Going to the Dogs.

Sparkle, left, a purple ball, and Graham in the heat at the Madison dog run.

There's a dog run just two towns over from us where we
some times take Sparkle so she can play with her friends. 

On Saturday morning, my ever-loving, Laura, texted Graham's mother, Kayla and asked if she would like to meet there. Graham, like Sparkle is what's known as an English Cream golden retriever. They're light-toned branch off the rustier main branch of the retriever river, and they're currently all the rage in the canine cavalcade.

Sparkle and Graham were off exchanging nips, tackles and humps, and Kayla and my wife were deep in conversation. That left me to circumnavigate the grassy, fenced-in expanse in my never-ending quest to get in my 15,000 step quota of arthritic-hipped steps.

I ache, therefore I am.

There was a shaggy young man in the dog run wearing a Los Angeles Lakers t-shirt. I joked in his direction, "Is this your way of telling the world that you're the new owner of the team?" (The franchise had just been sold for a record $10 billion.) He answered back, one of the few people who actually reply to my banalities, "No, baseball is my sport."

That led us into a deeper horsehide conversation, part of which led to this post.

"Who do you play for?" I asked.

"I played for UConn," he answered, "I'm a pitcher for the Huskies. But I didn't pitch last season. I had Tommy John surgery, and then when I was in recovery, I tore up my bicep."

He lifted the right sleeve of his Lakers' tee and showed me a couple of scars swimming in a sea of tattoo ink. 

Fiduciary as I am, I asked, "Tommy John, that's expensive. Did the school pay?" 

"Yeah, I got injured pitching during a game."

I'm not one-hundred percent sure, but I imagined he's a pretty good ball-player. UConn, was 38-21 last season and plays a good collegiate schedule, including games against traditional powers like the University of Southern California, Miami, Creighton and other major baseball schools. They won games versus number-fourteen ranked Vanderbilt and seventeen-ranked University of North Carolina.

"Yanny good," I asked. His answer is where I went ontological.

"I was clocked at 95 mph." This means he has major-league speed. "As a freshman, I hit 94. But I was consistently at 95 when I blew up my arm."

I thought about how I might have answered the same question 50 years earlier. I thought about what I was expecting him to say.

I would have said, "I went 7-5 with a mid-three ERA." Or I would have said, "I made all conference," or "our team made the second round of the NCAA tournament," or "I got drafted in the ninth round by the Pirates."

I would never have given an individual data point that has nothing to do with on-field success.

It would be like meeting Jane Austen and when you asked her if she was a good writer she answered, "I type seventy-two words per minute." 

There's nothing wrong with typing that fast, or throwing that hard. But it's immaterial to real success. 

Maybe this struck me in the wake of what one of my most august of advertising friends has called "the death of advertising from Cannes."

WPP, which is literally less than half the size as it was just five years ago--half the revenue, half the people, half the clients--was just named Creative network of the Year. I think, IPG, Omnicom, Publicis, Havas, Erwin Wasey, Lord and Thomas, NW Ayer, Kenyon & Eckhardt, Ammirati & Puris and two or three dozen other defunct entities may have won similar accolades.

WPP, the Cannes Creative Network of the Year
 has lost $11,000,000,000 of market cap in 3.5 years--60% of its value.
That would be roughly like going from having a $20 bill to having a $8.

Referring to a "pay-to-play" award seems a strange way to assess the viability of a company or a person, especially, when according to the parameters that matter they are not worthy of acclaim.

Like most people these days, I often look for information online--where a house for sale sits, how far the Housatonic River is from the Quinnipiac. The internet, now that it's all been sold to the highest bidder to meet the lowest standard, repeatedly comes back with answers that would have been completely unacceptable for the last 500 years but are not questioned today.

They give you the rendering of a map. 

But the map itself has no scale. 

When I was nine and a budding cub scout, I learned that a map had to have a scale or it was useless. A map without a scale is called a sketch. Like a weigh-yourself-scale without numbers would be called broken.

Here's one example.

From the above, you have no idea how far anything is from anything else. How far the green quadrangle is from the blue that represents water? How far Cedar Ln is from E. Gillette Dr. If there's no scale, you can't tell. 

It's not a map. It's a sketch.

A ballplayer telling me he throws 95 is somewhat like that. I don't know if his ball has movement and is thereby hard to hit. Or if to get that velocity he has to groove his pitches down the middle.

