Captians (and Generals and Admirals) of Industry

            It’s funny sometimes how things that at first glance seem unconnected, later come together in a kind of synchronicity.  For instance, yesterday I read an article about a study that suggested large companies whose CEOs are former members of the U.S. military are less likely to commit fraud than companies whose CEOs never served.  Later I watched an episode of Mad Men where an employee of the fictional advertising agency featured in that show faced a moral dilemma. She had to decide if she would commit an immoral act for a client who could potentially be very lucrative for both her and her employer, or forgo the act and potentially lose the client and his money.

            While the article’s study showed far less fraud by ex-military CEOs, it also showed that their companies made less money.  It was supposed that executives with a military background are rule-followers and not innovators, thus they were more about maintaining than expanding, and that when the line between right and wrong turned gray, they stepped back until it was thick and black again.  A feather in the cap for the ex-military CEOs is they perform better during downturns.  It was suggested having been on a battlefield makes one less likely to be too upset over tough times and slow returns.

The article also asked which company you’d rather have your pension invested in; the lower performing ex-military led company or the better performing non-ex-military led one.  Knee jerk reaction to this question would likely place most of us on  the side of the better performing company, but then the question was raised, How much more likely is it that a non-military background CEO would move his jobs offshore.  It doesn’t really matter which type of company I put my retirement in, if my job moved to another country and I had no income to invest.

            In the Mad Men episode the employee elected to commit the immoral act.  The ad agency got the client, and she got a partnership and a 5% share.  There was another character that was sure they would get the client with her having to perform the act, but he was out voted by the other executives.

            But these points might be moot, because ex-military led companies are becoming extinct.  Without the draft fewer and fewer business men and women are serving before they go into the business world.  Are we losing a group of leaders who serve with honor and have a distinct sense of right and wrong, or are there leaders, and future leaders, in the business world who want it to be a business world where ethics is considered with equal weight as the bottom line?

            A group of graduates from the Harvard Business School, class of 2009, have started a movement to have MBAs take a sort of Hippocratic Oath, to act responsibly and ethically.  I’m not sure that would work though.  Doctors are held by that oath because there is far more accountability in the operating room than there is in the boardroom, and profits are profits.

            I don't know a lot of MBAs, but I would imagine since they come from the same human race as the rest of us, that there are good ones and bad ones.  Of the few I know, I realize which are which and in a small sampling, the good ones don't seem to be as wealthy as the bad ones.  If you consider wealth in monetary terms.

Fancy Bred

Where is fancy bred, in the heart or in the head?

 -William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

                    (And Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka)

There she was on the television news, clutching about a dozen copies of John Lennon’s LP Double Fantasy against her chest as if rescuing them from a burning building, smiling and just slightly out of breath.  Just exactly what the reporter asked her I don’t remember, but her answer was something about the LPs being collector’s items.  You see, John Lennon had just been murdered in New York City.  My thought was, can’t they just print more?  They could and they did.  What she probably should have done was buy out the entire store, because if the Double Fantasy LP has become a collector’s item it’s not because of the death of the artist but because of the death of the medium.  My memory sets the price for LPs in 1980 at about five bucks.  An admittedly short Internet search puts the best price of the Double Fantasy LP at just under $19.00 today.  That’s a 280% profit in 30 years.  I wonder if the Facebook stock with garner that much in 2042?

            This week a jersey that Babe Ruth wore sold at auction for 4.4 million dollars.  Unlike LPs from the eighties they can’t make more clothing worn by the Bambino so that jersey is worth more.  But not to everyone.  I like baseball gererally and the San Francisco Giants particularly.  I wouldn’t take a second look at a Babe Ruth jersey but I’d take several at one worn by Willie Mays.  But would I pay 4.4 million bucks for it?  Even if I had it, or if I had 20 times it, I don’t think I would.  I’m not a “collector’s item” guy.  I know people with signed baseballs and I like their collections but more for the esthetics than as an investment.

