From a machine to send smells over the internet to a cartridge full of terrible games, some of the most terrible product ideas ever put into the market.

$20M

The amount that Digiscents, a tech company during the bubble era, had managed to raise for their product, iSmell, which—we kid you not—was a machine that could recreate smells and deliver them over the internet. It sounds like an absurd idea, but the company was able to get funding in part because its founders, Dexster Smith and Joel Bellenson, had recently gained fame because of their ties to DoubleTwist, a firm that helped work on the Human Genome Project.

Five people that have attempted to sell bottled water for pets

1. "They're part of the family. I don't believe you scrimp on your family." — Bill Fels, a Seattle man who began selling "Pet Refresh," a brand of flavored water for dogs. It came in beef and chicken flavors.
2. “It’s interesting to see different dogs react to the drink. They’ve never smelled anything like it in their water bowls and some will dive in and lap and lap and lap it up; others come to it a bit more tentative. ‘What’s this treat smell?’ they say. It’s kind of cute.” — Brian Fate, the creator of a dog-focused beverage called Dogdration, a peanut butter flavored drink that is laced with ginseng for some reason.
3. "Research shows that many tap water sources contain levels of chlorine and fluoride that can be harmful to your pets. That's why we created Molli's Choice. It's a fun, healthful product line that even the most finicky pets will enjoy and benefit from." — Tomas Malave, the CEO and founder of Mollibrands, discussing the creation of his flavored water for pets, which he apparently developed with the help of food laboratories.
4. "Once you give people more than water to drink, they do. Why shouldn't pets have that option, too?" — Marc Duke, the creator of the Thirsty Dog and Thirsty Cat bottled beverages, attempting to create a market for flavored bottled water for cats and dogs.
5. "The biggest challenge we faced was the smell. Smell is key, in particular with cats. They are very finicky." — Dr. George Hill, discussing the research he undertook when attempting to launch his namesake Pet Drinks.

“Whoopi said to me on the set when we were shooting, ‘Robert, you’ve got to make me rich.’ So I said, ‘But Whoopi you’re already rich,’ and she said ‘No, Robert—really rich.’”

— Robert Levitan, the CEO and founder of Flooz, discussing the deal Levitan brokered with Whoopi Goldberg to convince her to do a TV ad for his product, which essentially was an early effort at internet-only currency, but closer in style to frequent flyer miles than Bitcoin. Goldberg didn't accept money for the ads she did for Flooz, asking only to be paid in stock. This proved to be a particularly bad idea after Flooz went under due in part to the currency being a popular target for use in fraudulent purchases. Where's Satoshi Nakamoto when you need him?

Action 52: A Perfect Example of Why Nintendo Licensed Developers

The nice thing about video games is that, no matter how good or bad they are, there's always a cult audience ready to tell you every possible detail about that game.

Action 52, the unlicensed Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Genesis title, is a perfect example of this idea in action. The brainchild of a guy named Vince Perri, the game made a bold promise: You could get 52 original games in a single cartridge, ensuring that you'd never again have to spend $50 on a single game.

Perri is said to have had the idea after witnessing his 9-year-old son play a pirated multi-cart from Taiwan, a device that had numerous titles installed.

"I happened to see my son playing an illegal product made in Taiwan that had 40 games on it. The whole neighborhood went crazy over it," Perri said, according to a Miami Herald article from 1993, dutifully reproduced by CheetahmenGames.com. "I figured I'd do it legally. It's obvious when you see something like that, you know there's something there."

There was one obvious problem with this line of logic: he didn't have 52 games to sell. So he hired a couple of developers to make them for him. They didn't have much in the way of time or money, and while it's entirely possible they had talent, the lack of time or money ensured the talent would be hard to find.

Perri made the ultimate mistake that one could make when creating an original product—he mistook quantity for quality. But Perri was able to get a variety of investors to buy into his idea, ensuring that the idea had enough funding to go to market (at a price of $199, or as they liked to put it, $4 per game), but he skimped out on the only thing gamers really care about—the actual games.

"Action 52 is just plain ugly, with Cheetahmen and Billy Bob being the only two games out of 52 to contain adequate artwork and visuals," Hardcore Gaming 101 wrote of the final result in a review. "Some games are little more than a mess of pixels, but for most of them, they look like something you'd find in the margins of an eight year old's math notebook. There's also practically nothing in the way of animation, and backgrounds are extremely repetitive."

A developer who worked on the project, going by the anonymous name of "Action 52 Developer #4," explained that they were basically up against the wall trying to build numerous video games in a minimal amount of time.

"That's right, 4 guys, 3 months, 52 games, no pressure. And, no money," the developer wrote. "That's until I talked the guys into letting me ask Vince for some kind of advance. I don't recall the exact number, maybe $1,500. And that's all I ever got paid for those long hours spent on this project."

The most prominent game on the multi-pack was Cheetahmen, which Perri hoped to franchise and turn into a series of hit toys

There are all sorts of stories about the games, Perri, and Action Enterprises flying around. Among them: that the developers of the game ripped off the code of a pirate cart and recoded it for their own needs; that Perri had $20 million at his disposal, but spent less than $100,000 on the game itself; that more than 1,500 copies of a Cheetahmen sequel were sold at a Florida warehouse for a dollar each in 1996; and, most embarrassingly, the vaporware system that the company announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1994.

That system was supposed to be able to play NES, Sega Genesis and Super NES games, and included both a built-in LCD screen and a built-in CD-ROM. It was the most obvious piece of vaporware ever created. The company, of course, disappeared without a trace soon after CES.

The Cult of Cheetahmen

But a funny thing happened on the way to obscurity for Action Enterprises: A YouTube celebrity named the Angry Video Game Nerd (birth name James Rolfe) took on Action 52 in a two-part episode. The first episode focused on the first 51 games on the cartridge (all of them were awful), while the second gave lots of hate and mockery to Cheetahmen.

"Out of 52, I'm sure we'll eventually find one that's decent … I hope," Rolfe says at one point in the first episode, only to soon learn that he was wrong.

Quickly, Action 52 became something of the video game version of my favorite movie, The Room. (Congrats on your Academy Award nominations, Tommy! Oh … wait.)

Sure, it's still awful, but people have sort of embraced the awfulness of both the concept and the the absurd backstory of its creation. In 2012, Rolfe even showed up in a Kickstarter video for Cheetahmen II, the unreleased sequel to the original game. (That whole situation drove some controversy over whether or not the Kickstarter's creator, Greg Pabich, was running a scam—but in the end, the results ended up being legit.)

Perhaps the most notable part of the Action 52 saga is the remake project that came about in 2010, when game developers pledged to remake each of the 52 games on the infamous cartridge, with the goal of making the games good (or at the very least, playable). So far, 23 such remakes have been completed.

The thing to remember about terrible product ideas is that there was likely a point at each of these products' creations where the idea seemed like a good one. For example, a device that create any scent you can think of is an innovative idea, if not a particularly useful one. The problem there was a lack of market research.

Each of the ideas listed above fell apart at some point in their collective processes. Action 52, clearly, was a failure in execution, and if it had 52 good games, maybe we'd be hailing it rather than mocking it. Vince Perri might have even been a hero.

Others were simply ahead of their time. Flooz was about 15 years too early and lacked the kind of security that we expect out of anything financial on the internet. It was a bad idea because of its timing.

But then again, there are ideas that can't be defended in any way, shape, or form. Flavored water for pets falls into that category, which makes us wonder—why do entrepreneurs keep trying to make it?

Honestly, they should give up and make pepper mills that look like baseball bats instead.

Why are we so ready to look toward alternative medicine when the regular kind of medicine generally does the job? Maybe it's a tonal thing.

"I'm a little off my game because right before I walked out here, I got some results I was disappointed about. I had been non-detectable, non-detectable and checking the blood every week, and then found out the numbers are back up."

— Charlie Sheen, the world's most famous HIV-positive person at the moment, telling Dr. Oz earlier this month that his HIV levels, which were undetectable, went up because he stopped taking his pills. The reason they went up? Sheen, apparently working on some not-great advice, got in touch with a guy named Dr. Sam Chachoua, a Mexico-based doctor who claims to have found cures for cancer, AIDS, and a wide variety of other illnesses. Chachoua gave him an alternative form of medication which appears not to have worked. Chachoua is not a licensed doctor in the United States, and this page offering a take on Chachoua's appearance on Dr. Oz tells you everything you need to know about him.

So What the Heck is "Alternative Medicine," and Why is it so Appealing?

Why would Charlie Sheen, or anyone else for that matter, decide one day to stop taking a prescribed medication that's actually doing its job, or choose a treatment that eschews decades of medical research in favor of a guy that even Dr. Freaking Oz, Mr. Green Coffee Bean Extract himself, thinks is beyond the pale as a medical doctor?

Sheen is rich—when it comes to doctors and medication, he can afford some Hot Shots. (Sorry.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvmMB4PBxp0

But Sheen still went to go seek the not-easy-to-find Chachoua out, claiming an interest in being a "guinea pig." As soon as he figured out that it didn't work, he switched back to his traditional regimen.

Beyond the constant efforts to make "tiger blood" jokes, what makes someone do that? Perhaps the answer can best be summed up by Anthony Campbell, a noted expert on homeopathy and acupuncture who once was a resident physician at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital. Campbell, while an expert in topics generally considered alternative medicine, makes a point of simultaneously remaining skeptical of alternative medicine.

(Alternative medicine, by the way, is broadly defined as an unsanctioned form of treatment that is used as a replacement for traditional medication.)

In an essay on his website, Campbell aims the discussion not at the world of medicine but the world of philosophy. He specifically mentions the work of philosopher William James, who looks at the left-brain right-brain split and finds two approaches: "tough" and "tender."

"The tough think of the tender as sentimentalists and soft-heads. The tender feel the tough to be unrefined, callous, or brutal," James wrote in his 1907 book Pragmatism. "Their mutual reaction is very much like that that takes place when Bostonian tourists mingle with a population like that of Cripple Creek. Each type believes the other to be inferior to itself; but disdain in the one case is mingled with amusement, in the other it has a dash of fear."

Applying this thought process to medicine, Campbell suggests that the rational approach to medicine tends to come off a bit cold and calculated for some people—particularly since we often never see the same doctor, meaning that there's no interest in us as a patient—and that leads people to find different options.

Alternative medicine, as a result, takes on the same mind space as a Daniel Johnston song or a Duplass brothers film—the fact that it's unpolished and warm adds to its appeal. The problem, however, is that alternative medicine often comes with a bunch of other stuff that is arguably more problematic than the cold, calculated thing that users are trying to avoid.

"The alternative practitioners don't just extend tender loving care to their patients; they also provide them with a complex web of belief systems," Campbell writes in his essay.

Maybe Charlie Sheen just wants his medical experience to be less formulaic than an episode of Two and a Half Men. Thing is, however, he's not the only one.

38%

(LCCR & LCCREF/Flickr)

The Senator Who Became Obsessed With Bee Pollen

Tom Harkin isn't a doctor, but he knows what he likes. And the Iowa Democrat, who retired in 2015, learned to greatly appreciate alternative medicine during his three decades in Congress.

The turning point came in the early '90s, when Harkin—who had tons of problems with allergies over the years—found something that he said took care of his problems. It was a bee pollen-based dietary supplement called Aller-Bee-Gone, which he said zonked out his symptoms unlike anything else. Well, after he took like a hundred pills.

“It's the most bizarre thing that ever happened to me,” Harkin explained to the Washington City Paper in 1993. “But I want you to know something: I've had my allergies completely cleared up. My nose doesn't run. My eyes are cleared up. I don't sneeze any longer.”

(morganglines/Flickr)

Unlike most people with allergies and an affinity for alternative medicine, Harkin had power to do something about it—specifically, the ability to add amendments to funding legislation for the National Institutes of Health. In 1991, he added $2 million in funding to the NIH's budget to create the Office of Alternative Medicine—basically to create a mechanism to research whether these methods, which hadn't really been researched, were worth diving into deeper.

The medical and scientific worlds, which run on research defined by the scientific method, weren't exactly so hot on testing stuff that they openly considered quackery, and Harkin himself ran into a roadblock within OAM after its first leader, Joseph Jacobs, actually required the organization to research whether this alternative medicine stuff actually worked.

"I'm turned off by the idea of cures immediately," Jacobs told the New York Times in 1993. "When I hear that word, my defenses go up. Our challenge is to get people in the alternative-medicine community away from the panacea notion and to be more realistic about what they're trying to say."

(Jacobs failed to do so; he resigned the next year, claiming that Harkin was using his authority to force alt-medicine gurus on the OAM board.)

Undaunted, Harkin kept using his ability to get the issue in funding bills to continually raise the organization's budget and standing. In 1998, he got the standing of OAM upgraded to that of a medical center, then renamed to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine—with a budget upgrade to match the upgraded standing. These days, the center is known as the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH).

Despite directly driving hundreds of millions of dollars into research for alternative medicine based on a personal interest in the issue, Harkin admitted that he was disappointed by the results—in part because the organization he launched seemed set on gathering evidence against alternative medicine.

"I think quite frankly that in this center, and previously in the office before it, most of its focus has been on disproving things, rather than seeking out and proving things," Harkin said during a 2009 committee hearing.

(Anyone with experience in science would tell you that he's complaining about a crazy thing called the scientific method.)

The existence of this center still drives critics of alternative medicine crazy, something best exemplified in this line on the RationalWiki page for the center: "If you could find any government agency that RationalWiki would advocate cutting immediately, this is it."

"I began to feel livelier and healthier. In particular, the severe colds I had suffered several times a year all my life no longer occurred. After a few years, I increased my intake of vitamin C to ten times, then twenty times, and then three hundred times the RDA: now 18,000 milligrams per day."

— Linus Pauling, an early advocate for the the usage of vitamin C, discussing how he became a convert and advocate of the vitamin. Pauling's advocacy for vitamins as a cure for pretty much any disease led to the growth of a multivitamin industry, despite the fact that there was little in the way of proof for these claims. Author Paul A. Offit, who wrote about the issue (and alternative medicines in general) in his book Do You Believe in Magic?, points out research showing that multivitamins are more likely to cause health problems. Oh, and that Pauling died of cancer.

These days, different kinds of alternative medicine are so common that we don't even think of them in that mindset anymore. Massage is considered a form of alternative medicine, according to the NCCIH; so is yoga.

On the other hand, there are benefits to some of these solutions that are hard to ignore—as has been proven by research. Mindfulness techniques, for example, are a great way to focus energy away from the negative so that one can focus on what's ahead.

But the problem is that we have a natural tendency to question things assumed to be proven by research. As I was writing this, the rapper B.o.B. (who got into an entertaining debate with Twitter this week over whether the Earth is flat) was basically highlighting this point in action.

"I'm going up against the greatest liars in history … you've been tremendously deceived," he wrote on Monday.

How can we convince B.o.B. that all those crazy science folks might have a point?

Before there was "Rock Band" or "Guitar Hero," bands didn't really know how to handle making video games. Which meant their games were usually very bad.

Stop Believin'

When Journey was at the height of its fame, someone convinced the corporate rock band to promote itself using a arcade game ahead of its 1983 tour. The result was a mish-mash of confusing game concepts, poor controls, and digimatized versions of the band's faces—and makes one long for the days when the worst game you'd ever played was the Atari 2600 version of E.T. The Internet Archive has an in-browser playable version of it over this way. (One fun fact about the game: those digimatized faces in the game were created with a digital camera that was to be included with the physical arcade game. Problem was, people kept taking R-rated photos with the cameras, so they ditched the idea.)

Get a Grip

A slightly better arcade game built around a rock band came around about a decade later, when Aerosmith became the featured band in Revolution X, a shoot-em-up style game that featured a number of Aerosmith songs as well as a bizarre plot line involving the rescue of the band from a paramilitary organization called the "New Order Nation." You don't just shoot bullets; you shoot explosive CDs. And you rescue members of Aerosmith along the way. It was a popular quarter-muncher at the time, but the game's concept didn't translate quite so well to consoles. As a result, it got some pretty rough reviews—with many criticizing the lower graphics quality and the sound compared to the arcade version. "The graphics are bad, even for 16-bit standards," IGN wrote of the Playstation version. "Even when Aerosmith aren't playing the music is awful." To get a full taste of Aerosmith on your console, here's the Genesis version of the game.

I Wish You Could Swim

Late rocker David Bowie made a lot of art that was popular. But occasionally, he made art that was misunderstood by the broader world (just ask Trent Reznor, who once toured with the guy). One of those pieces of art was the game Omikron: The Nomad Soul, a 1999 Sega Dreamcast game that was a failure as a game, but as a work of art—one that Bowie himself assisted with—people are still trying to embrace it. A 2014 Paste Magazine piece highlights the strange relationship some have with the game, with author Joe Bernardi explaining that he was once stuck with little to do during a summer vacation besides play the game. "For whatever input Bowie had in the game, however, he was unable to contribute his trademark monomania. Instead of doing one thing really well and changing that thing extremely frequently, Omikron just does a lot of different things poorly." If you want to play this game, it's on Steam.