Likewise from Cannes, I have no idea why if you're _____ of the year, you're shrinking by 27-percent a year. 

It's not an award, it's a sop.

Think of all the "case study" videos you've seen that herald the garnering of "trillions of impressions." Have you ever seen one of the subjects of those case studies in the wild? 

There might be an advertising, or an ontological koan, here.
Not "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" Maybe "what is the sound of one stat deceiving?" 

And what kind of trophy do you get for that?

Books to Read. Books to Think.

I have read Homer's Iliad and Odyssey more times than I have ever read any other books, with the possible exception of a slight book I was in love with when I was a boy called "Heaven's My Destination," by Thornton Wilder. More than anything else, I spent some years willing myself to write like Wilder. As I so often say about almost everything, "that didn't work out."

Of late, the world of Classics has been taken over by women. Women are popularizing the old stories. And women are leading departments at major English and amerikan universities. Oxbridge. Yale. Harvard.

Here's a small smattering of evidence for my broad claim:

Each of the authors of the books above, has written a lot. Each of these authors are taking stories and histories thousands of years old and looking at them with fresh eyes, from a perspective that wasn't considered when I started reading these stories fifty years ago and is seldom considered today.

As A.E. Stallings wrote in the review of "Penelope's Bones" in Friday's "Wall Street Journal," "The women 'written out' of Homer’s world, as Ms. Hauser sees it, also include relatively unsung women archaeologists and scholars."

The point of this post is not to encourage you to read the ancient stories that have, to a degree, helped define our species at least in what we call "the West." The point is how hard these new books are to read.

They take what I've always known and force me to question it. 

They take stories I've been reading for half-a-century and they have the courage to re-examine them. They have the courage to re-animate women who were left without voices. They have the courage to do what Adam Morgan in "Eating the Big Fish," (his hallmark book on Challenger Brands) lists as one of the principles of being a challenger brand.

Each of these books challenges the dominant complacency. 

They shoot arrows, investigate, examine, question prevailing wisdom.

You know, like you're supposed to do if someone says that something you're supposed to be advertising is exactly the same as everything else.

You're supposed to shoot arrows, investigate, examine, question prevailing wisdom.

In other words, they take things "everybody knows," and they say, "no, that's not right. I think this happened."

I've said for about 40 years now that I don't read books about business. I prefer reading books about life and seeing how they apply to business.

The books listed here, if those of us in advertising can read and think about them, help us become better at our jobs. 

Not because you need to know about Priam and Hector and Scylla and Charybdis (though it wouldn't hurt) but because they force you to do what any good thinker has to train themselves to do--even thinkers in advertising.

That is: re-think.

Don't accept something because everyone says so.

Turn things upside down.
Make the age-old new.

They train you to shoot arrows, investigate, examine, question prevailing wisdom.

I realize going to the Peloponnese is a long way to go for a blogpost on advertising.

But it's my blog. And how I work.

Thanks for reading.

Losing Your Lemons.

As I wrote about last month, after almost six years, GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, lost one of the clients it opened its doors with.

I don't like losing.

Not a ballgame. Not an insignificant wager. Not my place in-line at the grocery store. 

I certainly don't like losing a client who paid me month-after-month for about seventy months.

Even so, despite the loss of revenue, I'm not disheartened.

 

Neither am I really upset. Because as much as I liked this client personally, and as much as I believed in what his company's mission was, and as much as I trusted the efficacy of his products and services, he pissed me off.

Maybe I fucked up.

Maybe I was too nice.

Maybe I should have told him he was pissing me off and why.

My pissed-off-ness, it must be said, had nothing to do with baroque briefs and Net90 payments. 

My pissed-off-ness had everything to do with a malady I see more and more people/clients succumb to. 

They work and work and work and work and work on messaging. (Or having me work on messaging.) They spend their days consumed by messaging. They perseverate about messaging.

They do everything pertaining to messaging. 

But then they fail to spend money on messaging. 

The other day up here on the Gingham Coast which often feels more like 1950s "Leave It to Beaver"-land, with white picket fences, lush lawns and kids riding bicycles than it does systems-collapse-amerika, I saw two approximately 10-year-old boys standing alongside the road. They were trying to sell lemonade, at a dollar a cup, to cars speeding by at between 35 and 55 miles-per-hour.

