The winner of the 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is David McKenzie, a 55-year-old Quality Systems consultant and writer from Federal Way, Washington. The B-L Fiction Contest challenges entrants “to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels.”
“Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ [...]
Archive > June 2009
“It Was A Dark And Stormy Night”
How to Shrink Systemic Risk
Laurent Pacalin has a great piece about “financial systemic risk” on his blog, Ad-Ventures in Marketing. In it he breaks the economic meltdown and its solution into three separate solutions which I will describe as simplicity, clarity and decisions at a mico-level. He even quotes my personal hero, Harvard law professor, Elizabeth Warren, who chairs [...]
A cappella Goodness
I was a lukewarm fan of Toto but this is a fascinating a cappella version of their hit song, Africa. The interpretation is by the Slovenian vocal jazz choir, Perpetuum Jazzile, performed at Vokal Xtravaganzza 2008. They credit the Kearsney College Choir of South Africa for coming up with their innovative rainstorm intro. Perpetuum Jazzile [...]
What’s a Madda You?
This is Joe Dolce singing a song that makes me wish I were more Italian on those down days. [Samuel L. Jackson has a wonderful "Snakes on a plane" revisionist look at the song, too.]
The Day the Media Died
L. McDuff takes the piss out of “old” media in this celebration (dirge?) about the change social media has wrought. Titled Mad Avenue Blues, McDuff says the parody of Don McLean’s famous song “is about the media/advertising world and the impact to the traditional models brought about by the accelerating migration to digital.”
[To the tune [...]
Tennessee Valley Hike
A group of friends take a hike on a warm, foggy Sunday in the hills above Tennessee Valley just north of the Golden Gate Bridge in the Marin Headlands.