In a much-ballyhooed example of favoritism, the White House originally installed a clown named Jim O’Beirne at the relevant evaluation desk in the Department of Defense. O’Beirne proved to be a classic Bush villain, a moron’s moron who judged applicants not on their Arabic skills or their relevant expertise but on their Republican bona fides; he sent a twenty-four-year-old who had never worked in finance to manage the reopening of the Iraqi stock exchange, and appointed a recent graduate of an evangelical university for home-schooled kids who had no accounting experience to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget. James K. Haveman, who had served as Michigan’s community-health director under a GOP governor, was put in charge of rehabilitating Iraq’s health-care system and decided that what this war-ravaged, malnourished, sanitation-deficient country most urgently needed was … an anti-smoking campaign.
More from the ever-growing annals of corporate stupidity:
Johnson & Johnson (founded 1886) sues the Red Cross (founded 1881) for appropriating their red cross trademark.
David Thomson on Antonioni in The Guardian:
Being with someone but not looking at them was nearly invented by Antonioni, and on film it is like a mortal sin.
Jeffrey Zeldman on the iPhone:
Computers are supposed to make our lives easier, but everyone knows they do the opposite, and I was so deep into my rut I thought of it as a groove.
(via Gruber)
Jon Lusk on Fat Freddys Drop, just played at Glastonbury (from The Guardian):
The band’s laidback, island-time ambience is unmistakeably a product of its environment, but that seems only to have enhanced their appeal to British listeners. Though Mu’s beachfront home has just been sold, the new owners have agreed to let him to working there for the time being, and it is just the right setting for the band’s calm, cool, maritime style.
I think this is the same Jon Lusk who was Programme Director at Radio Active when I started back in 1986.
Mark Ravenhill on the curse of Robert McKee’s “Story” (from The Guardian):
Writer delivers script, goes in for meeting. “I’m missing the initiating incident on page 23,” is a note that you’re very likely to hear in our Story-centred world. Rarely, “Why are we making this” and certainly not, “Are we challenging any ideas about form?” Recently, a playwright told me that he was advised by one major theatre to read McKee’s Story. This is a book about writing a Hollywood movie! It’s frustrating for us writers. But it’s disastrous for you as an audience member or reader. Gradually, our culture is turning into the equivalent of the McFlurry. And that’s got to be bad.