Fin de siècle Frosty. Snowmen haven’t always been clean-cut and good-natured. In the 1890s, for some reason, snowmen were plastered on almost every leading liquor and beer label. Advertisements depicted them chasing girls, harassing Santa or being harassed by kids (all the while clutching a bottle and a corncob pipe). As for Santa, he too has moderated over time. History records show that the original St. Nicholas lost his temper at a speech given by the heretic Arius at the Council of Nicaea. He proceeded to walk over and, right in front of the emperor and everybody else, punch him in the nose.

Side effects include memory loss and…um…memory loss.  A 34-year-old man was sentenced to 50 years in prison after selling drugs to the same undercover officer for the third time in 14 years. He shouldn’t be expected to recall the officer, he said.

Department of Roads-Paved-with-Good-Intentions. Foregoing the last possible turnoff en route to a matinee in a crowded Atlanta suburb, a young lady and her boyfriend had no idea that they faced five hours traveling less than five miles, first in separate cars, then together after he ran out of gas. Each had time for a pit stop and a snack at roadside restaurants while the other inched the car forward. Most memorable moment: a petite silver-haired woman in a bright red Rudolph sweater emerging from her husband’s Toyota to rap on a nearby van, screaming, “Back up, you #%@ moron!” while a driver young enough to be her granddaughter quivered inside. Responsible for it all? A church that had the audacity to give away 6,000 Christmas hams to the needy.

Hard times for these times. Wal-Mart used to find its busiest time of day was 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., when people finished their workday. Now the daily crunch comes about 11:30 p.m. at night when crowds arrive in time for the federal government to drop money into their accounts at midnight. One quarter of the population now receives federal assistance. America’s largest retailer adjusts.

Holiday mix. Yuletide celebrants intent on excitement might be look to this offering from one Atlanta concern: “Wine Tasting, NASCAR Driving & More.”

Quote to note: “May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions.”
– Joey Adams

Thanks for reading,
joe.ledlie@theledliegroup

A homeless romantic. A charity worker came across him just this month. Disheveled, hanging out at the Chernovtsy train station in Ukraine, with – strange! – a U.S. passport bearing the name of Cary Dolego, onetime write-in candidate for governor of Arizona. Dolego says he’s staying right there until he finds Yulia, who stood him up on a blind date. The chances of a reunion? “She would probably not recognize me – I was wearing a very distinctive Russian hat.”

Miss Myrtice likes to stop for a peppermint eggnog caramel mocha. We all know that daily commutes can cause poor sleep quality and lousy performance on the job. But, whoa, wake up for some good news. A new study finds an hour or more on the road is better than 30 to 45 minutes, and commutes of 30 minutes or less are actually good for you.

Something to try in your next staff meeting. Sarcasm is the language of the devil, our Victorian ancestors said. Now linguists, psychologists and neurologists have found that the ability to detect and use sarcasm actually increases problem-solving and critical-thinking skills. (Incidentally, how do we go back in time and get this word to our moms?)

The Myopic Manager. Back in the boom years, a star newspaper reporter totally corners information on the real estate market. Then a PR firm hires him thither. Miffed, the publisher wreaks revenge: total blackout of that firm’s clients for six months. All’s fair in love and war, but business, as they say, is business.

Quote to note. “There are so many famous people now, you haven’t heard of half of them.” – Henry Allen

Thanks for reading,
joe.ledlie@theledliegroup

One more thing to get wrong.  The “point d’ironie” is the original name of the backward facing question mark (؟) created by 16th-century printer Henry Denham. It was originally used to signal a purely rhetorical question. Now called the “snark,” it has been proposed as a solution to the problem of identifying online sarcasm. Like that’s really going to catch on؟

But who’s counting? Seriously.  Marine biologists recently discovered that, despite being some of the slowest swimmers in the sea, jellyfish have surpassed fish to become the most dominant predators in the ocean ecosystem. Try not to think about this the next time you go to the beach.

Get a big fan, Louie. A really big fan.  Copyright problems around the world in the 1930s tied up Atlanta’s favorite author for years. So says an engaging (if plainly named) new book, “Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.” One battle was with New York stripper Renee Villon, who planned an antebellum costume act in which “an electric fan blew off her clothes.” (The act was called “Gone with the Wind.”)

