Stan Taylor

Ben Stein’s State of the Union.

From the Richmond Times Dispatch
(via Eliot Gelwan)

Eric Sink has a recent blog post about negotiating. He makes the common sense observation:

In negotiation, the one thing that really strengthens your position is the ability to walk away from the deal.

My salary history over the last ten years bears out Eric’s observation. With every job change except one, I received a decent salary increase. The one exception was the job I accepted after having been laid off. I was not in a strong position to negotiate salary, and I took a big hit for it. It took me several years to get back to the salary I had before.

While browsing the web this morning, I came across this review of a recent coporate identity redesign. I think the author has some interesting thoughts on the redesign, but I couldn’t decipher his meaning very easily due to his extremely long sentences. An example:

Just recently, in late June, Kansas-based Payless Shoesource, unveiled a new logo and a new direction for their retail stores as a result of new leadership change in the summer of 2005 when Matt Rubel, who previously worked on retail brands like J. Crew, Revlon, Tommy Hilfiger and Nike’s Cole Haan division, joined the company and procured Payless Shoesource in need of a new, more focused direction: to dispel the notion that they only sell “cheap shoes,” to appeal to a more design and budget-conscious customer (in other words, Targetize it) and, ultimately, to somehow deliver on the brand’s promise and strategic direction, “to democratize footwear and accessory fashion and inspire fun fashion possibilities for the family.”

Parsing that sentence gives me a headache.
(To be fair, it seems that the author is not a native English speaker)

Water-assisted flatulence

The New York Times lists ten lesser-known significant dates in American history. For instance:

FEB. 15, 1933: The Wobbly Chair
It should have been an easy shot: five rounds at 25 feet. But the gunman, Giuseppe Zangara, an anarchist, lost his balance atop a wobbly chair, and instead of hitting President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, he fatally wounded the mayor of Chicago, who was shaking hands with F.D.R.
Had Roosevelt been assassinated, his conservative Texas running mate, John Nance Garner, would most likely have come to power. “The New Deal, the move toward internationalism — these would never have happened,” says Alan Brinkley of Columbia University. “It would have changed the history of the world in the 20th century. I don’t think the Kennedy assassination changed things as much as Roosevelt’s would have.”

Listed here, all on Youtube.

I’m spending the week on a business trip to San Jose. The company put me up at the very tony Valencia Hotel which is located in Santana Row. Wikipedia says that “Santana Row was intended to be Northern California’s answer to Rodeo Drive featuring the one of the highest concentration of luxury retailers in the Western United States.” Oh. My. God. I have never seen such conspicuous consumption, especially the cars. The hotel offers valet parking, but in the evenings, they park a few cars in front of the hotel, not in the garage. I’m not sure what it takes to get your car parked conspicuously on Santana Row, but tonight there was a blinged-out Rolls Royce and several other extremely expensive cars in the hotel’s valet spaces. It’s obscene, really.
UPDATE: A fellow hotel guest told me this morning that one of the other cars in front of the hotel last night was a sports car (I don’t remember which brand) that sells for $1.2MM.

The press release is titled: “Kroger Introduces ‘Disney’s Old Yeller’ Chunk Style Dog Food.” What’s next? ‘Song of the South’ fried chicken bucket at KFC?

This little gem of wisdom struck me this morning: Life is like a Taco Cabana drive-through: you rarely get exactly what you ordered.