BOLD

The helmet from a set of jousting armor owned by Karl Christian von 
Breitenbach, an officer of the Saxon court from 1694 to 1726.

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Week Four—Self Portrait

Week Four of LensProToGo's 52 Week Photo Project.

View their Flickr photo pool here.

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Week One—Representative Self Portrait

Week Two—My Front Door

Week Three—My Favorite Thing: Toasted

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Pure Genius

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Week Three—My Favorite Thing: Toasted

Week Three of LensProToGo's 52 Week Photo Project.

View their Flickr photo pool here.

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Week One—Representative Self Portrait

Week Two—My Front Door

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Week Two—My Front Door

Week Two of LensProToGo's 52 Week Photo Project.

View their Flickr photo pool here.

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Week One—Representative Self Portrait

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Week One—Self Portrait

Week One of LensProToGo's 52 Week Photo Project.

View their Flickr stream here.

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"Private Sector Jobs Have Been Doing Just Fine…"

…and at this rate, it'll only be another five or six years 'till we get back to normal! Thanks, Harry!

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Microsoft Gobbles Up Yet Another Company

Skypersoft is a reality—Microsoft has completed its $8.5 billion purchase of Skype, officially making the deal Microsoft's largest takeover to date.

The tech giant's biggest prior acquisition was its $6 billion deal for aQuantive, a firm nobody had ever heard of (or since), in 2007.

The boards of directors of Microsoft and Skype greedily approved the all-cash acquisition. So did the Federal Trade Commission as well as other international antibusiness agencies.

"Skype is a phenomenal product and brand that is loved by hundreds of millions of people around the world," said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in a statement. "We look forward to abusing that hard-earned trust and forcing the Skype team to create new ways for people to be disconnected at random intervals from family, friends, clients and colleagues—anytime, anywhere."

Skype CEO Tony Bates sold his soul to become president of a new Skype division at Microsoft, lorded over directly by Ballmer. While the delivery date for his soul was left open in the contract, Bates' tenure is expected to last as long as three years before his innate desire to offer customers a user-friendly and functional product finally clashes with Microsoft's long-held strategy of simply making money, regardless of the actual quality of any of their products.

"The Skype division will continue to offer its current products to millions of users globally," Microsoft said. "Longer term, Skype will also be integrated across Microsoft's bloated array of poorly-supported products to broaden Microsoft's reach and accelerate its growth as a fundamental barrier to the way people try, but ultimately fail, to work and communicate online. Skype's global workforce will be downsized and outsourced to India, or maybe China. Whatever's cheaper, y'know?"

Bates said the subsummation of Skype by Microsoft "will be able to accelerate Microsoft's goal to annoy and frustrate one billion users daily."

Skype's software is used by about 170 million people each month on PCs, tablets, smartphones, and even home TVs, enabling users to talk by either voice or video over the web for free, though for a fee calls can be placed to landlines and cellphones. "It won't be long before our beloved 'Blue Screen of Death' can be seen on every screen, every device, everywhere, at any time," Ballmer said. "With Steve [Jobs] out of the way now, these are indeed exciting times."

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Heinz 'Dip and Squeeze' Container Aims to Conquer a Major Frustration of Evil, Profiteering Corporations

 

Some people rip the corner off with their teeth.  Others, while driving, squirt the ketchup directly into their mouth, then stuff in the fries.  Some do the unthinkable and forgo fries at the drive-through altogether to keep from making a mess in their gas-guzzling minivans and SUVs.

After observing these and other "compensating behaviors," H.J. Heinz Co. says it spent three years developing a better ketchup packet to squeeze more profit out of the public.

Heinz says the new "Dip and Squeeze" packets will begin replacing the traditional rectangular ketchup packets later this year at Wendy's Co. restaurants.  Smaller chains including Chick-fil-A Inc., Smashburger Master LLC, and International Dairy Queen Inc. started forcing the new packets on clueless customers earlier this year.

McDonald's Corp. and Burger King Holdings Inc. are experimenting on customers but refused to release their results.

As the name promises, "Dip and Squeeze" ketchup can be squeezed out through one end or the lid can be peeled back for dipping.  The red, bottle-shaped packets hold three times the ketchup, and therefore three times the calories, as traditional packets.  The new containers are more expensive than the old sleeves, but Heinz hopes the easily-duped customers learn to buy even more food, thus offsetting the increased costs and creating windfall profits.

To develop the new packet, Heinz staffers sat in air-conditioned splendor behind one-way, mirrored glass, watching consumers trapped in twenty gas-guzzling minivans inhaling noxious exhaust fumes and putting ketchup on fries, burgers, and chicken "nuggets".

"We of course tried experimenting on chimpanzees," says Mike Okoroafor, Heinz vice president of global corporate propaganda innovation and executions.  "But the stupid monkeys just ate the packets whole.  Then most of them couldn't pass the plastic, so we sold them all to the Air Force for nuclear bomb testing and moved on to humans."