Fevers and Mirrors

At the turn of the 21st century, emo music was suffering a bit of an identity problem. A kind of music borne from a fusion of hardcore music and introspective emotions, the genre shifted and broadened to the point where "emo" essentially stood for "feelings with guitars." In one of the best reactions to the rise of the genre, budding Flash developer Jason Oda created The Emo Game, which featured all the major emo musicians of the era—among them Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes, Cedric Bixler-Zavala of At the Drive-In, and Chris Carraba of Dashboard Confessional (who is played, hilariously, as heart-on-sleeve comic relief)—attempting to save The Get-Up Kids from being attacked by Steven Tyler. It's a jokey game concept, but a clever one, and it turned out to be a starting point for Oda, who has since made numerous games for bands, most famously Skrillex Quest.

Digging in the Dirt

It's hard to remember these days, but there was once a period when we treated "multimedia," particularly that driven by full-motion video and CD-ROMs, as this hallowed concept that was going to change the way we interacted with games. In the end, it just turned out that CDs were simply a vessel for the games rather than a game-changing element. The only truly good example of an interactive multimedia adventure title was Myst, a point-and-click game that created numerous imitators. One of those imitators came from Peter Gabriel, whose Xplora 1, Peter Gabriel's Secret World borrowed heavily from the concept to create an in-depth way to research Gabriel's then-recent album Us. "This effort seems to be about the best one can do with the present state of multimedia," a Washington Post review backhandedly stated about the game. (You can sample the gameplay in this YouTube clip.)

Be Quick or Be Dead

The heavy metal band Iron Maiden has long had a quiet obsession with video games, and seeing an opportunity to show its fans that it could create a game they could actually enjoy, the band threw a first-person shooter in the package with its 1999 greatest-hits CD Ed Hunter. Unfortunately, the game—despite having a clever concept (the levels were based on the band's quite-awesome album covers)—failed to connect with its audience, because the game itself was in fact not awesome. "You ARE right, that does sound awesome, but in practice as opposed to theory, the game just fumbles this baby all the way across the field," RetroJunk's James Swift wrote of the game. "The enemies are repetitive, the controls are stiffer than a piece of plywood, and there is NOTHING even remotely resembling strategy going into the title." On the plus side, Iron Maiden has never really stopped trying to bring its iconic mascot Eddie the Head back into the world of gaming. They've had much better luck lately.

Get Back to Where You Once Belonged

Yes, yes, we know you know about the other video game featuring Paul McCartney. But did you know about the game Macca did for the Commodore 64? Yes, Macca did a game for the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, and it was based on his long-forgotten 1984 movie Give My Regards to Broad Street. The plot to the game is very Macca-esque: the master tapes to his new album have been lost, and while most of the album has been recovered, the first single hasn't been, so you're trying to get your band back together. (Side note: How many plots to games and movies are now null-and-void thanks to the cell phone?) The game is worth checking out for the chintzy 8-bit take on "Band on the Run," which plays repeatedly. (Should've gone with "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" if you ask me.) The ZX Spectrum version of the game is playable in your browser, by the way.

The crazy thing about all these games is that they were actually released and hit the market in a real way. Can you imagine some of the games that weren't?

Well, you don't have to imagine, because I can tell you about a couple of the failed projects: In 1989, the New Kids on the Block announced that they were making an NES game, which was never released. In 2009, however, a prototype box for the game surfaced on eBay. (No word on actual cartridges.)

And though it has never surfaced, Vanilla Ice was rumored to have been involved with an NES game called Rap Quest.

One music-related game that didn't get released but has been found in complete form is one based on the California Raisins franchise. It was made by Capcom, so it was actually good.

Before the world of gaming compartmentalized music games into something that required a fake guitar and the ability to tap buttons like a human metronome, this is the weirdness gamers had to look forward to.

The Arctic country of Greenland is one of the world's sparsest and most remote, but despite that, the country has had success in building unique culture.

10-15

Greenland's greatest rock band singlehandedly brought rock 'n' roll (and revolution) to the island

If you were a music fan living in Greenland in the 1970s, you most assuredly owned a copy of Sumé's Sumut. The record was revolutionary for a number of reasons. For one thing, it was a rock album in Greenland, sung in Greenlandic rather than Danish or English.

And it emphasized a message of freedom and sovereignty in an area that was treated as a second-class citizen to Denmark, which had colonized the region in the 1800s—taking over from Norway, which had colonized the land six centuries prior. The album was a huge success—and a quietly political record.

The record's politics start with the cover art for Sumut, which depicts the violent struggle between a legendary figure in Greenlandic culture named Qasapi and a Norse chief named Uunngortoq. The basic story of the battle between the mythic characters can be read in Google Books, but the long and short of it is that Qasapi won handily. (The man who created the artwork is equally legendary in Greenlandic culture, by the way; Aron of Kangeq was a 19th-century Inuit who went from being a seal hunter to the country's best-known artist, thanks to a cultural reassessment of his work during the 1960s.)

Also highlighting the politics of the record is the label it was released on. Demos, the Danish publishing arm of the anti-war Danish Vietnam Committees, released the album essentially as a way of taking a stance against imperialism. Denmark's control of Greenland was pretty much as imperialistic as you could get.

But when it comes down to it, the most political thing about Sumut was the fact that Sumé was singing songs in Greenlandic. It was the band's way of showing off some native cultural identity when Greenland was in severe danger of becoming culturally assimilated as a part of Denmark—a strategy that Denmark began to encourage after World War II by offering Greenlanders Danish citizenship and taking a more active role in the country's affairs.

(The assimilation is interesting to note when looking specifically looking in geographic terms, by the way. Nuuk is closer to Toronto than it is to Copenhagen, and the region's Inuit background clearly creates cultural ties between the island and northern Canada. However, it's challenging even now to travel to Greenland without going through Iceland or Copenhagen first, meaning it's easier to head to Greenland through Europe than through North America.)

Sumut however, showed a new path for Greenland that allowed the country to build its own cultural identity—keeping the traditional drum patterns and the native language—while embracing modern trends like the then-prevalent progressive rock that was popular in Europe and the United States.

That music, implicitly critical of the Danish government, quickly became associated with an independence movement in Greenland, one that saw success just a few years later. In 1979, Greenland was given a degree of home rule, allowing the country to start its own parliament and control over some internal policies. That home rule has expanded ever since and is expected to turn into full independence at some point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDm2DyPEnLo

Sumé, as a band, didn't last nearly that long, breaking up in 1977 after three albums. But their legacy long outlasted the band itself. In 2014, the band was the subject of a documentary, Sumé: The Sound of a Revolution, which makes the case that Sumé started the home-rule conversation in the country.

"Among other issues, Sumé's lyrics put [feelings] of alienation, loss of direction, and the reestablishment of own self-esteem into words and questioned people's indignation towards authority," director Inuk Silis Høegh said of the band's importance to Greenland. "I think all of those issues are just as much in play today as they were 40 years ago."

That's a pretty good way to sell a rock record, don't you think? Good news for you: The full album is available on YouTube.

"The cap is in place so that heavy users do not monopolize the network to the detriment of others. These practices also allow TELE Greenland to recover extremely high capital and operating costs to build and maintain networks. To be sure, users who want to stream video can pay for a package with a higher speed and data cap."

— The American Enterprise Institute's Roslyn Layton, discussing how Greenland's internet access relies on the aggressive use of data caps in an effort to ensure that access is available to everyone. AEI (which, it should be noted, is opposed to net neutrality) says that such a system, which basically forces people to pay for higher levels of bandwidth, helps to ensure that network offerings meant to benefit the public good go above those (like Netflix) that benefit just a few.

Five of Greenland's most popular musical acts

1. Nuuk has a posse, and that posse is pretty much the country's greatest gift to hip-hop. Active since the 1980s, Nuuk Posse has built a reputation for socially-conscious (and good) music, and the group—made up of Inuits, the largest population sector in the country—has managed to remain relevant in the country for decades.
2. Also from Nuuk but mostly based out of Copenhagen these days is Chilly Friday, a band with more of a grunge sound. Don't believe me? Compare this Bush song to this Chilly Friday song.
3. Perhaps the most popular act in Greenland these days is Nanook, an indie pop band, led by a duo of brothers, that has an acoustic-driven sound comparable to early Coldplay. The band comes from a musical family, one that runs one of the largest record labels in the country, Atlantic Music. (No, not that one, the other one.)
4. Slightly easier for non-Greenlanders to get into is the Qaqortoq-based Small Time Giants, an alternative rock band from the country that mostly sings in English. While there is some heart-on-sleeve stuff in their songs, it's hard to miss the political messages in like "3-9-6-0." Sample lyric: "We sold all we had at the end of the rainbow/we lost all we had when the sun set."
5. Greenland doesn't have its own version of American Idol or anything like that, which makes it one of those times that having ties to a European country comes in handy. Julie Berthelsen, a pop star in Denmark whose voice throws shades of Kelly Clarkson, grew up in Nuuk and found major success after being featured on the Danish edition of PopStars. She didn't win, but she became famous anyway.

"Natural performances from the native Greenlanders help anchor the film, while the amazing landscapes provide a rich backdrop for this lushly photographed odyssey. Technically, the film leaves nothing to be desired."

— Variety reviewer David Stratton, offering a blunt-but-thoughtful critical assessment of Heart of Light, the 1998 film that represents the first piece of Greenlandic cinema that was shot completely on the island. The film stars Rasmus Lyberth, a well-known musician from Greenland who plays an alcoholic in the film. The film industry, working from this starting point, has since produced dozens of films (including the Sumé documentary mentioned above), leading to Greenland Eyes, a traveling film festival that went to numerous countries between 2012 and 2015—including the United States.

Befitting Greenland's role as an outsider nation, the island tends to be the subject of a lot of outside-in cultural depictions, rather than the other way around. But too often, these depictions fail to actually tie in the native culture, instead overplaying the whole icy, remote element of the country.

Most famously, Happy Days lead Richie Cunningham joined the army and found himself stationed in Greenland for two seasons—conveniently, allowing Ron Howard to leave the show to become a director. Despite this remote assignment, he still managed to marry his girlfriend Lori Beth and have a kid with her. (No word on if Richie partook in the local culture while he was there.)

And Greenland isn't an unusual setting for video games. For example, the PC-based game series Penumbra largely takes place in Greenland, using the remote location to play up the horror elements of the game. The Playstation game Wipeout, meanwhile, used Greenland as a setting for some of its races.

More recently, Animal Planet pointed out the fact that there's gold and other noteworthy minerals in the glaciers, launching a series called Ice Cold Gold a couple years ago.

But the most depressing emphasis of Greenland as a nation that's only good for ice and cold is yet to come. Syfy is currently working to produce 51st State, a series that imagines Greenland being purchased by the United States and turned into a giant prison for all of its extra inmates.

There may only be less than 60,000 people there, but could we perhaps do a better job representing their pop culture in our pop culture?

The salad bar is something that many restauranteurs claim to have invented, but we know for sure that just one guy invented the sneeze guard.

"You know, I looked at what was the problem with restaurants. You'd go in, the waiter would come up to the table, maybe he wouldn't, and then he'd take an order, and disappear for a while. You'd fill up on bread. I said I want to let the customer see what he's getting. And that includes a salad."

— Norman Brinker, a groundbreaking restauranteur during the 1960s and 1970s, discussing his claimed invention of the salad bar concept for his Steak & Ale restaurant chain. Whether he did or not is a point of dispute, but he most certainly had the most success with it. (He also played a key role in the expansion of two other chains that you're probably more familiar with, Chili's and Bennigan's.) Brinker, who gained status as a business guru before his death, was a master at building a more casual approach to dining—hiring cheery college students instead of snooty waiters and creating a vibe that encouraged repeat visits. And to think, it all started with the salad bar.

Five other key points in salad bar history

1. In the 1950s, a restaurant called The Cliffs in Springfield, Illinois made its claim to being the originators of the "famous salad bar." This postcard in the Illinois Digital Archive also makes the case. The Cliffs (which had air conditioning!) came around nearly two decades before Steak & Ale.
2. Chuck's Steak House in Waikiki, first founded in 1959 is another of the claimants of having the first salad bar. The chain is still around today, somehow.
3. In 1971, the Chicago-based restaurant R.J. Grunts launched with a massive salad bar, complete with 40 different items. The restaurant, which ultimately begat a conglomerate called Lettuce Entertain You, was a key part of the salad bar becoming a trend in the 1970s.
4. The decision by Wendy's to go all-in on salad bars in 1979 started a trend of salad bars at fast-food outlets, and Wendy's was out front for much of that period—at one point extending the concept to a Superbar buffet. But Wendy's eventually pulled out of the concept entirely in 2006—long after its competitors did the same.
5. In the early 1990s, the salad bar concept began to evolve in big cities, so that many smaller restaurants began to try it on for size. This is around the time that the salad bar concept moved away from all-you-can-eat to the scale-based format, which is also used in grocery stores. "Salad bars have become the cafeterias of the 90's—cheap, convenient and with something for everyone," The New York Times wrote about them in 1994.

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(Photo by Grant/Flickr)

Pay by the pound: How Whole Foods ruined a good thing

It's arguable that the biggest problem Whole Foods has with the public is its scales. Its hot and cold salad bars, which would likely be considered a buffet if it didn't charge by the ounce, probably do more than anything else to give the chain its reputation as "Whole Paycheck."

Last year, the company found itself the target of some embarrassing headlines in New York City, which were caused in part due to "scales not being calibrated correctly." The company responded with a blog post and video titled "Addressing Weight and Pricing: A Message to Our Customers," which featured two contrite-looking co-CEOs. It's long been a big problem for the grocer, but it's been much more of one for consumers, who end up paying extra cash for those rubber-band-wrapped boxes.

(The company eventually settled with the city for $500,000.)

But let's assume the scales are calibrated correctly. The food's pretty good, but there's sure a lot of couscous, and heavy dressing in the mix. And at the hot bar, they sure are nudging you toward the mashed potatoes, the mac and cheese, and the red beans and rice, aren't they?

(Photo by Shoshanah/Flickr)

That's no accident, of course. Those salad bars are designed to be immensely profitable for Whole Foods, which most assuredly does not pay $8.99 per pound for all those ingredients.

Salad bars have in recent years become more aggressive at charging by weight, and they put out ingredients that are specifically designed to add weight, like croutons and dressings. (Many salad-bar strategy guides specifically recommend you buy the heavy ingredients separately and add them to your salad after the fact.)

But Whole Foods has taken this maximize-weight approach to a different level by putting particularly heavy things out there as options. The fried chicken and casserole prey on your worst nourishment tendencies, those moments of impulse that you would otherwise avoid at all costs. And for those who want to eat something more exotic—ooh, johnnycakes!—they have you covered, too.

They're tricking you into getting more than you actually want, and by the time you've realized you've put $20 of stuff into a biodegradable bowl, it's too late. It's not like you're gonna put that gravy-covered lump of mashed potato back, are you?

Whole Foods knows that this strategy is brilliant and effective, but it can in fact be defeated. In a 2011 New York Times Magazine piece, statistical genius Nate Silver recommended that people buy goods at the salad bar that cost as much or more elsewhere in the store. Instead of romaine lettuce, get in on the mesclun; get some blue cheese instead of the ranch; and get loads of exotic toppings, which often cost as much or more in the store than the salad you're getting.

The scales may not be calibrated properly, but there's still room for you to tip them in your favor.

"Being the germaphobe that he was, he couldn't stand people going down the Smorgasbords smelling things and having their noses too close to the food. He said to his engineers, 'We have to devise something—I don't want these people sneezing on the food.'"

— Barbara Kelley, the daughter of sneeze guard inventor Johnny Garneau, discussing the importance of the invention. The plate of glass separating your bacteria from the food that's just sitting out came about out of a desire for Garneau to innovate at his Pennsylvania smorgasbord business. His timing was opportune—just a few years after filing for a patent on the sneeze guard, the federal government took steps to require that every salad bar had one.

So going back to the start of the piece, it's worth asking—did those health inspectors who tried to put the kibosh on the school salad bars have a point? Even with the sneeze guards?

Last year, a South Carolina television station worked with a laboratory to test how safe a selection of salad bar food was. They overnighted the ingredients—a mix of raw and prepared food—to a Seattle-area lab, which did a variety of tests on the final result.

They found that while the food did not test positive for any of the tell signs of food poisoning—E. coli, listeria and salmonella—but much of the raw food did show signs of large numbers of microbes and coliform, some above the level of what was considered safe. But at the same time, IEH Laboratories CEO Dr. Mansour Samadpour tried to make clear that food isn't meant to be sterile, and that coliform levels can seem unnaturally high.

Still, though, it's a reminder that sneeze guards can only do so much.

Sound cards like the Creative Sound Blaster were the missing element that computers needed to take on multimedia. Then, they faded from view. Here's why.

The business oversight that created the market for sound cards

The IBM PC was created squarely for the business market, and while such machines were far more powerful than most video game consoles of the day, two places where they fell flat were video and audio.

