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I’m the agent orange of change agents

This article on BizWeek about the downfall of Wal-Mart ad exec Julie Roehm makes for entertaining reading. And it’s worthwhile to note that advertising people really do talk like this:

Wal-Mart, she says “would rather have had a painkiller [than] taken the vitamin of change.” What has she learned? “The importance of culture. It can’t be underestimated.”

. . .

“We’re probably the edgiest automaker in terms of the things we try. And the times Julie went over the edge have been well documented,” says Jason Vines, [Chrylser’s] chief spokesman. “But we realized you don’t know where the edge is unless you are willing to go over it once in a while.”

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Down by contact

Ahoy, dear readers! Sorry for the lack of posts; I was down-n-out with some sorta flu yesterday. I made it into the office for an hour or so, then gave up and came home to rest.

The construction across the street — our neighbor’s building an addition on his house — made sure that I never got too much sleep during the day. I take that as a positive, since it meant I didn’t have trouble when I went to bed last night.

Anyway, I’ve got a ton of work to catch up on, so I leave you with Life After Sports (and make sure you check out the slide show).

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Monday Morning Montaigne

From That the taste of good and evil depends in large part on the opinion we have of them:

Indeed, just as study is a torment to a lazy man, abstinence from wine to a drunkard, frugality to the luxurious man, and exercise to a delicate idler, so it is with the rest. Things are not that painful or difficult of themselves; it is our weakness and cowardice that make them so. To judge of great and lofty things we need a soul of the same caliber; otherwise we attribute to them the vice that is our own. A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see the thing, but how we see it.

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Morning stroll

Amy thought it’d be a nice idea this morning if we lit out for Ringwood Manor and snapped some pix while the 8am light was going on. She wasn’t happy with her photos, but here’s the first image in the photoset I posted:

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Enjoy the set.

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Come Fly Without Me

This week, my boss & I went over the year’s conference schedule, to figure out who’s going where. As it turns out, due to a couple of local-ish shows and changes in our production schedules, I’m not going to have to do too much business-flying this year. It’s a nice change from the past 3 years, which saw plenty of work-flights and lots of Xanax-ingestion.

I can trace my air-anxiety to a takeoff to Phoenix in October 2003, where the first 90 seconds out of Newark were the most harrowing moments of my life. Since then, I’ve been a nervous flyer. Not in extreme “Get me off this plane!” ways, but I tend to take bumps pretty seriously. It’s silly, and I’m able to get over it sometimes by preoccupying myself with music (the louder and more techno-y, the better) or that aforementioned anti-anxiety drug.

I bring all this up because Donald at 2Blowhards has a great post about Scary Airports:

The airports I’ve flown into that make me nervous tend to be those in cramped locations. National Airport near Washington and New York’s LaGuardia are two examples. National is tucked next to the Potomac River and its main runway is about 6,900 feet long (and seemed shorter the last time I used it, 15+ years ago). La Guardia’s runways are about 150 feet longer, but the airport is boxed in by Long Island Sound. Unless you’re landing to the north (and waving at friends in the Shea Stadium parking lot), landing approaches are over water.

Personally, I don’t have a problem with coming in over water. Although I recall that a flight during my trip to Sweden & Denmark in 2004 allowed passengers to look through cameras on the plane’s exterior, as part of the in-flight entertainment. The approach over water (I think it was coming into Paris for the connection at CDG) was a little disturbing from nose-cam.

Anyway, give his post a read, and make sure to check out the comments, which are fantastic.

(Bonus: a YouTube video of planes landing at the incredibly wind-cursed Wellington airport in NZ!)