When the Coffee Machine Breaks

Idiotic Advice From An Unexpected Source

The editors over at Entrepreneur.com are a bunch of god damn geniuses. Day after day they crank out new articles, many of them with numbered lists in the titles, all on the subject of how to succeed in business. And day after day people gobble this stuff up, in the same way those insatiable housewives read every issue of Cosmo for their fix of 10 New Ways to Drive Their Man Wild in Bed.

Sarcasm aside – a rarity around here – Entrepreneur’s cadre of contributors regularly come through with some quality advice. The only thing that is usually lacking is the electric shock reinforcement therapy for a certain unnamed person around here who forgets the advice faster than it takes to read the article. 

So when an article like the one I just read gets published I have to call it out. 18 Unusual Habits That Boost Your Energy More Than Coffee reads like an internal moral struggle on the part of the writer who can’t decide if he should give real advice or just go for the affiliate clicks. As most of us do when our conscience is at odds with itself, the guy tries to do both, hoping the good stuff will in the long run make up for the instant gratification of the bad stuff. Come on, I’ll make you breakfast in bed.

Question: Why 18 Unusual Habits?

Couldn’t think of two more for an even 20? Didn’t want to miss out on any affiliate clicks by rounding down to 10 or 12 or even 15?

Here’s what the author – and Co-Founder of Empact – had to say: “To understand unique and healthy ways to consistently and quickly boost energy daily, I interviewed the country’s top ambitious young entrepreneurs, honorees of the Empact Showcase…”

Nice self-promo there.

OK, let’s see what advice the 18 Empact Showcase honorees have for us in exchange for a link.

Salaryman No More

Yen Pro Quo

There's a real good reason this is my first post since last Fall.
It has to do with that picture - more specifically, what's in it.

I moved my family back to Japan in July 2014. During our month in Fukushima, during which we did our best to decompress while simultaneously gearing up for our intended move to Nagano, I managed to land an interview for a teaching gig.

I don't know why I keep doing this. It is an undeniable fact that me and full-time jobs are about as compatible as Binyamin Netanyahu and any randomly-chosen sane person. I guess it's the idea that as a husband and father I'm supposed to do shit like this.

I enjoy teaching people, don't get me wrong. I get a kick out of it actually. As long as my students are all okay with having a good time first and are willing to consider any real learning a bonus they I'd say we're golden.

The downside is that my students - and my bosses too - expect me to show up every day. And on their schedule. No negotiating, no deal-making. Evening class means evening class, no switching to the morning so I can go home and eat dinner with my family like a real husband and father. Can't even move class across the street to the yakitori bar.

So while I liked my bosses, enjoyed my students and looked forward to seeing the other teachers at our weekly chat which everyone had a habit of callling a 'staff meeting', the immovable object that was the sum of demands of the job met with the irresistable force of my need for self-determination and I decided to return the keys to the company roadster you see in the picture.

So once again I am the master of my own schedule. I can use each hour of my day as I see fit. I can leave those neckties in the closet, stash the attache and settle down to dinner with my family.

Of course, now I have to figure out just who's going to pay for all that food on the table.

Finding Wall Street Funny - Part 8

Caviar Emptor

What do Bedouins, bad neighborhoods and beachfront apartments with beach-less views have in common?

“They’re all things you are writing about for no money!”

Ah, the wife.

She’s right. But more importantly, they are all alluded to in our eternally-amusing Wall Street Journal Magazine April 2014 edition, in a string of advertisements so smooth and slick you’d think you were being hit on by Barack Obama’s teleprompter.

No Bedouins are seen in this magazine. No bad neighborhoods, no beach-less views. WSJ prefers images of diamond prenuptual agreement rings and confused metrosexuals sitting in the dark – images that obfuscate the truth of what’s being sold in these advertisements.

I say what could be more fun than to un-obfuscate the truth?

“How about un-obfuscating our mortgage situation?!”

Nah. Not nearly as fun. And so...

Finding Wall Street Funny - Part 7

SJ + JG = BS

Scarlett Johansson graces the cover of my latest greatest punching bag, the April edition of the Wall Street Journal Magazine. “Scarlett Johansson does it her way” reads the trite teaser down in the corner. I suspect the cadre of writers who became the billionth entity to use that one were trying to set a certain tone for their feature article: Scarlett’s supposed no-nonsense, to hell with societal expectations, Look you middle-class low-life, go pay your taxes style of straight shooting.

It also seems meant to imply that Miss Johansson’s accomplishments have all come of that damn-the-torpedoes attitude we’d all love to emulate if only it didn’t mean ending up at the unemployment office. Yet we learn – if we do our research – that dear Scarlett’s skin was too thin for rejection at those TV commercial auditions so her mommy agreed to drag her only to movie casting tryouts.

