Prince Philip is the tall chap who married the queen of England, enjoys making beautifully inappropriate comments, and feels intimate contact with his television might be necessary in order to make it work.
In a revealing interview, only some of which seems to have appeared on the Buckingham Palace YouTube channel, the prince laid bare his electrical dysfunction, one that many might, secretly or not, actually share.
His interviewer, a rather well spoken chap called Kevin McCloud, brightened up the pages of London's Times newspaper with some of the prince's heartfelt words.
Perhaps the most elegant of the phrases turned by the 88-year-old prince was: "To work out how to operate a television set, you practically have to make love to the thing."
It has never been my habit to wonder about the conjugal behavior of the regal.
However, once one's mind goes quickly beyond boggling in order to consider how one might make one's plasma pulse race, one begins to appreciate that many people do find it rather difficult to grasp even 10 percent of their gizmos' workings.
Of course, the prince's imagery is so disconcerting that I wonder just what actions came immediately before the creation of, for example, Prince Charles.
However, Phil the Greek, as he is sometimes known in pejorative circles, will no doubt receive some sympathy for his giddy criticism of technology's grave new world. Why can't things be just blindingly simple, especially for those whose eyes are not quite what they used to be?
Not satiated with his criticism of televisual operations, the prince turned his mind and, one feared, his devilishly seductive eyes, toward the Web.
"The Web sites I've seen are so awful it's untrue," he told McCloud. "They're so unfit for purpose I'm surprised anyone tolerates them."
Surely he has a point. There are so many ill-designed sites on the Web that one's eyes sometimes water with pain. However, given the prince's somewhat outre position on the subject of televisions, many will find themselves caught in the uncomfortable posture of now considering which Web sites the prince has, um, actually visited.
Please might readers suggest something appropriate, as I fear my own thinking has been addled and muddled by the prince's highly colorful imagery.
Few could imagine a more chilling tale of depravity than the story that has emerged over the last few days concerning the kidnapping of Jaycee Lee Dugard.
While her alleged kidnapper, Phillip Garrido, has now been revealed to have penned a disturbing blog, some commenters on Boing Boing have uncovered visuals from Google Street View that they believe show him in pursuit of a Google car.
Boing Boing co-editor Xeni Jardin has posted a series of Street View shots in which a van is seen progressing from Garrido's address in Antioch, Calif., toward a Street View car.
At Boing Boing, Jardin gives precise directions on how to follow the van on Street View and believes that its driver may have been suspicious of a Google Volkswagen that was filming for the Street View site. Jardin describes it as "the creepiest thing I've ever seen on Google Street View."
No one viewing this footage when it first went live would ever have considered it suspicious. However, some have pointed out that had police viewed this overhead shot from Google Maps, perhaps it might have made them search Garrido's home with a little more vigor.
I am philosophical today. Would you take a slow walk with me and listen to a story that may not have an ending?
I was in my favorite sushi restaurant the other night when Dan, a man in a Tommy Bahama shirt, leaned over to me and, through thickly alcoholic breath, said: "There are more banks going down. Mark my words."
Normally, a Tommy Bahama shirt signifies "my brain is dead and my eyes have turned to disco balls." However, Dan is, I know, a retired accountant. The very finest, wiliest, (relatively) honest kind.
With his words still nuzzling my ears, I got home and picked up a book I was reading called Ahead of the Curve. I reached a chapter in which the author was interviewing at Google.
(Credit:
CC Esparta)
The author, Philip Delves Broughton, is a former New York and Paris bureau chief of the highly conservative Daily Telegraph newspaper, who suddenly decided to enter the Harvard MBA program because he felt he needed to learn about the realities of business.
One of the the realities, for him, was that Google, which originally was interested in employing him in the marketing department for its Book Search, ended up interviewing him 14 times.
In the end, Broughton was interviewed by people at Google's New York office who made it clear that the company was now wondering whether he could do hard-core sales.
After this interview, Broughton knew that his corporate daze was complete: "I decided I was going to quit before I was pushed (...) They told me they were sorry and that I could always come back. But I wanted the company expunged from my life. I wanted to scrub away the mask I had worn for them all these months. I uninstalled all the Google features on my computer and made Yahoo my default search engine."
Perhaps Broughton was just unsuited for the unsuited, but corporate, life at Google.
However, if you wander along to his conclusions about the direction of corporate life in general, you too might pause to put a word into the search box on your browser. The word might be "soul."