The reason? At the time of the machine's initial release—particularly before clones came about—there was no real business case for a computer to support a wide array of graphics and sound. The graphics-heavy GUI as we know it was still years from becoming commonplace, and it wasn't like you needed robust sound capabilities when writing documents or crunching numbers.

While early IBM PCs had speakers, they effectively existed only to allow for error messages—and as a result were heavily crippled. As developers got their hands on these devices and moved beyond purely business programs, they eventually figured out ways to stretch this incredibly limited palette of sound using a hack called "pulse width modulation."

This eventually allowed for the PCs to make 6-bit digitized sounds—not enough, say, to play a pop song through your speakers, but plenty to make music for your average King's Quest game.

IBM, nor many early clone-makers, were really interested in improving the sound element much for the business computers, but they did try to make overtures to the home market. IBM's PCjr, released in 1984, had better sound capabilities, thanks to its use of the Texas Instruments SN76489 chip. You may not have owned a PCjr, but you've probably come across a SN76489, as the chip was used in many video game systems—both of the arcade variety and in home consoles like Sega Master System and Genesis. But the PCjr's lack of compatibility with PC software, along with its inability to play games very well, killed the machine on the market.

IBM's failure to improve the sound on its early machines left an opening for others to step into. At first, this meant buying a machine that wasn't IBM compatible. Atari's early computers, for example, used a capable sound chip it affectionately named "Pokey". Later, Commodore's Amiga, with its four-channel "Paula" chip, helped the computer build its reputation as a multimedia heavyweight.

Eventually, though, peripheral developers in the PC world spotted an opportunity of their own.

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Why the Sound Blaster broke through

The Sound Blaster wasn't the first attempt to create decent sound on an IBM PC. In fact, it wasn't even the first attempt by its creator, Creative Technology, to take on this market—it made its first attempt in 1987 with the launch of its Creative Music System, then in 1988 with its Game Blaster card.

Nor was it the only major player in the market. Also in 1987, a Canadian company called AdLib was the first major player to the musical computing market, and its device proved an early success. These cards relied on the Industry Standard Architecture, or ISA, expansion slots that had been common on IBM PCs since their 1981 release.

The complexity of this approach might sound a little surprising to those who missed the early PC era. Unlike a USB device that you might plug into your laptop, these expansion slots (which you had to open your machine to access) were fairly large and could generally just do one or two things. So one card might be a modem, and another might add a printer port to your machine. Desktop machines tended to only allow for two or three of these cards, while a tower could take half a dozen or more. But because you were plugging these cards directly into the motherboard, the result was a notable speed boost compared to an external device.

Complicating matters at the time was that peripherals didn't just work when you plugged them in—they required complex drivers, often a new one for every single program you installed. It was pretty much the opposite of "plug and play."

Anyway, as we mentioned earlier, AdLib's card relied on the Yamaha YM3812 FM synthesizer chip, which allowed it to create high-quality synthesized music. However, it couldn't play any type of audio file you threw at it, because it didn't support pulse-code modulation, or PCM. (PCM is the secret sauce that allows digital devices, like CD players or computers, to handle analog audio.)

Creative wasn't the first mover in the sound card market, but much like the clone-makers of the era did, the company took advantage of the fact that most computer chips weren't proprietary. In other words, the AdLib wasn't using unique chips, so Creative used those same chips and improved on AdLib's offering slightly, launching a fully compatible card with PCM support.

And because Creative was building its devices in Singapore rather than Canada, its production costs were a lot lower. It wasn't perfect—it could only play sound samples in mono, not stereo—but it was a huge leap forward for computer audio, especially on the PC. And Creative did it using off-the-shelf parts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hE9X8bxbG4

(Here's what it sounded like, by the way.)

On top of this, Creative made some smart strategic moves—it worked with a bunch of major game publishers to ensure that they supported the Sound Blaster natively, and also made drivers widely available to developers. Further, Creative added a game port on the back of the sound card—taking advantage of the fact that most computers of the era didn't have game ports—which gave gamers an incentive to buy.

The result was that, within a year, the Sound Blaster had become the de facto standard for the PC industry, and over the next few years, the company was able to iterate on this initial success, creating a product line that led its market for more than a decade.

"In Singapore, the no U-turn without sign culture has permeated every level of our thinking and every segment of our life. This no U-turn has created a way of life that is based on rules. When there is a U-turn sign or when there is a rule, we can U-turn. When there is no sign, we cannot U-turn. When there is no rule, we cannot do anything. We become paralyzed."

— Creative Technology founder Sim Wong Hoo, writing about the "No U-Turn Syndrome" that he claimed had permeated Singaporean culture. Sim's point, first explained in his 1999 book Chaotic Thoughts From the Old Millennium, is essentially his way of arguing that people from Singapore are often waiting for someone to tell them that to do before they take any action—something he argues shows up in driving, as Singaporeans won't take a U-turn unless explicitly told. Sim, who built a reputation as a business maverick in the culturally-conservative Singapore, argues that the mindset of inaction is incompatible with the modern business world. "We are moving faster and faster into many uncharted territories, where there are no rules," he adds. "We do not want to be paralyzed by waiting for the rule to be formulated before moving—it will be too late."

These days, Creative is still active in the technology space, though perhaps with a smaller profile than it had during its '90s heyday. It was an early competitor in the MP3 player market, hoping to take on the world with its Nomad device, but things changed one day when Apple decided it wanted to get in on the market itself.

Not that Creative didn't have passionate supporters.

"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame," Slashdot founder Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda infamously remarked about the iPod at the time.

As for its bread and butter, the Sound Blaster is still a centerpiece of the company's offerings, though a decision by Microsoft to effectively stop supporting hardware-based sound cards starting with Windows Vista—as well as improved computing power in general—turned sound cards, once a key purchase for any PC owner, into something that was no longer necessary. If you have a headphone jack, why do you need a dedicated sound card? Most people didn't have an answer.

Creative got around this problem by classing up its offerings—going back to its roots as a luxury for gamers. And because most people these days are more likely to own laptops or tablets than towers with room for extension cards, most Sound Blasters the company sells these days aren't sound cards in the traditional sense. Instead, they're more like mini-amplifiers that you put on your desk or in your pocket. They often support Bluetooth, and some of them, like the Sound Blaster X7, sell for hundreds of dollars.

Recently, Creative announced an elaborate speaker system called the X-Fi Sonic Carrier that it plans to sell for an absurd $5,000 when it gets in stores.

“The X-Fi Sonic Carrier is the epitome of high-end home theatre and high-end audio systems, made for people who appreciate the finer things in life,” Sim Wong Hoo said of the device. “It redefines the boundaries of the state of the art in the category. It is truly a work of art.”

Sure, it sounds over-the-top, and it probably is, but this guy has earned the right to sell $5,000 speakers. Don't expect him to make a U-turn now.

"Gut Guy," Xifaxan's infamous intestine-shaped mascot, is disturbing, but it's OK; he's gonna make Valeant Pharmaceuticals a billion dollars this year.

"While brands themselves are intangible concepts, mascots created and adopted by them act as protagonists of brands’ stories and endeavors. Brand mascots start out as being the personification of a brand’s value then make the brand’s personality more explicit through their characters, traits and mannerisms."

— Cardiff University Marketing Lecturer Adriana Campelo, discussing the nature of how companies use mascots to reflect the values of a brand, which include telling its story. So in the case of Xifaxan's Gut Guy, the brand's value is affiliated with the idea that your intestine won't have a similar impulse to Gut Guy if you take this prescription drug. But why use an intestine to make this point? Why not use, I don't know, anything else? Turns out, it's a challenge across the medical industry.

Five medical mascots attempting to put a cute face on gross topics

1. "All I want is to get under here and live under your nail." — Digger the Dermatophyte, an annoying piece of toenail fungus that made its name by promoting Lamisil. Digger is something of a ground-breaker in the world of pharmaceutical mascots, first appearing way back in 2003.
2. "It's a mucus family reunion!" — Mr. Mucus, the mascot for the over-the-counter drug Mucinex, taking the snottiest tone possible before the drugs kick in. (He was recently redesigned, by the way, and is now voiced by T.J. Miller.)
3. “I just checked and I am way more than half full today. It's going to be a great day!” — Petey P. Cup, the mascot for HealthPartners, a healthcare firm in Minnesota. As you might guess by the mascot's name, the firm does drug testing. As you might not have guessed, he has a partner named Pokey the Syringe.
4. "I'm your prostate—I know urinary issues when I see them!" — Wally, the mascot for Rapaflo, a medication for dealing with enlarged prostates. As pharmaceutical blogger Pharmaguy helpfully points out, Wally looks a heckuva lot like a walnut.
5. "The worry your pipes might leak means you don't always detour from your route." — The voiceover from a commercial for Vesicare, an overactive bladder medication that promotes its products using pipe-shaped people.

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How medical advertising became a symptom of pharmaceuticals' high prices

The United States has a few things in common with New Zealand. Both countries used to be British colonies, both countries tend to speak English, and each country has taken a liking to the music of Lorde.

But perhaps the most unusual thing the two countries have in common is that they're the only two countries in the world that allow for direct-to-consumer medical advertising for prescription drugs. And New Zealand, which approved the move in 1981, was something of a trailblazer on the move—the U.S. didn't allow for the same until 1997.

But the decision has always been an uncomfortable one for the medical industry, which associates the rise of direct-to-consumer advertising with the increasing prices of drugs. In fact, the American Medical Association last year voted in favor of a resolution that would recommend banning such ads from the airwaves, claiming that they helped raise the prices of drugs.

“Today’s vote in support of an advertising ban reflects concerns among physicians about the negative impact of commercially-driven promotions, and the role that marketing costs play in fueling escalating drug prices,” the association's board chair, Patrice A. Harris, M.D., said in a statement. “Direct-to-consumer advertising also inflates demand for new and more expensive drugs, even when these drugs may not be appropriate.”

For drug-makers, let's be honest, this advertising works—no matter how ugly the use cases may often be. The average American spends just under $1,000 per year on pharmaceuticals, according to statistics from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development gathered by PBS Newshour.

That level is far above any other developed country—including 40 percent above second-place Canada and more than three times what New Zealand spends. There are a number of reasons for this, including the higher rates of certain diseases in the United States, but some of it is also the fact that brand-name drugs are so expensive.

In fact, those high drug costs lead to the fast rise of generics in the U.S. as soon as they come on the market. After a patent expires, a generic drug quickly takes over the market share.

Which is why drug-makers like Valeant need to flog their cash cows now before their investment fades from view. They can only flog the patent for Xifaxan for so long, and there are a lot of research dollars to recoup, a lot of testing that went into the drug that led to Gut Guy.

Something tells me New Zealand's pharmaceutical ad industry isn't nearly as disturbing as our own.

"[Irritable bowel syndrome is] pretty simple to self-diagnose, so we think that going directly to the patients to make them aware of the treatment for this … will really drive demand."

— J. Michael Pearson, the CEO of Valeant Pharmaceuticals, discussing the strategy that the company used when planning its advertising campaign for Xifaxan. Pearson claimed that the ad would be a supercharged version of the company's 2015 Super Bowl ad for the toenail fungus treatment Jublia. According to one estimate, Valeant had spent more than $20 million on Xifaxan ads just last fall, on top of the $5 million Super Bowl ad. All that money spent on the second-worst-rated Super Bowl ad, according to USA Today … just ahead of another Jublia ad.

One thing you may have missed when you saw all the clips of Martin Shkreli stonewalling a Congressional committee last week was the fact that he wasn't alone in Congress' crosshairs.

Also there was Valeant's interim CEO, Howard Schiller, who attempted to defend the firm's high prices for the generic drugs Isuprel and Nitropress. (Pearson was out of commission due to pneumonia.)

Schiller's argument wasn't nearly as divisive as Shkreli's smirking, but it nonetheless shouldn't be missed.

"When these drugs are priced to reflect more closely their true clinical value, the more accurate price signals incentivize generic competition and innovation," Schiller said, according to Business Insider. "Higher prices draw generic competitors into the market, which in turn tends to put significant downward pressure on prices."

Granted, this argument is in terms of generic drugs rather than brand-name drugs like Xifaxan, but it's still worth pondering this argument in action. So many drugs out there are in the hands of just a few companies, or in the case of patented drugs, one company.

Often, these companies are fighting between a variety of masters, including the massive costs of research and development, the needs of Wall Street, the health of the public, and what consumers are willing to pay for drugs. In this equation, without some form of regulation, the consumer usually loses out—being sold drugs they probably don't need at prices they can't afford.

The scope of some of these drugs blows up the budgets everywhere—advertising, research, mergers—and those costs get paid down to hospitals or medical facilities, and eventually … you.

It's enough to make you sick.

The average barber shop or hair salon for some reason has a major aversion to credit cards despite their wide use. Blame the economics of being a barber.

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(Photo by Randy von Liski/Flickr)

Many businesses rent buildings. Many hair stylists rent chairs.

To understand the issues that lead many barber shops to skip credit cards, it's important to understand the big differences between your traditional restaurant or retail outlet and most independent hair salons.

Despite the fact that barber shops function similarly to retail outlets—a person comes in, orders something, and receives the service in question—the average barber or hair stylist gets paid using a system that's closer to a taxi driver or freelance employee.

And this breaks down by putting the hair stylist in a spot which requires them to either rent out a chair for a flat fee each month, or pay a significant share of their earnings to the salon owner. Like an Uber driver, the people who make the most money at a hair salon or barber shop are the ones who are the most active and have the best rating.

(It should be noted that this isn't the case at chains like SuperCuts, where payment structures tend to be comparable to a low-wage retail gig. Perhaps this is why you'll never have a problem using a credit card, or even a gift card, at SuperCuts.)

Jay the Barber, a prominent NYC-based hair stylist known for his Barber Quest instructional DVDs, says that it generally makes sense for barbers who are new to the business to insist on a commission-based rate, in part because it takes time to build up clients.

Once you've managed to to build up a name for yourself, renting becomes the best option available. That said, renting a building in a large city tends to be expensive, meaning that it can be a challenge to cover basic costs by simply accepting rent. So not every salon offers the option.

"If they do rent chairs, renting chairs is the way to go because you make more money," Jay said in a 2012 YouTube clip on the issue.

It's this somewhat convoluted business structure that creates problems when it comes to credit cards.

"Tax evasion is relatively common, especially among both-rental salon workers. For example, to avoid paying costly payroll taxes on one or two employees, owners will sometimes make arrangements with the employees to pay them a higher wage in exchange for keeping things 'under the table' or for accepting a subcontractor form 1099 at the end of the year that defines the employee as working on a peer-job basis."

— A notable passage from the dramatically named 2015 academic paper Sex, Drugs, and Deception: Deviance in the Hair Salon Industry. The paper, which highlights a number of other questionable elements of the hair salon world, nonetheless adds a valid point to the hair stylist equation—if a salon was only requiring its patrons to pay in cash, it would be easier to avoid paying taxes on the income they receive. Oh yeah, it'd also be easier to launder money if they wanted to. Not saying that many salons are doing so like the authors are suggesting, but they certainly could. (Worth noting: one of the authors of this study, Keene State College's Angela Barlow, worked in this industry for more than two decades, so she has some first-hand experience on how the industry works.)

(photo by dotpolka/Flickr)

The role transaction fees play for barber shops

The credit card situation highlights an interesting dichotomy for hair stylists. Because the way that they get paid is so direct, they more acutely feel the pain of accepting credit cards than CVS or Old Navy might. (Not that CVS or Old Navy are particularly happy with those fees—just take a look at the drama this long-running lawsuit has raised—but they work at such a large scale that the cost-benefit ratio is pretty high.)

Doing some barber shop math here: If you charge $20 for your average haircut and do about 15 haircuts per day, five days a week, that's $1,500 a week, or $6,000 per month. Let's say that you're working a commission deal with the barber shop at a 60/40 split—so the breakdown for you is that you're getting 60 percent of $72,000.

You'll most likely get tips, and you'll have slow and busy days, but if we go for an average of 15 people per day, you're making $43,200 per year, before taxes. (And that may be a little on the high end of things; the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the average barber wage at $28,800 per year.)

You'll probably have to buy some supplies with that money, such as a fresh set of hair clippers, a broom, and some Barbicide to ensure that you're offering your customers sanitary cuts. Those supplies will add up and probably take a big chunk out of what you're making, but you have to start somewhere.

Now, talking in credit terms, if you're working through Costco to buy your supplies—which is quite likely—you might see their Elavon payment processing service and think, hey, this might be a good idea. But then you do the math. For each transaction, you're paying 1.22 percent to the payment processor for each $20 transaction, on top of a 12-cent charge for each card swipe.

The device you'd be buying? That costs $459—which effectively adds another 12 cents to each transaction until the device is paid off. And even after you pay off the device, it comes with maintenance costs; devices break, need paper, stuff like that.

So for each transaction you make, you're paying around 48 cents, which doesn't sound like a lot, but then you do the math—that cost is $1,728 per year, or nearly what you'd take home after a two-week period. You're already running on a relatively tight budget, so that extra cost is felt a little more acutely than if you're running a much larger business.

