I always enjoy Mike Rowe’s Dirty Job on the Discovery Channel. His talk on this particular dirty job shoot on castrating a sheep really re-defines what direct jobs are. Some things are not what they appear to be until you start doing it yourselves. Is doing a mundane job well and consistently all that bad? How do you explain why the workers are as happy as they can be? Perhaps, fancy jobs that you’re passionate about may not cut out to be what you think they are? How true!
Book Review: “Possible Side Effects” by Augustine Burrough
Some interesting side stories from Augustine Burroughs:
– Buying John Updike first-edition books and cursing him to die to profit from it.
– Nose bleed in the plane and book-signing while encountering his book fans.
– His encounter with Tooth Fairy, not a very organized fairy as told by his Grandma.
– Getting his other dog as a companion to his Cow Cow dog.
– Chipping his molar biting into a clam shell during vacation and chipping another tooth biting into a tater. Vacationing in a doll-filled Bed and Breakfast inn.
– Lesbian friend, Christi’s searching for a lipstick lesbian mate. $3K ad in a magazine and getting shut on her face after sending 1 dozen-dozen roses to a potential mate after one date.
– The making of the Jr. Mint commercial.
– Awakening from constant state of drunkenness and started writing his inner thoughts
– Dating Alex – why being 30 years old makes him put up more of the craps.
– Giving up Kitty-Kitty, the retarded dog, as a sign of rock bottom in alcoholism.
– Saturday-night Susan and the Penis Man – the ultimate peeping-tom experience plus the Hendersons and star-gazing from his office window.
– Trying to get out of being caught by the undercover cop while getting the attention of an English bulldog.
– Sarah Lee ad account – how he scraped the bottom of the barrel and yet came out shining.
– New job at cutting sails – got hired and fired the same day.
– Druggy Debbie – a friend who he met at a job fair of new restaurant. She threw a bloody tampon at a disgruntled customer who waved his penis after being asked to show his ID. Debbie is also a traffic-law-binding citizen. She and the author would go out and flash nasty sign (with obscene picture) to warn people of bad driving.
– His two grandmothers – how he hated his grandma on his mother side and tease her on his thinning hair and cutting off the grandma’s heads from all of the family pictures.
– Getting an Afro perm. Touched on racism about McDonald vs. Wendy’s and Chery Coke.
– Tricking his Mom on his psychic ability after learning the tricks from the packages of Wonder bread.
– Chinese Santa. He listened to all his childhood stories told by Mrs. Chang who spoke with a strong Chinese accent.
– Getting his puppy after earning $3/day on throwing dummies into a pond for dog training.
Very funny and some facetious stories as told by Augustine Burrough. I must say he either has a very interesting life or somehow he captured and told them better than anyone else. A little of both, maybe.
Protect the Ocean – on TED
Just finished watching this wonderful presentation by Sylvia Earle. The often neglected ocean needs to be protected if we want to preserve our own, by not overfishing and prevent pollution into the seas. Those video clips speak volume!
Movie Review: “The Incredible Hulk”
The hulk, Bruce Banner (Tim Roth), is being hunted by the General (William Hurt) who wants the turn ordinary people to super soldiers. Bruce escaped to South America but was still tracked down. He met up with his old girlfriend, General’s daughter, and went looking for the University professor in search of the cure. The stumbling professor turned his rival into an “Abomination” monster and had the final showdown. Of course, he saved the girl at the end. Of course, there was a lot of fighting with advanced military weapons and between the two hulks, thanks to the computer graphic animation.
This movie is rather predicable and slow. The 1-hr-54-min movie can be easily cut down to an hour without losing any contents. The two hulks did a lot of damage to New York city, reminding me of the King Kong movie, especially coupled with a girl victim who fell in love with the Hulk. The lead in to another sequel is paved with the entry of Robert Downey Jr. at the end.
Movie Review: The Cheyenne Social Club
Netflix’s description:
“After the death of his estranged brother, John O’Hanlan (James Stewart) inherits a thriving business in Wyoming known as the Cheyenne Social Club. The virtuous cowboy and his confidant Harley Sullivan (Henry Fonda) trek across the open plains to Cheyenne, only to discover that John’s bestowal is actually a well-known brothel. Now, he must resolve to ratify his existing enterprise or discontinue the dissolute dealings.”