They had no table out on the sidewalk. (No store-front.)
They had no signage anywhere. (No media.)

They were shouting at passing cars. (No reach.)

The client who axed was similar to the lemonade kids in those three respects. 

He said to me when he told me we were separating, "George, you've written the first three pages of fifty decks fifty times, our mission, our positioning so many times. But we're not selling enough."

I'm stupid in very many ways.

One: I do my best to believe in the efficacy of the things my clients make, do and sell.

Two: I do my best to boil that "promise" down to something I call an "epigram." Something on the order of "The Ultimate Driving Machine." Or "When it absolutely, positively has to be there over-night." 

In fact, I always work to make my clients offering "the cure for cancer." That is, something no one can live without. At its very simplest, that is the essence of our jobs. Not to lie. But to make our clients success inevitable.

Three: I believe if you have something that's needed, articulated in a compelling way and you spend the money to get it viewed, people will try it.

Like the kids (not) selling lemonade up here, my client figured out what the market needed. He created a product that answered that need. He found a way to say it.

He just never told anyone.

I don't like losing.

But if you do, that's a perfect way to do it.

A Long Strange Trip.

I've said it before, I'll say it again. 

When it comes to predicting how humans are going to behave, or respond or think about a certain proposition or artifact, I have very little faith in science.

Maybe even less faith than I have in sorcery. Tea leaves. Bird entrails. Crystal balls. 

It seems to be knowing what's going to happen next, or if someone is innocent or guilty, or how they'll behave given a set of circumstances has been a human wish since the beginning of human time.

I've heard stories of inveterate gamblers choosing one rain drop over another and saying that one will descend the windowpane first. Or people betting on turtles in county fairs, or trying to figure out where fish will be so we can catch them.

We've been trying to predict the unpredictable since the early days of bi-pedalism. In fact, it's been conjectured (speaking of bi-pedalism) that our ancestor stood on two feet so they could get a better view of where food was, or enemies, on the veldt. Standing upright was a new way of seeing things, and edge.

People and companies have always looked for that edge. Very few people and/or programs and/or institutions have been right much more often than they've been wrong. 

Hans Rosling, in one of his great Ted Talks, claims (to make a point) that the professors from the institute that awards the Nobel Prize, can be right less often than a random group of chimps. (Watch the first four minutes of the YouLube link above.)

Late last week, I read a book review in The Wall Street Journal of a book called "Dots and Lines: Hidden Networks in Social Media, AI, and Nature" by Anthony Bonato. Smack dab in the middle of the review, I ran across these sentences:

It brought to my mind once again my thesis (once I get a thesis stuck in my head, the chances of me straying from it are as low as a cockroach doing the limbo in Death Valley. To say I'm a dog with a bone is unfair to dogs, maws and bones.) 

When I first came across the "science" of Customer Relationship Marketing, messages (usually in the form of variable field letters) were customized according to six or ten bits of data. The customer--aka victim--might have filled out a survey that said she had children. Every letter to her from the car company that owned that data therefore was about seating capacity and safety.

The "data" was a blunt instrument based on very little, but because we trade in certainty, we pretended it would portend great accuracy. We knew what that customer with children wanted--we had data on them, after all. And data is the answer.

What we continually fail to see is the very complicatedness of the human brain. We fail to appreciate the near impossibility of understanding how it works and how much more baroque it is than even them most ornate of human-made systems.

The most sophisticated AI systems cannot reckon with the idea of 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses, much less 300,000 miles of neural connections. We look to find order or predictability despite these numbers, ignoring the very idea that decision-making, like any causality, can and will mutate based on a wisp of a chimera.

I read this bear. I don't know anyone else that did.
Certainly not ad people who pretend to know things.

A short review from the Economist.
I send these things to clients to give them more ways to ignore me.

Since the very beginning of time, humans have tried to find the locus of feelings, emotions and thinking. For many millennia, the brain wasn't considered at all. It was thought "thinking" came from the heart. Phrases like "learn by heart," "heartfelt," and "heartbroken" are evidence of that misguided thinking. Eventually, we landed on the brain as the seat of thought.

We tried to explain through metaphor how the brain worked. First, when automata were the rage, say in 16th century France, we explained the brain that way. Then as clocks and watches grew in sophistication, they were enlisted to explain the mechanistic calculus of your grey matter. Next, scientists compared the brain to telegraph system, or a computer. Then, they compared it to the world-wide web and giant networks. 