It’s a small world؟  The United Nations Population Fund estimated that the world’s population would reach 7 billion today, and sure enough, multiple countries right now are claiming one of their own as the 7billionth person. The UN, however, declined to select any specific child. Projections are that the world’s population could number 15 billion by the year 2100.

Contest.  Even if you work at Pollyanna & Partners and the whole place is populated by Care Bears and Smurfs, there’s got to be something unusually good about your office life. Or maybe something in these grim times is really bothersome about your work. Email us about the persistent pain, or the shining good deed, and wait for readers on six continents to go “aha!” Best entry gets a book. (Maybe the new “50 Bosses Worse Than Yours”?) All entries confidential unless we spot a class action.

Quote To Note:  “What’s on your mind, Senator, if you will allow the overstatement?” – Fred Allen

Moving beyond Mario.  Online gamers recently cracked an enzyme code vital to HIV research that had puzzled scientists for over a decade. To the surprise of the researchers, the gamers unfurled the virtual amino acid chains in less than three weeks – a task that even the scientists’ automated programs were unable to perform. Gamers 1, Computers 0.

Don’t listen to her.  Drivers of new BMWs recently demanded a product recall. They said they were too uncomfortable accepting the directions given by the GPS’s female voice. And they still wouldn’t pull over to ask for directions.

Thumb thumps.  One in three teens now sends over 3,000 text messages every month. That’s more than 100 messages per day. Adult cell phone owners are following their lead: over 31 percent now prefer texting to traditional phone calls. Another reason this nation has lousy handwriting – our thumbs are too tired to hold our pencils.

Another GPS issue?  An emperor penguin that washed up on the shores of New Zealand earlier this month ate sand and sticks he thought was snow, slid backward down the slide designed for his departure boat and swam in the wrong direction for several hours before eventually turning toward home. The other penguins in Antarctica will surely exclaim upon his return, “Dang! He’s back!”

Future shock.  Libraries, schmibraries! If Nooks replace books, what happens to “Meet the Author” and book signings? Not to mention bookplates, heart-felt inscriptions on flyleaves and phrases like “dog-eared books”? What will our children curl up with or stick their noses in? What will we throw at the puppy found chewing on the furniture – the Kindle? This is serious. Dogs could die!

Quote To Note: “Progress always involves risks. You can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first.” – Frederick B. Wilcox

RIP.  (Also QED.)  Philip A. Contos, 55, joined other Harley-Davidson enthusiasts on the streets of New York.  They were riding without helmets in protest of state law to the contrary when Mr. Contos lost control of his bike, flipped over the handlebars and died of head trauma.

The film will star Eddie Murphy.  Mohamed A. Mohamed, in the U.S. since 1990, shuffled on down from Buffalo to see the president of his native Somalia while he was visiting at the U.N.  So impressed was Sharif Sheikh Ahmed that he named his errant countryman Prime Minister on the spot. Now, after a dutiful career of nine months, the former Prime Minister is back at work in his cubicle at the Department of Transportation in Buffalo.

Don’t forget shirt cuffs.  A landmark new study of instructional effectiveness finds that students in classes employing Twitter happen to average grades that are five points higher than their tweetless counterparts.  The Twitter students are also tidier.  No more ink on skirt hems or forearms.  However, carpal tunnel may be a problem.

And speaking of hems.  Short skirts indicate a bull market and long skirts presage the bear.  Heck, everybody knows that.  Observe now how hemlines have gone long this year as the market has gone south.  So, who’s going to win the World Series?

American pie.  Americans are still responsible for one half of the patents and one third of all the money invested in research and development in the entire world.  About 70% of all global economic power is organized around America and American alliances. The streets, it seems, are still paved with gold (lest we forget).

But are they Harley-friendly?  Scott Brusaw’s  “Solar Roadways” are curb-to-curb panels that are environmentally efficient, fitted with wirelessly controlled LED lighting, and capable of melting ice.  That’s good enough for the Federal Highway Commission, which has given the electrical engineer a $750,000 grant to test the panels in a parking lot.

Quote To Note: “Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night.” – Hal Borland

“Welcome to the real world,” a South Carolina father said to his teenage son, who had just returned from a mission trip to the heat, pests and overwhelming poverty of a Central American village.  “No, Dad,” the boy replied, “I’ve just come back from the real world.”