To try new prototypes himself, Okoroafor forced his underpaid secretary to give him her minivan, taking it to local McDonald's and Wendy's drive-throughs to order fries and apply ketchup in the confined, low-class space.

"I wasn't going to use my Bentley or my Maserati—my chauffeurs insisted it would ruin the leather," he says.  "It's genuine Italian, made out of genuine Italian peasants."

Heinz for decades has searched for a better way to wring more profits out of the unsuspecting public with their single-serve packets.  The company has tried making them bigger, easier to open, and attachable to a cup of fries; they've even tried more effective subliminal conditioning.  Executives insist that there is no truth to the rumors that they tried lacing the packets with cocaine.  "None whatsoever," said one top company bourgeois aristocrat anonymously.  "Besides, it was too expensive."  None of the other changes could be made without sacrificing profits or even solve customer's complaints—the single-serve packets are messy, hard to open and don't provide enough ketchup in which to drown America's favorite greasy cholesterol sticks.  For about the past decade, Heinz sold two single-serve containers: the classic squeeze packet and a dipping cup.

Heinz believes traditional ketchup packets are so annoying that they stop people from ordering fries at drive-throughs.  "Fry-inclusion orders" and thus profits at drive-throughs "have been going down for years," says John Bennett, vice president of food-service profiteering for Heinz.

"Some of us have yachts and private jets that are more than two years old," he says.  "They're not going to just replace themselves."

A large, wedge-shaped packet almost made it onto the market but Heinz ditched the design months before its planned introduction in 2008.  Mr. Okoroafor declines to admit what his greedy corporation spent developing the sinister "Dip and Squeeze."

In 2006, when activist investor Nelson Peltz battled Heinz for board seats, he pushed the company to increase profiteering activities even more, large and small, including developing larger and more seductive ketchup packets.  Now Peltz sits on the boards of Heinz and Wendy's, which his holding company, Triarc Cos., bought in 2008.

Mr. Peltz declines through a lackey to admit to the true purpose of the packaging change, saying it wouldn't be helpful to either company's bottom line.

Since a supply spat between Heinz and McDonald's that arose during a premeditated 1973 tomato "shortage," Heinz, the country's largest ketchup producer, has been locked out of most of McDonald's U.S. locations, denying Heinz the ketchup-supply monopoly they so clearly desire.  Though Heinz didn't design the new packet to get back in McDonald's good graces, "that would be a wonderful side benefit," says Mr. Bennett, winking knowingly before he boards his personal 767 for another weekend getaway to Aruba.  The only McDonald's serving Heinz now are " a couple of rubes" in Minneapolis and those forced to by corporate mercenaries in Heinz's company-owned hometown of Pittsburgh, he says.

The new packets cost Heinz several times more to produce than the old rectangular pouches it has been selling for over forty years.  The new containers cost restaurants more than three times the old packets, providing a perfect excuse to fast-food chains for greedy price hikes in these tough economic times.

Restaurants pretend to give ketchup away, so "cost is king," says Amy Coltrin, senior direktor of profit enhancement for Golden State Foods Corp., a Heinz competitor (and rumored front for Monsanto Co., or maybe Cargil, Inc., or Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., or probably all three) that supplies private-label ketchup to most McDonald's in the U.S.

Stuart Leslie, president of 4sight Inc., a propaganda-design firm based in New York that worked with Heinz, says the package subtly cons the consumer about the portion.  Shaped like a bottle of Heinz ketchup and larger than the traditional packets, the malign "Dip and Squeeze" packs signal, "This is a serving, this is a bottle of ketchup," Mr. Leslie says.  "You're going to need more food to go with this."

Early tests at Chick-fil-A show the potential profit drainers: greedy customers took more ketchup with the new packets, according to Chick-fil-A surveys of about fifty restaurants over several months.  But the survey also indicated that the customers are strongly addicted to the new packets.

Some consumers appeared to be hoarding the packets, says Brian Wray, manager of brand dissimulation and artifice for the Atlanta-based food chain.  He expects food purchases will increase as the novelty wears off and people figure out how much more food they need to buy.

On a recent afternoon inside a Chick-fil-A in Atlanta, Bruce Stanford is skeptical.  The 55-year-old wage slave worries he might rip off the cover and douse himself with ketchup before scarfing down his cholesterol-and-trans-fat-laden chicken sandwich, fries and iced tea.

But after using it, the minimum-wage employee from Marietta, Ga., stays clean.  "I get the concept," he says.  "You squeeze on the sandwich and dip for fries.  I think I'm gonna need more fries…"

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Picture Perfect ~ Three—Chapel Windows

The windows on the north wall of the Smithsonian Castle's west-wing chapel.


For more Picture Perfect, click here.

