Right now, we’ve got two great actors who’ve got the chops to pull it off. Mike Judge, you’ve got to make this happen!
I can’t think of a better way to say “I feel your pain” to a product manager than by giving them this shirt, which provides a pretty apt description of the product manager experience:
Being a product manager is like riding a bike
Except the bike is on fire
And you’re on fire
And everything is on fire
And you’re in hell
You keep on being your cute freaky self, kitty.
Categories
An even better cookbook title
After seeing yesterday’s “Dump Cakes” photo, Alexandra Macqueen sent me this photo of a cookbook with an even more memorable name:
I saw this book while out and about last weekend. “Dump Cakes” would be a terrible nickname for your sweetheart, but it might be a good name for a band. And “Just dump and bake!” sounds like a stoner’s battle cry.
Comic by Brett Lamb for Torontoist. Click to see the source.
If you live in Toronto and wore a uniform to school, chances are that you’re part of Toronto Life’s target demographic. It’s the Toronto version of that sort of city magazine for people in six-figure-income households who like reading about First World Problems as seen from the corner table at Daisho. I find it a generally interesting read, but every now and again, its Upper Canada/Trinity College/Crazy Go Nuts University/Western-bred prejudices rear their ugly head, as it recently did in an article on the new blitz on illegally parked cars during rush hours.
As a long-time resident of Toronto, and having travelled through it for decades on foot, bike, transit, and in my car, I’m pleased to see that the city is finally enforcing these laws. Many of the biggest offenders, if you look at the “See who got towed today!” photos on the city’s @TrafficServices Twitter feed, are service or delivery trucks. The Toronto Sun’s Joe Warmington has written that while the blitz will help smooth Toronto’s serious traffic problem, the people paying the price are the small businesses whose lifeblood is these service trucks.
Philip Preville, the Toronto Life article author, counters with this Mitt Romney-esque paragraph:
If those businesses want to stay downtown, they will have to adjust. As I parsed the logos of the offenders last week, one infuriating question rose to the surface: What are any of these trucks doing anywhere near downtown during rush hour? The services they offer are all forms of provisioning or disposal. It’s scut work, the back-room support that allows the more important, economic-engine-of-the-nation work to proceed efficiently. In many cases there’s no good reason any of it should be done during daylight hours, period.
“How dare these people, who would be cleaning the king’s chamberpots in a more civilized age, do their work at a time that inconveniences us economic engines (which presumably includes smug arts majors doing magazine writing for the country club set)? Can’t we simply time-shift them out of our way? We’re the makers and they’re the takers, after all!”
There’s no attempt in the article to find a win-win solution — the only proposed one is “kick the 47 percenters to the night shift.” What. A. Dick.
The best response to this I’ve seen comes from Edgar Dennehy, a friend of my friend Jess Wood and it can be summarized as this: If it’s the work that makes the other work possible, how the fuck is it not equally important? As for there being “no good reason any of it should be done during daylight hours, period”, how about health, safety, and social mobility? When you work nights only, you’re ghettoized because you can’t engage the world and its “economic engines” in the same way.
Steven Hilton reminded me that this scene from Fight Club exists. I’m posting it to remind Toronto Life and Philip Preville:
Thanks to Jess Wood for the find!
I’m in awe of this person’s work.