“…I’m not sure that we aren’t seeing the emergence of a society in which almost *everyone* who isn’t famous considers themselves cruelly and unfairly unheard. As though being famous, and the subject of wide attention, is considered to be a fulfilled human being’s natural state – and so, as a corollary, the cruelly unheard millions are perpetually primed and fired up to answer any and all questions in order to redress this awful unbalance.”

-Fact. (by Chris Heath in Chuck Klosterman’s “Eating the Dinosaur“) Of course, Chuck namechecks “New Media” in addressing this statement.

Very few good things came out of the year 1984, but among them were Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” me, and Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (and, according to Wikipedia and Amy Winehouse, crack as well).

I guess you could call Unbearable Lightness a novel, inasmuch as that’s exactly what it says on the cover. What it’s actually more like is a collection of the thoughts of an author that might have, at some point, led to a novel. From the beginning, the story is told as though Kundera has pulled the curtain back, revealing the stagehands and pulley system that are allowing the actors to “fly.”

That’s not to say that this is a book about flying, or plays, or even Kundera (although he is omnipresent). I don’t know that the book on the whole is about any one thing in particular, or maybe I’m just not smart enough to figure it out. However, I can tell you this – the vast majority of the vast number of things that make up this book are sublimely tantalizing. That may appear to be a strange choice of wording, but it’s the closest term I could use to describe what the book does with your mind at various, unexpected times. Kundera frequently (and I mean frequently) steps away from the story for long digressions that have nothing to do with the story, but everything to do with the human condition. (Note: I would have an example or two here, but the copy I was reading wasn’t mine, and I didn’t take any notes. After you read the first 20 pages, though, you’ll already know what I’m talking about.) It’s almost as if he had all of these brilliant thoughts lying around, filling up random notebooks, and he thought, Well, I can’t just not publish these things. I’m a genius. I guess I’ll just spread them around this book I just wrote. It doesn’t matter if it makes sense or not if people think they’re interesting. And he was right. Or maybe they had everything to do with the story. I really don’t think I’ll ever be smart enough to know for sure.

I’ll do my best to explain the premise, since that’s standard for reviews, even though I don’t know how much significance it has. The story follows four people: Tomas, a caring and thoughtful man who also happens to be a serial womanizer; his wife Tereza, an insecure and naive country girl who is tortured by Tomas’s various affairs; Tomas’s favorite mistress Sabina, an artist and a seductive sociopath in that order; and one of her extended flings, Franz, an academic who canonizes Sabina and loathes his wife and daughter. Probably the only unifying concept amongst all four that I can grasp is the most obvious one, the one that is made plain in the title. Unfortunately, that theme, that life is at once both magnificent and burdensome, is not in the least bit compelling. Unless, of course, you’re Milan Kundera. Then, you take this stale cliche and recreate its very meaning, deconstructing several other prescribed human truths that take people’s entire lives to build along the way, just for the hell of it. And if you think he’s going to end up tying everything into a little gift basket of philosophy, cohesion, rationality, and other morsels of personal comfort as a reward for investing time unspooling your entire emotional development – if you need that kind of resolution – then you probably shouldn’t read The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Or maybe you’re exactly the kind of person that should.

Like I said, Milan Kundera is smart, and I’m not. Maybe you should just ask him.

This. Is. One. Of. Those. Times.

There’s a hidden joke in the literary device I used in the links above. See if you can find it.

-Josh (via @dannynewman)

The content: I don’t consider myself someone easily embarrassed, but at times, this book’s cursing and the things being suggested by the main characters (especially when it comes to women) made me nearly blush reading it in public, even though I was totally cognisant of the fact that no one knew what I was reading.

The style: For two different chapters, King streams a character’s consciousness in sentences that appear to last a page or longer. Sentences that last a page. I’ve been known to push the conceivable boundaries of the run-on myself, but a page was never on my radar.