John went to Cheyenne with an idealism of being a property owner. Little did he know that this property is worthless without being a whorehouse. Thanks to the bad guy, Banister, who beat up one of his girls and he shot the guy with some luck. John became the hero of the town after shooting and killing all but one of the Banister gang. Upon hearing there will be more of the gang coming to seek revenge, he quickly gave up the ownership of the Cheyenne Social Club and went back to Texas to work on cattle.
For some reasons, Jimmy Stewart tends to play a goody, goody, virtuous man – probably inherited from his role in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Henry Fonda plays a talkative good friend who followed John around for 10 years. This movie has a little of the wild wild west shooting, horsing around with loose women (John’s girls), friendship, and the good old American individualism. Sherie Jones plays the leader of the girls in the brothel (whore house) with dignity and glamor.
Not a bad movie for a movie made in 1970. The conversation was interesting and funny. I enjoyed the move.
Movie Review: Get Smart
I didn’t hear good review about this movie so I watched this movie on DVD. As a person who grew up with Get Smart series in the 70’s, I was really looking forward to this movie but was disappointed.
Maxwell Smart was just a lowly intelligence analyst with a penchant for long, tedious details and who just lost 150 lbs in weight. He got promoted to agent 86 when the identities of field agents were “compromised.” He and agent 99 were sent to Russia to find out what KAOS was up to. He was then set up by Agent 23, performed by Dwayne Johnson (The Rock) and sent to jail, being suspected as a double agent. With his “smart,” Maxwell got out of the jail and flew to Los Angeles to save the President, where he attended an orchestra that had an atomic bomb rigged under the piano. After saving the President, he lived ever after with Agent 99.
Some interesting improved gadgets like the “cone of silence” was as broken as before. The others include the shoe phone, radioactivity meter watch and etc. Some of the funny scenes include the tango dance with an overweight woman, Bill Murray as a lonely agent hidden inside a tree trunk, and the jump off from a tall building with a high-voltage electric wire.
It’s not the same as “24” but comes close to its ridiculous plot. Of course, the lack of public enemy like KAOS, insinuating the “Russian empire,” makes the story not as believable as back in the 70’s or 80’s. This movie brought back some nostalgia about the 70’s but the current macro setting doesn’t lend well to a movie like this.
Book Review: Outliers – the Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
According to Malcolm Gladwell, success takes hard works (over 10,000 hrs) and opportunities, upbringing, culture and dumb luck.
On hard work:
It takes roughly 10,000 hrs or 10 years to be prepared for an extraordinary opportunity – like Beetles, Bill Gates and Bill Joys. It’s a nice rounded off number. Surprisingly, the correlation of good math skill is strongly correlated to hard work. And engineering takes good math skill. Does it mean all engineers are hard workers? Perhaps.
On opportunities:
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Bill Joys all were born within 6 months of one another in 1955 to catch the wave of computer innovation, Canadian hockey team members were all born near January due to the recruiting cut off time. Bill Gate was fortunate to be do programming at age of 13 with unlimited access to a university mainframe computer.)
On background and culture:
Chinese kids have linguistic advantage due to the simplicity of number counting. This stretches a bit. But Asians do have a legacy of good work ethics, thanks to the rice planting culture, which espouses the cause and effect or reaping what you plant. This is a very different style of feudalism from the western culture. Honestly, I believe Confucius might have more to do with it than rice plantation as people in Northern China don’t farm rice. The high accident rate of Korean Airlines in the past was attributed to the high PDI (Power Distance Index) of the Korean culture, where the lower-ranked officers do not communicate or challenge his/her superiors, thus allowing mistakes being made by the captains. I tend to agree with this theory. Gladwell attributed his success to being surrounded by two intelligent friends from childhood and educated parents, thanks to their heritage and superior standing in Jamaica.
Gladwell is a extraordinary (outlier) story teller. He seems to make simple, mundane stories so interesting, especially the Korean Airlines cockpit conversation. It’s ironic that outliers is a statistic term to describe something that doesn’t fit a normal distribution and some of the theories he proposed would not pass the mustard of a good statistician. I was told by my Six Sigma instructor that outliers are like goldmines because there are some phenomena/variables that have not been accounted for. In this case, Gladwell found a goldmine of a topic for this book. And yes, if all corner cases are accumulated at the same time, there would be outliers. It happens but rarely. If the society can change or improve the factors for success, the normal distribution may get shifted, raising the bar for the society.