If you’ve been following this bonfire of vanity (and who hasn’t?) you are already well-aware that WSJ is clearly bent on feeding its readers page after stultifying page of bull turds, and Jason Gay, who picks up the pen for this feature on Miss Scarlett, wastes no time in exchanging that pen for a shovel.

Finding Wall Street Funny - Part 6

Palatial Inheritance & The Shallow End of the Gene Pool

Failed CEO Laudomia Pucci.

Laudomia Pucci lives in a 15^th Century, 150-acre estate in the Tuscan countryside. From the pose she strikes in the photo on page 85 of the Wall Street Journal Magazine that we simply can not stop making fun of, it is difficult to tell whether she feels embarrassed and awkward or stupidly entitled. She inherited the estate and the family’s fashion business in 1989 at the ripe age of 29 and, as stated in the article Fortress of Fashion (a title which will become clearly ironic in a minute), “took over both the business and creative sides.” As the next (and, one writer predicts, last) in a long line of fashion conquistadors, she found her unearned responsibility "a challenge.”

Presumably because working for Daddy all those few short cushy years wasn’t.

Her razor-sharp mind becomes immediately evident as we are told, shortly before we start barfing in repulsion at the photos of what this numbskull was born into, that Laudomia “knew” when she took over for her deceased father that her ticket to ridiculous wealth – the family’s “fashion legacy” as it were – was in trouble. And Ms. Laudomia, whose name sounds suspiciously like the Italian word for Laundromat, waited 20 years to do anything about it.

Finding Wall Street Funny - Part 5

Time is a Waste of Money

The fifth installment in the series. These people have no idea the fodder they are providing.

Imagine: someone comes up to you and asks to take your picture. “Okay,” you say, because you’re cool like that. But then the person asks you to dress in this gold foil suit. And strike a pose like you are feeling the beginning stages of a hernia. “Now, look at the camera like you know you’re sexy!”

Um…come again?

Now imagine you are showing up at the studio for the eightieth time, to have people take your picture for $5,000 an hour. Same gold foil get-up. Same hernia pose. “Now, look at the camera like you know you are sexy!”

Not so hard anymore, is it?

Now imagine you are the cameraman. Or the guy who holds the big illuminated umbrella for the cameraman. Or the person who buys the magazine with Miss Golden Hernia on the cover.

No matter who you are, if it’s your first time the whole thing seems ridiculous. Why? Because it is. Stick around, though, and everything changes. No matter who you are – the model, the cameraman, the umbrella man or the chump who buys the magazine – this sort of thing goes to your head. “Now you know you are sexy!”

This has got to be the dynamic behind WSJ’s ridiculous magazine. Because if they saw their watch ads like a normal person - or like a person like me - they simply wouldn't publish them. Fortunately for the rest of us they are too into themselves to understand.

Finding Wall Street Funny - Part 4

Putting the 'nary' in 'luminary'.

Continuing our deconstruction of the Wall Street Journal Magazine, April 2014 Edition, we rate the (un)importance of six so-called "luminaries". But first, a dissertation in marketing in the 21^st Century.

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Enough of this biology-blurring bullshit. Michael Jackson looked like a complete freak trying to make himself look white. So someone please give me a sane explanation for this ad for white shirts (I guess) that features an androgynous mannequin looking out a window, one plastic hand resting above what may be the swell of a breast in a sultry, sexy Does this mean I am a woman? pose.

Michael, you were a stellar performer but you had serious issues. And I’m not even counting the whole McCauley Caulkin thing. For anyone who is drawn by this androgynous marketing trend, hear this: Buying someone’s shirt is not going to help you figure out who you really are let alone deal with it.

How’s that for a theory?

This mannequin seems to be gazing with prescient confusion at the opposite page, where we see WSJ Magazine’s six April “columnists” – so dubbed because they have each managed to write something to fill one column of space. These people are also referred to as luminaries, which compelled me to do a little research – starting with the definition of luminary. This because WSJ’s first columnist, Simon Doonan, is said to be “the creative ambassador for Barneys” and I couldn’t imagine an ambassadorship to a purple dinosaur requiring or resulting in being luminescent.

Finding Wall Street Funny - Part 3

Have Nasal Dexterity, Will 'Work'.

They say when you lose one sense the others grow more acute. Nowhere is this postulate more evident than in the case of our perfumer friend Frederic Malle, made famous in Part Deux of our WSJ Magazine deconstruction.

This two-page fairy tale about Monsieur Malle would have us believe his super olfactory powers are genetic in nature and nurtured through the child labor imposed on him by his own mother. But considering he would on any day (let alone the day of his big interview with the Wall Street Journal Magazine) wear that suede Bordeaux and ox piss suit with a black-and-white checkered shirt and a tie as wide as the Seine and as depressing as the winter sky over the shores of Calais, it stands to reason that poor eyesight was the true catalyst for his supposed nasal dexterity.