You could always go with something like Square, where the device is cheap or free, but the fees there are actually a bit more painful—2.75 percent for each transaction, or 55 cents per haircut. That's $2,145 out of your pocket each year. That sucks.

But here's the question I have: How many potential customers walk out of a salon after finding out that they can't charge their haircut, and they don't want to be on the hook for a potential charge of $2 or more from the no-name ATM in the corner? (Disclosure: Part of the reason I'm writing this is because I'm that guy.)

If the answer to that question is just one per day, that one person whose hair can now be cut more than makes up for the lost costs of accepting a credit card. It requires the barber to stay a little bit longer, but that value proposition of the credit card pays for itself right away, more than covering the additional costs incurred by the 50 cents you're losing for each customer—and then some.

And hey, you make more money by admitting that the customer is right.

Still though, I admit that I do get the reason why hair stylists might get frustrated about this state of affairs.

As I was researching this post, I ran into a Quora page that featured people attempting to answer the basic question about why so many barber shops don't accept credit cards. The response that stuck with me most was an anonymous comment left by a hair salon owner who said that they had stopped allowing customers to tip with their credit cards.

Their reasoning? Because the tips go through a payment processor rather than directly to the stylist, this leads to tips getting paid out of the till, and those tips have to suddenly be taxed and reported. This state of affairs, the person explains, leaves the facility more open to auditing and financial headaches that could hurt the business.

"[It's] not worth losing my business for someone who is to lazy to bring $5 to $20 in cash for a tip when they know they are coming to the salon to get their services, they made the appointment," the anonymous author wrote. "Why should I have to lose money just because it's easier to flash it on the card?"

The thing is, a lot of people would rather never have to carry cash, but the salons and barber shops of the world are working on such tight margins that credit cards just make their lives a real pain in the butt. The real solution here might be a little more flexibility for small businesses, who don't have the time to deal with bureaucracy like this.

Either that, or we could just cut our own hair.

Audiobooks are common these days, but advocates for those with vision disabilities saw their value early—as well as the value of the vinyl record.

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The technical considerations of early audiobooks

The strategy that eventually went into use in creating some of the earliest audiobooks is best explained through a couple of different forms of media technology that you might be more familiar with. Here goes:

If you're willing to lose quality, you gain space. If you went to Blockbuster back in the day, odds are generally pretty good that you'd rent a tape that's around two hours long. But if you went to your local Radio Shack, you'd find video tape that would let you record for hours at a time. Those tapes are still available, and can hold up to 12 hours of material. But the thing you give up for that extra length is quality. Fragmenting, for example, is incredibly common, as is visual noise.

Sometimes, lower sound quality is OK. For example, FM radio is clearly better in every way than AM radio, and relies on the improved bandwidth to bring high-quality music to your car. But that AM bandwidth still comes in handy for certain uses that don't need such fidelity—you don't need FM quality to make out the thoughts of Rush Limbaugh or Art Bell. And going even further, Shortwave radio has even lower quality—but gains massive reach. It's all give and take.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05w0omnsndw

Vinyl records came in different speeds. Different records play at revolutions per minute, or RPM, which allows the audio to take up differing amounts of space. And records didn't always follow the traditional formats that you might find in stores, which these days usually come in 12-inch 33⅓ RPM albums and 7-inch 45 RPM singles. During the 1930s and 1940s, for example, radio stations would syndicate shows using gigantic 16-inch vinyl records called transcription discs. (They're pretty rare, but they pop up on YouTube occasionally.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doz1QJ7LwjA

Finally, vinyl is quirky and endlessly fascinating. There's a vinyl-head phenomenon that's cropped up over the past decade where people take 45 RPM records and slow them down to 33⅓ RPM, which turns Dolly Parton's classic "Jolene" into a Ray Lamontagne song and Michael Jackson into Luther Vandross. (It also works the other way, as well—I can't find a clip on YouTube to prove this, but speeding up The Beatles' "Let it Be" from 33⅓ RPM to 45 RPM basically turns it into a lost Jackson 5 song.) For people of a certain mindset, this is like the coolest rabbit hole ever.

In their own small ways, ideas driving each of the above concepts apply to the earliest audiobooks.

How "Talking Books" got vinyl records spinning

The Library of Congress, with the help of the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), borrowed from many of the concepts mentioned above in building the technology that became "Talking Book Records."

In fact, the earliest format that went into general use was a 12-inch, 33⅓ RPM vinyl record, very similar to the kind you can find at Urban Outfitters today. Vision-impaired readers were among the first to use this format, at a time when the public was still living life at 78 RPM.

How did the American Foundation for the Blind get their hands on vinyl at a time when everyone else was still using fragile shellac? Credit AFB for doing its due diligence and keeping its eyes on new technologies to make audiobooks feasible from a cost perspective. In 1927, the foundation reached out Frank L. Dyer, a onetime associate of Thomas Edison who had recently patented a process for creating high-capacity "talking machine records."

These records were roughly album-length—30 minutes per side—but the quality of the sound produced was closer to talk radio than music. In other words, it was perfect for books.

By getting Dyer interested in the project early, AFB and the Library of Congress were able to take advantage of his patents on a royalty-free basis. By 1935, the federal government—working with more than $200,000 in funding allotted to the Works Progress Administration (WPA)—started producing 5,000 talking-book machines, which allowed vision-impaired people to listen to audiobooks, often at a library.

The machines were a particularly important part of the equation due to the fact that 33⅓ RPM record players didn't become common until after WWII.

These days, 12-inch vinyl records—which later got past their technical weaknesses and are now considered to have masterful sound—are associated more closely with the Beatles and the heady years of rock 'n' roll than they are with audiobooks, and audiobooks themselves became more closely affiliated with the cassette tape thanks to the 1975 founding of Books on Tape, but the efforts of AFB and the Library of Congress to ensure vision-impaired people have the opportunity to read kept record players and vinyl records specifically in production all the way up to the 1990s.

The era of smartphones and CDs may have changed the format, but it hasn't stopped the mission. The Library of Congress' National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped remains active to this day—with AFB's help still strong.

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Perhaps the most surprising part about the creation of vinyl audiobooks for blind audiences is the fact that there was a very prominent early critic of this approach: Helen Keller, The Miracle Worker herself.

Keller, a groundbreaking deaf and blind woman who worked with AFB for more than four decades, was not immediately convinced that the foundation should be working on audiobooks or even transcribed books in Braille, arguing her point in economic terms: During a time when people are struggling to find work, why should the foundation put so much energy into a purely educational effort?

"Will radios and talking-books take the place of food, shelter and clothing? Naturally I am not willing to divert the attention of the public to talking-books while more urgent needs of the sightless demand first service," Keller wrote to a friend in February 1935.

That skepticism in the end didn't stop her from taking a key role in its launch. Eventually she decided to change her mind on opposing the project, realizing she could be a roadblock in its success within the organization, and became a key advocate for it in front of both Congress and the President Roosevelt. Her book Midstream was even used as a technology sample.

In September of 1935, Roosevelt signed an executive order funding the Talking Books project—and putting AFB in charge of it.

Keller was ambivalent toward the final result, especially as it didn't benefit her personally because she was deaf, but she knew when it was time to help.

For a brief time in the '90s, publishers thought that CD-ROM magazines were the future. But, as it turned out, readers were more interested in the internet.

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Five examples of the kind of content you'd find on a CD-ROM magazine

1. Previews of upcoming CD-ROMs: In case you weren't already impressed enough with the CD-ROM inside your CD-ROM drive, these magazines would preview much better CD-ROMs you should buy instead. Here's an example of what this sort of intensely meta offering looks like.
2. Mystery meat navigation: You remember how some early websites had designs where you never knew where to click? CD-ROM menus were like that, multiplied to 11. Watch this poor guy attempt to click through this Nine Inch Nails story on the first issue of Substance Digizine. He has no clue what to do!
3. New age music: Considering this is the platform that brought us Myst, it only makes sense that one of the CD-ROM magazines out there, NautilusCD, had a deal with the record label Windham Hill, which had built a name for itself as the new age label du jour.
4. AOL installers: It was the '90s, and you had a CD-ROM. What did you expect?
5. For some reason, wire stories. Medio Magazine, which promoted its offering with the tagline "like a new encyclopedia every month," felt like there would be an audience for a periodical-style version of Encarta, which according to Variety, was loaded with old Associated Press copy, proving to the world that Google couldn't come along soon enough.

The founder of Maxim spent $5 million trying to make CD-ROM magazines happen

It makes a lot of sense that Felix Dennis was the guy behind the magazine Maxim. The British publisher, who died in 2014, was prominent enough to receive an out-and-out obituary in The Economist, but whose reputation was such that the obit almost immediately called him "a hedonist" and spoke of Dennis' masterful ability to spend millions of dollars on all sorts of excesses.

Almost immediately after starting his career with the counterculture magazine Oz, Dennis went to jail on an obscenity charge, only for John Lennon to step in and record a charity single to help pay the magazine's legal fees.

To put it lightly, Dennis was a bit of a risk-taker, which is probably why the idea of a CD-ROM magazine appealed to his sensibilities. In 1994, his company Dennis Publishing launched the first edition of Blender, a monthly pop-culture magazine designed to appeal to the multimedia crowd.

Star power was not lacking from the magazine, which offered a nice halfway point between MTV-style interviews and print. Early issues featured interviews with Bjork and Devo, and numerous vignettes featuring a pre-Daily Show Jon Stewart.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EKAC2d0o98

"Hey you're watching Blender," TMBG's John Flansburgh said at the start of one video. "It's interactive! Click on my face! Click on my damn face!"

Dennis invested $5 million of his money into the effort, hoping to see some dividends. He did not, with the initiative failing to sell enough copies to recoup its operating costs.

"I loved it. So did the rest of the media. We won a zillion awards. The designers and editors were fêted and rivals began to prowl around the corridors wondering if Blender meant the death of ink-on-paper magazines. They needn't have worried," Dennis wrote in his cheekily titled book How to Get Rich.

The CD-ROMs stopped rolling off the presses in 1997. (You can find some copies of the CDs on the Internet Archive, though you're on your own in getting them to actually run.) As a brand, however, Blender didn't die right away. At first, Blender tried to live on as an interactive television app for Mac and Windows users, but that didn't catch on either. In 2001, however, Blender returned in its most successful form—a traditional print-and-digital music magazine. Prior to the magazine's relaunch, loading up Blender.com on your browser brought up this fairly self-aware comment on the nature of the CD-ROM magazine.

"Blender pre-dated and predicated much of the interface design and high-bandwidth technologies available today, but after three years our distribution model had clearly been eclipsed by the Internet," the website stated, according to the Internet Archive.

Not that Blender survived to the present day. The magazine stopped publishing in 2009 and the website now redirects to Maxim.

There will be no charity singles written in its honor.

"Quick: What are the most compelling features of a magazine? Exactly: You can take it to the john. You can throw it under the desk when your boss walks in. You can rip off the cover and post it on the wall or rip out that stink bomb of a perfume ad and throw it away. In short, a magazine is disposable, portable, malleable."

— Entertainment Weekly critic Ty Burr, basically nailing a major problem with CD-ROM magazines in a roundup that reviewed most of the popular ones of the era. (LAUNCH had yet to, uh, launch at the time Burr wrote his piece.) To be honest, this problem wasn't really solved with digital magazines until the point that the smartphone came along and was good enough to produce a magazine-style experience on a tiny screen.

CD-ROM magazines figured out one thing online journalism never has

The downfall of CD-ROM magazines, when you get down to it, is very similar to the issue that faced digital magazines upon the launch of the iPad—to put it simply, they're designed to be single-source media outlets at a time when we read dozens of media outlets a day.

Unlike when The Daily or any of the Apple Newsstand apps appeared, however, this wasn't a foregone conclusion. The New York Times had yet to appear online in 1994. Heck, Wired hadn't even unleashed the banner ad onto the world until September of that year. It was entirely possible that the future of journalism was going to involve a handful of in-depth experiences with multimedia each week, much like with magazines.

What publishers didn't anticipate, however, was that consumers would become omnivores of journalism. Instead of eating one or two large meals a day, we forage for information online—and have a lot of shallow experiences with tiny pieces of content every minute of every hour of every day.

Websites that better adapted to these kinds of consumption habits—Slate and Salon, which first came on the scene in 1995, and Pitchfork, which launched the next year—are still with us. None of the CD-ROM magazines, made it to the present day, even in radically revamped forms. In a lot of ways, it's because audiences began to treat the kinds of experiences embraced by LAUNCH and Blender as toys, rather than journalism.

This didn't bode well for journalism's advertising model, which relied on in-depth interactions with copy, rather than short, omnivorous clicks. Despite efforts to optimize and target using our personal data, the ad market is arguably still broken to this day—putting too much of an onus on the editorial content to bend to its will rather than sitting next to the editorial copy because it wants to be there.

These CD-ROM magazines at least tried to sell the latter approach, even though we ended up with the former. LAUNCH, with its per-megabyte rates and consistent approach, was more successful than most.

"In some ways, we were too early. What we got most of the attention for was advertising. People had never seen advertising on their computer. We had a lot of investors tell us: ‘No one will ever want to advertise on computer.’ Very well respected, successful venture capitalists," LAUNCH Media founder Dave Goldberg explained in an interview last year.

Goldberg and LAUNCH proved investors wrong, but ultimately, the magazine's ad model looked nothing like how advertising works on the internet today.

The tough part about this story, sort of the challenging thing I have to touch on at this point in the text, is what happened to Dave Goldberg after he spent years innovating in the CD-ROM magazine space. (His idea, by the way, had fans: One such enthusiast has painstakingly gathered every issue at this WordPress site.)

LAUNCH Media almost made a successful pivot away from CD-ROM based magazines by launching one of the first internet radio services. And it had big backers, too: it worked closely with Yahoo at a time when that meant something. Unfortunately, it waded into internet radio at the peak of the Napster era, leading to numerous lawsuits against the company.

Yahoo bought the company essentially to avoid being exposed to lawsuits itself, though the internet giant still had a mess to clean up.

Goldberg's story, for years, was one of success: he worked at Yahoo for six years, got married, had kids, and later became the CEO of SurveyMonkey. He was considered a mentor to many in Silicon Valley.

But last year, things changed dramatically, and in an instant. While on vacation in Mexico last year with his wife, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, he had an accident while exercising, and died tragically. You may have heard about this—it was a fairly big story when it happened. And it remains a tragic, senseless thing that no amount of me writing will make any sense of. In fact, the only person who has even gotten close is his widow.

"I have learned gratitude. Real gratitude for the things I took for granted before—like life," Sandberg wrote a month after Goldberg's death. "As heartbroken as I am, I look at my children each day and rejoice that they are alive. I appreciate every smile, every hug. I no longer take each day for granted."

This is not the best way to end this issue of Tedium. But sometimes, a trip down the long tail means you have to take some unexpected, dark turns along the way. Sometimes, tragedy touches even the tedious.

We’re getting better at converting saltwater to drinkable freshwater, but the environmental costs of the desalination process aren’t cheap.

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The time Thomas Jefferson humored a guy who thought he invented desalination

The process of converting saltwater to freshwater was once an idea of such novelty that it could convince founding fathers to listen to regular people.

Just ask Thomas Jefferson, who spent more than a year humoring a guy who thought he created a surefire desalination process. During a 1790 trip to Newport, Rhode Island, the Secretary of State was given a bottle of purified saltwater by a guy named Jacob Isaacks.

Isaacks, then 71 years old, claimed his proprietary mixture could be added to saltwater and would then filter it just enough to drink. Jefferson, tasked with researching things that would be beneficial to the fledgling U.S. military, took Isaacks' idea seriously, going so far as to create a team of people—including two chemistry professors—to see if they could confirm that Isaacks' idea worked.

The group found that at the very least that the water was slightly better than an untreated equivalent.

"The distilled water in all these instances was found on experiment to be as pure as the best pump water of the city: it’s taste indeed was not as agreeable; but it was not such as to produce any disgust," Jefferson recalled in a 1791 report on Isaacks' creation. "In fact we drink in common life in many places and under many circumstances and almost always at sea a worse tasted, and probably a less wholesome water."

The results were ultimately disappointing, however, as Jefferson and his fellow experimenters could not prove that Isaacks method of production actually removed the salt. "Mr. Isaack's mixture does not facilitate the separation of seawater from its salt," Jefferson stated in an affidavit immediately after the experiment.

Ultimately, Isaacks realized that working with Jefferson on his bajillion-dollar idea was a bit of a dead end, and he began researching other options for his technology, including some promising leads in Europe. Problem was, Jefferson was constitutionally bound to put together a report on desalination, and that report ultimately wasn't favorable to Isaacks' business prospects. Isaacks sent a letter to Jefferson asking him to delay the release of the report, but the secretary of state only received the letter hours after he had submitted the report to Congress.

