Engrish of the Month

I forgot I took this picture on the last trip. It's almost like a poem:

A good drink makes you refresh. We carefully

did the best selection.

They are outstanding among others

We strongly suggest you to taste once

Its gorgeousness and pleasantness get you dreamy world

An Alarm Without a Snooze

The first thing that came to my conciousness was that someone was shaking the bed. Knowing that I was alone I came a little more awake and found that the whole room was shaking. "Oh, just an earthquake, "

A moderate earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.7 jolted central Japan on Tuesday, the Japan Meteorological Agency said. The quake, at 3:18 a.m. (1818 GMT), was also felt in Tokyo.

Couldn't it have waited just a couple more hours? Now I'm awake.

I'm Cool For Five Months

I was going to brag today that I turned in my RAZR today for a new Blackjack, which is WAY cool:



This finally puts me on mobile email, plus I will now have cellphone coverage in Korea.


Of course this coolness is majorly trumped by the new iPhone.


The only good part is that the iPhone won't ship until June, giving me a window of coolness before I am put to shame.

Breaking The Rules To Appease Illegal Immigrants

So let me get this straight.

• Toys R Us runs a contest clearly stating contestants, expectant mothers, must be women (you never know these days) and "legal residents of the 50 United States or Washington D.C."
• Contest winner was NOT a legal resident of the 50 States or D.C.
• So Toys R Us gives prize to someone else
• Ethnic Chinese groups whine about "discrimination"
• Toys R Us caves and gives prize to illegal immigrant

Companies and organizations keep falling over backwards to reward people who break the law to get here. Is there any wonder that we have an illegal immigrant problem?

I was thinking that what we really need is a change of "any person born here is automatically a citizen" to discourage some of this illegal immigration. However, with various states offering free education, special college tuition rates, or even planning to offer free health care to illegal aliens, the difference between being a citizen and being an illegal immigrant is becoming smaller and smaller every day..

Home Depot: When CEO Pay Is Not Okay

I really like the fact my own CEO has a good pay package. Because his good pay package has translated into good pay packages for everyone at the company; the rising tide lifting all ships theory working in practice. In addition, where my company is today is largely because of the CEO. He didn't start the company, but he turned it from an also-ran into a cash generating machine. And he should be recognized what he did for both shareholders and employees.

But my situation is something of an anomaly since my company has only a couple hundred people, nearly all whom have college degrees, and a huge percentage with PhDs (including the CEO himself). For attracting and retaining this kind of talent the same sort of package that motivates the CEO has to motivate everyone else.

The same can't be said of the recently departed CEO of Home Depot. In a company where tens of thousands work for an hourly wage, he was taking home pay packages totaling in the hundreds of millions of dollars ("$123.7 million in compensation excluding certain stock option grants"). That might be okay for someone who started what became a large company like Jobs or Gates and created thousands of new jobs and generated billions of dollars of new wealth. But we're talking about a professional manager recruited from GE in 2000 when the stock was about 40 and who saw it go up no more than 10 points during his tenure. In fact, from 2002 to today the stock has been below or equal to where it was when he started (source: the new toy-size WSJ). And for that he was granted a guaranteed $3 million dollar annual cash bonus?

To add insult to injury, his exit package is ridiculous: $210 million dollars. That is ten times Carly's exit package, which I thought was insane when it was announced.

It's people like this who give capitalism and business a bad name, and the reason it angers me so much. They become poster children for anti-business crusades and bad legislation that does nothing to reign in excesses.

Maybe They Should Rename It US Wall Street Today

Back in my 20s there was a knock on my apartment door. Upon opening it I found two very attractive women dressed it what could best be described as "revealing" clothing. As I stood there blinking at two sets of cleavage, wondering what good fortune brought these two women to my door at the same time, one of them blurted out "You want to subscribe to the Houston Chronicle?".

"Ah ha," I thought to myself, "this was a clever marketing ploy." Now wanting to get rid of them as soon as possible, I duly informed them that I subscribed to the Wall Street Journal and wasn't interested in the "Comical".

"But, but," one of them replied in a deep Texas drawl, "that paper doesn't even have PICTURES!"

I shut the door in their faces - and on their other physical features. I assumed they would have no difficulty getting other men in the complex to subscribe.

The Wall Street Journal did add pictures a few years later, taking away that sales tactic, and more recently came out with the "Weekend Journal". I have generally liked these changes and thought they added to the paper.

Today, however, they came one step closer to the Comical and other mainstream papers, by coming out with a new physical format and editorial changes. The worst part is the new format - the dreaded 48" broadsheet - that reduced the number of columns from six to five, making it look like a toy newspaper:

The other changes are in content. They promise more "analysis" of the news

A cornerstone of the new Journal will be an increased focus on unique, differentiated content, with 80% of the news content focusing on "what the news means" not just "what happened."

Great. So they are becoming more like a blog? I dunno, I read blogs and newspapers for different reasons. I don't WANT Instapundit to be like the WSJ or the WSJ to become more like a blog. They each give me a different kind of information, and I like it that way.

So I will have to think long and hard about whether I re-subscribe. Of course if I don't, I might get the harassing mail campaign like I did the last time I let my subscription expire.

Update: A different perspective from Business Pundit.

Starbucks' Food Already Sucks

I found this news release interesting on a couple of fronts: Starbucks cutting transfats from food.

First, their food already sucks. Their muffins are tasteless, their cakes are crumbly, and their danishes are stale. I stopped eating their fare a long time ago. Taking out the transfat will only make their bad food worse.

But this sort of thing is ridiculous for another reason: the fat that is already in many of their drinks (grande latte has 14 grams) and the calories of their blended drinks (up to 420 calories - the same as a McDonalds Quarter Pounder). Not to mention the heavy cream that people seem to add to their coffee by the pint. If Starbucks really wanted to help American health, they do more than cutting "evil" transfats.

In the end, this whole ban bandwagon is just ridiculous. It is not going to make Americans healthier - it will only make consumers feel better that they stuffing their face with "good" fat. And that is what companies like Starbucks really want.