Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Tell Me, if you know so much.
— New Living Translation
Author: Dell Deaton
- (of online content, merchandise, information, etc) selected, organized, and presented using professional knowledge:
- individuals still desire curated news content
- a curated alternative to the world’s most popular video portal.
— Oxford Dictionary of English
As I’ve grown older, I’ve found fewer and fewer absolutes.
Five years ago or so, on a canoe trip with an acquaintance, the subject of “joining” came up — as in becoming a member of an organization. He’d joined a local church and we were discussing what he actually knew about it, the seriousness of the commitment.
Surprisingly, he didn’t seem to know much. How could one make such a significant commitment based on so little information?
“If I don’t like it, I’ll quit,” he answered simply.
In hindsight, maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised.
My father’s generation joined companies out of high school or college, and stayed with them for life. My generation saw companies treat their “human resources” no better than plastic buildings on a Monopoly board. Whole departments and divisions and larger were subject to being wiped out in service to some senior executive’s need to hit an EBIT target upon which some suit’s stretch-bonus depended.
Although I don’t revisit my past (see Genesis 19:26) — wouldn’t do a thing different even if I could — I do wonder upon reflection if I haven’t had a problem of sticking with some things for far too long.
I don’t think “quit” need be viewed today as the pejorative it might once have seemed to have been.
That’s not to advocate making the sort of hollow commitments that came so easily to canoe-trip-guy. Due diligence largely instructs my looks-before-leaps.
But the story of Sodom and Gomorrah isn’t limited to Genesis 19:24, which reads: “The the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah….”
No, it starts over two pages earlier in my NIV. Second chances abounded. With each succession, it looks to me like the bar was lowered beyond that which anyone should have expected. Warnings were clear.
My Grandma Deaton used to muse about folks who’d stick with organizations that had “quit us” long ago. In the Bible story here, I think Sodom and Gomorrah quit God long before God quit Sodom and Gomorrah.
Commitment is important. But there’s gotta be a reasonable basis for it.
I don’t think it’s wrong to say “enough is enough” when you have, indeed, had enough. How do you know when that is? Pray for discernment.
Amen.
via Internet Archive—
A partner and I started D² Enterprises on August 12, 1983. One of our first major clients was the University of Michigan Panhellenic Association.
They hired us to produce marketing materials and do some re-imaging work.
The impetus for D² Enterprises actually came a year earlier. I was freelancing for a business contracted to photograph sorority rushes. Our contract called for me to be paid for every “salable” image I took, shooting 35mm film with my own camera over the course of six hours or so.
As an aside, I knew an advisor to the program and some of the women independently through a local theater group. They were very pleased with my results, and, based on the orders they shared with me, I anticipated a rather sizeable check from the firm for which I’d done photography.
So I was floored when [the business man’s] calculations yielded a payment for less than a third of that. He explained that “salable” was a term subject solely to his interpretation, and that nowhere in our contract did it say that salable was related to actual sales.
In other words, just because an image had, indeed, sold, well — that didn’t mean it was salable. “I don’t care what you think,” he said without further explanation. “If you don’t like it, go start your own business.”
And I did just that. No hard feelings. Within five years, this photograph guy was gone, D² Enterprises had become D² Corporation, and I’d bought-out my former partner ….
via Internet Archive—
When I started out pitching articles for print publication in the 1980s, there were commonly at least three contending types serving any given demographic.
The clear leader. The second on its heals. Then some periodical running clean-up. My first run was always at the top book. Readership didn’t anoint this position easily, editors guarded the brand that kept ’em there jealously. But the payoff was a peerless credential. Someone reads you there, and they know you’ve been vetted, edited, and confirmed ten-ways-to-Tuesday.
Twenty-some years later now, I still prefer hardcopy periodicals to electronic format for my most important communications. The former is in trouble of course; many going dorsal-fin down, others transitioning to online. I guess they couldn’t leverage their differential advantage of credibility — if, in fact, they even realized they held that key at all. Me-too managers and committed bean-counters seldom look for such things.
Be that as it may, now that those who’ve fled to the Internet are here, translating the trust of ink-on-paper is their challenge. Cut-and-pasters chip away at intellectual property protection. Expectations of “dialogue” portend message re-direction concerns (admittedly salted on occasion with nuggets of serendipitous good). Publishers long for the days when a part-time ombudsman fielded complaints and letters to the editor were handled space-permitting. A “get it posted,” if not “get it first” mentality has largely replaced “get it right” here. Material and mailing cost savings are eaten up by increased speed and quality control demands.