            Awhile back someone paid a couple million for the first Superman comic.  It went for that price because it was in good condition and very rare, and because someone was willing to pay that price.  Maybe in a few years he’ll sell it for twice or thrice that much.  But it’s already not as rare as it was on auction day.  About two weeks after the unnamed buyer got it, a nicer copy was found.  So if his copy was “very” rare, then the discovery of another, better one could only devalue his.  It’s a gamble like stocks, but unlike stocks you can’t always liquidate collectibles when you want the cash.

            This week a man in San Francisco was arrested for printing fake barcodes for Lego collectibles.  He would go to Target stores and put his labels on expensive Star Wars Lego items, purchase them at maybe 10% of their retail price, and then sell them on Ebay at 100% of their retail price.  What is interesting about this story is that not long, long ago (about three days), and not so far, far away (Mountain View) another man was doing the exact same thing.  The authorities describe the actions of these two men as, “extremely labor-intensive and not particularly lucrative.”  Those same authorities have found no connection between the two other than that they are willing to put a lot of man hours in for little return, and they “targeted” Star Wars Lego items. 

            These items are not rare.  They haven’t been locked away in a barn since the Yankees shared the Polo Grounds with the Giants or hidden in a childhood closet untouched since the Truman administration.  They’re new and there is no reason the Lego Company can’t make more.  Just like printing more John Lennon albums in 1981.  They are collector’s items for no other reason than the Lego company says they are.  They are called “manufactured collectables” in the industry. 

In a scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the bad guy are sitting in a Cairo bar.  The bad guy – I forget his name but I remember that he totally eats a fly by accident in a later scene- pulls out a watch and comments how it’s only worth a couple of dollars today but if it gets buried for a thousand years it becomes priceless.  Maybe these two guys should hold on to their Star Wars items and then sell them in 20 or 30 years instead of right away.  On Amazon I found a Lego Star Wars Ultimate Collector’s Millennium Falcon for $2,700.  Those are serious dollars but I can’t see where how many have actually sold.

            What makes something a collector’s item?  Is it its rarity, the demand, a flaw, perhaps contact with someone or something famous or infamous, whim of fancy, a emotional connection to an childhood memory, marketing brilliance, or an intangible something that just strikes you?

            One man’s trash will always be another man’s treasure.  Whether its old baseball paraphernalia, brand new toys, or comic books that depict the origin of a pop culture icon, some things will be assigned value via the heart and some the head.  In the mean time, I’ll be stuffing my boy’s Lego Star Wars toys back in the boxes as soon as they move out.  Daddy needs a retirement fund.

Stormy Night

 It was a dark and stormy night (Thank you Edward Bulwer-Lytton).  Well, of course it was dark, it was night.  I was at a sleepover at my friend Mark’s house which is where the stormy part comes in.  We were in our sleeping bags in his back yard when it started raining so we moved inside.  Rain in Fresno in July is weird enough but the precipitation wasn’t the strangest thing to happen that night.  It was July 15, 1976.  As Mark and I listened to the Queen album Night at the Opera over and over again until we got too sleepy to go on, about 40 miles north of us 26 children never came home from school.

            The next morning after we got up and grabbed two bowls of Frosted Flakes, we turned on the TV to watch cartoons or maybe some old black and white horror film; sometimes one of the channels would show the same one Friday night and then again Saturday morning.  But when we switched on the tube there were neither cartoons nor The Murders in the Rue Morgue, there was instead the seeds of a real horror story on the screen.  The image we were looking at was a school bus, something we’d seen a thousand times before that morning without giving it a second thought, but this one was cantered over in a grove of reeds or tule grass, I don’t know which, lit from most likely the spot on a Sheriff’s car, and as empty as a ghost town.

            As Mark and I dropped the needle on Bohemian Rhapsody, 26 children and their bus driver had been kidnapped right off a lonely country road outside of Chowchilla.  The image of that abandoned bus, poorly lit and listing to one side, was far more haunting to me than any murder victim from a movie.  The youngest missing child was 5, the oldest 14.  Just like me.

