Walt Gleeson's Ovular Analysis for the Day

Canfield, Proctor, Nightingale, Zagler, Hill, Robbins, Tracy, Aaron... step aside please..there's a new success guru in town! Walt Gleeson is a highly successful, internationally renowned author of motivational books and CDs and other products. With a career spanning over half a decade, he has enthralled readers all over the world, from Alaska to Florida and from Hawaii to Rhode Island, with such titles as You Can Do It!, You Can Do It! Too, Literally Make Your House Work For You and Become a Billionaire Whilst On The Toilet, 

Hi, this is Walt...you know, and old British commercial advised people to 'go to work on an egg', a very clever play on words worthy of Shakespeare, Joyce or even Richard Stillgoe, and it had me thinking about eggs...stay with this for a minute because it's brilliant, or so my PA told me when I was thinking it up last night in the hotel bar. After all, we all eat eggs, don't we? There's noone in the world who doesn't- you'd die if you didn't eat eggs.

Think of all the ways you can cook an egg; you can boil it, fry it, poach it, scramble it; you can put it into an omeletter or even bake it. but has it ever occured to you that they way you cook an egg shows exactly what type of person you are, wholly accurately and reliably with no hyperbole, speculation or cod science thrown in? No, me neither.

For example, people who favour boiled eggs are usually dependable, cautious sturdy types but maybe a little unimaginative, while those who like fried eggs tend to be flashier, more of a risk taker. If you like poached eggs that definitely means you are turgid and unglamorous, rather than trying to be a bit healthier. Those who like to scramble their eggs are a bit too reckless, and making an omelette is just too complicated and involved. There is a more sophisticated variant, namely baked eggs. This is really for the international club sandwich set. Finally, you can also eat eggs raw, although this is only for real plebs.

If I were to analyse myself, I'd say I'd have to be whatever the best one is, probably a combination of fried, baked with a bit of boiled thrown in on the side. I suggest you do the same, and if it's not exactly the same as mine, I suggest you change your habits and follow my directive, or you're going to die, freezing in poverty in the dark.

Have a great day! - Walt

In My Day We Only Had Colour TV

Something which I'd noticed recently but thought was only peculiar to the Puumaja was that I virtually never watch TV any more. Admittedly, notwithstanding the improvement in language skills that watching TV here could bring, when most of the stations are not in your mother tongue it can sometimes induce you to seek other forms of entertainment; but I don't think that's the reason.
Clay Shirky (we're not going to take the mick out of people's names here at the PMC any more, he is american after all) a writer and consultant whose been using the internet since it began (that's welll before you or I) did this excellent little presentation some years ago where he attempts to shed light on the role of TV (filling what he calls the 'cognitive surplus') and how that has changed particularly since the rise of the net. Glad to know I'm not alone. Still, I'd never be a wikipedia contributor..

Beckham's Out...

...not really news nor particularly earth shaking (it was news to me that David Beckham was in the offing for the squad in the World Cup in South Africa in June)  but there's going to be no repeat of the World Cup in 2002 when, if memory serves as it  (which, despite watching games either as dawn was cracking or during the office lunchbreak accompanied by several rounds of stella,I think it does) the whole coutry was behing Beckham's partial recovery ready to go out on penalties in South Korea/Japan and added the word 'metatarsal' to its collective vocabulary. Not sure the news justifies what even by Puumaja Crew standards is an unnecessarily long sentence, either.

Thought for the Day No. 9 - With the Rabbi Anders Weiss

..religious leader, psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste..

"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning".
Henry Ford.

"My people perish for lack of knowledge."
The Book of the Prophet Hosea, 4:6

Fun Wordplay

This is an intriguing little web app. It's called wordoid and was developed by one Oleg Podolsky. Not being a technophile, I can only do my best to explain it as being a naming app, best used if you want to devise a URL which stands out a bit. Apparently it's difficult to come up with a good domain name (what sort of a name is 'the Puumaja Crew' after all?!?) which can really make or break a start up, but this app can help you. You type in a word, and it comes up with a load of permutations using that word in 'natural', 'almost natural' and 'hardly natural' modes. You can also limit the number of letters in the name (obviously domain names don't want to be too long; wordoid won't let you go beyond 15 or below 5) and devise names in a few languages other than English (sadly Estonian isn't included here!).

For example, when we entered "Kentigern", after our beloved BFK in the natural sounding mode, with a limit of 12 letters, we got names like "kentigernoon", "kentigerness" and "kentigerned", we're sure he loves that. Do the same in hardly natural yields such shibboleths as "kentigernal" and "crokentigern". Doing the same but in German threw up "sickentigern", which is what BFK will be if Lotus don't recreate former glories in the new F1 season, and "kentigernauf"..  etc. Try it!

How to Pronouce Seth's Name Finally Revealed

Since I started posting regurgitations of my big brother Seth Godin's blog here at the P'maja Crew we've been agonizing, or at least thinking, about the correct pronunciation of his name. Well, here he is now to clear everything up. Those émigrés..tchah.
 
And a worthwhile quote 'Just because it's important to YOU that I see your press release [or blog!] doesn't mean it's important to me. And even though it costs you nothing to send to me, doesn't mean you have the right to do so". Hear, hear, as they say in the House of Lords.

BFK's Dream

Benedict Francis-Kentigern, or BFK as we know him, is an affable motoring journalist of the old school. Dropping out of some big public school somewhere in England to pursue his passion pretending to race cars, he's acquired such an array of tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, arran sweaters and empty travel sweet tins, that you can't help but ignore him. Look forward to BFK's "weekly" reports on motoring, cars, and what drives the people that drive them, in his section to be found somewhere on the site.

Today BFK asked us to post this grainy and jerky picture he managed to take, somewhere in Tallinn,  of one of his fave machines of the moment, an Aston Martin DBS! Nevertheless it's the first pic we've ever posted here! So here it is...

Providence Doesn't Want Futile Things Glorified..

..good old you tube. Managed to find an old favourite, the Name of the Rose made over 20 years ago with Sean Connery, whose career I think was at a bit of a nadir at the time (and seeing him playing a celibate monk makes for worthwhile viewing) and a very young Christian Slater.

Needless to say it didn't make a splash in the States, but its international cast, including a German, a Latvian, even Feodor Chaliapin Junior (not to be confused with Feodor Chaliapin Senior) as the venerable Jorge, its extremely evocative music, climactic finish and the fact that it's not nearly so subtly meaning-riddled as the book, makes it something in a category by itself. Seem to remember as an undergraduate studying medieval Europe as part of my History BA that I was excited to find that two of the characters, Ubertino de Casale and the inquisitor, Bernardo Gui, were actually real people.

Forget the Oscars if this didn't win one. You foolish boy Adso, try thinking with your head and not your heart..