The lengthy report highlighted the fact that desalination had a history long before Thomas Jefferson knew who Jacob Isaacks was—in other words, Isaacks didn't actually invent desalination. In his letter to Isaacks soon after submitting the report, the future president pointed out a truism of inventing things that's sort of the inversion of Must-See TV: just because it's new to you doesn't mean it's new.

"That the discovery was original as to yourself I can readily believe," Jefferson wrote in his letter to Isaacks. "Still it is not the less true, that the distillation of fresh from seawater, both with and without mixtures, had been long ago tried, and that without a mixture, it produced as much and as good water as in your method with a mixture."

Jefferson may not have had a choice in the matter, but Isaacks was mighty pissed off when he found out.

"Altho’ you were not in possession of my secret which I am fearful wou’d have shared the same fate, you must be thoroughly senceable of the injury that report has done me by making it of Publick use without any advantage to the Discoverer," Isaacks wrote in a very angry letter to Jefferson.

Ultimately though, Jefferson was right—and Isaacks is a guy known to history basically for bugging a future president repeatedly for a couple of years.

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(Carlsbad Desalination Plant/YouTube Screenshot)

Why environmentalists don't think industrial-scale desalination is a great idea

We've come a long way from the days of Jacob Isaacks and Thomas Jefferson, and now we actually have a variety of processes for desalination that can be replicated around the world—just in time to help parts of the world struggling with drought.

But as a lot of environmentalists will tell you, anything manmade is a process of give and take, and the take of converting saltwater to freshwater is a bit more than the give.

"Desalination: A National Perspective," a 2008 report on the issue by the National Research Council, found that the issues of desalination are often complex and vary based on the specific location. The use of greenhouse gases in producing desalinated water is common, and on top of that, the process can destabilize a local ecosystem and even hurt wider biodiversity throughout the ocean.

"A variety of environmental impacts are possible with desalination. Seawater desalination can cause impingement and entrainment of marine organisms and create ecological impacts from concentrate discharge," the report stated at one point. "Desalination of inland brackish groundwater sources could lead to groundwater mining and subsidence, and improper concentrate management practices can negatively affect drinking water aquifers and freshwater biota."

However, the council noted that research on how desalination can affect specific sites isn't quite there yet.

"Site-specific information necessary to make detailed environmental conclusions on the ecological impacts of both source water withdrawal and concentrate management associated with desalination is lacking," the report added.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT5C6o7kfaI

The result of these environmental concerns is that plants like the Carlsbad plant mentioned above, and a similar plant being discussed in nearby Huntington Beach, are frequently the subject of controversy. It doesn't help that these plants spit extra-briney water back into the ocean in the process of removing the salt for human consumption.

And California is far from alone. Australia has been dealing with similar issues for decades—dry periods come and put desalination back on the table, then it starts raining again, and plans to build desalination plants get paused. Currently, though, Australia is in build mode.

It's a challenging situation, and the end result is simply not going to make everyone happy. But hey, maybe they can mine the result for lithium in the process.

"Human kidneys can only make urine that is less salty than salt water. Therefore, to get rid of all the excess salt taken in by drinking seawater, you have to urinate more water than you drank. Eventually, you die of dehydration even as you become thirstier."

— The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, helpfully explaining why you can't drink saltwater. Generally, our bodies can't handle drinking saltwater, because it contains more salt than human blood does, and as a result, throws stuff out of whack. In other words, if you're stuck on a desert island, follow the advice of the Dave Matthews Band. Don't drink the water.

Ultimately, though, we have a huge problem—way too much water that humans can't drink—and there are really only two ways to take the pressure off of the massive amount of resource use already going on: either we figure out ways to produce more water, or we consume less.

As the phenomenon of lawn care proves, we're going to have a hell of a hard time consuming less H2O, so what we're really looking for is a solution that can clean a heck of a lot of water in parts of the world that don't get a lot of freshwater naturally. On top of that, the solution has to be relatively cheap, it has to be sustainable, and it has to work in areas that electrical lines don't necessarily reach.

The closest we've gotten to this seemingly impossible goal came in 2014 from a few smart researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The researchers, working with a base that necessitated all of these requirements—villages in India that survive off the electrical grid and have "brackish" groundwater, which is partly contaminated with salt—came up with a solution that was relatively small in size, worked only on solar energy, and could be put pretty much anywhere.

Last year, the MIT team beat out 68 engineering teams from around the world to win the Desal Prize, a $140,000 award handed out by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

That should come in handy as the team works on a $11,000 version of the device that can create enough fresh water for an entire village.

The ability to do multiple things well, or multipotentiality, is a big problem for some people. Why? Because they're often stuck having to choose one thing.

The problem with being good at multiple things is that people usually want you to choose one

The reason that Louis C.K. has managed to stand out as an entertainer in recent years is largely in part because he's a singular talent. Yes, stand-up is his forté, but he has other artistic wrinkles he's learned over the years, some of which he picked up when working on other things.

He spent years as a writer for a number of late-night shows, and he gained his chops with the camera by working at a public-access TV station when he was a kid. Every little failure eventually turned into a success.

And not everyone can do that, but Louie is fortunately in a field where such ingenuity is rewarded. Mitch Hedberg had a great joke about this, which you can watch here or read below:

I got into comedy to do comedy, which is weird, I know. But when you're in Hollywood and you're a comedian, everybody wants you to do things besides comedy. They say, 'OK, you're a stand-up comedian—can you act? Can you write? Write us a script!' They want me to do things that are related to comedy but are not comedy. That's not fair. It's as though if I were a cook and I worked my ass off to become a good cook, they said, 'All right, you're a cook—can you farm?'

Hedberg, who died in 2005, was the opposite of Louie in every way that matters—he was a gifted joke-teller but one who leaned more on wordplay and one-liners than observational storytelling, and, like he says above, he got into comedy to do stand-up, not a bunch of other unrelated things.

That's OK! Plenty of people are good at just one thing, but the problem is that, unlike in the entertainment industry, we expect people in most fields to stay in the lines. If someone is a good writer, we don't ask them to design the cover for their book even if they have an eye for layout.

We don't want our scientists to pursue creative interests, and we think our MBAs should be focused on the bottom line, not their garage bands.

But is it OK to be not just a jack of all trades, but a master of more than one?

"The notion of the narrowly focused life is highly romanticized in our culture. It's this idea of destiny or the one true calling, the idea that we each have one great thing we are meant to do during our time on this earth, and you need to figure out what that thing is and devote your life to it. But what if you're someone who isn't wired this way?"

— Emilie Wapnick, the founder and creative director of Puttylike, speaking at a TED conference last year. Wapnick is an advocate for "multipotentialites," or people who don't have a singular creative focus—and she just so happens to be one of those people. She graduated from law school, spent time as a singer-songwriter, has web design skills, and (as you might guess by the fact she did a TED talk) is a talented public speaker. And Wapnick tends to give things up all the time! "Once I no longer feel inspired in a field, I simply move on," she explains on her website. "Some people call this 'quitting,' I call it growth."

Multipotentiality is cool, but what if you're stuck trying to make up your damn mind?

The problem for "multipotentialites" is that, unfortunately, you can't always combine your many interests into a single job, or even two jobs.

You may be a good writer, a budding scientific mind, an innovative visual artist, someone who knows their way around a Unix command line, and even a masterful home brewer. But the odds of you finding a job that brings together even two of these skill sets is extremely low. And that leaves you in a position where you have to decide: what the hell do you want to do with your life? Where will you make your money, and where will you allow your freak flag to fly?

Some folks, like author John Green, have managed to combine their skills in unique ways—he's an author who moonlights on YouTube and is really talented at hanging out with his brother. But those people are few and far between. Combining skills is simply really freaking hard, especially if you're working on someone else's dime.

I don't personally consider myself a multi-hyphenate—more a wanna-hyphenate, really—but I think the strategy here comes down to a willingness to embrace the side project, to admit that sometimes, fun is work and work is fun. That requires a degree of wanting to go into business for yourself, or maybe even admitting to yourself that you'll never make money off of your passion project.

But sometimes, you might just be better off turning off or killing talents that you don't really have any use for. That's one argument made in "The Too Many Aptitudes Problem," an essay by Hank Pfeffer, a guy who seems to be immensely talented, but is only known for one thing—this essay he wrote.

"Some of the feelings associated with strong talents are negative," Pfeffer writes in his piece, which I recommend you read in full. "An unused aptitude is a source of frustration and restlessness. A talent is also a need. Ongoing in its functioning, an unused aptitude must either be stifled or ignored. It takes energy to stifle a part of yourself and to neutralize or ignore a natural and ongoing tendency. It also doesn't feel good. This takes its toll in the long run. Motivational energy seems to be finite—the extra effort needed to stifle a part of yourself is an important factor in burnout."

If Ryan Adams decided one day that he was interested in accounting, he wouldn't have the bandwidth for it because he's already decided his lot in life—unless, that is, he decided to drop his steady job as a musician and try on something else for size. He could always create an album about accounting (suggested title: "Mathbreaker"), but ten to one, he would probably alienate the audience he has doing the one thing he's good at.

The problem is that lots of people with multiple skills aren't like Emilie Wapnick, able to disengage easily. They have a bunch of things that they like, but they have no clue either how to get rid of any of them, or how to keep them around. For example, I can play guitar (barre chords and all), and I love doing it, but ultimately, I pull out the guitar maybe six times a year—not because I don't like it, but because I can't balance my desire to become the next Ryan Adams with my job and my newsletter.

I'm never going to make money being a rock star. I do, however, have a shot at getting a paycheck from writing. So writing takes priority, as much as I enjoy playing the 'ol Washburn.

So going back to Louis C.K., the question I go back to regarding his very expensive creative process is this: how does he manage to fit all that stuff in without going insane trying to balance all those skills? He manages to have his cake and eat it too, somehow, and as I mentioned above, that is not an easy thing to pull off.

In a 2014 essay for The Hollywood Reporter, he credited his network, FX, for leaving him alone so he could actually create things at his own pace, without shaking up the balance:

My process is very organic. It's kind of like a garden, the way it comes out. And I'm only able to do it this way because FX doesn't oversee the writing. If I had to go through the broadcast network approval process, I'd have to congeal every idea I have into an episode script! I'd have to know exactly what is going to happen throughout the season and then rewrite it over and over before shooting. FX approaches my show as if we are telling stories and being artistic. They're never worried about stuff like, "Is this guy likable or good-looking enough?"

Now if he could only get the unions to follow the same strategy.

We pass by all sorts of crazy warning signs every single day—including police tape, wet floor signs, and crazy road warnings. But do they actually connect?

"Even if a warning is perceived and comprehended, it will not be effective unless it induces people to behave safely."

— A line from Warnings: Fundamentals, Design, and Evaluation Methodologies a technical book on the nature of warnings, first published in 1986, which is believed to be the first in-depth analysis of the importance of warnings ever published. (Good luck getting your hands on it. Amazon sells it for nearly $600, though one of their other books about warnings goes for a lot less.) The authors of the book, James M. Miller and Mark Lehto, have closely worked on this issue for decades, from the perspective of human and philosophical factors, rather than merely from an appearance standpoint. Beyond running JM Miller Engineering together, the partners have written four books on the topic of warning signs. When you're done reading Fifty Shades of Grey, this is the next book you should pick up.

(Victoria Pickering/Flickr)

Police caution tape is everywhere, but it's not easy to figure out where it came from

Once relegated to crime scenes, barricade tape or police caution tape, the yellow-and-black plastic that tells people not to cross, has become something of a pop-culture icon, quietly showing up on the bedrooms of rebellious teenagers and on guitar straps for decades.

Strangely, though, finding out where it came from is really freaking hard. It's one of those things that has taken over the world, but nobody bothered to explain how or why it did. Doing a Google search on the history of barricade tape may make you feel completely lost, which is how I felt when I first started searching.

Even with a lot of deep digging, I could only find a single reputable source that had covered the rise of barricade tape as a cultural phenomenon: The Miami Herald, which wrote about it in 1998. In his piece on the subject (which, as a favor to you guys, I've replicated here), Geoffrey Tomb describes the way that tape has become a mainstay at rock concerts and road repairs.

It even, according to Tomb, has become more popular than Bob's Barricades, a mainstay of Florida warning signage that works closely with the state's department of transportation on traffic control issues. The crime-heavy city of Miami went through a lot of the yellow stuff, so much that they had started to use bilingual tape.

What inspired Tomb to write about this topic? To put it simply, there was a crime scene that was so large that it required the use of a lot of police tape.

"So much yellow tape was used at a police shooting in Miami last week that all four corners of an intersection of two city streets were roped off by multiple lines, making it look like a boxing ring," Tomb wrote in his story. "Yellow tape blocked traffic on streets nine blocks away from the shooting scene."

(I couldn't find that exact photo, but the crime scene left behind after the tragic shooting of fashion designer Gianni Versace in 1997, shown in this Herald story, kind of gives one an idea.)

Going back to my original question, the reason I started down this rabbit hole in the first place, when was police tape actually invented? Tomb dates the invention to 1962 and credits the invention to a California company called Harris Industries, which produces a variety of plastic warning tapes for purposes far beyond crime scenes, following the color codes recommended by OSHA standards.

Despite the fact that the tape tends to be used for official reasons (think signifying a chemical spill or a construction risk), the very inexpensive nature of plastic warning tape is the exact thing that makes it perfect for trolling. You can buy a giant thing of police tape on Amazon for less than $10, and you can even work with vendors to create your own customized warning tape.

Generally, this gets used for things like halloween decorations, but in 2009, teachers at a primary school in the United Kingdom were criticized for using the tape as part of a mock crime scene on the school's campus.

Apparently, trying to go all CSI on six-year-old kids is frowned upon in some parts of the world.

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(Mike Mozart/Flickr)

Five Recent Innovations in Wet Floor Signage

1. Rubbermaid sells a lot of wet floor signs, but few rise up to the wood-and-metallic level of the company's Executive Multi-Lingual Wooden Caution Sign, which looks like it should be a trophy rather than a wet floor sign. "This wooden caution sign is designed to work with a wide variety of Rubbermaid products, helping to make cleaning and waste management more efficient and safe," the company says on its website.
2. Not to be outdone, a company called Banana Products has made an impact in the world of wet-floor signs by creating variations that look like … wait for it … bananas.
3. Fortunately for Rubbermaid, it has other tricks up its sleeve. One of those tricks is a product it calls the Over-the-Spill Station, which is akin to a Post-it note for spills. instead of putting down a sign, you put down super-absorbent paper towels that warn the public while picking up the stain.
4. Perhaps the ultimate example of floor-warning innovation, however, goes to the Hurricone, a device that combines a wet-floor warning cone with a floor-drying device, a joining of technology and helpfulness that any fan of hand dryers is bound to love.
5. Does this patent represent the future of wet-floor sign technology? The invention, submitted by a guy named Rick Charles Furtado, includes a timer, a speaker, and motion sensors. Any more knobs on this thing and you might as well make it Android-compatible.

"The thing is though, that the people who really need to see this sign, are most likely just gonna pass it with their eyes glued to their screens."

— Jacob Semple, a Swedish artist, discussing the project he worked on last year with his creative partner, Emil Tiismann. The duo threw up a bunch of signs around Stockholm warning drivers of people caught up in their smartphones, texting and doing a bunch of stuff that people do on their phones. Semple said the project was inspired by personal experience. "One morning when I walked to work I almost got run over by a car because I was staring at my stupid smartphone," Sempler told Tech Insider last year. "I looked around, and realized that I wasn't the only one."

The point that Jacob Semple tripped onto in making his smartphone art project is pretty similar to the one that Mark Lehto has been making in numerous ways over the years.

Lehto, the guy who co-wrote the technical book on warnings that we mentioned earlier in the piece, is a longtime faculty member at Purdue University with a deep interest in "Human Factors"—in other words, the way that humans interact with information given to them.

As it turns out, humans don't necessarily handle this information very well. In 1995, Lehto organized a study in which a number of subjects were asked to complete a task using a foul-smelling glue. Despite the fact that the label clearly recommended that people ventilate the room before using the glue, only one of the 54 subjects did just that.

"This study suggests that if someone's main goal is to complete a task, the benefits he perceives in finishing may outweigh the risks of skipping a safety step," Lehto said of the study in 1997. "Similarly, if someone's out to have a good time, the benefits he sees in having fun may outweigh the risks he sees in driving drunk. If you want people to behave more safely, you need something more dramatic than a warning label."

Warnings already focus on bright colors and and dire wording—just look at cigarette warnings. How can we make them better?

From the Peruvian band that carried the Beatles' torch to the random releases of Apple Records, doing a deep dive into The Beatles gets obscure, fast.

The Peruvian rock band We All Together quietly and obscurely carried the Beatles' torch

Sorry Oasis, but We All Together beat you to that whole aping-the-Beatles thing by more than two decades. And unlike Badfinger, they didn't have help from the Beatles themselves in making their tuneful pop.

We All Together is pretty much completely unknown outside of their native Peru, outside of their song "It's a Sin to Go Away." That tune, a spectacular bit of fuzz-bass and drum-pounding dramatics, showed up on the second volume of the Nuggets box set, deservedly giving the band some garage-rock cred.

