The Joy of Cooking... Squirrel?

Squirrel!

The Joy of Cooking also recommends catching the possum alive, and feeding it milk and cereals for ten days before dispatching it and serving.

Awesome! Can't wait to try it someday!

Chinese traffic accidents.

Not particularly graphic - but funny enough that you'll laugh (then feel guilty for laughing).

Uh... Chevrolet? What?

According to the New York Times, some morons who work at General Motors decided that employees should refrain from using the word "Chevy" when communicating about their products.

Imagine if BMW insisted that its employees could only say Bayerische Motoren Werke!

Anyway - see the memo below:

"Chevrolet Team,

We wanted to write you a quick note requesting your support of our Chevrolet Brand. When you look at the most recognized brands throughout the world, such as Coke or Apple for instance, one of the things they all focus on is the consistency of their branding. Why is this consistency so important? The more consistent a brand becomes, the more prominent and recognizable it is with the consumer. This is a big opportunity for us moving forward.

As you know, we are investing substantially to improve the consistency of our retail facilities through the EBE process. Aside from the facilities aspect of our branding, there are many other ways in which we can demonstrate this consistency. One way to achieve this is with the use of Chevrolet vs. Chevy. We’d ask that whether you’re talking to a dealer, reviewing dealer advertising or speaking with friends and family, that you communicate our brand as Chevrolet moving forward.

We have a proud heritage behind us and a fantastic future ahead of us... speaking to the success of this brand in one consistent manner will ensure Chevrolet becomes even more prominent and recognizable than it already is.

Thank you for your support of this effort!

Alan and Jim

P.S. We put a plastic “Chevy” can down the hall that will accept a quarter every time someone uses “Chevy” rather than Chevrolet! We’ll use the money for a team building activity."

Who are Alan and Jim? Alan is the Vice President for Chevy's Sales and Service, and Jim is Chevy's Vice President for Marketing.

Reading through the memo, it appears that Alan and Jim do not realize that "Coke" is not the proper brand name for Coca-Cola. It also appears that Alan and Jim believe that GM's marketing woes had something to do with brand ambiguity.

What is brand ambiguity? Generally it is a potential buyer's inability to discriminate between alternative brands.

Hm. So what was Don McLean singing about when he wrote "drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry" ?!

Are these two people complete imbeciles? Really? Chevy has a brand recognition problem? Who seriously thinks that Chevrolet, a French sounding name of Swiss origin, sounds better for a blue collar car company?

As a taxpayer, I'm not optimistic that the US federal government is going to get its money's worth from the GM IPO. Especially with these morons wasting time on these senseless efforts, instead of you know... drawing up <sarcasm> awesome marketing </sarcasm> efforts for the Chevrolet Volt.

Pontiac: How to beat the problem of the Beetle and the Bug!

General Motor's employee motivational video from another era. NPR noted in their special on the NUMMI facility (when it was a GM-UAW "partnership"), union contract employees practically had to commit fraud to get fired. As a result, the employees drank on the job, had sex on the job, sabotaged vehicles to "get back" at management, and obviously aided the collapse of the American automotive industry.

Anyway - Pontiac tried to get their employees to show up at work, and uh do their jobs - by appealing to their nationalist sentiments. Obviously it did not work.

What is Kim Jong Il's 'pran'?

In late March, the Cheonan (천안), a South Korean corvette mysteriously broke in half and sank off in the Yellow Sea. The sinking claimed the lives of 46 sailors. North Korea promptly denied any role in the sinking.

This week investigators from Australia, South Korea, Sweden, United States, and the United Kingdom concluded that the corvette, which broke in half, was likely sunk by a torpedo of North Korean origin.

North Korea has already called the results of the investigation a fabrication, and threatened to resume full hostilities in the Korean peninsular if South Korea proceeds with any sanctions.

What is the Dear Intelligent Great Leader, General Secretary, Supreme Commander Kim Jong Il's pran?

Is Kim Jong Il a closet General Motors, Ford, Honda, Toyota fan? And he seeks to ruin Hyundai and Kia's corporate headquarters?

Is the Dear Leader upset that Samsung developed the world's biggest 82-inch TFT-LCD screen? Making his Sony 50-inch cathode ray tube projection television obsolete?


What is this portly midget up to?

What's wrong with this picture?

Original Capacity: 74.88 Wh
Current Capacity: 6.76 Wh

As you can see, my Lenovo Thinkpad X61's 8-cell battery, after 727 cycles, now only has 9% of its original full charge capacity. I used to be able to get a decent seven, sometimes even eight hours of use out of the battery, now? I'll be lucky if it lasts 30 minutes.

The laptop has a relatively smart power manager software that seeks to delay the inevitable deterioration of lithium ion batteries by not charging it to actually 100% of 74.88 Wh and also avoiding unnecessary recharging for situations when you unplug and replug the laptop within a few minutes when relocating from one office to another.

But after only two years of intense law school use and abuse - this laptop will need a new battery for it to become mobile again.

Who still wants to buy a Nissan Leaf?

Good Bye NUMMI.

Tomorrow is April 1. Unfortunately it won't be a joke when the last Toyota Corolla will come off the production line at NUMMI. New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI) is an automobile manufacturing facility in Fremont, California. NUMMI is perhaps most famous for being Toyota's first North American production facility, but it was originally a General Motors production plant. GM had to shut the plant down in the 1980s due to a variety of factors, including low productivity, poor quality, and generally FUBAR relations between GM and the UAW.

This American Life made a podcast on this, and it is fairly good.

In the mid-1980s, Toyota was looking to setup shop in the United States. The Japanese car manufacturer had realized that GM, with its heavy political base, was capable of influencing protectionist policies in the US Congress. However, Toyota had never dealt with American laborers, and had no experience with setting up shop in North America, so they entered into a joint venture with GM, reopening the factory and implementing Toyota's lean manufacturing.

The joint venture was an instant success. For nearly two decades, NUMMI built the the most reliable vehicles sold under a GM badge, such as the Geo/Chevrolet Prizm or Pontiac Vibe.

NUMMI was proof that there was nothing fundamentally wrong or uncompetitive about the American worker - it demonstrated that poor productivity and consistency was the result of a bad structure and lousy labor relations.

Unfortunately, with the demise and bankruptcy of GM, the joint venture ended. Toyota, which has excess production capacity in North America, decided to close the plant. Good Bye NUMMI.