The right metaphor might be the universe itself. (Walt Whitman knew this: "I contain multitudes.") The same universe that is unfathomably complex and expanding and contracting at the same time. Take one 101 course on astronomy and you realize the vastness of things.

I understand the salesmanship behind the perennial promise that "I know what will happen next." It makes a compelling promise. And people buy it. It's like a magical drug.

The Greeks had a word they used when humans believed they were more powerful than the gods: Hubris.

It's not hard to get from "tech bro" to hubris. 

Things that start in hubris almost always end in humiliation.

It seems though we might be an industry ruled by hubris.

Hubris is an all-you-can-eat-buffet.

Where you're eating yourself.

H/T to Francisco Goya and "Saturn Devouring His Son."
He never won a Lion.

 

Trouble? Double?

I got an email just moments ago from one of the Holding Companies. In it they're announcing, though they are hemorrhaging business, revenue, people and market-share, probably $10,000,000 worth of talks and agenda items they are staging at Cannes.

There's a lot of Orwellian cognitive dissonance happening in the world today. Failing companies throwing giant parties celebrating their success is yet another example. It's hard for me to reconcile a guy who quits with no successor, who's halved the size of his company, who's destroyed half a dozen major advertising brands showing up in public.

As long-time readers of this blog know, my parents, in say 1965 and still in the thrall of Kennedy's Camelot, enrolled my older brother and me in a series of speed-reading courses when we were just about nine and seven. 

Kennedy, though he had no formal connection with Evelyn Wood, the Sam Altman of rapid reading, could reportedly read 1,200 words per minute. That's roughly five pages of a book every 60 seconds. By comparison, spoken language--a podcast, or a book on tape--usually brings you about 150 words per minute. JFK could take in information at eight-times that of a normal person listening or six-times as fast as a normal reader.

At my peak, I can read faster than that. With about 75-percent recall. I'm cursed that way.

That's all to say, I speed read the Holding Company agenda that was sent to me. Not only did I see nothing that interested me in the least, I also barely saw anything I could reasonably understand as remotely related to advertising.

The analogy I'll use here, from the tips of my fingers is this: It all seems like studying manure in order to watch the Kentucky Derby. I suppose there's something to learn from the shit, but there might be a more informed way of placing a thoughtful $2 bet.

Here's what I mean. I sped-read the above and literally can't conceive I am even in the same "ecosystem" as these people. Whatever is meant by ecosystem.

It all, somehow, reminds me of an old Borscht Belt joke about two Martians who land somehow in Brooklyn. Their spaceship can't take off from earth because it has a broken wheel. The Martians are walking down the street and they see a bagel shop. To the Martians, the bagels look like perfect replacements for their broken wheel. They go in and ask the counterman for a wheel. The counterman says, "those aren't wheels, they're bagels. You eat them." The Martians each take a bite and the one says to the other, "These would go good with lox."

That's how alien I feel. 

From a completely different interplanetary ecosystem. An ecch-o-system, maybe.

But back to the agenda items above.

Baseball today, all sports, actually, are fairly incomprehensible to me. The statistics that kept track of the game since its very beginnings are no longer important to many people and new ones have taken their place. 

Hank Aaron hit 755 career home runs. Babe Ruth hit 714. Barry Bonds some drug-induced number, maybe 7800. 

They never once thought about the velocity of a ball off their bat. If they thought about it at all, they'd say something as incisive as "I got good wood on that." 

Likewise, Bob Gibson, who had an era of just 1.12 in 1968 never worried about pitch count, or any of a dozen statistical variables that dominate the jabber about the game today. In the parlance of the greensward, he "threw the ball where the bat wasn't."

Simplicity in what we do. The equivalent of throwing the ball where the bat isn't. Or in the words of Wee Willie Keeler, "hittin'  ‘em where they ain't."

As Carl Ally said, advertising should "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted." To paraphrase Mark Twain, the difference between Ally's quote and this Cannes' agenda, "how brands can actively mitigate algorithmic bias and champion representation in a rapidly evolving AI-driven ecosystem," is as vast as the difference between "lightning," and "lightning bug."

Fifty years ago I made a meager living for one summer playing professional baseball. My manager, Hector Quetzacoatl Padilla, aka Hector Quesadilla was one of the wisest men in the game. He is in two Mexican Baseball League Halls-of-Fame, for both playing and managing.

