Source: YouTube
Charlotte the bathtime refusenik has become the surprise hit of the French presidential campaign. Find out why on our new French elections blog
This.
Irresistible logic …
A surprise hit I was unaware of.
This summarizes the feelings of most of my French friends.
Exactly two things have made air travel safer since 9/11: reinforcing the cockpit door, and convincing passengers that they need to fight back. Everything else has been a waste of money. Add screening of checked bags and airport workers and we are done. All the rest is security theatre. If we truly want to be safer, we should return airport security to pre-9/11 levels and spend the savings on intelligence, investigation and emergency response.
—Bruce Schneier (via ayjay)
(via ayjay)
The Plot of Every Mel Gibson Movie
“a good person is dealt a terrible injustice (usually the loss of a loved one), which is compounded when the authorities fail to deal with the perpetrator in a way that satisfies the victim’s desire for retribution. When the perpetrator offends again, the protagonist takes the law into his own hands, finds his own justice, and sacrifices his civilized nature.”
“Slave Labor”:
This is probably the most radical commercial the company has ever made: an eight-minute epic in which a young unemployed woman must face down the scorn of her friends and family in order to hold down a job flipping burgers. The ad addresses virtually every criticism anyone has ever made of the company — the low pay, its environmental record, lukewarm food, even the obesity crisis — within the format of a kitchen-sink drama. You’ll be choking back the tears by the final scene in which the heroine’s mom is finally forced to admit she respects her daughter’s honest toil.This ad is simply amazing and touches on all my buttons and all the topics that are important to me. For some…
- Advertising is an awesome medium.
- Service work and humble work are worthy. I absolutely love the bit where her friend is crushed by her supposedly more respectable cubicle job.
- The way that capitalism changes the world isn’t just through Googles and Apples but also through small incremental improvements in our quality of life.
- The importance of service.
- Parents need to cut their kids some slack.
In France, there aren’t many lines of work where you can start as a high-school dropout and end up a millionaire, but flipping burgers at McDonald’s and going on to own a Micky D franchise is one of them. McDonald’s has done more for employment, food quality and upward social mobility than any French Government in the past 20 years, and it’s loathed for it. These are the true jobs of the future, and they’re great.
The ad also highlights the importance of service. In every McDonald’s I’ve been to in France I’ve had excellent service and people going “above and beyond” as the ad shows to help me out. This isn’t true everywhere, of course, but smart resilient organizations understand the importance of both standardization and leeway for these improvements. More generally, the ad wouldn’t work if the people she were working with weren’t nice. It’s a stupid thing to say, but everything works better when we’re excellent to each other.
The ad also shows that it’s good to be a corporate shill. She doesn’t just like her job. She likes her job at McDonald’s.
It’s a small-c conservative ad: the contrast between the postmodern hellscape of the graffiti’d playground and Mel’s clean room, showing the structure that comes with honest work, is great.
By being a global multinational conglomerate, McDonald’s can standardize and improve processes over thousands of locations, increase the productivity of workers, introduce training programs, etc. and raise the floor on food quality in neighborhoods while lowering prices. Because it’s big it has flexibility: you can be a college kid working 10 hours a week to make ends meet or you can do it as a career and go from (what would be considered) menial work to running the place which, because of the college diktat, isn’t possible anymore at places ranging from The New York Times to Goldman Sachs.
God bless McDonald’s.
I am an American living in France, and honestly, I never go into a McDonald’s. One of the reasons I like living in France is the quality of its non-fast food. There are bakeries everywhere where you can buy real bread…the kind that hardens after a day or two, i.e. not hamburger buns. Sure I appreciate American-style service better, but heaven help us if the only jobs of the future are flipping burgers in a fast food joint.
Comedy … is not only possible within a Christian society, but capable of a much greater breadth and depth than classical comedy. Greater in breadth because classical comedy is based upon a division of mankind into two classes, those who have arete and those who do not, and only the second class, fools, shameless rascals, slaves, are fit subjects for comedy. But Christian comedy is based upon the belief that all men are sinners; no one, therefore, whatever his rank or talents, can claim immunity from the comic exposure and, indeed, the more virtuous, in the Greek sense, a man is, the more he realizes that he deserves to be exposed. Greater in depth because, while classical comedy believes that rascals should get the drubbing they deserve, Christian comedy believes that we are forbidden to judge others and that it is our duty to forgive each other. In classical comedy the characters are exposed and punished: when the curtain falls, the audience is laughing and those on stage are in tears. In Christian comedy the characters are exposed and forgiven: when the curtain falls, the audience and the characters are laughing together.
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W. H. Auden (via ayjay)
I wonder how a certain Jewish host would feel if he know that The Daily Show’s satire of politicians is made possible by Christianity?