The dialect: At times, it’s nearly impossible to identify the English slang used, even for someone who’s lived in the UK for over a year and a half, and for a year of that in Scotland, where the word “murder” can often sound like the person speaking has forgotten there are vowels in it, and has lost control of his tongue rolls (think “mrrrrrrrrrrr-drrrrrrrrrrrrr” being said as though the extended rolled r’s are causing a whirlpool effect with all of the saliva in the person’s mouth).

The violence: Movie violence can make you cringe, but without sound, it actually tends to seem comical. Reading about a violent act, especially when described in deranged detail, makes you cringe, shiver, and squirm all at once. This book will do that to you on a regular basis.

My reading of The Football Factory, therefore, became a very on-again, off-again affair. Then I moved to Denver and began riding public transit into work every day, and I brought it along to pass the time. Reading through the book in ten-minute to half-hour pieces – sometimes getting through just a couple of pages – changed its complexion and removed some of the difficulty from the equation of reading it. And what I found was that the people who couldn’t initially stomach the book, for the reasons laid out above and probably more, missed out. What John King did with this novel, originally published in 1996, was nothing short of amazing – he was able to plainly explain the deep-seated motivations of the UK’s football firm culture. It has fascinated and dumbfounded people the world over in attempting to understand why it is people would get together on the day of a soccer game, travel for miles to see their favorite team, have as couple of drinks before the match – and proceed to beat the holy hell out of a group of fans of the opposing squad, knowing full well that they could die at any time in the fray.

Needless to say, the mentality of Tom Johnson, the main character and a well-respected (if inconsequential) member of Chelsea firm, is complicated. Typically, when your main character is violent and womanizing by nature, and seemingly picks and chooses the direction of his moral compass, an author will hope to endear the figure to the reader to eventually reveal the character’s humanity in hopes of evoking empathy. But what John King accomplishes is something completely refreshing. When something inevitably terrible happens to Tom, I am more or less unmoved. Where I am used to feeling empathy (or sickness at the writer’s attempt to evoke it), I instead feel pity. Nothing else. I, for one, think that this is by design.

Though the book focuses on Tom Johnson, and the majority of the book is told through his eyes (at least in the chapters unambiguously titled by each match that he is attending, just in case you weren’t sure what his life revolved around), it’s salted (not peppered) in between Tom’s chapters with singular stories about other people representing the societal pressures of British culture – the elements that produce the most peculiar aspects of it. One of my favorites of these (although they are always a welcome diversion from Tom’s base existence) is Mr. Farrell, an elderly man who fought in World War II for the Queen and spends his days interacting with the ghost of his dead wife, unable to separate his former life as a soldier from his current life as a civilian without her presence. When he does remove the safety blanket to venture out and visit a war memorial in remembrance of his fallen friends, a trip which he admittedly has never been able to complete, he turns violent on two trouble-making Pakistani boys on his train, unable to let their antics (petty theft) go unpunished. These sub-stories never intertwine, save for one important exception, suggesting that their purpose is merely to serve as an explanatory tool – something that would render Tom’s story less authentic. King makes sure of its authenticity in very inventive ways. His talent for assuming the schizophrenic differences between characters in juxtaposed chapters is impressive, and the fact that the reader subconsciously understands what they mean in the context of Tom’s story is a stellar achievement.

During my time in Scotland, I rode with a busload of Celtic fans from Dundee to Glasgow for a match. It was arranged by the father of a friend of mine from the University of St Andrews. I don’t know if they were part of a firm or not, but I am sure that if something would have “gone off” at the pub we had rounds at before the match, not a single one of them would have backed down. I didn’t get a glimpse of the violence (I got that in 2005 when on the way back from a Man U away match, we had a brick lobbed at our bus that just missed crashing through a window), but I did gain firsthand knowledge of the camaraderie. Without knowing me, but knowing I was American, they cared only that I was there to support The Hoops (Celtic FC), that I had a pint of lager when we got there, and a few more cans on the ride home. I was offered to watch all away matches at their select pub in Dundee for the rest of my stay and a ride into home matches on the coach anytime I wanted. The man I sat next to on the ride in gave me his cell phone number to call in case something happened, and when I was lost finding my way back to the pub after the match had ended, left and made the walk back to the grounds to find me – even though he was risking missing the bus himself by doing so.

