People are always telling me their life stories and they always tell me they have done so because I am a good listener. In fact I am a terrible listener, I don’t listen to a word: what I am doing is looking like I am listening while concentrating all my energy on not listening, on finding some refuge beyond what is being said. It is easy to be a good listener in America: all you have to do is not interrupt and it is easy not to interrupt when you are not paying attention.
- Geoff Dyer
A few weeks back, I posted the first part of a talk I gave about Paleo Fitness for the Eating Paleo in New York Meetup.
As promised, here’s the second chunk, which looks at what we know about how fit our ancestors were, and how they go that way:
A few days ago, skimming through the always excellent Ask Metafilter, I stumbled across a great post asking about America’s quirks as seen by foreigners.
A slew of international readers weighed in, listing the number of American flags in non-civic setting, the giant portion sizes, that cigarettes are sold at drug stores with news agents and tobacconist shops nowhere to be seen.
And then, one said: paper toilet seat covers.
And I thought: paper toilet seat covers?!? Certainly, we must not be the only country using them. The very idea of pooping sans-paper struck me viscerally as below barbaric. Were all of these foreign people raised by wolves?
But a bit of cursory Googling confirmed the usual; we’re the ones who are really the barbarians here. Toilet seats, it seems, are actually far cleaner than faucets, door handles, toilet paper rolls, even office desks and workstations. And, further, it’s essentially impossible to catch anything from a toilet seat, regardless of germ content. From the Mayo Clinic and the CDC on down, the consensus was clear: the seat covers are an odd Americanism, a placebo at best.
(Also discovered in that Googling: women’s bathrooms apparently have twice as many germs as men’s, and men, who get the bum rap for supposedly carelessly peeing on toilet seats, are actually much less likely to do so; we lift the seat when peeing, whereas germaphobic women apparently pop a high squat hovering over the seat and pee all over the place. The fairer sex indeed.)
Of course, I’m not alone in my faith in the power of the toilet seat cover. A USA Today poll showed that nearly 90 percent of Americans erroneously believe diseases can be transmitted by sitting on toilet seats. Which is why, perhaps, even armed with the knowledge that I’m accomplishing nothing by doing so, in the days since discovering this all, I’ve continued to paper up – I just also feel vaguely guilty and foolish for doing so. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
A month or so back, Greenlig.ht moved into new, larger digs – a sublet space in NoMad. (For those keeping score, that’s North of Madison [Square Park], the central upper 20′s. My brother maintains that you can make any New York neighborhood hot just by renaming it with a smart acronym, and therefore suggests buying up property at the [otherwise rather financial and stodgy] southern tip of Manhattan, then rebranding it as NOSFERATU – North of the South Ferry Terminal – then raking in the returns. But I digress.)
The new space, which is fairly cavernous, belongs originally to a guerrilla marketing firm that’s since moved most of their team out of town. We’ve taken over the majority of the floor, but the marketing guys have hung on to a couple of desks at one end, and continue to use the office to store all kinds of previously-used guerrilla marketing stuff.
Our conference room, for example, is divided off by a wall of giant CRT TVs, once used in the early 90′s as an MTV advertising installation. The waiting area features both a Shark Week table (missing the requisite great-white-bite-shaped chunk) and a giant Dunkin’ Donut.
And, most interestingly, the space houses a small fleet of Segways.
When the Segway first came out, I was dying to ride one. But, as the Segway craze quickly passed, I started to think I’d lost my chance. Until, walking into this new space, I discovered a dozen of them, neatly lined up and plugged into wall jacks. They looked a bit worse for the wear, held together in some places by layered duct tape, but they were real, honest-to-God Segways nonetheless.
My Greenlig.ht colleagues and I have, obviously, taken the Segways for countless spins around the office: straightforward drag racing, obstacle-laden steeplechases, even Segway polo, using rulers to smack around Bank of America promotional rubber bouncy balls.
Yes, it holds itself upright, and, yes, it’s impressive to control forward and backward motion by leaning rather than by gas or break. But actually steering the thing, using it in a real-life situation, feels clunky, unwieldy, mildly unsafe.
A few weeks in, it’s clear to me why the Segway never really took off. It wasn’t too much hype, or not enough, or even the rather high price tag. It was that, well, Segways kind of suck.
As the old saw goes, you can’t polish a turd. It’s a good reminder that business, while not easy, is at least simple: if marketing won’t save you, there’s not much you can do but make a truly excellent product in the first place.
Two chemists walk into a bar.
The first says, “I’d like to order some H20.”
The second says, “I’d like to order some H20, too.”
The second man dies.
++
An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar.
The first orders a beer.
The second orders half a beer.
The third orders a quarter of a beer.
The fourth begins to order, but, before he does, the bartender cuts him off, puts two beers on the bar and says, “you guys need to know your limits.”
Jess: AND TAKE OUT THE TRASH!!
Me: You know you don’t have to yell at me just to get me to do something.
Jess: Yes I do! You’re voice activated.
Cleaning out my closet this spring, I tossed at least a dozen t-shirts and button-downs whose armpits had yellowed beyond acceptability. I went online to see if any cleaning products might help (answer: Oxiclean, though not enough to save that deeply yellowed batch), and discovered more importantly that it’s not the sweat, but rather the acidic aluminum in antiperspirants, that drives the color shift in the first place.
Still, that new knowledge presented me with an ugly Catch-22: better to scare people off with pit-stains, or with pit-stink? I had tried deodorant (as opposed to antiperspirant) a few times in the past, due to concerns about aluminum’s healthfulness, and each time had quickly sweated my way out of thinking that was an even vaguely publicly-acceptable solution.
So it was with more than a little skepticism that, on a friend’s recommendation, I tried out MenScience Advanced Deodorant. The brand name “MenScience” sounded like something out of a Saturday Night Live commercial. The fact that it was unscented seemed even less likely to work (what did deodorant even do without antiperspirant, aside from masking scent?). And ‘active ingredients’ like tea tree extract and witch hazel made me feel like the stuff might be better sold at a booth at Burning Man.
Despite it all, it works. After a few days of use, I found that MenScience Advanced Deodorant, stupid name and all, left me with less armpit smell at the end of the day than even high-aluminum-content products like Certain Dri.
Color my armpits surprised. And not, for a change, yellow.
I have always thought that one man of tolerable abilities may work great changes, and accomplish great affairs among mankind, if he first forms a good plan, and, cutting off all amusements or other employments that would divert his attention, make the execution of that same plan his sole study and business.
- Benjamin Franklin
Sometimes, you come across a piece of technology so blindingly obvious, you wonder how it didn’t already exist.
Consider Kwaga’s excellent WriteThat.Name: it plucks information from people’s email signatures, and uses it to update your Gmail contacts.
It’s so effective, I’ve now stopped manually entering contacts into my address book, and simply synch my iPhone directly with my Gmail contact list.
Definitely worth giving WriteThat.Name a try yourself.