Fifty years ago today, Don Mazzella skipped out of school to see the hot new car that everybody was talking about, the hot new car that almost nobody had actually seen.
Ford Motor Co. had proclaimed it “E-Day,” and Mazzella and two buddies sneaked out of East Side High School in Newark, N.J., and hiked 13 blocks to Foley Ford so they could cast their gaze upon the much-ballyhooed new car that had been kept secret from the American public until its release that day.
It was called the Edsel.
“The line was around the block,” recalls Mazzella, now 66 and an executive in a New Jersey consulting firm. “People were coming from all over to see this car. You couldn’t see it from the street. The only way you could see it was to walk into the showroom and look behind a curtain.”
Mazzella and his truant friends waited their turn, thrilled to be there. “Back then for teenagers, cars were the be-all and end-all,” he explains. They’d read countless articles about the Edsel and seen countless ads that touted it as the car of the future. But they hadn’t seen the car. Ford kept it secret, building excitement by coyly withholding it from sight, like a strip-tease dancer.
The 7 Wonders of the World in Full Screen VR Panoramas
Your DNA, Please
The Economist:
Rapid advances in genetic testing promise to transform medicine, but they may up-end the insurance business in the process
“IF YOU can make a good soufflé, you can sequence DNA.” That assertion sounds preposterous, but Hugh Rienhoff should know. When his daughter was born about three years ago, she suffered from a mysterious disability that stunted her muscle development. After many frustrated visits to specialists, Dr Rienhoff, a clinical geneticist and former venture capitalist, decided to sequence a specific part of her genome himself. He discovered that her condition, which most resembled a rare genetic disorder known as Beals’s syndrome, was probably due to a new genetic mutation. “Without a lab and for just a few hundred dollars, you can contract or outsource almost all the steps,” he explains.
What a well-connected and highly motivated scientist in California can do today the rest of the world will be able to do tomorrow. Indeed, a number of firms are already offering tests for specific ailments (or predispositions to ailments) directly to the public, cutting out the medical middle-man. Dr Rienhoff, for his part, will soon launch MyDaughtersDNA.org, a not-for-profit venture intended to help others to unravel the mysteries of their family’s genes in the way that he unravelled those of his own.
Federalism
Presidential Candidate in waiting Fred Thompson weighs in on Federalism and the “compelling reasons not to look to the federal government first”. Video
Politicians “Hypocrisy on SUV’s”
You can’t make this stuff up, folks. Last week, during a speech to a labor group in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards told the crowd: “One of the things [Americans] should be asked to do is drive more fuel-efficient vehicles.” Asked if by saying that he was specifically telling Americans to give up their SUVs, Edwards replied, “Yes.”
t’s a wonder we Americans haven’t choked to death on all the hypocrisy we’ve been force-fed of late. Naturally, Edwards owns and drives an SUV himself — several, in fact. In Washington D.C. he often pilots his Cadillac SRX, while at his North Carolina spread — a 28,000-square-foot manse more than ten times the size of the average American home — one can easily spot several more those-aren’t-Priuses (click to enlarge accompanying photo). Asked at the labor-group speech how he can reconcile asking other Americans to sacrifice while he’s living so large, Edwards replied: “I have no apologies whatsoever for what I’ve done with my life. My entire life has been about the same cause, which is making sure wherever you come from, whatever your family is, whatever the color of your skin, you get a real chance to do something great in this country.”
Merci Pour Les Roses :)
One of my favorite recent photos, taken in the 5th – Paris.
Taxes & The Closing of Foreign Car Specialists
Beebe bought the business after working there a year and Lucey sold the building to the family of President Kennedy. Beebe said the Kennedys bought the building because they wanted a business reason to visit Wisconsin where the former president’s sister, Rosemary Kennedy, who was mentally retarded and lobotomized at age 23, spent decades at St. Coletta’s in Jefferson until her 2005 death at age 86.
Beebe bought the building from the Kennedy family in 1979 and recently paid off the mortgage
Hearing on Fair and Equitable Tax Policy for America’s Working Families
House Ways & Means Committee. Submit your statement to this useful event:
Chairman Rangel Announces Hearing on Fair and Equitable Tax Policy for America’s Working Families
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles B. Rangel (D-NY) today announced the Committee on Ways and Means will hold a hearing on fairness and equity in the tax code. The hearing will focus on a number of tax fairness issues, including the tax treatment of investment fund managers and the impact of the alternative minimum tax on working families. It will also examine the reasons why investment funds are being organized offshore. The hearing will take place on Thursday, September 6, 2007, in 1100 Longworth House Office Building, beginning at 10:00 a.m.
In view of the limited time available to hear witnesses, oral testimony at this hearing will be from invited witnesses only. However, any individual or organization not scheduled for an oral appearance may submit a written statement for consideration by the Committee and for inclusion in the printed record of the hearing. A list of invited witnesses will follow.
Who’s afraid of Google?
RARELY if ever has a company risen so fast in so many ways as Google, the world’s most popular search engine. This is true by just about any measure: the growth in its market value and revenues; the number of people clicking in search of news, the nearest pizza parlour or a satellite image of their neighbour’s garden; the volume of its advertisers; or the number of its lawyers and lobbyists.
Such an ascent is enough to evoke concerns—both paranoid and justified. The list of constituencies that hate or fear Google grows by the week. Television networks, book publishers and newspaper owners feel that Google has grown by using their content without paying for it. Telecoms firms such as America’s AT&T and Verizon are miffed that Google prospers, in their eyes, by free-riding on the bandwidth that they provide; and it is about to bid against them in a forthcoming auction for radio spectrum. Many small firms hate Google because they relied on exploiting its search formulas to win prime positions in its rankings, but dropped to the internet’s equivalent of Hades after Google tweaked these algorithms.
And now come the politicians. Libertarians dislike Google’s deal with China’s censors. Conservatives moan about its uncensored videos. But the big new fear is to do with the privacy of its users. Google’s business model (see article) assumes that people will entrust it with ever more information about their lives, to be stored in the company’s “cloud” of remote computers. These data begin with the logs of a user’s searches (in effect, a record of his interests) and his responses to advertisements. Often they extend to the user’s e-mail, calendar, contacts, documents, spreadsheets, photos and videos. They could soon include even the user’s medical records and precise location (determined from his mobile phone).
Continental Airlines Smart Move
Continental Airlines (NYSE: CAL) today announced that it has implemented new functionality at continental.com that allows customers to change flights online as part of the company’s ongoing effort to improve the customer experience.
Customers whose flights may be impacted by disruptions, such as severe weather, now have the option of going to continental.com to change their flights in addition to contacting a Continental reservations agent or their travel agent. The new system allows Continental to make real-time updates to re-accommodation policies and recognizes when it is appropriate to waive change fees or additional fare collections.
“Customers want to be in control of their travel experience,” said Martin Hand, vice president reservations and sales resources. “This is another step toward empowering our customers with the latest technology to make changes effortlessly when the need arises.”
Smart.