No Love For The Love Boat?

Well, friends, time marches on and in case you needed proof, here's one for all the boomers: The Love Boat is being ripped up for scrap.  Yep, the Pacific Princess, home to Captain Stubing and Gopher and the rest of the Love Boat gang is officially decommissioned.  The ship could host about 600 passengers and that's just too tiny by today's standards, with cruise ships that host 3000 people.  

Of course, the Love Boat never caught fire while on a cruise, never had all it's toilets fail at once, and never capsized while full of passengers.  Both those sort of metrics are just so....yesterday. 

Design By Committee

I recently rediscovered this brilliant cartoon that crystallizes what's wrong with creating things by committee.   There's certainly a place for collaboration and it's often touted as the only way to success, but there are innumerable examples of how a committee screwed up a project.   

I'm sure everyone can come up with examples of committee decision-making run amok.  Click the image to make it larger.

 

Egotists are us

So NYC mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner is asked a question by a voter who wants to know how he can lead a city administration and expect employees to behave in an ethical manner when he can't.  Watch this CNN video.

IMO the problem isn't that Anthony Weiner is a douche who can't control his fantasies, but that he's an egotistical, self-centered ass who can't ever admit that he isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread.   He actually can't tell when he's gone off the rails.  As a result, he can't see the utter contempt that he attracts.  

New Yorkers don't have to settle this low for a mayor.  The rest of us also have our own collections of egotistical, self-centered politicians pandering for votes.  We shouldn't settle that low either.

In a related video, The Daily Show's Aasif Mandvi tries selling a promising congressional candidate on going to Washington DC, despite its 535 obvious flaws.  The conclusion? 

"Washington is too gridlocked to attract the kind of results-oriented politicians we need to break the gridlock."

What's that? I can't hear you!

This website has some terrific reminders of what a variety of things used to sound like.   And thankfully, the list does NOT include a dial-up modem!