Meanwhile, The Rebel Sell continues to have legs. The Korean edition was released a few months ago, in  a wonderfully playful-looking volume. Also, HarperCollins recently sold the Serbian rights, which is a total delight. Finally, the film rights were optioned during the summer by a New Zeland company — hopefully they’ll come up with something neat.

 Feedback on the book or related subjects is always welcome, so feel free to email either of us at the addresses linked on the right.

 Here’s an entry about the domination of the CBC’s commentator ranks by goaltenders.

Here is  a recent one about how to fix the diving.

Here is the  original entry, “World Cup of Acting”

 Comments are very welcome.

UPDATE:   Would help if I turned  comments on. Done

I can’t say I ever learned much from anything he wrote, though he has some good lines here and there — his observation that the city is a competition did as much to shape my understanding of urbanization as anything in Jane Jacobs. Everything you need to know about his thought is in The Matrix.

He was always a bit of a philosopher/clown, but he became embarrassing in recent years. His thoughts on the riots in the French suburbs last year were inadvertently hilarious; his take on terrorism and the post-9/11 world was near-criminal in its idiocy.

Still. There is that cool scene in The Matrix where Neo hides the disc in the copy of Simulacra and Simulations.

Andy & Joe

just finished going through “nation of rebels”.

didnt know if you were being serious, sarcastic or ironic or none of the above.

whatever weak points you guys attempted to make were only made by dismissing other ideas which you dont really understand.

your sense of history seems more beerhall hist/phil than well read & digested. feel sorry for your students.

curious why ‘harperbusiness’ & not an academic publisher? pretty sure you arent making much money from it.

you guys are still fighting (personal?) battles that are long over. others have moved on?

are you guys ‘randians’ (rush fans) trying to slip anarcho-capitalism into the ‘left’ media?

or just developing yet another political iconography into the stew of human discontent?

& your conclusion is seriously dis-eased.

well thanks for another piece of the puzzle. but where does it fit.

gerald

outside of a dog, books are a man’s best friend. inside a dog, its too dark to read.

groucho marx

 I thought about my job in customer service while reading “THE REBEL SELL”. The authors think that: “Consumer capitalism has taken every authentic human experience, transformed it into a commodity and then sold it back to us through advertising and mass media.”.

I would go one step further, customer service is a part of personal selling, too. For me, it is very difficult and complex sometimes, because I had to deal with emotions. I didn’t lie, because I never said anything that is not true, but I didn’t say what I was really thinking sometimes.

I was polite and very professional to make people smile and happy as customers. But those people don’t really mean anything to me.

I just managed emotions professionally.

Am I authentic?

I always thought so.

link 

With a cool simplicity inspired by Film Noir posters of the 1950s (when Frenchmen were, well,  men) the Sarko-Tee is a tribute to France’s straight-shooting man of action, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. The man they call Sarko took some heat in the press for suggesting he’d use a Kärcher (a high-powered street-cleaning hose) to clear the banlieues of their criminal elements, but we admire his frankness. Whether you’re for or against him, you’ll look hotter than a blazing Citroen in one of these items. 

This is probably a good time to apologise for the lack of updates to this blog over the past while. Part of the reason is that I’m trying to juggle two blogs, and not doing the best job of it. Most of my attention is focused on my Maclean’s blog at the moment.  There are a lot of good reasons for keeping a separate non-corporate blog, and if the guy who owns andrewpotter.com ever follows through on his agreement to see the domain to me, I might start one up there.

 In the meantime, I’m going to put this blog into neutral. I hate to do it — traffic remains steady, and rss subscriptions are climbing.  But I think blogs should be a daily activity, and I don’t want this one to just trail off like an ellipsis…

For anyone interested, Joe Heath is working on a new book on economics, and I’m writing a book on authenticity. Please send me authenticity watch items, as you come across them. Meanwhile, I’m hanging out here.

Go buy something.

ap