Let me tell you about Bob Beamon and his incredibly long jump in the 1968 Olympics. Do record setters’ lives change when they run out of things to strive for?
Tomorrow is my last day at Variety. Today, I was going to write about sensing the melatonin-draining properties of Variety and the innate self-preservation instinct my scalp must have. Instead, as I was saying final, final keepsies goodbyes at Variety, something special happened.
Last night, I went to a firing party for Sandra Loh, a radio personality at KCRW in Los Angeles who was dismissed because she accidently let the word “fuck” get on the air. The party was put on by the L.A. Press Club, and was fun and festival and fabulous at the Hotel Figueroa. I met more than the usual amount of interesting people.
“I’m not bitter about what happened to me as a child, and my mother was instrumental in keeping me from being so. ... She taught me to be grateful for my life regardless of what that entailed, and that’s directly related to the image of Christ on the cross and the example of sacrifice that he gave us. What she taught me is that the deliverance God offers you from pain is not no pain—it’s that the pain is actually a gift. What’s the option? God doesn’t really give you another choice.”
After over a decade of user testing, it is clear that the way we search the web is similar to the way we would search our home for valuables as it was burning to the ground. Frantically.
“We must shift the focus of companies back to the customer and away from shareholder value ... The shift necessitates a fundamental change in our prevailing theory of the firm… The current theory holds that the singular goal of the corporation should be shareholder value maximization. Instead, companies should place customers at the center of the firm and focus on delighting them, while earning an acceptable return for shareholders.”
You can scroll right easily by holding down the SHIFT key and using your scroll wheel. (Firefox users trying this will end up jumping to old Web pages until a) Firefox releases a fix, b) they change their settings like so.)