Happiness is a warm timesheet.

Checking my Facebook this morning I was struck by how many "friends" commented that they'd like nothing better than to rewind the world to Friday night. In other words, they are dreading work on Monday.

These pictures came to me this weekend in the form of a pdf'd "Employee Happiness Kit."

Perhaps the reason they call it a "depression" is that we are now all low-grade.

The kid doesn't stay in the picture.

A friend of mine was a leading creative director at an agency that was recently named, in their particular vertical, "Agency of the Year."

Shortly before they were named Agency of the Year, my friend was fired.

In the picture that accompanied the trade-magazine article on this agency,
she was re-touched out.

So much for "truth in advertising."
Which is way nicer than what I wanted to say.
Which is that this particular "Agency of the Year"
are a bunch of scheming mother fuckers.

Best practices.

David Brooks, an op-ed columnist for The New York Times has an interesting article, "The Harlem Miracle," on Charter Schools today. And yes, it's prompted me to think about the advertising industry. You can read the whole megilleh here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/08/opinion/08brooks.html?_r=1

The miracle Brooks writes about is a charter school called The Promise Academy producing gains of 1.3 to 1.4 standard deviation. Quoting Brooks, "the most common education reform ideas — reducing class size, raising teacher pay, enrolling kids in Head Start — produce gains of about 0.1 or 0.2 or 0.3 standard deviations."

Roland Fryer, a Harvard economist, had this to say about these results. "The results changed my life as a researcher because I am no longer interested in marginal changes.”

Now, the parallels to our industry. We accept, for example, an "open-rate" of .015% in direct mail. Getting that open-rate becomes the norm. We build "best practices" so that we achieve those results.

A .015% open-rate means fifteen people out of a thousand opened a piece of mail. That's a best-practice?

A lot of what we do in our industry is accepting mediocrity and formalizing mediocrity so that it is acceptable to accept it.

Our job is the opposite of that.
Our job is to be "no longer interested in marginal changes."
It's to find miracles.

A leitmotif is developing.

About innovation vs. Detroit-ism.

This is a looooooooong quotation from a 1916 novel called "Mr. Britling Sees it Through" by futurist (though we didn't use that term then) and novelist H.G. Wells.

It's about England in the early years of the 20th Century.

"Our manufacturing class was, of course, originally an insurgent class...it had the craftsman's natural enterprise and radicalism. As soon it prospered and sent its boys to Oxford, it was lost. Our manufacturing class was assimilated in no time to the conservative classes, whose education has always has a mandarin quality...Machine haters. Science haters. Rule of thumbites to the bone...It isn't that we are simply backward in these things, we are antagonistic."

England 100 years ago. America today?

This morning I wrote about pragmatic absurdity.

And just a moment or two I ran across Allison Arieff's blog on The New York Times: http://arieff.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/searching-for-value-in-ludicrous-ideas/

In it she talks about an urban planner/inventor/designer/thinker/absurdist called Steven M. Johnson. Arieff quotes Johnson and I think the quotation is germane. “America has been falling into a depression, a psychological depression, for many years. Yet this is a land of pioneer inventors. It annoys me that an untrained person like myself can think up products easily... and yet the nation seems to sit helplessly passive and wait to be saved somehow.”

Anyhoo, as Minnesotans like to say, take a gander at Johnson's work.
And think.
And laugh.
And do.

Salvador Dali's Mustache.

I was in The Strand bookstore (18 miles of books) over the weekend and found a tiny little book called "Salvador Dali's Mustache." As the title indicates, it's about 40 pictures of Dali's absurd mustache.

One thing I've noticed over the years is that we have all become too serious. As if no one wants to laugh any more because it doesn't fit in a .ppt.

I bought the book for my 17-year-old. Because she should grow up differently.

BTW, you can order this delightful little laughter on Amazon for $11. It might just brighten your day--not a bad result of an $11 expenditure.

My Niece's 12th Birthday.

Alexa, my niece, is having her 12th birthday party at my apartment because we have a pool in our building. This morning, in the rain, I schlepped some balloons home to decorate the party room.

I thought about this scene from Carol Reed's "The Third Man," in which everybody is waiting for the mysterious Harry Lime (Orson Welles) to appear.

If you've ever seen anything better, let me know.

Oy vey ad of the century.

I just saw an ad on the on line New York Times for a local fast food chain called White Castle.

Frame 1 shows the BBQ Pulled Pork Slider. Frame 2 features a golden disco ball and 80s type that says, "Temptation Lies Between the Buns."

Fast-food and buggery. Have it your way, baby.

Movie of the week.

Aporkalypse Now.

Sad poetic line of the day.

Empty storefronts line the avenue like the missing teeth in a homeless man's grin.