For those about to chomp.  Aussie tour operator Matt Waller says great white sharks love rock music, specifically the output of Australia’s own AC/DC.  When the group’s music is played underwater, the sharks swim to the sound and rub their snouts on the speakers.

Pay scales.  A study in The Journal of Applied Psychology says women who weigh 25 pounds less than the average female make an additional $15,572 a year.  The study also found that men who weigh 25 pounds less than the average male make $8,437 a year less than their bulkier counterparts. Go figure.

Opening up.  Charitable giving in the U.S. was up nearly 4 percent to $291 billion last year while the economy only grew at about 2 percent. This probably says more about our hearts than our pocketbooks.

E pluribus… peonies?  Our colleague Thomas Allen Oder, a world-recognized orchidist, tells us that George Washington, like any self-respecting military genius, once took time to ban British flora from his Mount Vernon estate as he was facing the largest foreign army ever assembled on American soil (30,000 troops, in New York as it happened).  General Washington defeated the Redcoats, of course, but only after his gardeners uprooted any tyranny still lurking in his gardens.

Quote To Note: “Spring being a tough act to follow, God created June.” – Al Bernstein

 Wasn’t the recessional hula nice, though?  Catholics in the U.S. this winter will see a return of the language of the Mass to a style of English more like the original Latin text. This little story about the vagaries of translation comes courtesy of Father Dwight Longenecker, author and champion blogger of “Standing on My Head”:  

“After translating the liturgy into the native language of a tribe living in Papua, New Guinea, a friend of mine was informed by a local elder that he had translated ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts’ as ‘Super Pig, Super Pig, Super Pig. You are the most Super Pig of all Super Pigs.’ It seems that this particular jungle tribe kept pigs, and a man’s wealth and status was determined by the size of his herd of swine.”

Shutting down Detroit.  San Francisco has seen the end, for now, of all new car dealerships in the domestic category with the closing of a Ford dealership earlier this month. Fred J. Lautze Ford was the city’s first, opening in 1920. A Chevrolet manager outside town explains: “[San Francisco’s] allegiance is to anything but domestic.”  Wine from nearby Napa presumably excepted. 

Near-finish.  Earlier this month 19-year-old Jakub Maly almost died when a hole over six feet wide and seven feet deep caved in around him on a beach in South Florida. It took almost three hours to dig him out. He had dug the hole with 20 of his teammates and coaches from the Olympic swim team of Austria. 

When you’re worried and you can’t sleep…. This month Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter have fallen in line and mark the dawn. Some say this cosmic spectacle is a sign the end is nigh. Others see it as a reason to scan the morning sky.  (Sorry, that rhyme was totally random.)  

Hearts are stirred yet by the suffering of those pummeled by storms in the lands surrounding us: first Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, and now Missouri. Mighty waters meanwhile move south from the Great Plains into the Delta, bringing with them more suffering. This is a mighty country, but some folks are finding our might this spring mighty hard to bear.

Quote To Note: “We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the difference between us two” – Osama bin Laden.

Thanks for reading.

joe.ledlie@theledliegroup

Ó2011 The Ledlie Group

www.theledliegroup.com

He’s no Einstein.  He is, as they say, “something else.” Jacob Barnett, a 12-year-old from Indiana, taught himself in one week what most people take at least four years to learn: algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus, among other things.  Jacob has autism.

Dumb luck.  Last month a New York man missed out on his share of a $319 million jackpot.  He had skipped his weekly office lottery pool because he “wasn’t feeling lucky.”

The best four (or five) years of your life.  As admission letters go out, college surveys are paying more attention to the quality of the campus experience. Forbes set off an educational earthquake with new standards that included student likes and dislikes.  Now survey behemoth US News and World Report is playing catch-up with its list of schools most heavily supported by alumni. The oldest among the top 10 is Princeton University.  The youngest is Thomas Aquinas College.  

Picture this.  A recent addition to the Oxford English Dictionary isn’t a word.  It’s the graphic outline of a heart, as in “I [heart] NY.”  The heart is listed alongside the word “heart” and is defined as a verb meaning “to love.” Right in there with new listings “OMG” and “LOL.”

Quote to Note: “We need spring.  We need it desperately and, usually, we need it before God is willing to give it to us” – Broadcaster Peter John Gzowski, a Canadian.

