Hey joyfulagitator! Nail your sizzle points!

Can I bring you a non-refillable beverage while you look at the menu? Hey, don't forget to save room for our sinfully decadent Chocolate Suicide cake! It's my personal favorite.

I'm sure you'll be able to follow some of of these key points below, but if that's a hard slog just remember: you can always bring in TJ for one of his seminars, which are guaranteed stuff and not fluff!

Just thought I'd make sure you were keeping up with all the great tips in Service that Sells and Service That Sells 2: Managing the Sizzle!

1. Personalize the guest experience and eliminate cookie-cutter service
   
2. Nail "sizzle points" and wow every guest
   
3. Embrace the steps you can follow to make the magic come alive
   
4. Dramatically increase check averages, sales and profitability ... and truly set your operation apart!

Maybe next you'll get "Pour It On: 52 Ways to Manage Your Bar Profits", which promises to:

1. Improve the way you manage your inventory, your equipment overhead, your supplier relationships, and your bar staff
   
2. Give your staff the techniques necessary to sell your beverages
   
3. Show you how to entice customers to come into your operation, spend more money on alcohol beverages, and come back again — with their friends!

http://www.managersredbook.com/

Spamdexing Sites Produce Dada

While playing with some new google feature do_not_lick showed me just now, that spits out facts about celebrities I typed in "Winona Ryder's Height" and got this insane machine-generated thing.

You're welcome!

Pedagogy Year Zero

If I were the parent of a child in this teacher's class, I would have to be restrained from physically assaulting her.

In case she deletes this after being LJDrama'd to Yuggoth, her post is pasted with post-paste technology below.

( worst teacher ever )

Eine Kleine FOAFMusik

The "Mozart Effect", which has been a cultural phenomenon since the 1990s, is horseshit. It followed the same path as every urban legend, but the original study was never replicated, nor was the study about babies. The meta-study looks interesting, as does the researcher.

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS — Scientists have discredited claims that listening to classical music enhances intelligence, yet this so-called "Mozart Effect" has actually exploded in popularity over the years. So says Chip Heath, an associate professor of organizational behavior who has systematically tracked the evolution of this scientific legend. What's more, Heath and his colleague, Swiss psychologist Adrian Bangerter, found that the Mozart Effect received the most newspaper mentions in those U.S. states with the weakest educational systems—giving tentative support to the previously untested notion that rumors and legends grow in response to public anxiety.

( the whole thing was a wash )

Even funnier, I had to ask her to turn it down.

Weird and cool: Coming into the living room and seeing my 76-year-old mother watching Nick Cave on the TV. And liking it.

Weird and funny: Getting two text messages from bikupan that appeared to be from a year ago, one saying "What, no potato salad? Bah!" and the other "Is something wrong?". I vaguely remembered going back and forth about my accidentally vegan potato salad recipe last year and having some technical snafus. But no, she really did send those last night, and it wasn't a temporal wormhole in the SMS system.

Neither weird, funny, nor cool: My re-discovery tonight of the fatal flaw in desktop computers nowadays: they're all I/O bound. Here I sit with an 800 MHz PowerPC and 1 gig of RAM in my lap and I can't do jack. Why? Because there's disk intensive activity going on. The window manager slows to a crawl, none of my apps respond except in annoying bursts, and inexplicable errors occur probably due to clicks and keyboard presses out of focus because windows are changing erratically. It's like I'm connecting to my own computer over a crappy old 14.4 modem link. RAAAAAAR. I want IDE to go away. [/geek]

Neither weird, funny, nor cool: I am reading a book about the Vietnam war. Bad: we're doing it again. Worse: we're doing it again much more stupidly . I'm experiencing nostalgia for the sincerity, honesty, and sense of duty of CIA and military officers from 1966. YOW!

Weird and funny but not cool: Bro 'n' ho couple arrive in D's tonight and she asks D., who is behind the counter: "Do you have Chocolate Tea?" A moment of silence, and D. says "Umm, no?" Customer says: "Could you do that, like, put mocha in tea?" D: "I guess, yeah!" Customer: "Would that be disgusting, do you think?" D: "Yes, it would."

I link, I link, I link.

1. How'd they pull that off? The Atkins diet people have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Oh, probably because they bet $300 million on a diet trend lasting forever.
   
   
2. Acupuncture can reduce tension headaches by half according to a recent study.
   
   
3. These people claim that they can "fingerprint" the unique identity of a document, package, or credit card.
   
   
4. An Iraqi town has named a U.S soldier as a sheik, or village elder.
   
   
5. The Gitmo trials are so thoroughly rigged that military prosecutors have resigned in protest. Have you ever seen what military "justice" is like? Hint: everyone is guilty. What could possibly squick these guys? Were actual kangaroos involved?