Author: Joey deVilla

My friend Miss Fipi Lele tells me that the photo below was taken Friday — it’s a shot of the London office of Lehman Brothers in Canary Wharf. Note the gathering in the window on the upper right and the body language of everyone except the guy on the left in the khaki pants:

Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

In my experience of working at small-to-medium-sized software companies, there are two reasons for the sort of impromptu all-hands gathering like the one pictured above, where everyone is called into the biggest room in the place and stands while one of the C-level people makes an announcement:

• The company has done well and has either acquired another company or been acquired by another company, or
• “Game over, man.”

Lehman filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy today, so the meeting is probably of the latter type. This article says that they’re in debt to the tune of 613 billion dollars to various banks in Tokyo, Hong Kong, New York, Singapore and Taipei.

Some quick thoughts:

• Looking at khaki guy’s clothes — and the fact that he’s in khakis while everyone else is in “regulation charcoal business pants” — and body language, I think he’s got a backup plan.
• It’s probably a good thing those windows don’t open.
• I’m wondering what kind of impact that the implosion of yet another major financial house is going to have on me in both the short and long term.
• I’m reminded of the Simpsons episode in which Homer becomes the coach of the school football team: “You’re cut, you’re cut, you’re cut, you’re cut…”
• Maybe the truly dangerous “LHC” isn’t the Large Hadron Collider, but the Lehman Holdings Collapse.
• One wag who saw the photo posed an interesting rhetorical question: “What happens when you put frat boys in charge of one of the world’s largest banks?” Having worked for at least one irresponsible frat boy, I think the question’s got some merit.

Update

For more on the Lehman layoffs, see this entry.

Update 2

Hot man-on-man action outside the Lehman Brothers New York office!

…you see a sign like this:

Photo taken by your ‘umble chronicler.

(I saw this yesterday at my nephew’s birthday party at the Queensway Bowlerama.)

The Conservative Party of Canada has done an excellent job of marketing itself in the Canadian election by making party leader and Prime Minister Stephen Harper the face and focus of their campaign. As far as the ads go, this election is all about him. The Conservatives’ ads mostly boil down to “Stephen Harper is not a dick” and the New Democratic Party’s ads essentially say “Stephen Harper is a dick”.

The Liberal Party’s ads conspicuous by their apparent absence. Has anyone seen a Liberal Party ad on TV? I haven’t. Stranger still, with the notable exception of the Conservatives’ “slot machine” ad, I haven’t even seen an ad by the Tories or NDP that acknowledge the Liberals’ existence; if you didn’t live here, you might be led to believe that it’s a two-party race.

What is the Liberal Party doing?

First, Cold Stone Creamery

I’d heard of the ice cream parlor Cold Stone Creamery but didn’t get a chance to try it out until February 2007 while vacationing with the Ginger Ninja in San Francisco. It’s an ice cream shop with a twist: they create ice cream mixes by taking an ice cream flavour and toppings such as oreo pieces and graham crackers and blending them by hand on a chilled marble-like slab, as shown in the video below:

While this is fun to watch as it is, workers at some Cold Stone franchises like to add a little “flair bartending” style to the process, as the videos below show:

And Now, Marble Slab Creamery

Marble Slab Creamery is the company from whom Cold Stone took the idea — they predate Cold Stone by five years. They’ve come to the ‘burbs surrounding Accordion City.

According to their site, they’ve got locations in:

• Aurora (SmartCentres Aurora East)
• Milton (RioCan Centre Milton)
• Newmarket (SilverCity complex)
• Oakville (on Lakeshore, close to Trafalgar Road)
• Thornhill (Bathurst Centre)
• Woodbridge (RioCan Colossus Centre)

…and “Toronto” is listed as “coming soon”.

I heard about Marble Slab from my coworkers on Friday at noon, and that night after dinner, the Ginger Ninja and I hopped in the car and went to Oakville to give it a try.

Wow, is it goooood. Wendy had white chocolate ice cream with smashed-up bits of Coffee Crisp and Oreos, while I had “Birthday Cake” (sweet cream ice cream with cake flavouring, similar to a flavour called “Cake Batter” at Cold Stone) with smashed-up bits of Kit Kat and Oreos. There seem to over a dozen ice cream flavours and two dozen or so toppings to choose from, as welll as a helluva lot of types of ice cream cones.

We’ll be back.

Related Reading

Quite unsurprisingly, there are Wikipedia entries for Cold Stone and Marble Slab creameries.

In case you missed it, here’s the opening skit from last night’s Saturday Night Live, in which alumna Tina Fey returns to play the role of a lifetime: the “hockey mom” governor. It was pretty much the only bright spot in a pretty limp episode, and Fey’s Palin impression was spot-on:

Click the picture to see the video.

And in case you missed it, the New York Times vetted Sarah Palin themselves and the title provides a pretty good summary: Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes. It paints a picture of a “hockey mom” — the bad kind that the Canadian Hockey Association have been trying to rein in for the past few years. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal.

So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency.

Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages.

When Ms. Palin had to cut her first state budget, she avoided the legion of frustrated legislators and mayors. Instead, she huddled with her budget director and her husband, Todd, an oil field worker who is not a state employee, and vetoed millions of dollars of legislative projects.

And four months ago, a Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who chronicles the governor’s career with an astringent eye, answered her phone to hear an assistant to the governor on the line, she said.

“You should be ashamed!” Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. “Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!”

David Foster Wallace, author of the novel Infinite Jest, the essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and the short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, hanged himself on Friday night. Here’s an excerpt from the Los Angeles Times story:

David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 novel “Infinite Jest,” was found dead Friday night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.

Jackie Morales, a records clerk at the department, said Wallace’s wife called police at 9:30 p.m. Friday saying she had returned home to find that her husband had hanged himself.

Wallace, who had taught creative writing at Pomona College since 2002, was on leave this semester.

If you’d like to hear him in his own words, this interview on Charlie Rose is a good start. His segment starts at 23:17:

The 1970s TV series UFO was Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s first foray into completely live-action television. Prior to that, they’d worked only on “Supermarionation” marionette-based animated shows like Fireball XL-5, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet (whose distinctive style would be referenced in Dire Straits’ video for Calling Elvis and in the movie Team America: World Police (here’s a scene from the movie — note that there’s cuss words aplenty). The Andersons’ next show after UFO was the legendary Space: 1999.

It’s been ages since I watched UFO, so I don’t remember its title sequence, which takes the Andersons’ storytelling-by-montage approach and bears the “future as seen from the seventies” look that is the Anderson’s stock in trade. I also don’t recall its theme music, which has to be the most jazz-a-riffic theme for a science fiction show ever. Here it is, for your enjoyment:

Update

In the comments, “ajlb” reminded me that there’s another sci-fi show with a jazz-a-riffic theme: Cowboy Bebop. How’d I forget that?