…you spend half an hour explaining to your friends how Mark-to-Market reporting contributed to the fall of Enron, why stock option reporting is so problematic and that, in order to curb corporate corruption and greed, a change must come from inside, characterized by a shift in corporate culture and driven by the shareholders…
…and you actually manage to sound convincing and knowledgeable.
Deep thought:
Do birds call bird flu "bird flu" or do they just call it "the flu"?
On second thought, I think the correct term for it is "human bird flu," which would mean that if a bird got regular flu from a human it would have to be called "bird human flu."
Also, if a human were ever born with feathered wings and somehow managed to take off, the headlines would invariably be "human bird flew," which could easily lend itself to a typo by an overworked editor who didn’t bother to read the whole story.
Actually, strictly speaking, headlines have to be in present tense, so it would be "human bird flies." Which is, of course, completely humorless.
Too much briefing, sorry.
On another, completely different note, this is why I love living in New York City generally, and a couple blocks away from Union Square particularly:
http://www.newmindspace.com/pillowfightnyc.php
Too bad I missed it.
When I was a kid, about 6 or 7 years old, I used to love "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. Remember those? The book would start out like a regular novel, only it would be told in the second person and then, a few pages into the book, you’d be given a choice, and then told which page to turn to based on that choice.
For example, your character will be travelling through a bazaar in Morocco and it’ll say, "you are approached by a slightly stooped man with shifty eyes. He looks up at you and says, ‘hello, sir, I know this market very well and would be happy to show you around for a small fee.’ If you choose to follow the man, turn to page 364. If you choose to turn him down politely, turn to page 135." Every book had the same beginning and about thirty or forty different endings. It was as close to interactive as we could come back then, when the most advanced computer game around was Space Invaders.
Thinking back on my life since then, it seems a lot like one of those books. It’s basically seemed scripted for the most part, with my playing the role of observer, watching the adventure unfold. Every once in a while though, I’ll be faced with a choice that would determine where the plot is going to go for the next few days, months, years. If you choose to stay with dead-end, badly-run company that doesn’t appreciate you but pays pretty well, turn to page 632. If you choose to take out tens of thousands of dollars in loans in order to go to law school, turn to page 743.
The problem with "Choose Your Own Adventure" books was that a lot of the choices led to pretty random results,
and a lot of the endings weren’t exactly satisfying. Sometimes the
most counter-intuitive choice led to the best possible outcome. It got
slightly annoying.
So I started to cheat. I would flip the corner of the page over before
turning to the next choice, so I could always backtrack if my character
suddenly suffered some catastrophic mishap, or if I just plain didn’t
like where the story was going. This led, in my mind, to a much more gratifying experience, one that guaranteed a happy ending.
Life doesn’t work that way, unfortunately. There’s no turning the corner of the page over and backtracking if our choice turns out to be wrong. We can only hope that trusting the man to lead us through the bazaar will lead to a better shopping experience rather than a knife in the back. It still makes for a great adventure, though.