            Parents of those children, and parents everywhere, must have been haunted by what could have happened.  This was just a few years after the Tate/LaBianca murders and after the Zodiac killer in a letter to the Chronicle talked about how “school children make such nice targets.”

            Thankfully those parents anguish was taken away when all 26 children and their bus driver were found alive in a quarry in Livermore.   Their kidnappers had put them in a buried moving van through a hole cut in the top.  After 16 hours the bus driver, Ed Ray, and some of the older boys used a board to pry open the cover that the kidnappers figured was too heavy to move (thank you Archimedes) and escaped.

            Today, May 18, 2012, Ed Ray passed away at 91.  I understand that many of the “children” from that event visited him in recent days to pay respect to a man who rose to the times and likely saved over two dozen lives.  Ed Ray is a name that will be remembered long after today in all of Chowchilla and at least 26 homes.

The kidnappers, none of which has made parole in the last 36 years and probably never will – there have also not been school bus kidnappings - will not have their names noted here as my way of hopefully starting a trend where all future kidnappers, school or workplace shooters, and serial killers will go to their graves, by whatever means they arrive there, unnamed, unknown, unremembered, and without infamy. 

As a side note, I used to work with a guy who grew up in Chowchilla.  One day we were talking about it and I asked him what it was like during that time.  He said the only things he remembers is all the TV vans in town and walking down an alley past a car that Diane Sawyer was changing in and he got to see her bra.

No Shit. Sherlock

35 miles from my front door is London, California, supposedly named one early morning when tule fog had the opacity of latex paint.

            Some time in the mid-eighties I got on a Sherlock Holmes kick.  I couldn’t get enough of the famous Victorian detective.  I read all of Author Conan Doyle’s books and short stories, I rented every VHS movie I could find from The Seven Percent Solution to the tragically underappreciated Young Sherlock Holmes to Disney’s The Great Mouse Detective – but not the Basil Rathbone movies, I don’t care for the buffoonish Nigel Bruce as Watson - , and I read piles of Holmes stories written by other authors such as Isaac Asimov and Stephen King.

            Without looking it up I can tell you his address is 221B Baker Street, that his landlord is Mrs. Hudson, that he keeps tobacco in a slipper nailed to his mantel, that he met Watson at a hospital, that he was killed of by his creator and then brought back, that his stories originally appeared in a magazine named The Strand, that his brother is Mycroft and that Watson served in Afghanistan.

            I know why the dog didn’t bark.

            Some of the original stories I can name, also without looking them up; The Man with the Twisted Lip, The Adventure of the Dancing Men, and of course The Hound of the Baskervilles.  Not every story was a gem for me, just like not every movie satisfied my thirst for Holmes adventures, but more did than didn’t.

            Back in those same eighties, Jeremy Brett played Holmes on an English TV show that was broadcast over here on PBS.  A lot of Sherlockians view his portrayal as sacrilege, but I liked him.  Sure, he was a big ham who chewed scenery like a wood chipper, but the television shows were faithful to the source material; the original stories, and Edward Hardwicke’s Watson had a pair.  Brett my have actually given up his health to the role.

            I drifted away from the foggy streets of London and the…well foggy moors of the English countryside for awhile, and didn’t read or watch much Holmes stuff.  Then a couple of years ago a new television show based on Conan Doyle’s detective, titled simply Sherlock, debuted on PBS.  This time they put Holmes and Watson smack dab in the 21^st century.  Holmes is still a consulting detective but now he uses a Blackberry and has a website.  Watson writes his stories about Holmes on a blog instead of as serials in a magazine, but he still served in Afghanistan.

            Holmes is played by the actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who I’ve only seen elsewhere in Spielberg’s War Horse.  With a name like Cumberbatch he sounds like he should be running the pub in Hobbiton.  He actually has been cast in The Hobbit but is playing not a hobbit but the voice of the dragon Smaug.

