AdamSmith

My most valuable business asset is my customer and prospect list. I entrust that to salesforce.com with religious conviction. F500 companies now use salesforce.com, and if the company screws up one time, its credibility and future are shot. They invest countless $$$ in multiply redundant data centers, secure database partitioning, etc., etc., etc. How could I ever believe that my laptop and memory sticks and local backup devices hold any candle to the industrial-strength infrastructure that salesforce has built?

I must confess I don't understand one word of this. Is there a thought in particular that you're trying to articulate?

There we go! ...now if we can add kev to the mix! You know, you and marc have been telling me this for 10 years. Don't know where my mind has been all that time.

Score one for your side! But of course the reason I park my smiling idiot face in the front row is to increase my chances of selling them some consulting services. That is why I bothered to drag my ass out here, after all. So far, looking good. I think you would have totally gotten him and his sensibility. Have you read any of his books or articles?

For example, here is his description of California's Madonna Inn: http://lazenby.tumblr.com/post/204409635/travels-in-hyperreality-umberto-eco ...I would give several vital organs to be able to write (and think!) like that.

P.S. For no reason except to escape the mind-numbingly boring presentation that I am right now sitting through at this software conference -- as the price of their free breakfast! God, the cruelty -- my mind is wandering back to Eco's incredible lectures on semiotics. He would speak for 90 minutes without stopping, except to chain-smoke there at the front of the classroom (this was 1980) but he would say next to nothing about the main theoretical points. Instead he would use all the time by just casually uttering a one-line throwaway that summarized a whole big area of theory, and then would spend the rest of the classroom time illustrating it with endless colorful real-world examples. So we would have to go back to our dorm rooms from these bewitchingly colorful but totally incomprehensible lectures, and assiduously plow our way through whatever chapter of his book Theory of Semiotics he had been talking about, and thus finally see what the fuck he meant by going on and on about the "wind rose" (medieval term for the face of a compass; thus The Name of the Rose which it later turned out that he was writing that semester) or whatever other example he was fixated on that day. Sorry, what was my point? As he would say several times each class!

You know I love your optimism but I lose my lunch over the ungroundedness of your idealisms. How on earth would you propose to enact such training? I will omit the interminable lecture (read instead any paragraph selected at random from the marvelous effluvia of Umberto Eco). But you see the point.

Agree absolutely. Reid is getting taller & sturdier IMO (can the snickering ). He has clearly after long suffering finally had it up to the eyeballs, and now that the last election showed that the electorate is more or less in the same mood, looks like he has at last decided to damn the torpedoes and full steam ahead. Thank goodness. McConnell by contrast is suddenly looking surprisingly hapless and rudderless. The power struggles will be fascinating to watch. Now if only the House Democrats can pull themselves together and figure out how to capitalize on Boehner's confusion over how to marshal and organize his own troops. I think a lot of Pelosi but I wonder if she will find a way to wring some value out of the current mess.

I have clearly spent my entire life so far in the wrong hemisphere. Soon as I manage to reassemble myself, I will materialize there beside you. Dividing my time between wherever you, firecat, and Andre should happen to be at whatever moment.

I would have to leave the house. Just going into the next room wouldn't shut off the hideous drone. I can hardly stand to be reminded it exists even today. Ai yi yi, as Stevens somewhere said.

Let it come. I like Reid's sense of what might be possible in the current climate.

When one has abandoned a belief in religion, Andre is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption. -- Wallace Stevens (except he said 'poetry' instead of 'Andre'. His loss!)

Wikipedia has it different. It says that producer Selznick fired original director George Cukor, but then Leigh as well as Olivia de Havilland (your role to perfection!) both strongly protested to Selznick in FAVOR of Cukor. But to no avail.

My ... sweet ... Victoria ... I am now ... ensconced in the curiously named 'THE Hotel at Mandalay Bay' ... and assiduously attending ... this software ... user ... conference ... from whose psithic teats I nonetheless still hold hope of coercing ... some, few, ill-begotten commercial gains! ... I ... will report all ... upon tonight's return from ... the highly anticipated ... Fun Hog Ranch! ( ... Whereto one may even lure, just possibly, one or two of one's straight -- but wavering! -- friends.)

I bet: Arm tat is a rub-on, wash-off. Skin tone is random artifact of ambient indoor lighting & phone cam. ... I want to believe in those pecs! & just-right vascularity.

OK, another add-on question (last night's deadline notwithstanding ): In the Oz footage shot by the above-mentioned original director -- all scrapped once Fleming was brought in to replace him -- Judy Garland had to wear a WHAT, which Fleming promptly got rid of and which nowhere appears in the film as released?

His addiction to Lifetime was one of myriad reasons I had to ditch the ex.

There is that.

Well, I do agree opium should be the religion of the masses! ...or hash, at least

This morning I learned that one should definitely not attend a fundamentalist church service with any vestige of mood-altering substance still in one's system. When I was younger and more resilient in several respects it would have been the other way around.

LOL Perfect! ...a true analytic philosopher's answer

I'm next in line behind you! If he can look that good in a candid phone shot... I mean, think for ludicrous comparison of the amount of supercomputer Photoshopping it takes to churn out a publishable pic of Madonna these days.

I'm grateful for three opportunities afforded by a trip upcoming later today to Vegas for a software conference: 1. To flog my consulting services 2. To reconnect with several friends in the same line of business 3. To hang after hours at the Fun Hog Ranch http://funhogranchlv.com/

It was Buddy Ebsen. Also, didn't Margaret Hamilton likewise have reactions to her green makeup, though not as severe as Ebsen to his silver skinpaint? For #6, was it Gone with the Wind, ironically ALSO directed by Oz drector Victor Fleming? OK, my own addition to lurker's delightful questions: Who was the original Oz director whom Fleming was brought on midstream to replace?

Been there. Best of luck. Is there a neighbor's Internet signal you can mooch off of? Don't overlook whatever community services there are. In NYC food charities for example abounded.