If we were down by four with just one or two ups left, as we seemed to be so often that long summer, he didn't trot out statistics, probabilities, moneyball and other algorithms so bestially au courant today. He did not say to Buentello as he grabbed his lumber, "Uncover the challenges facing subscription and identify strategies to thrive in a rapidly evolving landscape. From personalization and value-added services to flexible pricing models and enhanced customer experiences, discover how to reinvent your subscription model with AI for long-term success."

He'd say, "Hit a double."

Advertising--making it effective, worth watching, worth paying for, and respected once again isn't hard.

We need to hit more doubles. 

A Post Fahdah's Day Repost.

 

One-hundred years ago this week, Yankel Tannenbaum or Tennenbaum or Tanenbaum or Tenenbaum (everyone in the family spelled our last name differently, part obstinance, part bad translations) my grandfather--my father's father-- stepped off the Hamburg-American liner, SS Leviathan and became the first, however it's spelled, Tannenbaum, to set foot on Amerikansche terra firma, soon to be pronounced in the Queen's Bronxian Latin, terrer firmer.

Yankel, just thirteen at the time, had lied about his age, claiming he was eighteen. He boarded in Hamburg, the SS Leviathan alone--though he called it the SS Limburger, being unfamiliar with Roman letters. He quickly found a hammock in the deck two decks below steerage, the decks well-below the waterline on the ship, where every crash and rattle and belch of the mighty engines, every shovel-full of coal, spewed out a Stygian effluvium of magma-heat onto the rotten rope of his swinging, stinking accommodations amid one-thousand farting men.

Yankel lost ten pounds on the three-week voyage, having eaten nothing but water they called soup and the soup they called water. He hadn't yet learned to get soup last--the bottom of the pot is where the potatoes lay--but as recompense, he stole three suits of clothing from other woebegone passengers and stuffed them all into the single rope-secured bundle that he hoisted on his already-bent Sisyphusian-back and he stumbled down the rickety gangplank and onto the beaten schist of Ellis Island.

He called it Smellis Island.

Appropriately.

Official gentiles with officer's hats and clipboards inspected him, looking at various papers, greasy from wear. They poked at his ears, his eyes and his mouth. They scrunched his scrotum. And then they pointed him to line three, gate four, the longest of the lines of wretched refuse on our teeming shores and Yankel, like a soldier in the Bataan Death March shuffled over under the weight of his bundle.

He saw an official eating an apple, about to drop the asymmetric core to the dusty, grass-deprived grounds and Yankel, always on the lookout for an opportunity or an angle, sensed one.

"Schexschuse Schmee, Your Schexcellency," Yankel spat. "Jew want see wut I can do mit der apple."

The tall, be-whiskered gentile handed Yankel the masticated core. It was already browning in the humid heat of a New York summer a century ago and tiny gnats had already arrived on the core. The air crackled with heat--it was not much cooler then than today, miserable and cornea-cracking.

"Vatch dis," Yankel said. "Jew see dat schmeegull ovah deah on duh piling?"

Yankel had noticed a fat fowl four-hundred feet away standing on one leg on an algaed post. 

"Your Highness," Yankel mustered, "Vatch me bean him."

Yankel had learned a pidgin of Hanglish listening to American sailors down in waterfront bars in Hamburg.

The official smiled and tucked his clipboard under his arm and nodded to Yankel.

"That's gotta be faw-hunnert feet," he mocked. "Like from centa to home at duh new Yankee Stadium up in duh Bronx."

"Yankee Stadium--I'm Yankel Stadium," my ancestor said. He then twirled his licorice thin right arm like the sidewheel of an old Mississippi River boat, lifting his left leg for power and torque and let the apple core fly.

It ran straight like an old Junker aeroplane and knocked the unsuspecting bird's legs out from under him. The bird tumbled into the viscous water, came up for air and screeched in anger. He spread his wings, drying them in the sunshine then flew high and circled over the people below, looking for someone to shit on in retribution. But by that time Yankel and the custom's official were walking arm-in-arm toward the processing center some one-hundred yards away.

"O'Malley," the official said shaking Yankel's calloused paw. "You've got an arm on you like Lefty Grove. And wit da Yankees not six miles away, I gotta getchu in for a tryout. You sticks with me. What did you say your name wuz?"

