A podcast about books & life — not necessarily in that order
I know I’ve praised the virtues of the In-N-Out burger profusely in the last few years, and I’ll take the Fatburger as the best east coast alternative, but Amy & I made the pilgrimage to one of the best burger joints around: White Manna.
If you come for a visit, I promise to take you there, but I can’t promise that the onions will ever let you rest.
So he used uppers? How else could Jim Leyritz have caught a 15-inning playoff game against the Mariners and then belt the walk-off homer?
Neat article in BusinessWeek about problems with the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner. This falls into the “I find this stuff fascinating but recognize that many readers don’t care about how some/most/all industries work.”
The article discusses the new model of production that Boeing’s trying to implement for this plane. The company’s engaged in a variety of outsourcing that it hasn’t really tried before, and that may be tied directly to the technological hurdles that the new plane is facing:
Boeing has undertaken a grand business experiment with the Dreamliner. In a bid to tap the best talent and hold down costs, the aerospace icon has engaged in extreme outsourcing, leaving it highly dependent on a far-flung supply chain that includes 43 “top-tier” suppliers on three continents. It is the first time Boeing has ever outsourced the most critical areas of the plane, the wing and the fuselage. About 80% of the Dreamliner is being fabricated by outside suppliers, vs. 51% for existing Boeing planes.
The Dreamliner’s mounting challenges call into question whether such a radical business model can succeed, and whether the advantages of collaboration on such a scale are outweighed by the loss of logistical and design control.
My day job is editing a magazine about outsourcing in the pharma/biopharma industry, so I wonder about how other industries manage this stuff. It’s not the commodity-level transactions that are interesting (like sourcing your wiring or excipients from a provider), but the question of how you look out-of-house for the more integral aspects of product design and development.
Now, for smaller biopharma companies, that’s a functional necessity, since they don’t tend to have the infrastructure to develop things themselves. But when it comes to aviation, in which there are really only a pair of major players left, it’s gotta be a much dicier proposition.
In this instance, the fuselage cracked.
I’ve been on prednisone for the last 10 days, trying to clear out the ugly ol’ case of poison ivy I picked up from the Memorial Day yard-clearing extravaganza. The pred has left me pasted by heartburn for over a week, which is no fun. I’ve juggled the sleeplessness with some Xanax & gin, which seems to be working okay, but this morning, I finally looked up all the listed side effects of this little corticosteroid and discovered that among of the rarer ones are a “false sense of well-being” and “mistaken feelings of self-importance.”
I don’t even know how you begin to diagnose that. I mean, does the doctor say, “You’re not doing as well as you think! And you’re simply not that important! This is just a side effect!”
Evidently, I may also get them menstrual cramps, real bad.
Neat interview with Stephen Wright, who is not the comedian Steven Wright.
Official VM buddy Mitch Prothero recently filed a story on the underreported civil war in Gaza, explaining some aspects of journalism in the process:
Palestinians are the easiest people in the world to cover as a journalist. They respect the work, know journalists take risks to tell their story, and, frankly, know that stories of their suffering under Israeli oppression are good P.R. But it’s not just cynical and calculating; they’re Arabs and that stuff about Arabs’ respect for guests is very real and sincere.
Having said that, a lot of the goodwill toward the foreign journo dries up when it’s Arabs fighting each other. Suddenly, you’re not documenting a noble struggle against occupation, you’re just some foreigner. And if you’re in a hospital full of pissed-off Military Intelligence officials tending to their wounded, it’s a disaster. As I tried to take pictures, I was suddenly surrounded by a mob of armed men grabbing at my cameras. Luckily, the son of a wounded official jumped into the fray and dragged me to a side room. Once he checked my digital images, he informed the angry crowd I had done nothing wrong and I was free to take pictures outside the hospital.
I like the mention that Hamas would be all for peace if Israel would just return to its 1967 borders. It’s always funny how no one asks Jordan how they feel about going back to those borders. . .
And Mitch also had an article about how the Hariri assassination in Beirut may’ve also been tied to a bank scandal (still implicating the Syrian government).
In the name of all this investigative and life-risking journalism, I’ll cut him some slack for not being able to make it to our wedding. . .
Continuing that series of posts and links about contemporary fiction, here’s a piece in Slate about how book sales are measured and ignored:
[Using Bookscan to garner sales numbers] has become popular for a few reasons having to do with the culture of journalism and publishing. In general, the publishing world treats money the way old-line WASPs once didâ€â€as a subject that genteel people simply don’t discuss. The only question considered to be more indelicate than how much one was paid to write a book is how many copies it has sold.
Geek Week offers us video of the Marvel Secret Wars Re-Enactment Society.
The video takes a while to load, and you’re probably not going to laugh unless you’re a comics-geek. Sorry. But Dr. Doom having a cut-man is hysterical to me.