But that song and its modest international profile, in a way, does We All Together a disservice. It's a powerful tune that (apologies to fans of Os Mutantes and Gilberto Gil) is potentially the best rock song to come out of South America in the 1970s, but it sort of clouds the fact that, much like The Beatles, We All Together's original run is best seen as a full piece.

The band, which released two albums in the 1970s, was known for creating original songs that were so in the spirit of late-period Beatlemania that they may as well have found a place on Abbey Road or Let it Be, or (more likely) a Beatles solo album. Part of the reason for that was that the recording quality of these songs was extremely high, to the point where, if you didn't hear lead singer Carlos Guerrero's slight accent, you would have no idea you were listening to a band that hailed from Lima.

The band had a lot of time to polish its chops. Guerrero and the other members of the band (Carlos Salom, Manuel Cornejo, and Saúl Cornejo) built their chops as members of another Peruvian band, Laghonia. By the time the members shifted to We All Together, they were good enough at their craft that they could mimic some of the Beatles' best studio tricks.

Both of the original band's albums, a self-titled release that came out in either 1972 or 1973, and the 1974 follow-up Volumen II, are driven by Paul McCartney's ear for tunefulness and Guerrero's vocals, which evoke the nasally parts of John Lennon's iconic register. They never straight-up covered the Beatles during this era, but they covered a lot of songs in the Beatles sphere, including tunes by Wings and Badfinger's "Carry On Until Tomorrow."

As a cover band, they were impressive. Just compare their rendition of "Band on the Run" to McCartney's version.

But when they were creating their own songs—like "Ozzy," a highlight of their second record—it didn't sound like they were imitators to the Britpop throne.

Like all good music with interesting backstories, these albums have only resurfaced outside of Peru within the past two decades, thanks to specialty labels such as Light in the Attic bringing them back to life. But the band itself remained active for nearly 40 years (and Guerrero the only constant), only hanging it up back in 2011, with a few more recent releases showing up on iTunes. It took them all the way until 1996 to record a straight-up album of Beatles covers, much to their credit.

#3

The peak UK chart position of Paul McCartney's solo single "We All Stand Together," a literal nursery rhyme that McCartney wrote for the animated TV show Rupert. (No clue if the song's name was a knowing nod to We All Together going out of their way to clearly ape him.) Macca was a huge fan of Rupert the Bear as a kid, to the point where he not only wrote this song for it, but he also co-wrote Rupert and the Frog Song, the short that included the song, and aired the short before his terrible 1984 movie, Give My Regards to Broad Street. He went so far as to record an entire album of Rupert songs (arranged by George Martin, of course), but that album never saw the light of day. How did Macca's Rupert theme song become such a big hit? He released it as a single just before Christmas, of course, because he knows how to make money.

Four awesomely random albums the Beatles released on Apple Records

1. John Lennon and Yoko Ono drew a lot of attention by showing up naked on their infamous 1968 album Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, but the shocking part of that album may have been the record itself, which very much toyed with the avant-garde. The approach of its follow-up, Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions, was surprisingly blog-like for the 1960s, using music to highlight the couple's quite-crazy day to day, which included protests and a miscarriage. One track on the latter record, "No Bed for Beatle John," was literally the couple singing press clippings about themselves.
2. George Harrison's experiments with a Moog, on an album he called Electronic Sound, represent perhaps the biggest stretch Harrison took in his career—and it was a stretch that no other Beatle had tried by that point, though Paul McCartney later got the bug thanks to his side project The Fireman.
3. Composer John Tavener, who eventually became known for his religious works, was sort of working on a religious wavelength when he recorded and released The Whale, a work inspired by the Old Testament story of Jonah, on Apple in 1968. But he was knee-deep in the avant-garde at the time, making his cantata a jarring composition for those unfamiliar with the avant.
4. The Beatles' Christmas fan club records, which were clearly designed to allow the band to mess around in the studio, are bizarre as heck, and pretty wild listens. The short records were initially only released in the U.K., but Apple released them as a full album to the U.S. market. Tiny Tim shows up at some point.

"For f&@! sake do something with 'Sweet Music' By Lon and Derrek Van Eaton. It's a potential No. 1 hit."

— George Harrison, writing in a telegram to the brass at Apple Records, expressing frustration that the label was failing to promote a song he produced. Lon and Derreck Van Eaton were two of the last artists to be signed to Apple Records, and soon after their album's release (and its eventual failure), Apple stopped releasing music by artists other than the Beatles. The label had a reputation for not treating non-Beatle artists well; most famously, Badfinger titled one of its albums Ass, with the record featuring cover art designed to critique the band's relationship with the record label. Lon and Derreck Van Eaton, meanwhile, saw their album Brother go out of print for nearly four decades.

It's worth remembering that George Martin had a career outside of the Beatles. He produced hit records before he met the Fab Four, and he even produced the most popular single of all time, Elton John's "Candle in the Wind 1997."

But perhaps the most interesting non-Beatles record he was associated with came about during his time with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the early '60s. Martin and a co-worker of his, Maddalena Fagandini, played around with an interval signal created by Fagandini, and ended up coming up with "Time Beat," the first commercial music single ever released by the BBC. It didn't become a hit, but it was an impressive feat. The single doesn't sound like it's more than 50 years old, which is saying a lot.

Hopefully Martin's musique concrète experience came in handy a few weeks after the single's release, when Martin met the Beatles for the first time.

He would eventually technically be considered one of them.

Sure, we're used to seeing rockers break guitars. But depending on the six-string being thrown, a broken guitar can ruin a rock star's entire weekend.

35+

The number of guitars Pete Townsend smashed in 1967 alone, according to an analysis by TheWho.net. The guitar-smashing phenomenon happened almost by accident. He did it once on stage after he accidentally cracked the headstock of his Rickenbacker, but found the public's response so welcoming that he eventually started doing it at every single show. (Our audience targeting is bad, so just in case you're reading, Bryan: During the summer of '69, Pete broke just three guitars.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRH63jtTENg

Five attempts to salvage broken guitars owned by rock stars

1. When Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast in 2012, one band that suffered damage more than any other was The Black Crowes, whose storage space was flooded. That led the band to reach out to a few luthiers who could salvage their treasured instruments, which talk to angels. RS Guitarworks played a key role in saving Rich Robinson's Gibson ES-335.
2. Kings of Leon isn't a band known for smashing guitars, but things happen. After a frustrating bout with busted sound, Caleb Followill tore apart his vintage Gibson guitar on stage. Problem was, it was a Gibson ES-325, a guitar with massive sentimental value that he frequently plays at shows. Fortunately, Gibson helped him out and repaired it for him, ensuring he'd be able to play "Sex On Fire" for another day. (Editor's note: Maybe this wasn't a good idea?)
3. Kurt Cobain was a notable user of cheap guitars of all sorts, and he left a trail of busted amps that went back for miles. Perhaps the most famous guitar that he destroyed was a Fender Stratocaster built in Japan, which he smashed while in the studio recording "Endless, Nameless" on Nevermind. The guitar was eventually repaired, but around the time Nevermind was released, he smashed the guitar again during a live performance of "Endless, Nameless" in Chicago. The smashed guitar is currently on display at the EMP Museum in Seattle.
4. Slash of Guns 'n' Roses has so many guitars that he has a Facebook page dedicated to them, and that page has more than 100,000 fans. (Slash himself has more than 11 million.) But the one guitar Slash turns to more than any other is a guitar that was so unloved that it was a "factory second" that Gibson couldn't put into the retail chain. Slash, wanting to keep his high-quality "replica" Les Pauls safe at home, bought two "factory second" six-strings that he could beat up on tour. One of them has pretty much lived as hard as Slash has—its neck has been broken numerous times and it has a number of cigar burns right on the body. But he still plays it. (He can't play the other; it was stolen from his apartment in 1995.)
5. Muse's Matthew Bellamy knows what it's like to smash a guitar or 140. He smashed that many six-strings during his band's 2004 world tour, setting a Guinness record. But occasionally he breaks a guitar he really likes. That guitar, the Manson Red Glitter, was heavily used by Bellamy, in part because it had a built-in MIDI touch pad. But despite the fact that he loved the device, which he nicknamed "Santa," it didn't stop the device from getting damaged repeatedly on tour. For a while, Bellamy would get it fixed, but during a show at the Staples Center, Bellamy's guitar rack got knocked over due to a stage malfunction, damaging the Red Glitter beyond the point of repair. His solution? He's a rock star; he just bought a new one.

"We can’t believe that it happened. I don’t think anything can really remedy this. We’ve been remunerated for the insurance value, but it’s not about the money. It’s about the preservation of American musical history and heritage.”

— Dick Boak, the director of the Martin Guitar Museum, discussing an accident that took place on the set of The Hateful Eight last year, in which Kurt Russell smashed a vintage guitar, assuming it was an inexpensive prop. It wasn't, and Russell destroyed the guitar before anyone had the chance to replace it with a cheap equivalent. (Jennifer Jason Leigh, who was playing the guitar seconds before it was smashed, was aware. She was "horrified.") Boak noted that the damage to the 1870s-era six-string Martin acoustic guitar was so severe that it couldn't be repaired. "As a result of the incident, the company will no longer loan guitars to movies under any circumstances,” Boak told The Independent.

(Rachmaninoff/Wikimedia Commons)

Enough about broken guitars; what about broken guitar companies?

Gibson Guitars is a pretty well-known company, and one that makes devices well-regarded by musicians. (Of the guitarists we've mentioned so far, a number of them regularly play Gibsons on tour and in the studio.)

Considering all that, you'd imagine that Gibson is a company with respect to spare. But recent stories about the brand suggest something else entirely. The trouble started in 2011, when Gibson was raided by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for illegally exporting wood from parts of the world where doing so was illegal.

The situation turned the company into something of a rallying cry among the political right in 2010, as the situation screamed "regulation gone nuts." That was helped along by Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz, who spoke up about the controversy.

“The federal bureaucracy is just out of hand,” Juszkiewicz said, according to The Daily Beast. “And it seems to me there’s almost a class warfare, of companies versus people, rich versus poor, Republicans versus Democrats …and there’s just a lack of somebody that stands up and says, ‘I’m about everyone. I’m really about America and doing what’s good for the country and not fighting these little battles.’”

Things got more complicated from there. The company's Glassdoor reviews are stunningly negative, with many pointing the finger at Juszkiewicz's very hands-on process. (Just 18 percent of those who reviewed Juszkiewicz approve of him.)

Eventually, Gawker's rabble-rousing Hamilton Nolan drew attention to Juszkiewicz's management style. In 2014, Nolan was forwarded an email written by the CEO, who denied a high-level employee his request for a day off just before Thanksgiving. Juszkiewicz then went further to criticize the employee for taking advantage of the company's PTO policy, before pledging to make top-down HR changes.

"It is not alright to leave early Friday afternoon or arrive late on Monday morning," Juszkiewicz wrote. "It is not alright to take extended lunches. The list of unprofessional behavior goes on."

For his part, Juszkiewicz said that the employee had faked being sick, and that he wasn't really as much of a stickler for PTO as he had suggested.

But that seed of doubt in Juszkiewicz's leadership skills, reinforced by a later piece on Gawker written by Nolan, has raised some deeper questions about the company—particularly as it has started to move away from making just guitars to building electronics. In recent years, the company has been accused of a decline in quality, while jacking up the prices of its models.

Gibson's terrible decision to shove a ton of electronics into its guitars

Last year, Gibson took two separate leaps that raised concerns for longtime fans of the brand. First, the company shifted toward consumer electronics, to the point where three-quarters of its revenue now comes from products unrelated to making music. Second, and more troubling for the purists, was the fact that Gibson did a massive upgrade of its devices in 2015, adding a bunch of extra electronics to the mix, including a so-called "robotic tuner" that automatically ensures the guitar is in the right key. Gibson spent $40 million on the effort, then passed the costs on to consumers.

James Brill, a writer for the guitar site Reverb, explained the controversy as such:

We all rolled our eyes at the earlier notion of the robot tuners, and the announcement of a wider neck, brass “zero-fret nut”, lower profile frets, and titanium saddles had us all wondering what exactly is going on at Gibson HQ. But what shocked us all was the huge price increase. The Les Paul Standard is now the price of a Fender Custom Shop model, as well as high-end makers of Gibson-influenced designs, such as PRS, Collings, Heritage, Knaggs, and countless other well-respected makers.

Ultimately, Brill found that the features, while interesting, were ultimately not worthy of the severe cost increase.

"As much as I love the impulse towards innovation, sometimes an old recipe is truly already perfect," Brill added.

But the company seems to be caught in a game of having to impress highly technical players who know a lot about guitars—which is why they spend $4,500 on them. Oddly, instead of creating features that impress the techies, they're making improvements that make the devices easier to play, which doesn't make sense, considering that if you're buying a guitar for ease of use, you're probably spending $250, tops (on a Fender).

The result of the outcry over the design changes—which were key to a credit downgrade for the company—led the company to reverse course entirely and revert to its prior approach and style for the 2016 model year, while selling guitars with all the doodads at a higher price point.

Gibson guitars aren't iPhones, and no amount of additional tech is going to change that.

Bryan Adams' guitar folly is far from the first experience of guitar damage caused by the process of air travel. And it's not even the most famous at this juncture.

That honor goes to a guy named Dave Carroll, a Canadian singer-songwriter who made a splash in 2009. While on tour with his band Sons of Maxwell in the prior year, he spotted United Airlines employees carelessly throwing around instruments on the tarmac, and then reacted in horror after finding out that his $3,500 Taylor guitar was significantly damaged. Carroll faced a significant hassle in getting this situation fixed, until he decided to use his greatest weapon: music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

He wrote an autobiographical song called "United Breaks Guitars," which scored 15 million views on YouTube and created a PR nightmare for the airline. United employees—who had proven downright unhelpful before—were suddenly quick to fix the problem, which was having an impact on the company's stock price, and Carroll became more famous for a broken guitar than he ever did for anything else.

Carroll, these days, has parlayed his moment of viral success—which, despite his clear frustration at the situation, is packaged as an upbeat country song—into a career as a public speaker on the issues of customer service. (The name of his company? Big Break Solutions. Clever.)

"If customers have the ability to communicate their experiences very easily, then brands can’t just own a message anymore by having the most money to make the glitziest ad," Carroll said in a recent interview.

Considering this incident happened nearly eight years ago and he's still getting mileage out of it, that's impressive.

Carroll can carry a tune, but in the end, it was a tune that carried him.

Could cereal's waning popularity in the United States have something to do with a lack of exotic options? Let's look at what the rest of the world is doing.

Soylent Has Some Competition

As we've covered previously, Kellogg's past is full of healthy history—specifically when it comes to the meat analogues the company still sells under its MorningStar Farms brand. But none of the cereals currently made by the Michigan mush-maker currently go so far as to market themselves as a "meal replacement in a bowl." Well, in the U.S., that is. You have to look north of the border for that—specifically, to Canada, where Kellogg's sells a very muscular cereal, VECTOR*, that stakes this claim. The mix of crunchy flakes and granola clusters (which any discerning consumer could tell you sounds awfully similar to Honey Bunches of Oats) packs 13 grams of protein, 54 grams of carbs, and 22 vitamins and minerals into a single skim-milk-mixed bowl.

Nutri-Grain, in Cereal Form

In the United States, Kellogg's Nutri-Grain cereal bars get a bit of a bad rap among health advocates—critics say that it represents one of the worst examples of an unhealthy product sold using healthy language. (The cereal giant defends its work, once pish-poshing a class-action suit over the issue.)

That's interesting and all, but what's perhaps more interesting is that in Australia and New Zealand, Nutri-Grain cereal (yes, cereal) is promoted basically the same way you'd expect Wheaties to be in the United States—generally with an athlete or medals of some kind on the front of the box. There's a reason for this: In 1984, Kellogg's started sponsoring a multi-discipline water sports endurance event called the Nutri-Grain Ironman Series, giving the event its name for more than 30 years and ensuring that the cereal would always have a place on Aussie shelves.

Problem is, even with the athletes and medals on the front of the box, it still nonetheless doesn't hide the fact that the cereal is unhealthy. In an analysis by Australian health officials released last year, the corn, oat, and wheat mixture received one of the lowest possible scores from the country's five-star rating scheme—a mere two stars, which won't look good next to those athletes. (It explains why the company reformulated the cereal late last year.)

The shape and flavor of Nutri-Grain may change, but its nutritional issues stay the same, apparently.

