Death Quasar

Oh look, a senile narcissist spews yet another chunk in a near-endless stream of mental diarrhea!
Better make a “news” article about it! So informed!

Old Old Spice, meet the New Old Spice.

that they polled customers afterwards points to this being a simple corporate fuckup

Yes, this is my thought as well. They bought their way into the market, somehow thinking it was the chunk of real estate and not the services provided that kept customers coming back over and over again. They didn’t even bother to see what these services were, came in like a bull in a china shop, indifferent to the point of oblivious about it, even as the accounting department back at the home office had to process out all the kitchen equipment, the self-service soda and ice cream machines, etc., from every store in Baja.

Nowadays, 7-11 is still there, puttering along, as a generic clone of Oxxo, the other large mini-market chain in Mexico, offering nothing special, except maybe along the lines of - “Hmm… Oxxo is three blocks this way, 7-11 is one block that way, I guess I’ll go to 7-11”, and Oxxos are everywhere, Jesus… like somebody gleefully abused the copy/paste function.

Now this truly does sound like a horrifying story.
Move over McRib, 'cause here comes Georgie “Please Let Me Die” Pie, even less often than you do!

Imagine if McDonald’s had actually defeated Jollibee in the Philippines, absorbed them, then resuscitated their menu once a year.
But that didn’t happen, I wonder how did Jollibee not only survive, but thrive? What was their crucial chessboard move there?

Gather round, children, and let me tell you a story of the same type of mindless corporate stupidity that happened in my state, about how something successful was ruined because all they could see was at the surface level…

When the mini-market chain AM/PM opened some stores in Baja California, they came up with a hybrid concept that also included a made-to-order fast food kitchen serving burgers, and a sizable seating area, they called this Dave’s Kitchen. It was a huge, huge hit.

Enter 7-11 into the scene. Getting wind of this new phenomenon and armed with corporate cash from their Mexico offices in… Monterrey I think it was… they bought every AM/PM in the state and converted them to 7-11s, surely salivating at the prospect of this large client base that was supposedly built-in with their acquisition.

So what was the first thing they did?
They shuttered Dave’s Kitchen. Poof… gone!
They got rid of the soda machine, the ice cream machine… instead of assimilating the business model of what they had bought, they got rid of everything that made these AM/PMs unique in the market, replaced it with their own bland and generic way of doing things according to the home office in Monterrey.

Within a month, the new 7-11s had lost around 3/4 of their customers. Their emergency response was to send in a squad of corporate poll takers to pester the customers still there and see… why the other ones had gone, I guess?

Asking the wrong questions (why did the customers leave in droves?) to the wrong people (the few remaining clients who didn’t leave). And thus, nothing of value was learned, because when your corporate business school suits are clumsy unthinking hammers, every situation and problem look like a goddamned nail.

The crowd that murdoch and limbaugh handed the orange parasite on a platter, does not care about pesky and boring little things like facts and figures. It is an irrational mob fed with bacteria-infested red meat for two decades. They can only be reached via the basest of impulses, ripe pickings only for the most ignorant and/or shameless of conmen. It doesn’t help society that the right-wing toxic propaganda machine operates at full blast 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

For a long time it was Huevos Rancheros, but that got nudged into the #2 spot when I discovered Eggs Benedict.

That’s an angle I’ve yet to see at upscale markets, turbo-branding the specific qualities of olive oil from Morocco.
Someone could make a fortune if they’re not careful!
“Whoops! I slipped on Moroccan olive oil and hit the ground rich!”

One night I was re-watching Almodovar’s “Átame!” (“Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” in English) and my older sister came in and sat to watch.
As I’d seen it before, I knew a very, very long and graphic sex scene was coming, so I got up and went to the bathroom.

When I returned, only after I was well and fully sure that scene was over, my sister said - “I’m so glad you walked out right when you did”, yeah no kidding, I did it on purpose.

Now for a friend of mine… his family are born-again Christians, it was his turn to pick a movie that night, and he’d chosen “Easy Rider”, yeah, this guy could be completely oblivious like that.
After an hour and change of uneasy watching with a palpable tension in the air… the acid kicked in… in the New Orleans raised cemetery. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back, that’s when the yelling started in my friend’s living room.

Ouch. From the very first scene, ouch.

I’m afraid they might be a whole bunch of oldies but goodies:

2001: A Space Odyssey.
The Empire Strikes Back.
Miller’s Crossing (the third movie written and directed by the Coen brothers, from 1989).
A Bridge Too Far (from 1977, a sprawling, star-studded epic about the Allies and their costly, ill-advised and ultimately unsuccessful Operation Market-Garden in WWII).
A Bout De Soufflé. (Godard’s seminal French New Wave cannon blast).
From Russia With Love.
The Spy Who Loved Me.

Why am I getting the sense that Angela Merkel made an enormous mess of Germany in the energy sector in so many different ways?

From sucking on the kremlin’s pipeline, lowering Germany’s guard to corrupt and corrupting russian influence, to negotiating the short end of Beijing’s stick on renewables as stated in this article, I get this nagging sense of tepid myopia, of giving free reign to immediate corporate appetites and impulses, as if tomorrow wasn’t coming soon to cash its’ checks.

The more time passes, the more corrosively mediocre her legacy seems to become.

See here… corporations don’t know what is best for them in five years, ten years, all they always care about is “Gimme more more MORE MORE…! Gimme now now NOW NOW…!”, they have to be monitored and guided like impulsive children that might drink the goddamned bleach under the kitchen sink, they might start playing with matches and burn the whole goddamned house down.

This visual is uniquely soothing, reminds me of artist Cory Arcangel, who did an art piece with just the Super Mario clouds drifting on a television screen - hacking into the NES cartridge and getting rid of everything else - to much admiration.

I remember reading an art journalist applauding the Impressionistic feel of the thing, the way Arcangel brought a background object to the fore, and in the process transformed it into something new entirely, with a surprising character and strength of presence.

Here’s a Whitney Museum link to the work.

Maybe the problem is that they’re all trying to be the same goddamned thing, like how there are 15 or more goddamned hamburger chains.

“We want to be like facebook! Also like Youtube and twitter and tiktok! And like Instagram!”

Maybe if they stuck to their speciality and strengths, pick a lane and stay in it, they would prosper. But no! God forbid!

Diamonds, or any sort of gemstone, as trying to sell those things would probably be as risky as stealing them in the first place.

Instead of remaining parallel as we move through space in the arrow of time, we get closer to other mass because our paths bend, our clocks running at slightly different beats.

Time-bending is mind-bending stuff, man.

Somewhat like Dziga Vertov’s “Man With A Movie Camera”, from the silent movie era. It’s a laudable intellectual experiment, but with the emphasis on what the camera and editing can capture instead of any narrative thread, the whole thing quickly becomes overwhelming and starts feeling like a chore.

Because so many trump voters are low-information, rabid and impervious to fact and/or reason. They will vote orange even if he shoots someone on Fifth Avenue to death, or if there are 32-or-whatever felony indictments/verdicts.

Meanwhile, many potential Democrat voters are also low-information in their own way - impressionable, fickle and with little memory retention, they seem unable to act upon a clear and present danger until it punches them in the goddamned face (and by then of course it’s too late), somehow have normalized the orange threat and are easy prey to an algorithm pushing a “both parties are the same” divide-and-conquer propaganda.

The difference between a parasite-laden excrement chip cookie and a raisin oatmeal cookie, “But I wanted chocolate chip! bOtH cOoKiEs ArE tHe SaMe!”

I still get all verklempt about it.