North Coast Online

Cheaper Than Tinfoil

Still not ready to believe the corporate insistence that Wi-Fi and cellphone radiation aren't dangerous?  Well, I've found just what you're looking for.

Stop Me Before I Graph Again

"Something awful is in the air. It is 19 years old and American. It ruins meetings, presentations and lectures alike. Its name is PowerPoint." 

There are few words that have a greater capacity to chill than “I’ll just take you through this on PowerPoint” and there are few surer guarantees of daytime slumber than the gentle shuffling of slides as what was once a compelling argument becomes a computer-aided anaesthetic. PowerPoint presentations are to persuasion what male posing pouches are to seduction — the death of the art.

If you do want to win an audience to your point of view, whatever it is you’re selling, then there is no effective alternative to the traditional art of speechmaking. Rhetoric, as it used to be known, has acquired a dodgy reputation over the years. Platform speeches have become equated, thanks to the efforts of hack politicians like me, with pompous and stilted cliché-mongering. You know the sort of stuff — references to things being “beyond peradventure” and initiatives being “rolled out through multi-agency working”. But it is still the case that a single speech can move, excite, motivate and change minds in a way that no other form of communication can accomplish.

I hate Powerpoint, but my employer absolutely adores it; insists on it.  I'm still occasionally criticized for a presentation I made three years ago without the requisite accompanying Powerpoint slides -- even though I presented my case clearly and sparked a very lively discussion.  Anyway, read the rest at the Adam Smith Institute Blog.

That Golden Hamster

ESPN The Magazine's recognition of the Sabres is a nice story on the same day that two ex-Bills were busy trashing Buffalo.  But I found this bit particularly interesting.

In February, the seven best-selling jerseys at NHL.com belonged to Sidney Crosby [of the Penguins] and six Sabres, part of a jump of more than 1,000 percent in sales of Sabres swag over the past year.”

Now do you understand why they changed the logo?  Golisano's a business genius; I'm really regretting not having voted for him for Governor a couple elections ago.

[UPDATE:] In other business of sports news, if you thought sharing our own personal revenues with the Bills were enough -- guess you were wrong.

May The Strong Life Force Be With Them

It might be that the Los Angeles Zoo needs a financial control board.

The Los Angeles Zoo paid $4,500 to an expert in the ancient Chinese art of feng shui to ensure three endangered golden monkeys on loan from China can have a strong life force.

Consulting the feng shui expert was part of the cost for a $7.4 million enclosure for the golden monkeys debuting at the zoo later his year. Feng shui focuses on balance in design to promote health and happiness.

Feng shui is in demand among high-end architects and interior designers, but Beverly Hills-based feng shui expert Simona Mainini said the Los Angeles Zoo's effort may be a first in animal enclosure design.

I suspect that it is.  And catch this.

"The viewing building has a Chinese character," said principal architect Charles Mays, who hire Mainini. "We thought it would be more authentic if we went that extra step and made sure it was done with good feng shui."

Makes eminent good sense, I suppose.  I'd always heard that golden monkeys were partial to Chinese architecture.

They're Ba-ack

Wow, it's been years since I've heard of a good UFO sighting.

A flying saucerlike object hovered low over O'Hare International Airport for several minutes before bolting through thick clouds with such intense energy that it left an eerie hole in overcast skies, said some United Airlines employees who observed the phenomenon.

Was it an alien spaceship? A weather balloon lost in the airspace over the world's second-busiest airport? A top-secret military craft? Or simply a reflection from lights that played a trick on the eyes?

Officials at United professed no knowledge of the Nov. 7 event--which was reported to the airline by as many as a dozen of its own workers--when the Tribune started asking questions recently. But the Federal Aviation Administration said its air traffic control tower at O'Hare did receive a call from a United supervisor asking if controllers had spotted a mysterious elliptical-shaped craft sitting motionless over Concourse C of the United terminal.

Some O'Hare tower personnel speculate that it came down and simply thought better.

"To fly 7 million light years to O'Hare and then have to turn around and go home because your gate was occupied is simply unacceptable," said O'Hare controller and union official Craig Burzych

Heh.

Give Me A Punch Card

News via Drudge and confirmed by the Instapundit that only buttresses my happiness that, for once, New York's dysfunctional government procrastinated long enough to save us from the head-long rush into computerized voting that so much of the rest of the country adopted.

New Jersey -- We're Not So Good With Slogans

American cities and states are desperate to "brand" themselves.  That's the current buzzword from the consultants.  Find the right slogan and market yourself under it.  New Jersey keeps trying and failing.

The state has jettisoned "Come See For Yourself," its second attempt at a tagline in less than a year. It was the product of a statewide contest set up by then-acting Gov. Richard J. Codey last fall, after he rejected a consultant's offering: "We'll Win You Over."

State tourism officials said legal issues led them to scrap the latest slogan, explaining that West Virginia and other states previously used "Come See For Yourself."

"We are proceeding without the slogan. We will revisit the next steps at the end of the year," Karen Wolfe, a spokeswoman for the state Commerce, Economic Growth and Tourism Commission, told The Press of Atlantic City for Saturday editions.

Codey, now state Senate president, dismissed "We'll Win You Over" because he said it reminded him too much of when he was single and asked girls out on a date.

"Come See For Yourself" was the top choice among more than 11,000 telephone and online votes cast by residents for five finalist entries in the contest. Codey unveiled the slogan with great fanfare in January, saying the Garden State's catch phrase "should hint at our true beauty."

But at an annual tourism conference in Cape May County last month, the slogan was absent from all state promotional materials. The slogan is also missing from this year's tourism television commercials, featuring a song by rocker Jon Bon Jovi.

Tourism officials said they won't pick from any of the four other finalists: "Love at First Sight," "The Real Deal," "The Best Kept Secret" or "Expect the Unexpected."

Maybe honesty would be the best policy here.  New Jersey -- We're Clueless.