            Watson is played by Martin Freeman who I remember most as Authur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  He also starred in the British (original) version of The Office but will probably forever be remember after this December when he stars as the title character in The Hobbit.  I was going to write titular but I giggle when I say it outloud.

            This very Sunday Sherlock is returning to PBS for its second season.  It will be on at 9:00 on Masterpiece Mystery.  The slot formally held by Downton Abby.  I rented the first season on DVD and watched it with my boys.  I’ll be taping this season and watching the same way.  My oldest who is 15 has been banned from computer games for awhile, it’s like crack to him, and was banished to his Kindle Fire.  I know, tragic.  We blocked the web access on that device so he was forced to use it for reading.  All of Author Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories are free to download on Kindle so he is reading the same stories I read nearly 30 years ago.  I think it kind of nice a 15-year-old, surrounded by such a vast electronic buffet can still get some enjoyment reading stories that are over 100 years old.  Next up, H. G. Wells and Jules Verne.

Take a Load Off

I pulled into Nazareth, was feelin' about half past dead;
I just need some place where I can lay my head.
"Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?"
He just grinned and shook my hand, “no” was all he said.

The Weight – The Band

 

            I haven’t really watched the concert film, “The Last Waltz,” aside from the occasional stop for a minute or two while channel surfing.  I’ve heard most parts over the years, such as The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, Up on Cripple Creek, and The Weight.

            I heard the Talking Heads concert film, “Stop Making Sense” on a cassette years before I saw it.  In my very humble opinion, with admittedly a very small sampling, I think those are the two best concert films to have been made. Or maybe I’ve determined that the best way to watch a concert film is to not watch it.

            But between the two I’m going to stick with The Last Waltz because last Thursday Levon Helm; drummer, singer, and songwriter for The Band, passed away at the age of 71.  The Band music has always sounded a little worn around the edges to me.  Not polished with hours of studio remixing or adding Walls of Sound, but comfortable from the get go, and as American as a rusting Route 66 sign.  Although the only American in the band was Helm.

            Some songs make me stop and up the volume no matter when or where I hear them; Neil Young’s Helpless – which is featured on The Last Waltz – Pure Prairie League’s Amie, the Allman Brother’s Melissa, and The Weight from The Band.

            Years ago, when American Idol was mowing them down, there were a handful of copycat shows that came out.  On one a teenage boy sat down at a piano and simply played and sang The Weight.  When the song was over the audience jumped to their feet and the other contestants followed with a standing ovation of their own.  The British judge –why is there always a British judge? - thought it was excellent, the record exec judge said the kid was “on his way” and the female flavor-of-the-month-pop-singer judge asked, “Did you write that?”

            But writing is what that song was.  Look at the economy of words from the passage quoted above, "Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?
He just grinned and shook my hand, ‘no’ was all he said.”  Many writers might have said something about meeting a man, or even describing that man before the “Hey mister” quote.  Elmore Leonard, whose 10 rules for writing include “Avoid detailed descriptions of characters,” would have been proud.

            Levon Helm didn’t write The Weight, but he sang it, along with most of The Band’s other songs, while playing the drums.  Today’s pop divas cheerfully admit lip-syncing their hits because they can’t be expected to do all that dancing and still sing.  Have you ever seen a fat drummer?  So thanks Levon, and take a load off.

King Missile, Led Zeppelin, and The Salvation Army

“Then, as I walked down Second Avenue towards St. Mark's Place, where all those people sell used books and other junk on the street, I saw my penis lying on a blanket next to a broken toaster oven.  Some guy was selling it.”

                                                       Detachable Penis – King Missile

            Today we had a garage sale.  Our garage, while quite large, is proving inefficient when it comes to holding all our stuff.  Basically we have more stuff than garage, so we decided that part of our downsizing would include getting rid of things we don’t really need, don’t really use, and more often than I’d like to admit, didn’t really know we still had.      

