Shakespeare in the Park, that’s what I’d like to do this Friday. I’ve never heard of “Shakespeare Miami” and note the misuse of the word “free” where it should say “no admission charge”. I wonder who I’ll meet there if I make it? The Shrew play is one I’ve never read and I don’t know what it is about. Yet the prevailing theory is that one should get exposed to English culture even if it hurts.
Are we in for a long war? Dumb question, since we were only in WWII for 41 months. [Some who actually believe Japan ever had a hope in hell may say 45 months.] Y’day, I took part in a forum about fighter aircraft being used in the Middle East. I may have been the only participant to realize the chances of armed forces winning a war is no greater than the intelligence of the population behind those forces. After a brief video, the questions started pouring in.[Author's note 2019: it turns out a lot of people had figured the code out and very shortly after and Sudoku quickly took on its contemporary form, shoving all the variants off the market. Invented in Indiana in 1974, it didn't really come into its own around here until the late 2000s, when I began noticing it on the Miami Herald puzzle page.]
I was the single voice asking how much the airplane cost. How many and how fast can they be produced? What is the kill ratio? Was it designed to fight in the desert? How many ground crew are needed to keep it operational? My plaintive voice was drowned out by people wanting to know such really important things like what religion is the pilot. Where was he born and how tall is he? Why is there a naked girl painted on the nose? Is the pilot married?
Yep, folks, I’d say we are definitely in for a long one.
Business is bad when people focus on problems instead of progress. I printed up an 8.5”x11” sample sheet because we do not yet have an 11”x17” printer. It should be obvious that these sheets are not congruent, that the smaller sheet cannot accurately portray the same scale as the larger sheet. Apparently this hard fact of life is escaping the customers and sales staff.
No, one cannot “just print up” a smaller copy. That amounts to more than doubling the amount of typesetting within a system never set up to instantly double the production labor. That’s like saying just go sell twice as hard, not only easier said than done, but conspicuously unappreciative of what is involved. Possibly the answer is to print up a generic page where there is no content, just more sales literature. Remind me to set up a flyer-specific email address, as some people are also having a tizzy over the existing ones.
This kind of trouble shows a misleading frailty on the surface. Please understand the flyer is a retrograde step, that is, to an earlier time. It is a concept that has to be nurtured back into favor. (Not everyone wants to lug a laptop to coffee break; that is why they still sell newspapers at Starbucks.) Beneath these surface limitations is an underlying strength in the first-rate designs of the pages, scanning systems, bizcard database and record-keeping that limit the in-house staff to just two persons. It will be nice when sales becomes as efficient as production.
