Death by two headed monster

CW FISHER. I keep thinking about James Kim, the young father who recently died in a frozen ravine in the mountains of Oregon while seeking help for his young family who was stuck in their car which was stuck in the snow in the deep woods which he drove into on purpose after missing his turn. And I keep wondering how it came to be that these intelligent people could make such monumentally stupid decisions. Forget for a moment that they weren't from around here. They had come from San Francisco to Portland for Thanksgiving and were on their way home when he, after missing a turn off for the interstate that would take them through the mountains, decided that a backroad mountain pass would be almost as good, if not more scenic. He who takes the road less traveled through the mountains in November might be an independent soul but is definitely an idiot. What did he expect? Eight miles in, they got stuck in the snow. Perhaps as a counterweight to their original bad decision, they then made a series of bad non-decisions. First they wasted time, more than a day, sitting in the car, consuming their remaining food. Once that was gone, Mrs. Kim nursed her two small children. Sometime after it became apparent they wouldn't survive without food, which was now -- shockingly -- gone, it must've dawned on them that just sitting there didn't seem to be yielding much of a result. So James Kim made the fateful decision to leave his family on foot, wearing only a light jacket, sweatpants and tennis shoes, with a general plan to seek help. His decisions could fill a pamphlet on How to Die. I'm not a survivalist but I was once lost in the deep woods of Vermont for more than eight hours and I found my way out by following logic. I reasoned that water rolls downhill, that it will find the valley and gather into a stream which will eventually flow under a bridge on which there will be a road and eventually a car that might stop and pick me up if I stand in the middle of the road waving my arms -- which I did. It worked. Had I known that bears also enjoy following streams, I may have reconsidered my strategy, but I would still be lost. My particular strategy might not have worked for James Kim. I was lost in summer, and the mountains of Vermont are generally less daunting than those of Oregon. but what saved me would have saved him. What saved me was 15 minutes of logical thinking. If James Kim had taken a 15 minute break from panic he would have built a fire -- a big bonfire with lots of smoke sends a clear message to any passing helicopters. We are here. Instead, he set off from the car in a different direction from his own tire tracks. If he wanted to find the road, the place where they lost their way, why didn't he simply follow his own trail of breadcrumbs? This man wrote for Wired Magazine. It's an easy assumption that he was technically savvy enough to have heard somewhere that cell phones send out a unique signal even when they're turned off. That's how his wife and children were found. That, and her flapping an umbrella. Smart lady. She nursed the kids, she flapped the umbrella, she didn't leave the vehicle. Did she have anything to do with the bad decisions that put them in that situation? Somehow I doubt it. Some husbands and wives, especially when one is driving and the other is "navigating," become a two headed monster under siege by itself. Under these conditions many a poor decision is made, and worse, defended. And because the driver has the greater power, the "navigator" is ultimately wiser to keep her mouth shut in the broader interest of general safety. I wasn't in the car that day after Thanksgiving. But 15 minutes of logical thinking brought me to the conclusion that, when one dumb decision brings an avalanche of supporting bad decisions, a two-headed monster is doing the thinking. Think Iraq. The two headed monster in this case is George Bush, as the driver, and the American public, as the navigator. We're going through the mountains, we're making our own road and eating up all our food, and when we can finally go no further, we'll just sit here awhile and eventually, when it seems prudent, venture out in our slippers calling hello. Yet 15 minutes of logic would make it very clear that America can have very little effect on the civil war now raging in Iraq between the Sunnis and Shiites, that this war is bigger than Iraq and wider than all Islam, and that America is standing in the middle of it, helpless, irrelevant and utterly ignorant of the true nature of the conflict in its midst or of its historical, religious and cultural roots. America, in its tennis shoes, thinks it got Iraq into this mess, and thinks it can get it out, but is doomed to be found frozen at the bottom of a ravine. And while President George Bush is currently taking a 15 minute break for logic, the problem is he's still in the car. If we could just get him to walk off in some direction or other we could maybe unfurl this umbrella.

McDonald's customers value taste and early death

Trans fats are now banned from New York City by the Department of Health as a way to prevent 500 deaths a year, which they say are directly attributable to the consumption of trans fats. My introduction to trans fats was more than a decade ago when McDonald's Corp., then a client, was testing it. Trans fats represented an exciting opportunity: a virtually maintenance-free vat frying system. The old way required filtering the oil every night after hours in a dangerous and tedious process. McDonald's saw a way to significantly lower their costs and reduce risk. Of course every opportunity has its dangers. The biggest danger to McDonald's was the fact that customers didn't care for the taste, and taste, at McDonald's, was everything, or so it was said. There was another danger farther out there, this one involving health -- little was known about the effects of trans fats in the human body -- but McDonald's monitored those discussions. Even though taste was most important at McDonald's, they went ahead anyway because food cost was pretty important too. And when the reports began to pour out that trans fats were indeed not so good, and especially for all the people it was killing, McDonald's took up humming. Denmark passed a law that said no trans fats and McDonald's complied. New York passed a law and McDonald's will comply. But McDonald's will not stop using trans fats elsewhere because of... taste. Taste, according to McDonald's, is the most important thing to their customers, and their customers prefer the taste of trans fats. Those 500 people who die every year are all New Yorkers. Worldwide figures haven't been compiled. But we're talking about a body count of near tsunamic proportions. McDonald's used to love to count things, how many burgers it had served, how many times they could go to the moon and back. They talked wistfully of such things as if they secretly believed that, one day, burgers might fly. But when it comes to bodies, McDonald's doesn't count. They don't stack, they don't fill stadiums, they don't compare them to the height of Sears Tower, they ignore the whole thing. It isn't them. It's the customer. The customer wants that taste. That hydrogenated trans fat taste. That's what they're saying now. And that's why trans fats, at McDonald's, will remain there until the very day that people like you refuse to eat it anymore.

