Pro Commerce

Ortolan and dying

The word ortolan gives me hope. I have had the sense that 'foodie' was both a derogatory term as describing a hedonistic wimp (think Michael Pollan) or referred to a environmental ideolog (think Alice Waters). People have called me a foodie because I ate at the French Laundry for lunch once every two months for the first two years it opened.  To me it was the first restaurant in America comparable to what I get on my yearly visits to Tokyo.

Now I find that the highest status meal in the gourmet world is an ortolan. Below is a video on ortolan. Don't watch it if you think like Pollan or Waters.

Orolan is considered the greatest food delicacy by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin who published the gourmet bible in 1825. The dish is made from a small bird that is stuffed with walnuts and seeds in a dark box for four months and then drowned in Armagnac before being lightly roasted and eaten whole (after removing the head).

The whole idea like, foie gras, suggests that a real foodie, understands death and dying as complex moral concepts. Eating a dead animal is not for wimps or ideologs.

Advertising is changing

I'm a little frustrated with Nolo Press, the publisher of my (and Rasberry's) Marketing without Advertising. Why?

Because the first chapter, written 25 years ago and still prominent in the 6th revision, makes it clear that most advertising doesn't work. The whole business world, these days, is coming to this same conclusion about advertising ineffectiveness.

We make clear in the book the distinction between advertising, banner ads, billboards and TV spots and listings such as Yellow-pages and Google click-thrus.  Listings are where people go to look for information, advertising is 'in your face' with 99% irrelevant issues.

Advertising doesn't work, rarely did, and the business world is finally catching on.  The Internet, which is 90% listings (think Craig's list) is only getting a small part of the benefit.

Here is the data: Four years ago total U.S. advertising was $150 billion with very little on the Internet. Today the total is down to $120 billion with $25 billion on the Internet.  So overall advertising has really dropped over one-third, more than $50 billion and been replaced by more effective listings of $25 billion.

Not only does advertising rarely work, but listing costs much less to accomplish the same goals.

Back to Nolo Press.  They have done little or nothing new to promote the whole point of this book and connect it to the real world of business. The business world is waking up... we were awake to the same issues 25 years ago.

Search engine problem

 The two main search engines I use (Google and Bing) make an effort to find alternative spellings for foreign words. 

The problem arises from the extent that the search engines will look for comparable words.  This is a particular problem that my son discusses on his blog.  There are a large number of Chinese words that are transcribed in Pinyin as: Jing, Qi, Gongfu, Baguazhang, Taijiquan, Daoism, Xingyiquan, Qigong, Tuishou, Jindan, Zuowang, Daodejing, Zhuangzi, Laozi, Yijing, Zhengyi, Liuhe, Beijing

But these words are often based on the Wade-Giles transliterations: (the following are exactly the same words in the same order) Ching, Chi, Kung Fu, Pa Kua Ch’ang, T’ai Chi Ch’uan, Taoism, H’sing-i, Chi Kung, Twai Shou, Chin Tan, T’so Wang, Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tsu`, Lao Tsu`, I-Ching, Cheng-i, Luo He?, Pei King.

My son's blog is about martial arts and Daoism, so it is a problem for him.  What other languages have a similar problem because of official government policy in designating word spellings in English?

All-in-one building

Dan Rather is suggesting that Obama appoint a committee to save newspapers. (Not the ones that are doing fine: Wall Street Journal, USAToday and the SF/DC Examiners).

I have a better suggestion.  

The government (any level, local, State, Federal) should buy-up all the old empty movie theaters that sentimental people are so anxious to save and give free office space to dying newspapers.

The auditoriums should be given to dying mainstream Protestant churches, the street level space should go to defunct video stores, Marshall's, gas stations with mechanics on duty, gift shops and sewing machine repair shops.

While we are on the subject of dying or dead businesses... Every local politician is trying to save the NUMMI auto plant in Fremont with over 4,000 union members.  Unions are threatening to boycott Toyota, the company stuck holding the bag after GM pulled out of ownership of the NUMMI plant.  