Thanks for reading.
joe.ledlie@theledliegroup

©2011 The Ledlie Group
www.theledliegroup.com

“PowerPoint Hell” is inflaming the business world, it seems.  “Use the glance test,” says Nancy Duarte, who makes a good living at it “A slide’s message should come across in two or three seconds.” If not, “back to the undrawing board.” Bring your stopwatch.

Up in South Carolina a state senator – Lee Bright by actual name – proposes that the state move away from the Federal Reserve system and create its own currency. This new money would be printed on “gold or silver or [perhaps even] both,” the senator suggests. Has G. Gordon Liddy heard about this?

The view from here. Across America, 30 months later, small business juggles.  It’s not easy hustling and suffering at the same time. Two and a half years after the cosmic mudslide, the typical small business owner stands atop a still slippery promontory staring deep into the abyss, still asking: “What the hell was that?” 

Ole Twitter. The average age of a Tweeter has risen.  Overall use among the young generally, however, is down. Lesson from these opposing trends: Tweeters are getting older and Twitter more stable as a medium. 

The last ride together.  The correct contest answer, from Mike Fitzgerald of Fitzgerald Land & Commercial Realty, was a 1911 Gräf & Stift Bois de Boulogne tourer, now located in the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum in Vienna.  What kind of car, we had asked, were Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his duchess Sophie riding in when they met their end?

Quotable Quote: “Some people think football is a matter of life and death… I can assure them it is much more serious than that.” – Bill Shankly (Scottish footballer)

Thanks for reading.

joe.ledlie@theledliegroup

Our latest addition to the list of states where we have provided serious help to businesses is Idaho.  From somewhat further to the west comes this note about our new electronic distribution: “I look forward to my copy of The Ledlie Letter. It makes for sage, smart and sensible company” – Mark Paterson, Currie Communications, Melbourne. Thanks, Mate.

©2011 The Ledlie Group

www.theledliegroup.com

January

Let’s talk about punkts, full-stops, periods – those little rascals that ancient scribes inserted on expensive surfaces years ago Wedge in one of those little symbols on vellum or parchment and you showed the reader where to stop, almost without sacrificing any expensive space Now, with electronic typesetting on endless cheap pages called screens, we’re all typesetters or monks and can use whatever device, of whatever size, to signal an end to our thought In this item here, we did it with triple spaces at the end of each sentence Did you even notice?

Not dead yet. The Times of London (circ. 502,436) brags about collecting money from all of its 100,000 online readers. Meanwhile, U.S. magazine advertisers trumpet a study showing the age segment 18 to 34 reads more magazines than their parents. Print endures.

Right, but did he text or did he use paper and ink? An eight-year-old boy named Charlie McClurg is responsible for getting a Books-A-Million store to open in north Georgia. He led the charge demanding the Birmingham-based chain open in his hometown of Dalton.

RT @getyourcarback. The Seattle Police Department is now using the 140-character format allowed by Twitter to report stolen vehicles to the public, including the car’s make, model, color and tag number. (This entry happens to be 294 characters – counting periods and not counting parentheticals.)

It’s not you; it’s my nucleic acids. A study shows our propensity towards being unfaithful, if any, is linked to genetic make-up – more specifically dopamine receptors in the brain. Links between genetic make-up and the rest of the Seven Deadly Sins are pending further study.

I don’t feel so good myself. For the third year in a row the overall average life expectancy has fallen in the United States. Estimates released this year have the average life expectancy for a child born in 2008 at 77.8. In 2007, it was 77.9, and in 2006 it was 78.1.  No one tied this to the Tea Party or the Obama Administration. Could it have been the sheer terror of economic collapse?

Contest. Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, were infamously assassinated in Sarajevo, Austria-Hungary (present day Bosnia). Those slayings (from gunshots following a hand-rolled bomb) directly or indirectly ignited three conflicts, including WWI, WWII and The Cold War. But what kind of vehicle were they riding in? A book to the winner.

Quotable Quote: “This is a country where a good prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich.” – Charles Krauthammer

Thanks for reading.

joe.ledlie@theledliegroup

What do we do? Last month we assisted in an executive transition at one of the nation’s 100 best hospitals. We also helped a law firm stave off a legal attack. And we named Philip Hauserman, 29, head of operations at this generally gray-haired group.

©2011 The Ledlie Group