Liar Identification

CW FISHER. There are two kinds of people in this world: honest people and dishonest people. Of the honest people there are, again, two kinds: the newly born and the recently deceased. Of the two kinds of dishonest people, the huge majority are well-intended folks who might tell a dozen itty-bitty lies a day in varying shades of white to gray, consciously or un-. Some of these lies are kind, like not telling the boss she has a bugger on her cheek; others are about survival: smiling at a person you hate, or ignoring someone to get their attention; some lies are to the self, designed to preserve some illogical but pleasureable behavior. None of them all put together would kill a tse-tse fly The second kind of dishonest person is the same as the first only significantly moreso. Extremely dishonest people are usually found in leadership positions, in crime, government, business, religion -- the most powerful liars work in all four areas simultaneously. Although honest leaders are probably in the majority, the dishonest ones do a disproportionate amount of damage, and are difficult to identify because they tend to present themselves as above reproach. Which they are, by design, until they get caught. There are two kinds of caught liars. The kind who admit it, and the kind who deny it. The ones who admit it are preferable, but troubling, because, well, because they're liars. The second kind of caught liar, the one who denies, is by far the more entertaining of the two, for the more evidence presented, the more bizarre their explanations become. My family was recently duped by a con man who made off with a considerable sum up our money for an investment scheme that didn't exist. After many months of listening to his explanations for the holdup, it suddenly became clear: this was a holdup. Suddenly the only possible explanation that made any sense at all was that everything he told us was a big fat lie. Usually by the time the victim figures this out the criminal is long gone, but in this case the criminal was a neighbor. So I invited my neighbor into my office for a chat wherein he admitted the whole thing was a lie from the beginning. In the days following he left several incriminating voice mails admitting he scammed us and promising to make it right -- somehow -- but he had absolutely no money and could not pay it back at this time or in the foreseeable future, therefore would I accept his Hummel collection? I brought the tapes to the police. He has appeared five times before a judge, and sought and received five continuances, which cost money because lawyers are required. Obviously he has the money. How could this have happened to me, an intelligent person, and even worse, to my family, who are even more intelligent than I am? It happened because my neighbor was above reproach. He wasn't just an honest person, he was the most honest person I'd ever met. My message to you is this: We are trained to see people as they want us to see them, and we allow people their fantasies about themselves perhaps in barter for their ignoring our fantasies of ourselves. But if you meet someone who seems too good to be true, that someone is likely a liar on a massive scale and if you get involved with them you will be their victim and you will pay, pay, pay. And they won't. And that's the truth! Look instead for deeply flawed people with a good sense of humor. They're safe, they're trustworthy, and, if you ever need extra money, they're easy marks.

MDI 73: Microwave-safe suit

The US has a new "less lethal" weapon at its disposal for dispersing crowds. It's a microwave on a truck. Swept slowly over a crowd, "the sheriff," as it's affectionately called, gently roasts demonstrators, causing their contact lenses to adhere to their corneas, causing their eyeglasses to severely burn the temples and bridge of the nose, causing 3rd degree burns wherever jewelry is found, and best of all, causing a stampede -- basically all without killing anybody, although the stampede, well, you can always blame that on the crowd. They're told to disperse, not run away. So the trampled are plausible collateral. Originally developed for Iraqi crowd control, the sheriff, it occurs to us, would be equally effective for American crowd control, or for simple day-to-day control of its citizenry, should the need arise -- although the threat alone would likely be sufficient. And now, because the US is also working on a portable model which can be carried by one man, effectively making him a super persona non grata wherever he goes, it begins to occur to us that these weapons could be a very very bad thing in the wrong hands, and the wrong hands are the only hands that would use such a weapon. The question is how can we protect ourselves? We'd like to go to the demonstrations but the sheriff will be there. We'd like to go to the ball game, but what about the rogue wavers? Should we stay home? My grandmother used to carry in her purse a rain bonnet that folded up to the size of a pack of gum. She opened it once and it sprang out like an accordion. Something like that is what is needed, only bigger than a bonnet -- it's a bonnet for the whole body -- and of course it's made out of some space-age material that protects against microwaves. Don't look at me like that. I'm not a scientist. I'm just an idea man. Obviously microwave safe materials exist, we use them all the time. All I'm saying is one that's flexible. Then they can wave us all they want. We'll just wave back. Until they start shooting us. I don't know what the defense is against the sheriff, but if you look at the truck, it appears that the beam is bouncing off a metal plate. If that's true, and microwaves can be deflected, that could mean a shield could bounce the microwaves right back at the sheriff, and of course anybody in between who happened to have not had the foresight to bring a microwave bonnet in their purse or back pocket. Ray guns. Can you fight ray guns with ray guns? I wonder if it's wise. Here's to a less lethal future. Also published in The Million Dollar Ideation Project.