And it is Frere Frederic's nasal dexterity that has brought him his success. Not as a wine connoisseur can tell at a whiff the difference between a 1986 Chateau Cos D'Estournel Saint Estephe and a 1989 Chateau La Conseillante Pomerol, but as the annoying guy two cubicles down who sticks his nose in the you-know-what of every person up and down the supply chain. That color scheme he wears is a tribute to, he says (and a thinly-veiled marketing ploy directed at, he doesn't say) big-time French book publisher (and, we can assume, heavy wine consumer) Editions Gallimard. Malle also endeavors to create fragrances "inspired by real people, such as his aunt or his father's charismatic best friend." I could never claim nasal dexterity, but I'd certainly bet a perfume that smells like anyone's father's best friend is destined for the personal care section at Wal-Mart.

"Mon frere, que ponce vous a.... Excuse moi, Monsieur Bruno,
why do you take ze perfume on ze tongue?..."

Whatever his father's charismatic friend smells like, something Friendophile Freddie is doing apparently works. Because assuming the rest of the article is fair representation of his professional life, there's not much else that one could call work.

Atop the second page of our expose on Frederic Malle we see him enjoying a light breakfast - Fage yogurt, some apple and English breakfast tea - to "maintain a clear palate" it reads. Pardon my French, but if you want a clear palate wouldn't it make more sense to just have a Perrier? There must be something secret in the way he eats that Fage yogurt.

"Do not talk to me about atmospere, zere is an avocado
in my Matryoshka doll!..."

So he gets his clear palate to his office and Skypes with his underlings in Paris - to make sure they haven't gone on strike - and then whispers with his assistant about his upcoming travel plans.

He goes to a fragrance manufacturer to "sniff scents" - next to a colleague who, evidently, prefers to taste them.

After a meeting with an architect, during which he puzzles over the rotten avocado someone left inside his Matryoshka doll, he heads uptown for a well-earned drink with Alejandra Cicognani, a high-profile publicist whose client list is noticeably devoid of any reference to Frederic Malle's perfume empire.

"No, I... Well, I... Yes, I will hold... Oui..."

On closer inspection we see that the photo of Frederic Malle and his drink is devoid of anyone named Alejandra Cicognani.

I'm no perfumer. Nor am I an expert on articles about perfumers. I didn't even know perfumer was a word until I read this article.

And after all this I still don't know what makes a great perfumer. Yet there's Frederic, a WSJ Magazine demi-god and purveyor of sweet-smelling snake oil.

I should get a publicist. Or maybe I just need to start treating my Fage yogurt like the magic potion it is.

NEXT UP: We (meaning I) will break down the comments of WSJ's six "taste luminaries," five of whom show extremely bad taste by talking mainly about themselves.

Finding Wall Street Funny - Part 2

The Value (or not) of a Name

This post is part of a series inspired by the April 2014 Wall Street Journal Magazine and the silly, self-and wealth-aggrandizing people who, I am guessing, have no idea as to the irony in their blither they put forth. Which makes for great fun for the rest of us. Check out the first part HERE.

When it comes to buying a car there are two ways to decide for sure which one is right for you.

One involves taking a test drive, to get a feel for how the car moves, how it handles, how it cradles your butt and how easily you are able to fiddle with the sound system while blowing through a yellow light.

The other involves how awesome you believe people will think you are because of the kind of car you drive. Think BMW.

Buick's advertisement in the April WSJ Mag involves neither a test drive nor a name that invokes even a slightly improved sense of worth. Instead they offer this compensatory bit of false allure:

The Buick Lacrosse: So comfortable it's like a mini-vacation between work and home.

Really?

Those who equate vacation with comfortable are generally the ones who prefer to spend their vacation stretched out on a chaise longue with a pina colada. In a Buick, this mini vacation would not occur between work and home but rather work and the ICU.

Finding Wall Street Funny

Humor Of the Moneyed, By the Moneyed, For the Rest of Us

I've had this Wall Street Journal Magazine sitting on my desk for three weeks. (No, that's not the funny part.) On the cover Scarlett Johansson looks back with an expression somewhere between sultry and amnesic. My wife doesn't like it one bit. Probably because she is not amnesic and thus has a hard time being sultry for me.

The topic of this issue is The State of Taste; below this a teaser that invites us readers in a very upper-class font to find out how Scarlett 'does it her way'. Titillating words, meant to induce the reptilian part of my brain to make me flip through, looking for a flesh-heavy photo spread if not a pull-out centerfold.

I was quite disappointed.

As consolation I know that our esteemed financiers are not letting leggy fantasies of Scarlett Johansson distract them from their main and very real purpose of screwing all of us equally.