Five interesting quirks you'll find with cereal worldwide

1. Manufacturers have been trying to make cereal a thing in Japan for more than 50 years at this point, and initially failed—early on, cereal was a common sight in the candy aisle, rather than the breakfast aisle. But slowly, it's caught on. A 1990 Los Angeles Times story found that cereal was finally becoming big business in the local market. In 2014, meanwhile, granola became a full-on trend in Japanese households, helping to drive double-digit growth in the cereal space.
2. It's common for downmarket brands of cereal to sell in bags rather than boxes in the United States, but outside of the U.S., it's common to see top companies sell cereal in inexpensive plastic bags. For example, Alimentos Granix was the top seller of cereal in Argentina in 2015—outdoing Nestlé and Kellogg's—but the company still uses bags.
3. While cereal generally tends to be a game of globalization—Nestlé and Kellogg's, mostly—there are some local companies that make their own kinds of cereal. One particularly interesting example comes from Lithuania, where Cerera Foods became a well-known manufacturer after launching in 1995. While mostly targeting kids, they also sell a coffee-flavored wheat cereal. (!)
4. Sometimes, popular brands of cereal stick around in other markets even if they fail in the U.S. for some reason. A good example of this is Oreo O's, a popular brand of cereal that came about due to corporate synergy—Kraft owns Oreos and, at the time, owned Post Foods. But when Kraft spun off Post in 2007, the corporate synergy was lost and Oreo O's faded from view. But in South Korea, far from all that corporate synergy, the cereal was made for another seven years by a local company called Dongsuh Foods that had the legal right to work with both companies. However, the cereal was discontinued in 2014 after the company faced a contamination scandal. Sorry, guys.
5. And like fast food, you'll occasionally run into a variant of a popular cereal that's only available locally. A good example of this is Frosted Flakes, which long had a chocolate-flavored variant, Choco Zucaritas, available in Mexico. People heard about it, and Kellogg's brought it to the U.S., where you can buy it at Amazon, complete with its original Spanish name in smaller type. One kind you won't find in the U.S., however, is Choco Zucaritas con Malvaviscos, which adds marshmallows to the mix.

Cocoa Overload

Outside of the United States, Nestlé is a cereal tour de force—something easily proven by the success of its Chocapic cereal, which is common in much of Europe and Latin America. The cereal's commercials follow similar cues to a lot of sugary cereal brands Americans are familiar with—anthropomorphic cartoon animal, usually shown with a kid, getting real excited about the cereal they're talking about, usually with some sort of adventure driving the ad. The cereal itself, speaking purely in American terms, is a pebble-style treat that's something of a combination of Cookie Crisp (in that the texture is similar) and Cocoa Pebbles (in that it's doused in chocolate powder that ensures you'll soon have chocolate milk).

In some markets, however, the cereal takes on a different name, Koko Krunch, though the style is otherwise the same. Last year, the Minions helped promote the Koko Krunch in Malaysia.

Lion's Sugary Roar

Another Nestlé brand largely sold in Europe that deserves a try in the American market is Lion Cereal—which is based off of the hugely popular candy bar that sports a style roughly akin to what you'd get if you combined a 100 Grand bar with a Kit Kat bar. Nestlé first put the cereal on the market around 2000, but stopped selling it for a time—potentially because the cereal was found to be the unhealthiest for sale on British shelves. It came back with a reformulated version a few years ago that does slightly better on the nutrition front.

But by no means is this cereal healthy, but unhealthy just means it tastes better! Some American expats have come to love this cereal so much that they've created their own profane commercials for it.

(Nestlé knows a thing or two about synergy, particularly between its candy bars and cereals. The company a couple years back also released a cereal based on its popular Toffee Crisp bars.)

“We’re having a think about what we’d add to Weetabix to make it savory. In the same way as we’ve added chocolate chips or golden syrup or banana to cereals here, you could add other savory flavors, like green tea, sesame seeds, cranberries and other fruits.”

— Giles Turrell, the CEO of Weetabix, discussing the long-time British brand's efforts to enter the Chinese market. Weetabix, which has long been sold in the United States and other countries though has remained a less-prominent part of the cereal aisle outside of the U.K., is now fully owned by the state-controlled Chinese firm Bright Food. One problem: Chinese culture isn't so hot on sugary breakfast cereal. As a result, the company has embraced green tea, fruit, and even salt and pepper in an effort to make the cereal palatable to the market.

If you're interested in seeing a random cereal from another country end up on your breakfast table, it's not easy. You'll have to do a bit of digging around. There will likely be shipping costs, and possibly even import costs. Lion Cereal, for example, can be found on Amazon, but good luck finding Kellogg's VECTOR* in the U.S.

That said, sometimes if there's enough interest or even a natural product connection that can interest cereal-makers into bringing a product stateside. Back in 2012, Kellogg's brought the chocolate-packed Krave to the U.S. after a solid early run in the U.K., proof that if there's a market for an international variety of cereal, the cereal companies will be willing to import all these esoteric brands and make them locally.

Now, of course, all we gotta do is get the snake people on board.

Hotels are bastions of consistency, especially when it comes to the amenities. But with Airbnb out there, is hotel psychology losing its grip on travelers?

"In the United States, toothpaste falls under a more rigorous set of regulations than shampoo or soaps; it’s treated like a drug. As such, it must be produced according to the government’s rules for 'good manufacturing practice,' which can increase the cost by 30 percent or more."

— Slate writer Daniel Engber, discussing one theory why you're unlikely to find toothpaste in hotel rooms, despite the fact that other main toiletries like soap and shampoo are handed out like it's no big thing. But Engber notes that this theory is not accepted across the board—one longtime hotel-industry worker that spoke to him argued that this wasn't the case, but rather that it's not enough of a status symbol to be worthwhile for hotels.

Why hotels were perfect vessels for introducing wireless access

Hotels were one of the first places where many people ran into WiFi in public, and it shows. When you stumble into a hotel network and log in, you might run into confusing, ugly login screens with limitations and regulations on how you can use that dangerous connection to the internet they're arming you with.

To this day, hotels have a mixed relationship with wireless internet access. Only within the last couple of years have luxury chains generally made wireless access available for free, and at times, some of those chains have been the target of some not-great headlines due to the way they regulate that access.

In this context, it may be hard to remember that hotels were at one point front-running innovators in the wireless space, launching the underlying networks years before you'd run into them anywhere else. While most of us were still using dial-up modems to get online, major hotel chains were serving up ethernet-level speeds, first through actual cables and later through wireless networks.

They had a good reason to get out front on this trend: Their guests are often road warriors, the kind of people that went to conventions and needed to remind the home base that they were still on the grid even if they weren't in the office physically. And as a result, they had laptops, cell phones, and personal digital assistants years before everyone else.

In other words, hotels were the perfect audience for WiFi. Now, there were early examples of WiFi in the public square, most notably Carnegie Mellon University's Wireless Andrew network, which was active as early as 1993.

But as far as normal people getting on the internet without any wires, that didn't happen until the turn of the century, really.

The rise and fall of the first hotel wireless company (and how Steve Jobs sold WiFi with a hula hoop)

Perhaps the first key moment in WiFi's takeover came about in 1998. That was the year that Hilton scored a deal with to bring wireless access to some of its hotel locations.

The company worked with a firm called MobileStar, which was launched with the goal of taking wireless internet mainstream. The hotel giant's agreement wasn't completely unique—another competing firm, Suite Technology Systems Network (STSN), came about around the same time and later helped Marriott get online, while a third firm, Wayport, worked with a number of other hotels. (Wayport, now owned by AT&T, famously got McDonald's on the internet.)

But MobileStar was able to strike so early that the industry didn't even have the branding for WiFi down yet. (That didn't come until 1999, thanks to the help of a branding company.)

"We think making wireless computer communications possible will create a huge demand in a very short time. We're calling it 'The Portable Internet,'" MobileStar CEO Mark Goode said at the time the deal was announced.

At first, the awkwardly named "Portable Internet" was mostly made up of computers with add-on PC cards. But in 1999, the concept had a public coming-out moment, when Steve Jobs revealed the Apple iBook to the public. Ever the showman, Jobs used a hula-hoop to prove that the iBook was connected to the internet without wires.

Partly as a result of that eye-catching display, it was only a matter of time until WiFi was off to the races. Soon, other laptop-makers included it as a default option. And MobileStar was doing its part by expanding its network of hotspots. In 2001, the firm scored a deal with Starbucks and was building out wireless access at a number of the coffee shop's locations, and it already had a strong base in a number of airports. It wasn't cheap—the service cost $30 a month—but it was very much a first-mover kind of service.

But MobileStar was a startup working in a post-bubble era—particularly in a space, business travel, that had been negatively affected by the September 11, 2001 attacks—and it ultimately wasn't able to hold on. In early 2002, the company laid off its employees and abruptly shut down its services. The disruption was so unexpected that hotels that relied on its service saw the network go down without any warning.

The firm eventually went back online, but soon was sold to the company that became T-Mobile, which runs the network to this day (although it lost the Starbucks deal back in 2008).

In the end, MobileStar's work was important. While the company itself was chewed up and spit into the merger abyss, it set the stage for the always-accessible internet we've come to expect. We left it to others to make it free.

68°

(Elizabeth Greene/Flickr)

Five ways hotels use subtle psychology to shape your experience

1. Website design: Your average hotel website is full of small cues to keep pushing you forward, small things to guide you through the process—think points of urgency, design predictability, things like that. The goal is that, once they have you hooked, they don't want to lose you as a customer.
2. Simple choices: Hotels attempt to take a lot of the decision-making process out of the guests' hands at every part of the process, from the reservations on down. This helps boost the comfort level. "If you do it right, then hopefully you get that big 'sigh moment,' when the guest says: Yes. They really get me. They understand what's important to me," hospitality consultant Andrew Freeman explained to Psychology Today. (If you know anything about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, that's be basic concept that we're talking about here.)
3. The headboard: In budget hotels in particular, hotel designers will splurge on a fancy headboard. The reason? According to The Daily Mail, they stand out when you first walk into the room—and tend to take the attention off the shabbier pieces of furniture elsewhere in the room.
4. Thread count: The Daily Mail piece notes that we ultimately decide on whether a hotel is awesome or not based on how we slept—and as a result, a lot of hotels up the thread counts on their sheets to help keep the bed extra comfortable. You'll find 600 thread count sheets in the nicest hotels.
5. Towel use: In recent years, you might have spotted notes near the bathroom telling you to be thoughtful about your towel use so as to save water. Crazy as it sounds, this strategy actually works—a 2013 study found that when people were told that previous guests in the room had reused their towels, they tended to use fewer towels themselves.

"The designer would say 'Send me a catalog!' And we would literally mail them hundreds of catalogs and they would choose the image based on that. But now, with the digital age, all the items are digitized, so you can make whatever color you want, whatever size you want, and you can print them on whatever you want."

— Puneet Bhasin, COO of the Artline Group, discussing with Marketplace the process that hotel designers use in choosing hotel art. His company, as you might guess, specializes in selling such art to hotels around the world—working with interior designers to help set the tone of a given hotel. One issue that Bhasin's firm has to help designers avoid is the issue of not putting the same artwork in different hotels, so as not to drive the road warriors crazy.

In the age of Airbnb, it's worth pondering: how important are all these amenities, really? You could always just buy a 288-pack of hotel-size shampoo, carry a handful with you during long trips, and be done with it.

That sounds a bit flip, admittedly, but on the other hand, Airbnb probably exists as a reaction to the overly perfect feel of hotel rooms around the world. In many cases, hotels feel antiseptic and over-designed. InformeDesign, an educational resource for interior designers, noted in 2005 that this problem is nothing new for big hotel chains, who dealt with the problem previously by pushing things over the top.

"Hotels were designed to support the most basic of needs," Domus Design Group's Bruce Goff wrote at the time. "Then, over the last seven years, hotels found that they were losing market share to smaller, more personal hotels and responded, not with personality, but with higher standards."

The hotel industry has not been happy to see the rise of Airbnb for a lot of reasons, but I have to wonder if one of them is the fact that the startup's track record of success suggests that we've been broken of the spell of consistency that we've come to expect from our lodging experience.

Or maybe Airbnb is simply pointing out that there's an audience for people who like imperfection, or at the very least something off the beaten path. That's OK, too.

We've come a long way from the government giving away free seeds. Nowadays, the seed industry is so powerful it's not even clear if seed exchanges are safe.

"While laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas are not patentable, respondent's claim is not to a hitherto unknown natural phenomenon, but to a non-naturally occurring manufacture or composition of matter—a product of human ingenuity 'having a distinctive name, character [and] use.'"

— The decision in the 1980 Supreme Court case Diamond v. Chakrabarty, which affirmed that genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, could be patented. This decision, while involving a form of bacteria that could break down crude oil, proved a major turning point for the seed industry, and allowed GMOs to propagate in the agricultural industry. This is the seed that allowed Monsanto to grow into a corporate mega-corp, guys.

(Swallowtail Garden Seeds/Flickr)

The federal government used to hand seeds out to farmers for free. Used to.

When the American Seed Trade Association got its start in the late 1800s, the seed business was far from the massive success it is today. In fact, prior to its launch, many seed companies went under. The culprit? The federal government, who spent nearly a century giving away seeds for free through a variety of organizations, starting with the agricultural arm of the U.S. Patent Office, eventually giving way to the USDA upon its 1962 founding.

For nearly a century, the federal government was organized around the reality of the economy, which is that it was still strongly agrarian. Many early post offices were hubs for picking up seeds. It wasn't a cheap program, either: At one point in the late 1800s, roughly a third of the USDA's budget was dedicated to distributing seeds around the country. And some political parties wanted the seed program to go even further.

Despite the fact that seeds were handed out for free, that didn't stop more seed companies from starting up, despite the long odds for success. Eventually, the American Seed Trade Association was formed in 1883, with the free seed program the companies' primary issue. It took a few decades of lobbying, but in 1924, things finally changed in their favor, when Congress ended the free-seed program.

Around that time, the seed industry came up with its first hybrid corn seed, which helped make the case that the commercial market could create seeds that produced better yields than the federal government. That helped set the stage for the commercial farming and food industry we have today.

To this day, commercial seed-growers understandably see this period as the "bad old days." In the 2013 Supreme Court case Bowman v. Monsanto Co., which pitted Monsanto against a farmer who wanted to reuse his friggin' genetically modified seeds, the seed industry argued that the government's free seed program ultimately harmed the seed industry by removing incentives for farmers to develop their seeds, and therefore, their crops.

The seed-makers apparently knew communism was a bad idea long before everyone else.

"Early seed breeders had little incentive to make costly investments in developing more productive plants because the free seed program crowded private breeders from the marketplace," the brief, filed by 21 different industry organizations, stated. "Additionally, without intellectual property protection, seed breeders had little control over the fate of their genetic material; purchasers were not barred from saving seed or from selling the new seeds they grew to others for planting purposes without compensating the breeder."

(The Supreme Court ultimately sided with Monsanto in a unanimous decision, finding that seeds remain patented even after you re-grow them.)

300+

The number of seed libraries, or grassroots-level seed exchange programs, in the United States. The programs generally work like this: you pick up the seeds you need, grow something in your garden, then when you're done, you return some seeds back to the library. It's a good idea, but the problem is, the practice is illegal in some states due to broadly written agricultural legislation—legislation that, in many cases, also bans you from exchanging seeds with friends.

(San José Library/Flickr)

So wait … you're telling me that sharing seeds with your friends is technically illegal in some states?

Yes, yes I am. In fact, there has been at least one case where a state agriculture department came down hard on a library for the heinous crime of seed-sharing.

In 2014, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture told a library in Mechanicsburg that they were in violation of a 2004 state law because they allowed people to plant seeds from the library, with the promise that they'd offer up new seeds from fully grown plants later on. The department told the library that this was a bad idea—the seeds had to be tested, had to come directly from commercial seed companies, and at the end of the growing season, all the extra seeds had to be thrown away.

"What they proposed to do at the library fell under the definition of seed distribution, and if you're a seed distributor, you fall under the provisions of the act," Deputy Agriculture Secretary Jay Howes told the Wall Street Journal.

When discussing the issue, Cumberland County Commissioner Barbara Cross suggested that the seed library created a legitimate threat to the food supply, and that it was important to get on top of the issue while it was still relatively manageable. Problem was, she did so while introducing the word "terrorism" to the conversation.

“Agri-terrorism is a very, very real scenario,” she told The Sentinel. “Protecting and maintaining the food sources of America is an overwhelming challenge ... so you’ve got agri-tourism on one side and agri-terrorism on the other.”

Eventually, the library made a deal with the state—it would no longer let gardeners bring seeds back to the library, and would only sell donated seeds from corporations. Crisis averted, apparently.

The thing is, though, is that the controversy highlighted to the public that these laws existed in the first place. And while they were meant to discourage the threat of Frankenseeds and prevent diseased plants for propagating in the commercial farming system (a genuine concern, considering the mess we know that is), there's evidence that they could have the side effect of putting gardeners on the hook for sharing seeds with their friends.

To the layman, it sounds—what's a good way to put this?—insane.

Fortunately, there are organizations that have been working on this issue. One of them is the Sustainable Economies Law Center, a legal group focused on environmental issues.

They have been active in lobbying for updated laws and exceptions to the laws currently on the books for seed libraries around the country, particularly in California, where the group is currently working to get AB 1810 on the books. That law would clarify that seed sharing laws are not meant to cover non-commercial exchanges like libraries.