Naturally, having had this limited experience, I get a lot of questions from people who see news reports about football violence and have watched Green Street Hooligans about what the difference is between soccer in the UK and the NFL in the USA that makes it seem like a reactive chemical has been introduced, turning fans from staunch supporters to rabid, physically confrontational animals.

Now, when people ask me how grown men could fight and kill each other over sports, I finally know exactly what I’ll say.

“Read The Football Factory.”

Now, I realize at the beginning of the post Mark states that the detractors are referring specifically to the concept of “Brainstorming” as originally suggested by some advertising guy in 1963. I don’t know if this is specifically the case or not, but to me, that’s not even worth confronting as an argument. As the admen griping about brainstorming certainly understand, the term “brainstorming” has taken on a wider popular significance that does not refer to a specific, four-pronged activity written about in a particular book meant for a certain field almost half a century ago. I’m certain they know this, because these men are too smart not to realize it, yet are smart enough to realize the power of word choice and the attention demanded by controversy (and yeah, I realize I’m playing into this, but at least I do realize it). However, there is nothing I like more than to disprove people who base their entire careers on saying things just to say them. So now that you, dear reader, understand my frame of mind when reading something like this, I want to rant for a little while about its utter bullshittiness.

In fact, the specific, decades-old concept of brainstorming discussed in the post isn’t really the problem. If that’s the end of what that guy thought brainstorming was, those are good enough points. I think a lot of this was implied, but I would amend them in this way:

1) “Generate as many ideas as possible” should read, “Get as many people to contribute as possible”: Diversity is the driving force behind brainstorming. Everyone brings different thoughts, emotions, life experiences, and frames of reference to the flow. Quantity of ideas may not necessarily increase quality, but broadening contributions always does.

2) “Don’t criticize” should read “Make everyone feel their opinion is valid”: At first glance, these appear to be the same thing. The important distinction is that debate fuels brainstorming as much as openness. As long as the criticism isn’t personal, people should be able to rationalize the ideas being suggested. There is a way to do this without stifling creativity, and it starts with checking ego, title, and interpersonal conflict at the door.

3) “Welcome unusual ideas” should read “Make sure everyone knows that anything is potentially valid in the discussion”: Start by saying “no idea is unwelcome,” and yeah, you might get a few things that would never work. But you never know what individuals think is possible or isn’t. One might be thinking that budget is part of the restriction, while another may think current staffing is a restriction. By setting out that nothing is impossible, you level the playing field and ensure that everyone knows that big ideas are possible.

4) “Combine and improve ideas” should read “Guide the conversation wisely”: Like I said, debate is crucial to the process. People have an intuitive sense of what will work and what won’t. As long as people are open to anything going into the session (which is muy importante, and should probably be Tip #5), the potential solutions will naturally spark more conversation. This kind of refinement is what brainstorming is all about, and one of the things that makes it vastly superior to individual creativity, no matter how robust.

The hidden factor that lurks in each of these guidelines is the need for a thoughtful moderator. A good brainstorm administrator is a neutral persona that sets the tone for the session, makes people feel at ease, and steers the conversation away from distraction and toward breakthroughs. Creative sessions should have the feel of internal focus groups, and sometimes it’s a good idea to have someone from outside the company administer the session because they have no interpersonal cache to overcome. All of the supposed drawbacks of brainstorming can be overcome by structuring the session. It’s easy to waste half a day of productivity around a brainstorming session that has no direction, and a good way to allow this to happen is to have an unsuitable mediator.

Of course, the title of this post was stolen from South Park, and it’s not by accident. Television shows are the perfect example of the successes of brainstorming, because TV writers are the quintessential example of the craft in practice. Most television shows are written by a committee of writers, who toss around premises for shows in a similar “brainstorm” fashion. That doesn’t mean that there’s never been a TV show written by a single writer, but its unpopularity does imply the superiority in group sessions to generate a wealth of useful content.

