June 23, 2004
Drunk Driving

If you're going to go on a drunk driving rampage, you might as well do a good job of it.

One fire hydrant, one flower shop, one dog, and nineteen cars, not
including his own (I omitted pictures of four cars with minor damage).

The driver, I found out later, was drunk, from Texas, and had only one arm.

(via waxy)

Posted by Bill Stilwell at 11:40 PM
June 22, 2004
Analemma

Excellent long exposure (44 over a year!) picture of an analemma. (via)

Posted by Bill Stilwell at 12:36 PM
June 14, 2004
Read & Unread

My current pile of started-but-not-finished books:
secret shame

An approximation of what I've read in the past, say, 6 months:
big pile of books

Update: Richard provides a photo of his unread pile and some details about the contents. I must confess that my photo was just of the unread books sitting around the bed - if I'd pulled stuff off the shelves like Richard it would have included (at least) Bleak House, The Royal Family, Elementary Particles, Flatterland, The City of Yes, Ulysses, and The Magic Mountain. marginalia.org: not reading only the best in quality literature.

Further Update: Three's a trend, right? The mention of buddha brought another couple unfinished books to mind: Three Pillars of Zen and The Story of Buddhism. Geez. Is there some point at which I should just admit that some of these books have been given up on rather than 'pending'?

Posted by Bill Stilwell at 06:43 PM
June 07, 2004
Bagels & Executive Perks

What the bagel man saw

He is leery of disparaging individual companies or even most industries, for fear it will hurt his business. But he will say that telecom companies have robbed him blind, and another bagel-delivery man found that law firms aren't worth the trouble. He also says he believes that employees further up the corporate ladder cheat more than those down below. He reached this conclusion in part after delivering for years to one company spread out over three floors -- an executive floor on top and two lower floors with sales, service and administrative employees. Maybe, he says, the executives stole bagels out of a sense of entitlement. (Or maybe cheating is how they got to be executives.) His biggest surprise? ''I had idly assumed that in places where security clearance was required for an individual to have a job, the employees would be more honest than elsewhere. That hasn't turned out to be true.''

Perk Hogs

[T]here is substantial evidence that perks hurt a company’s bottom line. David Yermack, an economist at N.Y.U. who specializes in executive compensation, looked at the performance of more than two hundred big American companies between 1993 and 2002, comparing those which allowed their C.E.O.s to use company jets for personal purposes with those which did not. Even after accounting for a host of other factors, Yermack found that the long-term stock-market performance of perk-rich companies was dramatically worse than that of their peers, costing shareholders hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Posted by Bill Stilwell at 06:31 PM