Listics

Dervala posts this morning.

Along the way I’ve even stayed in a Hmong village in Laos, a day’s walk
from the nearest dirt road. At sundown, when we went to the river to

bathe decorously under sodden sarongs, I slipped in the mud and fell
over, and cried. For dinner they killed a rooster—a precious
rooster—and fed me the boiled head. I eyeballed this baleful Pez
dispenser and made a show of handing it to the teenaged monk who was my
guide, in a gesture of fake humility. Pon lit up. It was the end of
Buddhist lent, and for over a month he’d eaten nothing after midday,
and no protein at all. He sucked the rooster’s tongue like a lover, and
then crunched through to the brain. I swallowed gritty gizzards. The
villagers gathered in the doorway to watch the feast in silence, though
they didn’t eat. Afterwards, someone made coffee, pouring the whole
packs of Nescafe and sugar I’d brought into a kettle of river water and
boiling it to syrup. I sipped mine, until Pon pantomimed that there
were only two plastic tumblers and no one else could drink until we
finished. We unrolled mats on the earthen floor, feet pointing towards
the door to keep bad spirits out. I lay awake in a coffee buzz while
underneath the stilted house the men hammered a coffin for somebody
dead, and got raucously drunk on laé-laé moonshine.

And the CBO at HighBeam Research publishes extracts from his book, Gonzo Marketing ("a highly entertaining, nimbly erudite screed against our current mass-market, mass-media culture"), including…

The investment banking firm of Dresdner, Kleinwort, Benson was a
slightly different story. IT director J.P. Rangaswami runs offsite swat
teams that take a real problem, break it down, come up with a solution,
code it, and integrate the results into the corporate computing
infrastructure — all within a week. In an industry where this sort of
thing is usually measured in months, quarters or years, such results
are astounding. Everyone on the team is expected to drink copious
amounts of beer, liberally provided, between the impossibly long, often
round-the-clock, hacking sessions. J.P. is working on a book about
certain structural and management challenges facing large corporations.
Working title: Fossil Fools. We had many deep exchanges about
what’s truly important in this industry at the moment. He turned me on
to a Dire Straits bootleg. I convinced him to buy a pricey but totally
kickass Roland guitar synth. "Damn you," he wrote later in email, "you
are starting to cost me real money!"