As for Pennsylvania, there's some good news on that front as well: Last month, the state's agriculture department clarified that non-commercial seed exchanges were not covered by the state's Seed Act of 2004, which means the library in Mechanicsburg can go back to exchanging seeds without any corporate influence.

Brian Snyder, the head of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, welcomed the change of heart by the state. While Snyder said the law had its place, it was necessary to clarify it wasn't intended for grassroots-level gardeners.

"Seeds are a basic element of human life and wellbeing," Snyder said. "Without this kind of informal cooperation among neighbors, that wellbeing is very much at risk.”

"About two years ago, our retailers came to us and said, 'We need you to be in this business everyone is talking about, the business of chia seeds.'"

— Michael P. Hirsch, the vice president of Joseph Enterprises, the company behind Chia Pets, describing how the company went from being a lynchpin of the novelty gardening market to selling highly nutritious chia seeds for human consumption. Chia seeds, which my wife friggin' loves but I'm ambivalent about, have become one of the hottest nutritional trends of the past decade.

If you go into a Lowe's and buy some seeds, you will most assuredly see the seed packets labeled with such phrases as "GMO-free" and "organic," two phrases that you would not have seen on seed packets two decades ago, because it would have been assumed.

But we can't make that assumption anymore. As a culture, we've been having a longstanding debate about whether we want our food to have GMOs in it, whether it should be labeled, or even whether it's a big deal. (If you read The Daily Beast and are at all skeptical about the genetic modification of food, get ready to be called an idiot.)

The portion of the seed industry that directly targets gardeners, at the very least, seems to have decided. If you care enough about your food that you're willing to plant it yourself, you don't want reprogrammed seeds.

The problem is, though, unless you're a master gardener and living 100 percent farm-to-table, someone else is making that decision for you.

Before Jack Abramoff became an infamous lobbyist, he co-wrote and produced a schlocky Dolph Lundgren film that broke a cultural boycott of South Africa.

"Joseph Zito's sluggish direction lingers on nonessentials. Tediousness could have been alleviated by dropping at least a reel's worth of trekking across the African desert. Lundgren provides little more than sustained beefcake."

— A 1988 Variety review of Red Scorpion, a film the entertainment news outlet describes as "a dull, below-average action pic." (The New York Times was even harsher, with reviewer Stephen Holden saying that "the movie's reflective moments belong to Mr. Lundgren's sweaty chest.") The film, with a story written by Jack Abramoff, his brother Robert, and Arne Olsen, came after a period when Abramoff had already dabbled in Republican politics, building ties to both Grover Norquist through the College Republicans and the Reagan administration during the Oliver North scandal. The film was something of a box-office flop, only grossing $4,192,440 in its domestic theatrical run.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzXTG5cLs0g

If Red Scorpion was made by someone else, we probably wouldn't even be talking about it

The thing about Red Scorpion is that it's not a great movie by traditional critical standards. It's from an era of filmmaking when auteurs weren't the driving force behind independent filmmaking in Hollywood. The auteurs never really went away, of course—John Waters and David Lynch made some of their best films during this period—but a lot of low-budget action movies being made in this era were trying to riff off the Reagan-era Republicanism of the Rambo series. As Abramoff was both a Reagan-era Republican and a guy who grew up in Beverly Hills, he was pretty much the perfect person to take advantage of this B-movie trend.

The story of a Russian special forces operative (Lundgren) brought in to assassinate an anti-communist military leader, only to switch sides and join a group of freedom fighters in beating down the Soviets, Red Scorpion definitely hits on all the plot points designed to make red-blooded Americans cheer. (Watch the trailer here, if you'd like.)

Shapiro-Glickenhaus Entertainment, the distributor of Abramoff's film, benefited from the changing nature of the film business. For one thing, there was a lot more distribution than there was even a decade prior—the home video market was blowing up, and premium cable ensured that even a terrible film could have life beyond the box office. That's why Shapiro-Glickenhaus films like Maniac Cop and Frankenhooker, despite being poorly-reviewed trash, are still fondly remembered by audiences with cable back in the day.

While these trends ensured Red Scorpion could be made and would have an audience, it also meant that it was far from unique in the market. Cannon Films, another independent filmmaker of the era, was making dozens of films just like this one every year, relying on a stable of well-remembered B-list action heroes like Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson, and Jean Claude Van-Damme. (Side note: This documentary about Cannon is an amazing document of this era and its impact on filmmaking.)

Joseph Zito, who directed Norris in Missing in Action, brought Red Scorpion to the screen.

It's likely that without Abramoff's connection to the film and the wacky politics it introduces, it wouldn't even be worth a second look beyond fans of '80s action films.

But fortunately for us, it does have those ties to Abramoff—and those ties make the film a far more interesting cultural document.

$16M

The budget of Red Scorpion, which doubled after Abramoff decided at the last minute to move production of the film from Swaziland to South West Africa, a country then controlled by South Africa that's now known as Namibia. At the time Abramoff was making his movie, South Africa was facing a cultural boycott due to apartheid, and a 1986 U.S. law made it clear that doing business with South Africa was frowned upon. And, from a purely practical angle, it doubled the film's budget because they had to move the entire production more than a thousand miles away. But Abramoff had ties to the South African government at the time, so he likely was undeterred. "There was some indication even in those days that he was not the sort of person who would feel overly constrained by the rules," said Jeff Pandin, a colleague of Abramoff's in the era, in comments to Salon.

[whitebox]

(Becky McCray/Flickr)

The most interesting part about Red Scorpion was who funded the film

One thing to understand about Abramoff was that his Hollywood career and his lobbying career weren't separate—they were like a giant melting pot of influence and propaganda. In fact, Red Scorpion was effectively funded by the South African military, thanks to the fact that the country was Abramoff's primary client at the time. If you watch the movie, in fact, you'll notice that the tanks being driven throughout are South African.

And looking at the plot—specifically below the surface points that involve Dolph Lundgren brandishing guns—the film was roughly based on the life story of Jonas Savimbi, an Angolan military leader who was considered a South African ally and a noted anti-Communist.

In 1986, Abramoff launched and headed an organization called the International Freedom Foundation (IFF), an organization that portrayed itself as an anti-Communist political think tank. In reality, though, it was a group meant to give some positive press and political cover to the South African government at a time when they were being pressured to release Nelson Mandela.

(Abramoff wasn't the only lobbyist-type backing South Africa at the time; as The Nation notes, Abramoff's old friend Grover Norquist, known these days as an anti-tax hound, visited a conference in South Africa intended to unify Americans in support of ending the anti-apartheid movement.)

Arthur Ashe, the late tennis star and anti-apartheid activist, spoke out against the film during its production, calling it an "endorsement of South Africa's policies." Members of the movie's crew found the funding for the film distasteful.

"We heard that very right-wing South African money was helping fund the movie," actor Carmen Argenziano, who played a Cuban colonel in the film, told Salon in 2005. "It wasn't very clear. We were pretty upset about the source of the money. We thought we were misled. We were shocked that these brothers who we thought were showbiz liberals—Beverly Hills Jewish kids—were doing this."

Nonetheless, it didn't stop the film's production, and the movie ultimately came out in April of 1989—less than a year before Mandela was released from captivity.

While the film ultimately failed at the goal of making the African National Congress look bad and ginning up support for South Africa, it was effective as a calling card for Abramoff. Most lobbyists of the era were busy trying to influence politicians in Washington; he went to modern-day Namibia with a camera crew to influence everyday Americans in movie theaters and on HBO. Maybe it didn't work out in the end, but it certainly helped boost his reputation when he finally did return to Washington in the mid-'90s.

"It was South Africa, so a lot of the guys I was working with and training with were real soldiers. My gun instructor went off on the weekends and killed some people who had tried to blow up a pipe line. You know, some actual terrorists. I did a lot of light firing exercises with these real South African soldiers. They were S.A.S regiments from Rhodesia. It was pretty intense."

— Dolph Lundgren, reflecting on the production of Red Scorpion in a 2011 interview with the now-defunct site Mondo Video. The Swedish actor did a number of his own stunts in the film, including a scene in which he had scorpions walking on him. "Jesus, I did so many crazy stunts on that film," he recalled. "It's unbelievable when I think back about it. It would never happen today. Nobody would ever let you do any of that stuff now."

As a cultural document, Red Scorpion is definitely a film that shows its age, one whose geopolitical conflicts have long been lost to history.

But it wasn't Abramoff's only production. In 1994, he produced a sequel to Red Scorpion, this time featuring neo-Nazi skinheads attacking the United States instead of Russians controlling an African nation. The film had no Dolph Lundgren, but it did co-star that one guy from The Wire.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwe4ofk0c04

Abramoff's last gasp as a producer came thanks to Austin St. John, a.k.a. the original Red Ranger from the Power Rangers. After St. John left the show, he created an instructional martial arts video, which you can watch here in full, because Austin uploads his stuff to YouTube. Abramoff has just three IMDB credits as a producer. Somehow, this is the third.

These days, Abramoff is more likely to have a documentary made about him, or to be played by Kevin Spacey in a movie, than he is to produce a film. The reason? Simple. Sometimes, real life is more interesting than any script.

A fateful decision by the movie industry six decades ago created a long-term compatibility problem between film and television. The solution? Letterboxing.

Before letterboxing, we were throwing away three-quarters of the picture on some films

The reason the black bars exist can be blamed on television—or specifically, how the film industry responded to television.

The 4-by-3 layout of most televisions produced in the pre-HDTV era was fine for most early films, but in 1953 Hollywood shifted gears in response to the growing small-screen threat, releasing a wide array of competing technologies to allow for increasingly wider film resolutions.

One early technology, Cinemascope, compressed wide images onto 35mm film using an anamorphic lens, then stretched those pictures out onto a giant, slightly curved screen, to create an experience that theaters hoped would make television seem pathetic in comparison. A later variation of the format, Panavision, became the industry standard and is still in use today.

A competing technology, Cinerama, used an even more-ambitious trick: it displayed the film through three different projectors, each aiming at different parts of an extremely curved screen. (You can see a model of the technique above.) The result was bold, and though the technique itself isn't used today, some of the theaters it inspired are considered legendary.

All these tricks were great, of course, for film-goers, but when the movie inevitably was put on a TV screen, it often meant a game of compromises. Many television networks decided to tackle the issue by using "pan-and-scan" versions of the films, which basically involved a film engineer selectively focusing on small parts of the screen and shifting the layout so as to match what was happening on the screen. This GIF explains the technique well:

This technique, as you imagine, has some really negative effects on the films that used it. If a film was framed so that two people were standing far apart, for example, one would inevitably be cut off. Panning-and-scanning could hide moments of tension or even remove key characters from a scene.

It ensured that movie theaters had the better product, sure, but the popularity of home video ultimately made the issue untenable.

Directors friggin' hate pan-and-scan, just an FYI

Beyond being controversial with serious film buffs, it's far more so for the directors, who often were forced to make compromises just to take advantage of home video's reach.

A 1990 piece by Roger Ebert, featuring an angry Steven Spielberg insisting that people will buy a widescreen version of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, nails the point—and then some.

"The only time I lose my integrity as a filmmaker, is when my films go on TV. I lose it because I'm very frame-conscious, very conscious of my visual compositions, and I do a lot of things to tell a story by where I put characters and objects within the frame," the directing legend told the reviewing legend.

These compromises, Spielberg continued, damaged his artistic vision.

"You can either pan and scan, which means you electronically pan the frame, or you make internal cuts in a scene, from one side to the other," he explained. "The problem with cutting is that you're adding cuts where a cut is not required—where you don't want a cut. When I see my movies panned and scanned, it's like some of the scenes were being redirected by someone else."

Letterboxing was the solution to this problem—and the approach that Spielberg greatly preferred—but for decades, it was a hard sell with consumers, who believed they were missing something.

In 2001, Martin Scorsese went as far as to launch an educational campaign with Philips to talk about how awesome letterboxing was.

"A director works painstakingly to set up a shot or scene—the whole meaning of which is lost when a film is cropped or panned and scanned to fit a standard television screen," he said.

In case you need any more proof, Scorsese talks up the issue in this Turner Classic Movies bit, which features his greatest widescreen pet peeve, a chariot scene in Ben Hur. (Ironically, the segment was filmed in standard 4:3.)

21:9

The aspect ratio of so-called CinemaWide TVs, a trend in home entertainment that's gone in and out over the years. The idea behind these TVs is that the aspect ratio roughly matches wide-screen films, so there'd be no letterboxing whatsoever. The results of this strategy have been mixed; Philips went in on the platform for a bit, only to double back after consumers weren't interested. And CNET's review of a Vizio CinemaWide television found an unusual problem with the monitor. "Anything that's not an ultra-wide-screen movie—like the vast majority of HDTV programs, games and, yes, many films—appears tiny, with big black bars to either side, or else must be cropped or stretched to fill the screen," they wrote. A recent effort by Samsung, however, gets around this by actually being two televisions that can join together to become either a 16:9 screen or a 21:9 screen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrSyYOTpPqY

Five notable moments in the history of letterboxing

1. As we pointed out last year, RCA's video-on-vinyl Selectadisc VideoDisc was not a well-loved video format, but the Capacitance Electronic Disc that drove the format does have the honor of being the first to have a movie released for it that used letterboxing. That film, Federico Fellini's Amarcord, came about in January of 1984. Other early films that used the technique include Monty Python & the Holy Grail and the Woody Allen film Manhattan.
2. The Criterion Collection, launched in 1984, represented one of the first concerted efforts to release films in a home-video format that perfectly matched the original layout of the films upon their release. The strategy, started with its Laserdisc release of the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which was filmed in SuperScope, was intended to keep the filmmakers' original vision intact. "We endeavor to present every film in its original aspect ratio (i.e., the ratio of height to width of the image), unless the filmmaker expressly requests a slightly different framing," the company says in its FAQ. Criterion, uniquely, also releases early 4:3 films with a small letterbox around all sides, so as to avoid oversetting by televisions.
3. One of the first big mainstream films that was released in a letterboxed home video format was Ghostbusters 2, which first hit stores on VHS and Laserdisc formats in 1990. At first, customers were confused—why was a third of the picture gone?—and that led to complaints, which eventually went up the food chain. As it turned out, those consumers had a point, because the person who did the letterboxing decided it would be a great idea to format the screen narrowly, but still do up the film in a 1.66:1 pan-and-scan format. So it was basically the worst of all worlds.
4. In 2003, the video chain Blockbuster, which was still influential at the time, formally decided to favor widescreen films in stocking DVD rentals, a move that effectively proved that widescreen films had gone mainstream. A 2004 Slate piece argued that this proved that widescreen had become a bonafide phenomenon. "There's a bigger factor behind widescreen's triumph: what you might call the continuing education of the filmgoer. If casual movie fans prefer pan-and-scan and film buffs prefer widescreen, then one way to tip the balance is to turn the casual fans into buffs," Bryan Curtis wrote in the piece. "The DVD format seems to have had precisely that effect."
5. Letterboxing is sometimes used for artistic reasons, so as to better highlight certain aspects of the film. Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, which covers three different eras, quietly uses aspect ratios commonly associated with each era—1.37:1 for the 1930s, 2.35:1 for the 1960s, and 1.85:1 for 1985 to the present. In an interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Anderson said that he was able to get away with it essentially because we're used to seeing letterboxes everywhere.

“We want to offer the best picture and provide the original aspect ratio of any title on Netflix. However, unfortunately our quality controls sometimes fail and we end up offering the wrong version of a title. When we discover this error, we replace that title as soon as possible.”

— Netflix spokesman Joris Evers, in a comment sent to The Huffington Post in the wake of the popular discovery of a Tumblr site called "What Netflix Does," which revealed that the company was crudely cropping a number of films in very awkward ways. (The Tumblr site appears to be down at this juncture, unfortunately, replaced by a spam site, but the Internet Archive is your friend.) The situation, essentially, appears to be this: the company has been bringing films into its streaming library, but those films are often not of the same quality globally, and as a result, the films are sometimes cropped in unfortunate ways. That said, running into panned-and-scanned movies these days is no accident: University of Wisconsin Film Researcher David Bordwell, meanwhile, writes that cable channels are still doing it to this day, though updating the technique for the HDTV era. (In one notable case, The Graduate's opening credits are shown in widescreen, only to switch to pan-and-scan a moment later.)

The fascinating thing about this piece is that when I mentioned this concept to people, many of them—including major film buffs—weren't even aware what letterboxing was, or that it was at one point controversial.

That to me suggests a major shift in perception within just the last few years. I'd like to think that two things happened to encourage that shift: Laptops and smartphones.

Watching a video on these devices, particularly in full-screen, generally means that there will be some natural letterboxing going on, just simply due to the design of our machines. A YouTube embed commonly has a letterbox, even though we never really think of it like that.

As a culture, I think we've come to embrace that our videos don't always go edge-to-edge, and find comfort in that. We weren't buying Spielberg's argument back in the day, but we made our peace.

That said, though, if you watched a Cinerama film in its natural letterbox style, you'd probably notice, because it's weird as hell.