinion (although they say it a lot better)
-
Fascinating stuff. Too bad my friends at The Economist wouldn't talk to Andy about it
Jurassic Web in Slate, subtitle: “The Internet of 1996 is almost unrecognizable compared with what we have today.”
What did people do online back when Slate launched? After plunging into the Internet Archive and talking to several people who were watching the Web closely back then, I’ve got an answer: not very much.
To which I say: bullshit.
The World Wide Web was an invigorating, compelling and, frankly, amazing place in 1996. Innovations were fast, furious and quickly adopted. Clever people did clever things and pretty much everyone noticed, because “everyone” was a rather small and curious community.
I know. I was there. Not “watching,” like the folks Slate’s reporter Farhad Manjoo spoke to, but creating. Designing. Exploring. Sharing. And, pretty much daily, blown away.
The Internet of 1996 was certainly nothing like today’s experience. But to suggest there wasn’t much to do is to ignore everything that was being done.
There was no iTunes; but there were MP3s, and .wav files, and sharing was just as exciting (and covert). There was no glut of information, not yet; but there were unbelievably good reads and finds, large and small, like Suck and HotWired and 0sil8. Tools for online creation were primitive, but that didn’t stop people like me from hand-coding HTML and slicing together animated GIFs frame by frame and putting amazing works online.
No Yahoo Mail? So what? I was sending email with Eudora over high-speed connections back in 1991. And I first used instant messaging in 1992, on an old Mac running OS 7, when young Farhad was still in middle school. Which is not to be a grumpy old man, but to make the point he misses: the Internet wasn’t hamstrung back then. It was just different.
I dare say 1996 was, in certain ways, more interesting online than 2009. The Web was still the great unknown. People didn’t know what to make of it, but they knew it was radical and fascinating. It was the future, happening in real time.
Today the Internet is a mature medium that has become more sophisticated almost non-stop since the early days of its commercialization. But to call its initial era boring is to miss the real story. The Internet has never been boring. Those of us who were there in 1996, shaping what so many people now consider normal, know the truth.