As a professional journalist, it is my job to stay informed about important news stories and trends, so you don’t have to. This week, as I have done every year since this blog’s inception in 1975, I take stock in the people and events that shaped our world over the past 365 days.
[Editor’s note: For those of you following the Jewish calendar, look for my special Rosh Hashanah “You won’t believe what the Goyim world did to our people this past year” Edition, to be published at sundown on September 28, 2011, the start of the Jewish New Year. – TEJ]
Consider this my Holiday gift to you – a week late, sorry. Blame it on the Post Office. Here is the annual View from the Bleachers’ Year in Review – 2010 Edition, or as I like to call it VFTBYIR-2010E, for short.
Oh, just one thing: Pay no attention to the subtle and repeated placement of gratuitous links to previous VFTB articles scattered throughout this week’s post. My tech person told me search engines like that sort of stuff. Hope you don’t mind. Let’s get started, shall we?
January: Avatarsmashes box office records as the biggest grossing movie of all time (not to be confused with Cannibal Holocaust, which gets VFTB’s vote for grossest movie of all time). Thanks to Avatar’s amazing 3D effects and unprecedented profits, Hollywood begins unleashing a tidal wave of 3D films for 2010, including Alice in Wonderland, Toy Story 3, Rocky XXXVII and Oscar-buzz, early odds-on favorite for Best Picture, Jack Ass 3D (right).
In the past week, WikiLeaks, the controversial organization that claims its goal is to keep governments honest by revealing classified documents, made news again. They announced that in the upcoming weeks, they will be releasing more than 250,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables and internal documents – to the dismay and embarrassment of top government officials in the US and the world over.
Government leaders from Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi to Libya’s Muammar Gaddifi to Russia’s Vladimir Putin to North Korea’s Kim Jong Il have been privately ridiculed and derided as incompetent, sexually promiscuous, behaving like a thug or having amazingly bad hair. WikiLeaks’ Australian-born editor and Internet activist, Julian Assange (right) has been characterized as everything from an anarchist to a terrorist – but he has not been ridiculed for having bad hair. This reporter thinks it’s quite stylish, actually.
But this is just the tip of the WikiLeaks iceberg. Thanks to my own painstaking Pulitzer-Prize-deserving investigative journalism and my extensive network of contacts within the Latvian intelligence community, I am about to blow the lid off the latest WikiLeaks scandal. In a View from the Bleachers EXCLUSIVE, I have uncovered WikiLeaks’ secret plans to release everybody’s email communications from the past ten years – Yes, everybody’s – including yours. The reasons for this latest attempt at public humiliation are unclear. My own speculation is that WikiLeaks chief Assange is trying to get back at an ex-girlfriend. But whatever the reasons, the consequences could be potentially devastating for millions of Americans, Russians, Chinese, Indians, Europeans, Middle Easterners, and potentially as many as three Greenlanders.
I’ll admit it. There are many mysteries in this world I will never be able to grasp. Like, when did time begin? How big is the universe? Is there life after death? Why does a loving God let good people suffer? How can I get the flashing “12:00” on my VCR set to the correct time?
And this week I find myself confronted with yet another unfathomable enigma: Why does the entire state of Montana hate me?
That’s right. I am convinced Montana hates me. And I have absolutely no idea what I have done to offend it. You see, I periodically check Google Analytics to see where traffic to my web site comes from. I have had visitors from every continent (except Antarctica).
I have had web site visitors from Tanzania, Malaysia, Indonesia, New Zealand, Belarus, China, South Korea, Ghana, and just about every nation in Europe. I’ve had visitors come all over – from Maui to Moscow, from Singapore to Sao Paolo. In the past year I have had at least one visitor from every single state in the USA…. except for… you guessed it – Montana. Not one visit from anyone in Montana in 12 months – nada –– zippo – zilch – bupkes.
It’s that time of year again – a time when we traditionally look back over the previous year and think about all the things we should be thankful for. It’s a time to remind ourselves to see that our glass is not half empty but really half full. Here are just a few things I am thankful for this time of year.
I am deeply thankful….
That I am not my neighbor Rich Donaldson. Man, what a streak of bad luck he’s been having lately. First he sells all of his stock when the market tanked at rock bottom at 6500. Then he invests his remaining life savings in a company that manufactures telephone booths, saying he was convinced cell phones were just a fad. Uh, no, Rich, not a fad. On the bright side, Rich will make you a great deal on a telephone booth. No reasonable offer will be refused. Comes complete with a Yellow Pages directory (if you’re old enough to remember what those were.)
That through a rigorous program of regular strenuous aerobic exercise and weight training, combined with a reduced calorie diet consisting mostly of kelp, almonds and curdled skim milk, over the past three months I’ve only put on two pounds.
As most of you know, over the past 25 years, I have been a highly sought-after lecturer / motivational speaker on business success strategies (gleaned largely from lessons I learned by making boneheaded business mistakes over the past 25 years). Every organization’s success is built on (brutally beating down) the backs of its frontline employees.
Business experts like myself – and even experts not like myself – have long known that employee recognition programs are a powerful way to reward your employees for their efforts. These programs build loyalty and reduce turnover, while at the same time improving systems, reducing waste, increasing customer satisfaction levels and keeping trophy companies in business.
Thanks to innovative employee recognition programs, every year motivated employees find creative ways to eliminate redundancies, cut costs, improve efficiencies, and leapfrog over obnoxious rival suck-ups competing with you for that next promotion.
There are a variety of highly effective employee recognition incentives, from nifty restaurant gift certificates to prime location parking spaces to those popular Employee of the Month plaques in the lobby that list the name of the same employee, Lin Chong (left), every month from January 2003 through October 2010 except for two months in 2008 when she was briefly out for chemotherapy for a life-threatening illness. In each case, these highly motivating incentives cost their employer roughly the cost of one cartridge of black inkjet printer toner.
As a professional journalist, it is my job to stay informed about important news stories and trends, so you don’t have to. This week, as I have done every year since this blog’s inception in 1975, I take stock in the people and events that shaped our world over the past 365 days.
January: Avatar smashes box office records as the biggest grossing movie of all time (not to be confused with Cannibal Holocaust, which gets VFTB’s vote for grossest movie of all time). Thanks to Avatar’s amazing 3D effects and unprecedented profits, Hollywood begins unleashing a tidal wave of 3D films for 2010, including Alice in Wonderland, Toy Story 3, Rocky XXXVII and Oscar-buzz, early odds-on favorite for Best Picture, Jack Ass 3D (right).