The day for me started at 5:00 when I got up, pulled all this fine merchandise out into the driveway, and hoped people would find some of it worth giving us a couple of bucks for.  I remember when a good friend’s father had a yard sale in the classified, (pre craigslist you see) and people were banging on his front gate at 6:00, demanding to be let into his yard.  I wanted to be ready.

At six our first customers showed up.  They were the construction guys who were pouring a new patio for the guy across the street.  They bought a couple of things then started up the very large and very loud contraptions that would pump the wet concrete from the curb to wherever the patio was to be.  That lasted for about 2 hours and was like running a boutique in the engine room of the Titanic.

The sale went well.  While we didn’t make enough to retire on, we did make enough to be worth driving over to the bank to deposit and I actually sold a metal bed frame that I’m sure has moved with us at least three times.  More importantly, our garage only looks half full now.  Or half empty depending on your disposition and to many of my friends whether or not their meds are working.

As I was sitting there, waiting for the next customer to show up and contemplating having an “every thing is a dollar for the next 30 minutes” sale, I wondered if yard sales are strictly a suburban phenomenon or do urbanites occasionally throw handfuls of their junk out front and ask for money for it.  Then I remembered a song (quoted above) from years ago that mentioned people doing that exact thing on a steet on the way to St. Mark’s Place which is in Manhattan.  If you can't believe what a guy singing about his penis puts in a song, what can you believe?

            St. Mark’s Place also hosts a building that served as the cover of Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti album which in turn could have served as a description of what occupied my driveway this morning.  That graffiti has been cleaned up and all that wasn't sold went to the good people of the Salvation Army, which also was a short-lived band in the early eighties.

The Lost World

"I turned it over, and gave an exclamation of surprise. There was a full-page picture of the most extraordinary creature that I had ever seen."
Authur Conan Doyle - The Lost World

Spoiler alert!

The Tooth Fairy is dead, gone from the imaginings of both of my sons forever. With her loss, can Santa and the Easter Bunny’s last full measure be far behind? The most recent dislodged tooth from my youngest boy was still on his nightstand the following morning; cold and forgotten, a dried spot of blood on its roots. His mother and father, possessed by job-hunting, bill-paying, and the stress of moving for the seventh time since their marriage, had done something they had managed not to do before. While the boy drifted off with the excitement of knowing that a magical being would enter his room while he was asleep and trade a dollar for that tooth, his parents just drifted off.

The next morning it was the first thing out of his mouth since the tooth, “The Tooth Fairy forgot me.” The first thing out of dad’s mouth was, “Oops.”

We used to take a dollar and fold it into an origami square (Something else the Internet is good for). Somehow that seemed more magic than just leaving a bill there. But we had forgotten and that was simply that. Later I took a dollar to him in his room and when he asked, “There is no tooth fairy, is there?” I told him yes. He took the dollar, the final one, and I took the tooth. The king is dead there will be no more kings.

Every person has to face losing innocence and every parent has to face their child losing innocence. It’s not the end of the world for either of them, just the end of a world. It’s the end of world without the stresses and pressure of relationships, jobs, money, health, or death. It’s a world where you’re always taken care of, where fairies and jolly old elves are real and there are no consequences, only rewards. And those rewards often come in the form of chocolate.

The loss of anything is always painful, but the loss of an entire world can be impossible to get over. We are tempted to long for that world. Sometimes it’s where we leapt from bed on cold winter mornings and made a made dash to the living room to check under the tree, or a mad dash to the yard to hunt for colored eggs or chocolate leporids, or just rolled over and checked our nightstand. Sometimes it’s where we never had to lock our doors or we trusted strangers. The former world was imaginary and probably, so was the latter.

This longing probably contributed to Sherlock Holmes creator, Sir Author Conan Doyle, being taken in by a fairy discovery hoax, pictured above.

This Sunday will be the first Easter for my youngest since the revelation that the Tooth Fairy was his mom and dad. We don’t plan on a visit from the Easter Bunny. I hope he isn't planning on one either. But to sooth the way, there will be chocolate.