"HBS does not need to promise to 'educate leaders who make a difference in the world,'" writes Broughton. "It suggests that business, with its priorities and decision-making approach, has a right to impose its will on the world. But business needs to relearn its limits, and if the Harvard Business School let some air out of its own balloon, business would listen."
Broughton has a solution as simple as your IT guy has when your computer crashes and you have no idea how to fix it: "HBS need only promise to educate students in the processes and management of business. It would be a noble and accommodating goal and would dilute the perception of the school and its graduates as a megalomaniacal, self-sustaining elite."
Could anyone in the tech world be accused of wanting to create a "megalomaniacal, self-sustaining elite"? I will keep my subjective objectivity to myself on that question. But Broughton's strangely sobering book ends with the story of HBS's perhaps most famous student.
No, not Jeffrey Skilling of Enron. A chap called Robert McNamara.
McNamara was the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War. According to the journalist David Halberstam, McNamara had no trust for anyone "who did not speak his language of statistics and hard data."
Naturally, South Vietnamese officers would think of a number between 30 and 4,000 and declare it hard data--a small subterfuge that led McNamara to disbelieve anything real people such as his own country's soldiers told him when they returned from the battlefields. And, well, if you've watched the documentary The Fog Of War, things didn't really end all that well.
Perhaps Dan, Ahead of the Curve, and the discomforting Wall Street events of this week have made me wonder more than usual if there really is safety in numbers, even binary ones.
Oh, what am I worried about?
Harvard Business School bears no comparison to the tech world. No one goes into the tech business just to worship the numbers and make money without any thought as to what kind of world they're ushering in, do they?
Let's ignore Broughton's slightly portentous final question about his alma mater: "Has society allotted too much authority to a single, narcissistic class of spreadsheet makers and PowerPoint presenters?"
Thank you for walking with me. Do you fancy some sushi? Dan might be here again tonight. He might have other shirts.
This week sees the Cannes Advertising Festival. Where a lot of advertising people and clients drink themselves silly and whisper sweet everythings into each others' ears.
I love it myself. But, being on the creative side of the business, only when you have something in competition that has a chance of winning an award.
McDonalds has already achieved a victory this week, according to the eyeball counters at comScore.
Not in Cannes (yet), but on the web.
comScore announced this week that McDonalds enjoyed the unprecedented attention of almost 600 million eyeballs in March with their display ads. (that's two eyeballs per person, for the cyclops reading this)
Which means that the burger company comScored more than 33% of the share of voice of the Top Ten Quick Serve Restaurants.
For some reason, McDonalds enjoys almost fifteen times the number of display views as Burger King.
It appears that Ronald and his cohorts (who have been responsible for some truly excellent advertising over the last twenty years) have worked out that there are huge numbers of bored workers sitting in front of their computers getting hungry all morning.
So why not tickle their palate, which is probably being destroyed by those two bitter office staples- coffee and gossip.
(Credit:
Ryan McFarland (www.zieak.com))
The rumor is that the growth of display advertising on the web is markedly slowing, because clients are not seeing the results that they would wish.
Another rumor is that the reason for this slowdown is that people see the display ads, but then go to search ads to find the very best deal for the very desire the search ad has stimulated.
Let me toss out a subjective rumor.
The pop-up did a lot of damage. Banner ads that flashed to the point of vomit-inducing vertigo made it worse.
While TV audiences were used to seeing ads from the very beginning, and at least some of them were entertaining, people recoiled against some of the advertising detritus they were served online for years.
They preferred word of mouth that sent them to specific entertaining sites, like BurgerKing's brilliant subservientchicken.com or Philips' astoundingly deep shaveeverywhere.com.
People just aren't that fond of being interrupted online. They have things to do. Like seeing if Rumer Willis really can find a way to look like her Mom.
TV quickly became part of the domestic furniture, just another light you turned on when you came into the house.
Your laptop is a different being. Something more personal, something far more evocative of your private self.
Many display ads online are the equivalent of a father walking into his teenage daughter's room to check on what she's doing.
In the vernacular of my home town, the reaction they get is "Bog off."
McDonalds clearly feels that its dominating presence will bring rewards.
It will be interesting to see whether the company will see its heavy online activity slide more burgers into the nation's epiglottises.
Yes, there is a McDonalds in Cannes. On the main square where locals play boules. And just a few paces from the Palais des Festivals.
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