Kid Tetris

An idea for a TV show: Trading Spaces Corporations. Two teams of management consultants take senior management teams from different similarly sized businesses and trade businesses for a few months. Same concept - screwing up living rooms across America to screwing up corporations across America. I think this would actually be interesting if it were something like restaurant chef/owners. Or do the current national obsession: Queer Eye for the Executive Guys. A team of gay management consultants (this would take a team of teams - IT, Operations, Financial, Public Relations/Marketing, Strategy) makeover a corporation (picture the Carson equivalent picking up the balance sheet and saying mockingly, "Sacrificing long term shareholder value for short term market outperformance by ignoring the need to invest in a rich supply chain management process is so 1987"). They'd go shopping together for updated enterprise software and their offices, conference rooms, bathrooms and lobbies would get madeover. They'd do benchmarking stuff, since I guess best practices would be the equivalent of shopping for Prada shoes. The party would be the annual shareholders meeting or something.

Also, I got infected by the self-awareness virus when I realized that a person in a picture from a concert was me (and a picture from a baseball game had a guy that looked too much like me). I turned away and got rid of the image as fast as I could, but the virus is still there, affecting other parts of my life. Like... I don't know... the way I shampoo my hair. Should I do it the normal way or do I do it the sexy way? (To contrast the two, one is like a man using a belt sander and the other is more like a girl in a commercial washing her hair) Still, I guess I'd rather be afflicted with the self-awareness virus than, say, the Marburg virus.

[Is it just me or does "Rift Valley Fever" sound like the name of a crappy festival concert in the South with bands like REO Speedwagon, Jefferson Airplane, Mr. Big and Eddie Money?]

Several characteristics of the TV show "Pauly" was basically a mixture of two previous movies, neither of which contained Pauly Shore, but are often linked together - "Billy Madison" (hotel magnate father, do-nothing son) and "Tommy Boy" (younger woman step-mother with a son that creates opportunities for hijinks marrying a flunky's rich dad). The TV show lasted less than a month. I came across the description for the show when I was burdening myself with vague memories of a show that had a theme song that was more popular than the show itself (answer: the regrettable 'How Do You Talk to an Angel?' from "The Heights" (song 4 on disc 1 - they sound like The Goo Goo Dolls, huh?) - the show was on for less than 3 months). The song finished 1992 as the Billboard #59 (55. I Can't Dance, Genesis. 56. Hazard, Richard Max. 57. Mysterious Ways, U2. 58. Too Funky, George Michael. 60. One, U2.) and 1993 at #80 (78. It Was a Good Day, Ice Cube. 81. Rebirth of Slick/Cool Like Dat - Digable Planets. 82. What is Love - Haddaway (Night at the Roxbury song).

While I'm on this topic, you remember the self-consciously long song title "Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand"? I think everyone agreed that was immature even then. Things like that cause the societal skin to become calloused and disapproving of things that could be remotely challenging, thus we're left with stuff like the lukewarm entertainment of primetime television and popular widely distributed cinema.

A headline from ESPN.com read "Not so Ducky: Oregon mauled by Wazzou" which is cute, because that's how an ignorant Midwesterner would spell Wazzu, since it seems to be from someone who knows of Mizzou (which is only shortening "Missouri" by 2 letters and 1 syllable, Wazzu lengthens WSU by 2 letters, but shortens it by 2 syllables [dou-ble you ess you], so there's a stronger rationale for speaking it rather than typing it). I think they want to be known as "WSU" anyway.