Putting my money where my mouf iz at, I had a meeting the other night with two of the founders of the Mile High Business Alliance to volunteer myself to lead brainstorming sessions with local small business owners who I had recently found out were floundering because of what I estimated to be a lack of creative marketing ideas. Soon, we will be announcing an ongoing program of structured brainstorming sessions meant to address specific problems that small business owners are facing (stay tuned for details coming soon). I’ve been trained academically in creative production, and I hope not only to give participants multiple concrete solutions to their problems, but also to introduce a design mentality to Colorado small business owners for use in every aspect of their business operations after leaving the session. I can’t wait to help out small businesses in Colorado and rub the results in the faces of group creativity naysayers.

Miss Teen Louisiana was arrested over the weekend and charged with drug possession in a foiled “dine-and-dash” operation that cost the current beauty pageant queen(pin) her crown and sash.

Wait staff solved the mystery with the help of local law enforcement when they scoured the booth crime scene and discovered that one of the would-be dashers left a purse behind. Police considered dusting the bag for fingerprints, but after a heated discussion decided to simply check the contents for identification.

A wallet found in the purse contained the driver’s license of Lindsey Evans who was declared Miss Teen Louisiana late last year. Also in the wallet was two grams of “suspected” marijuana. Results of that separate investigation are apparently ongoing. However, after looking at, smelling, and eventually smoking the alleged drug, police officers strongly believed that they were, in fact, dealing with cannabis. The suspect was apprehended when she returned later to regain the left purse, presumably once her high had receded.

Miss Teen Louisiana was informed of her title, crown, and sash revokation on Monday by the pageant sponsors, but it was made clear that no prizes or cash awards need be returned. TRJ operatives close to the situation believe that this would have been impossible, seeing as how all of these had been used to purchase drugs anyway.

Sure to become a major subject of blogger mockery and lampooning, Ms. Evans may finally supplant Caitlin Upton, better known as 2006′s Miss Teen South Carolina as the interweb’s most humiliated and (seemingly?…hopefully?) drug-addled teen beauty pageant winner. TRJ was recently reminded of Ms. Upton’s infamous meltdown when it was discovered by our team that Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin shared Upton’s pageant prep coach, who was jettisoned after a series of similar responses to interviews by ABC’s Katie Couric.

“A friend who moved to Silicon Valley in the late 90s said the worst thing about living there was the low quality of the eavesdropping. At the time I thought she was being deliberately eccentric. Sure, it can be interesting to eavesdrop on people, but is good quality eavesdropping so important that it would affect where you chose to live? Now I understand what she meant. The conversations you overhear tell you what sort of people you’re among.”

That from an essay about (of all things) how the city you live in affects your personality.

When I am killing time in public without my iPod, you’d better believe I’m eavesdropping on your conversation. You can tell, because the second I hear something out of context that sounds inane, you might see me crack a slight smirk out of the corner of your eye. If it’s particularly embarrassing, I might even give a muffled laugh so that you stop to consider what just came out of your mouth. It’s not self-serving condescention. I’m actually trying to  motivate myself to do what I can to avoid making similarly dumb statements (i.e. read), and (hopefully) convincing the conversationalists to examine what they spend their time talking about (and so where their priorities lie) – or at least the context in which they are talking about it (with “audibly, on public transit” probably being less prudent than alternatives).

One specific example in my past sticks out for me. During my final semester of college, mired in a major I cared nothing about, I had made the decision to skip a class based on the weather (something that was unfortunately quite common for me at the time). I was on a bus on the way back to my apartment, and I happened to catch a brief exchange between two sorority girls sitting in front of me. Now, I can’t remember exactly what they were discussing, but whatever it was, it forced me into a deep introspection, to the point that I was considering the very value of how I was spending my life. All of this happened in between bus stops. Without even thinking, I was off the bus at the next stop and heading purposefully toward my next class. That qualifies, as Bill Maher said recently, as “powerful stupid.”