Offended flashers won't show

Celebrity slut Paris Hilton backed out of her planned appearance with former pop star Britney Spears at the Billboard Awards after objecting to the jokes written for her about her peer's spreading reputation for flashing her crotch. "Britney Spears is not a 'peer.' In the whole two weeks we've been best friends she never peed on me once." Ms. Hilton then slowly uncrossed her legs for the cameras and left the pressroom aghast. It was only a matter of time before the vagina monologue became a dialogue. Paris couldn't keep the trend going all by herself and probably feels she owes her less famous friend a debt of gratitude for validating the most interesting thing about her. Crotchless women who don't know how to sit in the presence of cameras are always interesting, especially when their exposed genitalia is the only thing that's interesting about them. Together, these two women are twice as interesting as they used to be. Hillary Clinton is said to be exploring the viability of crotchlessness. Even if the doubling of interest is only half true, it could still be a huge boon to her popularity while keeping her safely out of the presidency. They say this all started with Sharon Stone, but I think it started with Bill Clinton. And it won't be ending soon. Mothers, don't let your daughters wear dresses for awhile.

Skyscapes

This is what happened after I started pointing my phone out of my car window at interesting skies. It gives me something to do when I'm driving and the results are often surprisingly good. I know it sounds dangerous, and it is, but the chances of you coming in the opposite direction just as I'm snapping a picture and veering into the left lane are pretty remote.

Double Your Intelligence Instantly!

Neononverbalizationizing: The New Science of Silence CW FISHER Scientists have long known that people talk too much and listen too little, and indeed much of the general public is beginning to catch on to it as well. Go anywhere and ask anybody if this is not true: you'll get an earful. But you won't listen! The best way to get smarter -- quickly -- is to close your mouth and keep it closed, as many an old joke and proverb go. But keeping one's mouth shut can be extremely difficult. It can actually be easier to close someone else's mouth. But we can't have that, because somebody's got to do the talking. Otherwise we're just standing there. Nobody likes silence. It's uncomfortable. Even deaf people don't like silence. They'd rather flutter on about nothing. It's what people have always done in all cultures through all time. This chatter is part of socialization, but because it's our most readily available tool, chatter is always loaded with subtext (lies) for the purpose of disguising insecurities. Chatter is how we chisel out our version of the truth. And the truth is, frankly, we're better than you. Therefore, he who fears his chest is concave will know more about sports than you. She who fears she's ugly and undesirable will talk shockingly dirty in mixed company. All of us, if we're allowed to go on too long (which is rarely permitted), will keep spinning wool into gabardine until there's nothing left of us but a pile of dirty laundry -- our own -- for your examination. Keeping our mouths shut is a lesson most of us are doomed to learn over and over for the rest of our lives. But with proper training you can achieve mandibular compression for extended periods and become the one person remaining in the room whose self-respect is still intact while the other dingleballs are still yimyammering away about beauty schools and pitching stats. Neononverbalizationizing is all about the conversion of negatives to positives, of turning disadvantages to advantages. When your opponent pushes, you pull. Using his own momentum, you yank him to defeat. This can all be done with out uttering a word. All you have to do is know how to wiggle your eyebrows. I fell on all this when I was getting people to open up on video. It's frightening what people will admit to in the presence of a willing ear. Even with a camera rolling. I found that I could twist my face to say all sorts of things, like, Really? and Tell me more, and That's unbelievable and No way! and I'm confused, explain slower. All done with eyebrows. I was listening with my entire face. I began to encourage a random blowhards to let it all out. Such deep holes they dig. And I was right there to nudge them over the edge, with only an eyebrow. Try my whole face technique at your next party and you'll be the most fascinating person of the evening. They'll call you brilliant and persuasive; you'll lift an eyebrow. They'll insist-- no, no, you are! You'll roll your eyes. Things get much better from there. If you're a man, you'll leave with the woman with the implants, but behind her will be three or four enraptured tagalongs, and yours is the short one in the shadows inside the largest coat you've ever seen where there is buried a rare gem whom you'll impregnate through eye contact, scoundrel. If you're a woman, you'll go home to your cat, thank you very much, since you might be shy but you're no slut, and before you even put the key in the door you'll hear the end of one message and the beginning of another -- call after call, one after the other -- marry me and I'll give you Monoco, camp with me on the beach tonight, let's go to Arby's -- the first one you call back is Mr. Wright.