Remember Happy Days? Here’s a video that’s worth seeing (if you haven’t already), courtesy of Funny Or Die, which is a site worth bookmarking. Ron Howard making an appearance with Henry Winkler, the Fonz himself. Depending on your political persuasion, you’re going to love it or hate it. The good thing about such viral approaches is that you get to give that feedback by voting on the video. And it’s the continuing shape of things to come.
Saw this over at John M Willis’s blog:
I couldn’t help but smile. It reminded me of something I heard nearly thirty years ago, when I worked at Burroughs Corporation. One of our customers, Smiths Industries, had a mainframe that was finally ready for that great computer graveyard in the sky. Nobody had really expected that day to come, so no one was prepared for it: no counselling, no advice, nothing for the grieving DP department. A sad state of affairs.
Until one of them had an idea. Why not give everyone a tool, and involve the whole department in dismantling the machine? So that’s what they did. They handed out chisels and saws and pickaxes and pokers.
And hammers.
They hacked the computer. Literally. And left with the pieces. A cathartic and joyous experience. [Note: I heard this from a Smiths guy, I wasn’t actually there to witness it. But I liked the story, and have remembered it ever since.]
People tend to value scarce things more than they value abundant things. Not all scarce things, though, as this site shows:
There I was, blithely catching up on my reading after returning from the vacation. Blog by blog, checking up on the recent output of the people I spend time “following”. Quietly reading Zephoria. And, following the links in answers to bizarre questions, I found myself in Graham’s Paddock.
So what’s the strangest collection you’ve personally come across?
Sitting comfortably? Take a look at this excerpt from what appears to be a manual written maybe sixty years ago:
Do you identify with any of it? Recognise those behaviours from anywhere?
Stay seated. Now take a look at the cover page of the manual in question:
Yup. Simple sabotage, as practised and trained for by the OSS. Yes, folks, many large enterprises have been OSSified. Of course it’s not happening in your organisation, or in mine. Of course you don’t recognise any of those behaviours. Of course the shoe’s on the other foot.
And of course that shoe’s made of wood.
My thanks to Sean for pointing this out, for transporting me to Euan’s post before I’d got to it in my feed reader. [And thanks as well to Michael Walsh for sending the link to Euan in the first place.]
I’ve taken a long hard look at the manual in question. Looks genuine. Take a look for yourself, Euan links to it. If it does turn out to be a forgery, in these days of Photoshop, at least it’s a good one.
First, an apology. I have this thing about cricket, and while some of you may like it, I realise it means nothing to others, and for that I apologise. I guess I tend to write “long tail”, with different posts being of interest to different small groups.
Now cricket people tend to know very little about baseball. If you asked a budding Bill Frindall what Tinker to Evers to Chance meant to him, you’d probably be met with a blank look. Baseball’s Sad Lexicon is not part of the traditional cricket aficionado’s vocabulary.
There are some things, however, that don’t need such lexical power for their enjoyment. Things like Abbott and Costello’s Who’s On First routine. I’d heard of it a long time ago, even read the script, but for some reason never actually heard it. Then, at reboot this year, Dan Gillmor made sure I didn’t miss out. [Thanks, Dan!].
Coincidentally, Tom Raftery made a passing tweet about the same thing today, as a result of which I found a video version.
If comedy routines were chillies, this one would be a naga jolokia.
If you’re a cricket fan, see how the other side laugh. If you’re a baseball fan, get your own back. If you’re neither, sit back and relax anyway. One way or the other, watch it. It’s too good to miss.
And if you’ve seen it before, I can’t see you not seeing it again….can you?