You’d think this was a UNICEF food-drop

The U.S. has a long way to go to reach British levels of mob depravity, but this piece from South Flordia is a heartening indication that we won’t be left in their dust forever.

“Black Friday,” the traditional start of the holiday shopping season, began in South Florida early today with a 73-year-old woman being knocked down as a crowd at an electronics store rushed a metal security gate to get inside. The crowd of shoppers outside BrandsMart USA in Sawgrass Mills, angry at being forced to wait by security personnel, pushed their way under the security gate and down a hallway into the store, forcing dozens of people against the walls and trampling the woman.

This is the third or fourth (at least) consumer-riot that Drudge has linked to in the past few days.

16:36 EST | permalink | /issues/consumerism

Advice for New Americans

George Soros, the Hungarian financier who former Malaysian PM and noted judeophobe Mahathir bin Mohamad blamed for the Asian financial crisis, endowed the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, a fellowship for recent immigrants and children of immigrants. I’m not eligible. But I have some advice for people who are. In the first essay, you’re asked to describe “activities you have undertaken that might give evidence of creativity, accomplishment, and commitment to the values expressed in the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.” My suggestion? Before you write the essay, see as many trucker/biker movies as you possibly can. For starters, I recommend these classics:

• Black Dog – Mayhem and freight-hauling. A gold-star trucker gets coerced into running weapons to save his family. Features Patrick Swayze, Meat Loaf, and some of the most incredible 18-wheeler stunts I’ve ever seen.

• Stone Cold – Former Seattle Seahawks linebacker Brian Bosworth is an undercover cop/player/unbelievably ripped biker sent to infiltrate a white nationalist biker gang. Fight scenes are simply not to be missed, nor is the courthouse shootout at the end.

I can think of no more effective way to learn the applications of the Constitution than these films, which touch on everything from the second amendment to the Interstate Commerce Clause. They are particularly recommended for immigrants from the E.U., who are less likely to realize the need for constitutional protection of their fundamental rights.

(Interested in more advice like this? Contact HPME Consulting, care of yours truly, using the “Contact details” link at the top-left.)

15:38 EST | permalink | /arts/film

Did all the fact-checkers quit or something?

I’m reading “Buzzmarketing,” an overly glib 2005 business book by Mark Hughes. To its credit, the anecdotes are plentiful and entertaining, which is why I pulled it off the new-book shelf at Baker Library.

The trouble is that they don’t always ring true: on page 216, Hughes tells a Steve Jobs story. In February 1983, the Apple founder was inspecting a Macintosh factory and demanded that all of the computers be reboxed. The cardboard boxes they’d been using simply weren’t white enough to appeal to retailers. Moral: attention to detail pays (or something like that.)

I have no way of verifying this story. But there’s one thing I can verify:

Before any were shipped, Steve Jobs went to the plant to inspect the computers. Hard drives worked fine, cases looked fine, everything looked fine, except one thing.

Hard drives? Hard drives?! The original Macintosh, as any Apple geek will tell you, didn’t have a hard drive. No Macintosh shipped with an internal hard drive until 1987 – four years after Hughes’s anecdote. The industry was up in arms about the omission – writing in 1996, Intel CEO Andy Grove reminisced about his first impression of the Mac: “a ridiculous toy” which “didn’t have a hard disk (at the time, all PCs already had one).” (Only the Paranoid Survive, p.112)

Jobs personally killed plans to include a hard disk in the original Mac, spurring infighting and memo-scribbling at Apple. (see p. 191 of Steven Levy’s Insanely Great).

Yes, I realize that Hughes included that line because it was a nice transition. Yes, I realize that it’s a detail irrelevant to his anecdote. But it’s much harder take a book seriously if the author makes obvious screw-ups like this – and the editors miss them. I know no similar trivia about Rit dye, Mustang cars, Britney Spears, or Pepsi – but I can’t say I find those accounts terribly believable after seeing this.

As a special point of irony, I’m posting this just after reading Hughes’s cautionary chapter on irritating your customers, in which he describes the online revenge of two businessmen shafted by a DoubleTree hotel.

A bit of free advice to the Penguin P.R. machine, should they, by some chance, see this: hire more fact-checkers.

14:19 EST | permalink | /media

Yet another word I can’t stand to hear or read

“bio-break”

See also

15:23 EST | permalink | /language