Still, it’s my contention that true thought-leaders will emerge here, too. They may not be print veterans. But they will have distinguished themselves by clarity of purpose, consistency of output, and reliable output schedules. Oh, yeah: And largely bullet-proof credibility (coupled with a rapid-response system for admitting and correcting the inevitable faux pas or outright screw-up).
In a word, it’s still “branding” as we in marketing have always known it.
It simply remains to be seen who will emerge as the web equivalent of our favorite obsoleting media. But the criteria by which that position will be objectively understood is not in doubt.
Ian Fleming is said to have been most disciplined in showing different aspects of himself to different groups.
You saw only what he, with conscious direction and discipline, wanted you to see. As a result, two strangers could meet, each thinking he “knew” Mr. Fleming — but neither in the end would continue to believe this after they’d compared notes in conversation.
To lesser or greater extents, we all do this, of course. Relaxed at home is different from workplace. Project meetings are different from end-of-the-day unwinds with those very same colleagues on the road at a trade show.
And it wasn’t that many years ago that it actually took a bit of effort to really flesh out every disparate aspect of a Supreme Court nominee’s background.
“Screen names” used on Internet Forums and Chat Rooms provided somewhat of a challenge in connecting the person expressing views on movie interests on what part of the Internet with that same person’s pitch to would-be romantic persuits on another.
But what are you gonna do with Facebook?
You can spend years developing expertise and respect in advanced rocket science if you’d like. Still, that image will forever onward be seasoned with high school connections from decades past to the choice you made for prom date.
It’s all “who you are.”
One of the more challenging areas of restraint for me is when someone rationalizes unbridled access to someone else’s information by arguing, “Well, if you don’t have anything to hide, you shouldn’t have any objection.”
What could it hurt?
Naïvely, and, more importantly — dangerously — this position fails to recognize the difference between data and intelligence. The former is raw, unconsidered information. The latter adds interpretation to that record of the former.
So, to you and me, “667 Main Street, Apartment 16,” is just an address. But coded into a database that runs character strings without spaces, apartment information preceding building, the number “16667” appears in a string. And it’s only a matter of time before some intelligence person sees the three of those sixes together in an apartment-first, street-second layout, and draws “the only possible conclusion,” ie, “mark of the devil!”
Stop and think about some of the best thriller-genre story lines. “Mistaken identity” is really nothing more than otherwise innocent data being taken the wrong way. Happens all the time.
And, as a matter of fact, so much so, I’m guessing, that folks who were here long before me and undoubtedly a lot smarter than I am, felt it important enough to spell out as a prohibition.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
As arguments go, Fourth Amendment trumps rationalization for riffling through my underwear drawer. At least as far as I’m concerned.
How ’bout you?
- the science of measuring time
- the art of making instruments for indicating time
Choose in marriage only a woman who you would choose as a friend if she were a man.
via Internet Archive—
Spoiler alert: While it’s hard to imagine that the torture scene in Casino Royale is much of a surprise to anyone, that’s what we’re talking about here.
Stop reading here if that sort of discussion might spoil anything for you.
For the rest of us— I wanted to let you know that the words, “Don’t Le Chiffre me” have already crossed my lips since seeing the latest James Bond 007 film feature yesterday. It’s a guy thing, calling someone on what is, I admit, usually a mere verbal jibe.
To be “La Chiffred” (pronounced “la-sheef-ed”) connotes the even greater context conveyed through the Casino Royale torture scene. La Chiffre is an opponent who cheats to get the upper hand. He attacks only after his henchmen have secured position on his behalf. Then, with no sense of boundaries, come his low blows, so to speak.
James Bond 007, secure in his masculinity and unyielding to such an unworthy opponent, mocks Le Chiffre.*
This is the the fullest message conveyed when labeling your experience at the hand of an adversary as a “La Chiffre.” For the perpetrator, clearly a moniker of shame.
That’s how I intend that it be heard.
Application:
It can unmask behavior, call it to account, suggesting the question, “You’ve crossed a line, do you really want to go there?” Or, more harshly, “You’ve already passed the point of no return: Stop before your friends see you scratching around in a way that’s obviously more humiliating to you than anyone else.”
Should you see La Chiffred appear in context elsewhere, remember that you read it here, first.
____________
* An oversimplification I reserve the right to address later, elsewhere. But it remains here, intact as written, for the value its more narrow construct in advancement of the local position taken here.