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Picture Perfect ~ Two—Daisho

          The wakizashi (short sword) on top and the katana (sword) on the bottom form a daisho—a pair of swords. Form the Arms & Armor collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

For more Picture Perfect, click here.

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Picture Perfect ~ Five

     Five ointment jars with lids, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Egyptian Collection. Three are in Egyptian alabaster, two in obsidian with sheet gold.  From the 12th Dynasty, ca. 1887-1813 BC, from El Lahun, tomb 8, chamber E.


For more Picture Perfect, click here.

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Moving Bass Ackwards

     UPS is apparently experimenting with time travel.  While I'm all for experimentation in the private sphere—especially for the purpose of improving customer service—the least they could do is move in the right direction.  I'm hoping that this is an early experiment.

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It Just Ain't Easy

A frog sitting beneath my air conditioner, soaking up the dripping condensate.

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Communal potty training . . .

. . . says pretty much everything that needs to be said about communism:


Caption from Speigel Online:

Potty training in East Berlin. This photo shows children at a nursery school in the Friedrichshain district in 1975. German photographer Thomas Hoepker took the image when he worked as a photographer for the German magazine Stern. He and his wife, a journalist for Stern, lived in East Berlin and chronicled daily life there. He now lives and works as a photographer in New York.

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Yeah, I'm talkin' to YOU

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Lonely is a Freedom

   

HOW TO BE ALONE by Tanya Davis

     If you are at first lonely, be patient. If you've not been alone much, or if when you were, you weren't okay with it, then just wait. You'll find it's fine to be alone once you're embracing it.

    We could start with the acceptable places, the bathroom, the coffee shop, the library. Where you can stall and read the paper, where you can get your caffeine fix and sit and stay there. Where you can browse the stacks and smell the books. You're not supposed to talk much anyway so it's safe there.

    There's also the gym. If you're shy you could hang out with yourself in mirrors, you could put headphones in.

    And there's public transportation, because we all gotta go places.

    And there's prayer and meditation. No one will think less if you're hanging with your breath seeking peace and salvation.

    Start simple. Things you may have previously based on your avoid-being-alone principals.

    The lunch counter. Where you will be surrounded by chow-downers. Employees who only have an hour and their spouses work across town and so they -- like you -- will be alone.

    Resist the urge to hang out with your cell phone.

    When you are comfortable with eat-lunch-and-run, take yourself out for dinner. A restaurant with linen and silverware. You're no less intriguing a person when you're eating solo dessert to cleaning the whipped cream from the dish with your finger. In fact some people at full tables will wish they were where you were.

    Go to the movies. Where it is dark and soothing. Alone in your seat amidst a fleeting community.  And then, take yourself out dancing to a club where no one knows you. Stand on the outside of the floor till the lights convince you more and more and the music shows you. Dance like no one's watching...because, they're probably not. And, if they are, assume it is with best of human intentions. The way bodies move genuinely to beats is, after all, gorgeous and affecting. Dance until you're sweating, and beads of perspiration remind you of life's best things, down your back like a brook of blessings.

    Go to the woods alone, and the trees and squirrels will watch for you.     Go to an unfamiliar city, roam the streets, there're always statues to talk to and benches made for sitting give strangers a shared existence if only for a minute and these moments can be so uplifting and the conversations you get in by sitting alone on benches might've never happened had you not been there by yourself.

    Society is afraid of alonedom, like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements, like people must have problems if, after a while, nobody is dating them. but lonely is a freedom that breaths easy and weightless and lonely is healing if you make it.

    You could stand, swathed by groups and mobs or hold hands with your partner, look both further and farther for the endless quest for company. But no one's in your head and by the time you translate your thoughts, some essence of them may be lost or perhaps it is just kept.

    Perhaps in the interest of loving oneself, perhaps all those sappy slogans from preschool over to high school's groaning were tokens for holding the lonely at bay. Cuz if you're happy in your head than solitude is blessed and alone is okay.

    It's okay if no one believes like you. All experience is unique, no one has the same synapses, can't think like you, for this be relieved, keeps things interesting life's magic things in reach.

    And it doesn't mean you're not connected, that community's not present, just take the perspective you get from being one person in one head and feel the effects of it. take silence and respect it. if you have an art that needs a practice, stop neglecting it. if your family doesn't get you, or religious sect is not meant for you, don't obsess about it.

You could be in an instant surrounded if you needed it

If your heart is bleeding make the best of it

There is heat in freezing, be a testament.

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Hello . . . ?

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Zenga Zenga

     Mixed by a Jewish kid from Tripoli, yet nevertheless a huge hit throughout the Arabosphere.

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The Men from Marlborough

"Death is more eligible than slavery. A free-born people are not required by the religion of Christ to submit to tyranny, but may make use of such power as God has given them to recover and support their ... liberties." -- The Sons of Liberty, December the Sixteenth, A.D. 1773

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