Metablogging for Mega Money

At a recent Emergency Meeting, Conch Shell asked, "How can we make money from this?"

It doesn't look like anyone is about to hire us to metablog them, and the Ethics Committee has some sort of issue with us charging people to not metablog them. Meanwhile, ESI: The Sock Puppet Movie is languishing in development.

That leaves Google Ads. They do an amazing job of picking ads that will match your content. Attached is a screenshot I found while perusing one of the dating sites.

I do not floss, therefore I am (in big trouble with my dentist)

I have a dentist's appointment soon. But I have not been flossing nearly enough. And I can't bear to face the tut-tutting and sanctimonious sighs of my dental hygienist.

So which of the following strategies would best encourage me to floss?

a) Tie a piece of dental floss around my finger
b) Take a spool of floss to The Observatory each day and use it during work
c) Surreptiously photograph my dental hygienist, preferably while she's scowling, and paste the photo to my bathroom mirror

In lieu of Conch Shell's Thursday post...

Our favourite street...

Strumming past the graveyard

I attended a funeral on Monday. I didn't know the deceased, but it was nice to be there to support his grieving widow.

Her husband died Friday night from pancreatic cancer. All tremendously sad. There were many tears as a silken-voiced guitarist strummed out a balm of gentle notes.

It occurs to me that the departed took his final bow as Coyote and I were enjoying a rare concert by the incomparable Daniel Johnston, a cat who's probably used up at least five or six of his nine lives.

I found the show inspiring, in part because Johnston has long struggled with mental illness. Everyone from Nirvana to Bright Eyes has covered his songs. Some are heart-tuggingly touching. Others are just plain fun, even when it comes to death. As a prelude to the funeral mass, it seems fitting that Johnston sang his cheeky little gallows-humour riff on Bruce Springsteen's Cadillac Ranch: Funeral home, funeral home / Got me a coffin, shiny and black / I'm goin' to the funeral and I'm never comin' back.

Management by magazine

Lately his Esteemed Baldness, Larry, has hired business gurus to help with his 'thousand days of change 'visioning' thing over at City Hall. (I hold a certain distaste for people 'verbing' nouns like that, but I will forebear digression -- just this once.) I suspect this exercise to be an outgrowth of that little book about 'corporate excellence and change' that he read, Execution: The Discipline of getting things done. He got so excited he publicly urged all the city councillors to read the sucker.

I suspect the mayor's infatuation with this book may be a, ummm, textbook variation on management by magazine. As excited as he is, he treads a very well-worn path. I'm a very old coyote. Old enough to have seen a buncha business cycles, a buncha companies and a buncha hotshot executives in action. And y'know, all of 'em seem to blather on faddily about cultures of excellence and paradigm shifts and methods for ensuring organizational quality. All sounding strangely repetitive after awhile.

Remember The Rules? A book of instructions that, if followed to the letter, would allow a women to snag herself a ma-yun? Heard it mentioned much lately? I thought not. It's pretty much the female dating equivalent of business guru's books on corporate change.

I'm gonna heretically suggest that this may be because so many captains of industry don't have a hot clue what the fuck they're really supposed to be doing to make their companies successful. Sure, they've gotten the MBAs (or in Larry's case, gone to Algonquin College) and they've learned to project that take-charge outer confidence that investors and voters love, but they're really as clueless as the rest of us.

Having aligned themselves with the people they believe to be the smart money, they don't want to admit that their fates depend as much as they do upon dumb luck. I can almost guarantee you that every rich guy whom I've ever visited of a night to tip over their trashcan, fondly thinks they've succeeded because they're such darn smart businessmen. They just don't get how much dumb luck is involved, and don't want to know. Because that would mean they're schnooks like the rest of us, not steely-eyed captains of their own fates.

Which leads us to management by magazine. At some level, everybody's insecure. Everybody's looking for a guru. Everybody wants to believe that someone else can tell 'em - preferably in fewer than eleven chapters - all of the rules for success in life and business. Because they don't think they know 'em themselves, and they find it heartening to think that someone else can tell 'em. A ton of writers are out there, willing to feed 'em that same old recycled bullshit, too.

Bad news: Today's guru, as soon as the next hot flavour-of-the-minnit comes out, is tomorrow's has-been. Guys who write these books are just as clueless as the people who buy 'em. But at least they're gettin' paid publishing royalties for it...