"Yankel. Yankel Tannenbaum. Schmere didja say you were takin' me, Yankel Stadium? Whas dat, schomewhere duh Jhoose like me-self schmives?"

"Noyadumbbell. Yankee Stadium. It's where dey play baseball, d' American past time. It's up in d' Bronx. D' house that Ruth built?"

"Like Ruth 'n Esther? That Ruth?"

"No, ya' stoopid Yid. Babe Ruth. The Bambino. The Colossus of Clout, the Behemoth of Bam, the Maharajah of Mash, the Mammoth of Maul, the Wizard of Wallop, the Rajah of Rap, the Vizier of Vector, the Caliph of Crash, the...the...the Sultan of Swat."

"Yer onny cornfusing me," Yankel said with barely a spit. "I have no ideer who this Ruth lady is."

"He's only duh greatest baseball player in the forty-eight states. And he plays up in da Bronx for the Bronx Bombers. I think wiff an arm like yers, I can getcha a tryout for d' Yankees. With an arm like yers, you could be making $5000 per annum, easy."

"$5000? Schmy wiff schmoney like dat, I could bring my twenny-nine bruddahs and sistas and aunts and uncles and muddahs and faddahs over. An all twenny-nine of us could share a room anna quarter with a cold-water bath just seven flights up and four blocks ovah."

"Dat's d' ticket, Yankel me boy. And wiff me taking only 125-percent of yer money for me agent's fee, you'll see that the streets in Amerika really iz paved with pickle juice and cel-ray."

"One-hunnert and twenny-five percent of ev'rything I schmake? So, I makes five thousan' and you takes sixty-two-hunnert and fifty dollars? That izza bargain! As soon as I learns t' schmite me name, I'll schmign on duh dotted line."

"Yer right as rain, Yankel, me boy."

And that my friends was how the Tannenbaums came to be in America.

Follow up questions (these may be on the test):

Did Yankel ever make it in amerika?

And what of officer O'Malley's 125% cut?

Were the streets really paved with pickle juice and cel-ray?

Was Yankel able to bring over his "twenny-nine bruddahs and sistas and aunts and uncles and muddahs and faddahs?

10 Gifts For the Holding Company CEO that Has Everything.

1. A single vinyl record. To remind him of when he had Agency of Record accounts.

2. Black Ink. An obsolete metaphor of the harkening back to times (like the 80s) when agencies were profitable.

3. Pineapple (Revenue) Upside-Down Cake. The cake recipe can be applied to agency data: revenue, head count, overall outlook. Just look at your financials as if they were upside down.

4. 3-D Lion. Printer. Perfect for printing replicas of faux Cannes Lions for ads that never ran, for results that never materialized, for clients you no longer have, by people you no longer employ. Why go to Lion hunting when you can breed your own?

5. Synonym Buns. After two-decades of industry contraction, stultification, firings and lowering of fees and wages, even the wiliest of Holding Company CEOs is running out of euphemisms for precipitous decline and abject failure. 

Our Synonym Buns will provide endless tasty ways of saying 'we're fucked.;
ex. "Downgrowth." "Negative Profit." "Downvaluation." "Right-sizing." "Write Downs." "Shrinkgrowth." Deceptive, yes. Delicious? You bet!

6. Silicone Butts, 100%  Fake Buttock Enhancers. Perfect for the CEO, who, after he's shed two out of five employees, wants "asses in seats," when he has no more asses to justify his seat expenditure. Your RTO mandate? With our buns, consider it done!™

7. Yachta, Yachta, Yachta. For the CEO who's tired of hearing the accusations about his incompetence halving revenue during his tenure. A simple way to remember the $1,700,000 you spent for a yacht rental while laying people off, plus a little reading about income inequality.*

(* Offer not applicable for CEOs who can't read.)

8. Custom-printed t-shirt. (Spinal cord not included with purchase.) After all, as Schattner said to Marx, clothes make the oligarch.

9. The Camel-through-the-eye-of-a-needle chainsaw. Jesus apocryphally said, "it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven." 

Our deluxe high-powered "Camel Chopper," can help cut your own personal camel down to size. Works with both Bactrians and Dromedaries. Or try it on a llama, alpaca or other ungulate. 

10. A pink slip. This one needs no explanation. Human not included.