Don't worry Toyota, these union folk are too stupid to pull off a boycott if they can't see that you would stay in Fremont if they lowered their wages and worked harder.

The 'enlightened' guru?

Enlightenment is not a big mystery, it is just shrouded in such woo-woo mumbo-jumbo that most people don't recognize it when it hits them on the head. Enlightenment is the ability to be present.  The longer one is present, the more enlightened.  Nothing more. Think RamDass's book title: Be Here Now. 

It is the tradition of people who experience enlightenment to never say they are enlightened.  I don't know the reason for this taboo. That is what I'm asking in this blog.

Is there a taboo on saying one is enlightened because saying so might discourage others who are trying to achieve enlightenment?

Is it because the taboo is so powerful and ancient that there is a widespread popular belief that a person who announces his enlightenment is mistaken?  Would such a person be ridiculed?

If you have the answer or even a good explanation...please comment.

The UN versus San Francisco

I think very little of the United Nations. In a discussion with a UN fan, I asked how many UN members have smaller populations than San Francisco and how many had GDPs that are less than San Francisco. The fan had no idea.  Do you?

San Francisco is tiny with roughly 800,000 residents and an annual GDP of $35 billion (a third comes from tourism). 

That means 16 UN member nations have fewer people than San Francisco and 150 out of 192 member nations have smaller GDPs.  

Vote and vote often you imaginary nations. Do your customary thing and vote against Israel and the United States once a month. Be sure to applaud every murderous tyrant who come to address you.

We probably saw a different movie.

I saw Quentin Tarantino's masterpiece Inglourious Basterds.  What I saw was probably not the same movie most viewers in the audience saw.

In the first scene, we have Colonel Landa carrying on a sophisticated pleasant conversation in French and English, over a glass of milk, in erudite terms about how Jews are rats. The film audience gets to see a Jewish family under the floor-boards about to be slaughtered through the floor with machine guns.   

* I saw Colonel Landa as a cross between Adolf Arafat, Hosni Mubarak and PA Foreign Minister Saeb Erekat.  I saw him as a high-ranking, modern-day Arab Jew-hater who is charming, talking with every leader of the European world and telling endless lies with murderous intent.

In the next main scene the audience saw Brad Pitt interrogating captured Nazi soldiers in France.  

* I saw a young officer in Israel interrogating a group of Palestinians with the remnants of bomb belts around their waists just after they had been caught trying to get on Israeli buses filled with children on their way to school.

In two scenes the movie audience saw adoring Germans getting a signature from German hero Fred Zoller and cheering images of him in a film that shows him killing over a hundred fifty Americans.  

* Instead of Fred Zoller and German fans, I saw adoring crowds of Libyans cheering Al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie murderer of 259 civilians, getting off the plane in Tripoli.

The audience got to see and hear a long conversation over strudel and cream between Colonel Landa and a secret Jewess, Shoshanna, in a tense edgy conversation

* I saw Secretary of State William Rogers telling Golda Meir, in polite terms, why the Munich massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinians wasn't a problem and that he was going to force Israel to take Gaza as a protectorate rather than make Egypt take Gaza.

Lastly the movie audience saw a great reception hall in a Paris cinema with Nazis in formal dress drinking champagne and cheerfully talking to each other with Swastikas hanging from the balconies. 

* I saw the same formal dress reception at the UN, with delegates from the UN Assembly and UN flags hanging from the balconies.  The assembled crowd was preparing to enter the UN Assembly hall to vote on the latest resolution blaming Israel for all the problems in the Middle-East and officially calling Jews racists.

Of course, the movie audience and I got to enjoy the same dramatic fire scene inside the Paris cinema that was so morally satisfying.

The film ends with the Nazi Colonel Landa promised the U.S. Congressional Medal of Honor.

* This reminded me that open Jew haters Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu were given Nobel Peace prizes and Tutu joined by Mary (Durban-Hate-Jews organizer) Robinson in getting the Obama Medal of Freedom.