Additionally, that got me to thinking about what eavesdropping in Colorado Springs does for me. Allow me to throw together an approximate list of the most overheard topics of conversation in this town:

1) God

2) How to make God interesting to pseudo-hipster teenagers,

and 3) Wedding plans.

These are not exactly the kinds of things that motivate someone beyond the “I-read-the-newspaper-which-means-I’m-doing-pretty-well” level. I assume moving up to Denver and being around young entrepreneurs will raise it a notch or two.

Obviously, the first step is to approach the UN about a global ban on airing “The Hills,” but after that, here is a great NYT piece that examines both McCain’s and Obama’s take on what to do about our country’s lack of cool new stuff. It comes from this series of informative articles that demonstrates the views of each candidate on a range of crucial issues (bipartisanship sold separately).

I really enjoy John McCain’s argument of deregulation and tax cuts to encourage corporate innovation – which has actually already been the central plan for years and has resulted in the National Review providing this scrumptious tidbit:

The report said industries like chemical, semiconductor and automotive were growing in other countries while comparable American efforts atrophied. The patent office issued most of its information technology patents to foreigners. The United States ranked 17th among industrialized nations in high-school graduation rates, and the country had become “a net importer of high-technology products,” many from China.

The report added that corporations were cutting back on basic research and eliminating in-house laboratories.

And how, exactly, is a diminished Capital Gains Tax going to improve a disgraceful high school graduation rate?

Even if McCain’s plan did work, the article points out that corporate innovation “tends to focus on near-term applications,” which essentially boils down to superficial upgrades capable of producing better quarterly numbers and share earnings, whereas public funding “finances more basic research that has greater breakthrough potential,” and aims to fix the problem rather than masking it with trinkets for the suburban masses.

Additionally, can we all agree to tell John McCain to stop talking about “pork” and “earmarks?” For example, he continually whiffs on nailing Barack by making an example of acquiring federal funding for a multi-million-dollar “overhead projector.” That “overhead projector” actually powers a planetarium, which sounds to me like a step forward in Obama’s big-picture science and technology ideals.

Finally, I love John McCain’s reported scientific advisory. It would seem that all of his information comes from Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economic expert, who himself consults with a team of experts on “science in general.” I just imagine McCain pressing a red button beneath a table when questioned on issues of science and technology at which point a signal is sent to a lab with a bunch of indistinguishable scientists in white coats looking at test tubes and nodding silently at each other before reporting back with a response. Not exactly an image that instills confidence…

2) I’ve always said I never want to see my President smile, ever, because his job too important. Fortunately, we learn that this won’t be a problem with Barack Obama, who can’t tell a joke to save his life.

3) The Boston Red Sox go down (a combined) 29-5 over two games and 6 and 1/2 innings, and then: Oh. My. God. To think a team could (*knocking furiously on wood*) come back from either a 3-0 or 3-1 deficit in a postseason series three freaking times in five years…I’m just going to stop there. I’ll just say that I’m not going to turn off the next game in the 5th inning.

For those of you who don’t know why the hell everyone on your TV keeps shouting about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (or Fannie Mac and Freddie Mae as our Presidential candidates like to call them), here is a great background article on their role in the current economic crisis as well as the reason as to why everyone in DC seems to be avoiding Franklin Raines like he has leprosy.

The article is written by the excellent Bethany Mclean, who also happened to discover the accounting scandal at Enron and co-write The Smartest Guys In The Room, and who also happens to look like this:

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/188301/october-13-2008/the-computer-menace—bethany-mclean

Which is to say, really, really, really hot. Especially for a business journalist who specializes in stories about accounting. Accounting majors should get a background on her in their first class just to let them know it’s not completely impossible to meet a good-looking girl in their line of work. They just might meet her because she happens to be writing a story about their malfeasance that will ruin their career…

Anyhow, great article.