A Week and a Half Break

Ms Duncan has just finished her summer break ... it was disconcertingly short - 1 1/2 weeks. We were quite busy - planning a certain ceremony and visiting friends with whom we bonded over various bouts of intestinal diseases during our Peace Corps service.

First we went to Vermont, stayed at a friend's family cabin in the woods, went swimming everyday in an amazingly beautiful lake with a perfect island right in the middle, toured the Cabot cheese factory, went to the Ben and Jerry's factory (no tour as they weren't actually making anything that day - and no free sample as far as I can tell), played cards and other games, cooked out (yours truly built a glorious cooking fire), played tennis, and generally had a fabulous time reconnecting with the people who were too lame to move to Boston when we left DC. There was much rejoicing.

As a couple friends were departing, we learned that they would be returning to the Northeast next weekend to see family in Maine - they invited us along so we ended up picking them up at the airport and driving through hellacious boston traffic along I-95 (easily the most gridlocked interstate top to bottom in the country) arriving at the family abode after midnight, waking up at 530 to drive another hour and a half north to the river, bundling up in wetsuits as it was 45 degrees outside, rafting down the river for 5 hours (an interlude that was broken up by lunch at the mosquito breeding grounds - seriously the most infested place I have ever seen), getting a busted lip from a bouncing oar (Ms. Duncan) and nearly falling out of the raft during class 5 rapids (yours truly - Ms. Duncan dropped her oar into the river to keep me from falling out), driving back to Bangor to attend a folk music festival, driving out to another cabin on a lake, jumping in said lake at midnight despite 45 degree temperatures, sleeping on tiny beds, jumping in the lake again, and heading back to boston.

When put that way it seems like quite a lot.

Business Ethics

One of the things that always amazes me is that for every movie out there, there's always someone who thinks it's awesome - no matter how horrible the movie was. Take for example, Disaster Movie - on the imdb list of 100 worst movies it's ranked by the user's as the 24th worst movie - the only movie on the list to be ranked by more than 25 thousand people - so it's pretty unanimous - but not entirely. An amazing 6% of people gave it a 10.* Surprisingly, very few of these 10 ratings are jokes - unlike the case with Manos: The Hands of Fate, long regarded as the worst movie ever. With that movie, quite a few 10s are handed because of a thorough enjoyment of the unintentional comedy from a horrid attempt at a serious/scary movie. But Disaster Movie is supposed to be a comedy, thus the unintentional comedy vote is largely removed (unintentional comedy is the realm of horrible dramas - horrible comedies are the worst as no laughs at all can escape) - that is to say, these people really liked the movie.** My favorite positive reviewer talks about how it's one of his favorite movies that he can enjoy with friends or alone. He then goes on to complain about the negative reviewers - "perhaps the users that commented negatively to this movie could make a better movie? hummmmm. doughtful."

What's interesting is contemplating the possibility that there might be some movie or book that you love, that everyone else clearly recognizes as being utter crap. For example, I really like this blog post, but there's a good chance that it's quite horrible. All this is just a long pre-introduction to bring up my own introduction to the blog topic using Adam Sandler's Billy Madison, which I was shocked, shocked I say*, to learn had a splat rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I believe history is largely on my side due to the numerous eminently quotable moments in the movie (a favorite of mine being "You ain't cool unless you pee your pants" to which the old woman responds "If peeing your pants is cool, call me Miles Davis." ... on second thought, maybe I'm wrong).

Billy Madison ends with an academic contest between the heir (Billy) and the scheming corporate hack who wants to take over the company. They have a final set of questions. Billy get's his so so wrong - the judge responds (and I'm writing this off the top of my head so it likely contains errors - indulge me) "at no point in that rambling incoherent answer do you even come close to approximating anything that can be construed as a correct response - everyone in this room is dumber because of you - I award you no points and may god have mercy on your soul." You would think it would be over for Billy.

However, his scheming opponent gets a question on business ethics which he of course is entirely unfamiliar with and at the thought of losing to Billy he proceeds to pull out a gun and take someone hostage (I forget who) before he is jumped on by the overweight elementary school principal who wrestles under the name of The Blob!

I imagine some of the people at business school might respond similarly.

Now, disclaimers first. I am truly impressed by everyone I've met in the program. They are all very intelligent and genuinely nice people and I don't think they're going to take anyone hostage nor do I think they'll bamboozle grandma out of her savings so they can buy their kid the latest diamond encrusted tonka truck.

That being said, I still have some qualms about their ethical training.

Ms. Duncan recently finished her first semester in the LGO program and to celebrate they had a BBQ outside on campus followed by some games. People were split up according to the teams they used in throughout the semester (with SOs included). We played the Tie-A-Balloon-To-Your-Ankle-And-Then-Jump-On-Everyone-Elses-Balloon game, a carry an egg on the spoon while blindfolded game, a water balloon toss, a relay race involving three legs, human wheelbarrows (yours truly) and sacks, and a final pie eating contest. No real prizes were awarded and no scores were kept.

Yet rampant cheating took place. Now one way to look at this is that no one was really hurt by the cheating since there was nothing to win so it was all in good fun. Another way to look at is that they cheated when there were no stakes - imagine when millions of dollars are on the line.

*As an aside, I'm guessing that these movies are made for the young idiot male (of which I'm sure there are plenty) but surprisingly men actually give it a lower rating than women and young women give it the highest rating of all. I have two explanations for this - first, women are nicer in their reviewing (as an eg. I give scathing reviews to bad teachers, but Ms. Duncan is much more resistant) - second, young idiot females have much more peer pressure power over young less idiotic females.

**I haven't actually seen the movie - the closest I've come to seeing anything by the craptastic directors who made this movie is Scary Movie where they served as minor writers - I remember the movie largely being horrible and paling in comparison to the great spoof movies like Airplane or Naked Gun or Hot Shots ... for a good critique of these directors see here.

***Just as I cannot say "So it goes" without thinking of Vonnegut, or "forever" without thinking of Sandlot, I cannot say "Shocked" without thinking of Casablanca.