Plight of the imprisoned executives
CAREER transitions can be difficult, especially when they are involuntary. After reading about recent well-deserved status changes for some former high-level executives, Feedback can see the need for Executive Prison Consultants (EPC).
“An error message flashed up on Abbi Connor’s Lenovo laptop saying: “The Network Connect session will time out due to inactivity in 71581872 minutes.””
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Consider the plight of the high-flying executive caught in an act of fiscal chicanery and facing the prospect of serving time in a US federal prison, or perhaps already sitting in jail. “Either way, you have embarked on a personal journey that can be confusing, frightening and intimidating,” says comfortingly. It urges visitors to “trust our experience” with the prison system and consult the company’s expertise for help in coping while inside, as well as for help in getting back outside as quickly as possible.
Unlike most ex-cons, company president Robert Zaranek is totally open about his incarceration. He writes that he was sentenced to 31 months in jail after pleading guilty to “an allegation of financial impropriety” while working as “a well-respected public administrator”.
Consultation with a famous search engine confirms that he is not exaggerating his . Zaranek pleaded guilty in October 2005 to embezzling some $400,000 from the Michigan school district where he had been an .
The EPC website also includes a testimonial from , a former National Basketball Association referee whose life merits his own lengthy Wikipedia page. Donaghy credits Executive Prison Consultants with getting him out of prison months before his original release date. Alas, Wikipedia reports, the former referee then violated his parole and got sent back to the clink to do the rest of his time.
Ice 11 – the next frutloop ingredient?
“OH NO!” That was Don Jewett’s response to 91av‘s report of a type of ice crystal known as ice XI out there in the solar system (27 August, p 8). Why? Because of our observation that “tiny flecks of the stuff embedded in ordinary ice can help convert all of it” to ice XI.
“What,” Don asks plaintively, “if the homeopaths get hold of this?”
It does indeed sound a bit like the “water with a memory” of which they are so fond. Will they notice that some actual atoms need to be present and organised in the ice XI structure, thus ruling out any connection to their favourite solutions containing no atoms of the alleged active substance at all?
Don thinks they will miss this subtle point, and nominates the appearance of “ice XI” in any description of a commercially available product as a “good marker of fruitloopery”. We’ve waited, and found none.
We pondered raising €900 to apply for a as a stick with which to beat anyone who indulged in such misappliance of science.
But then we calculated that this new field of pre-emptive anti-fruitloopery is so wide – much wider even than that of actual fruitloop claims – that the time would be better spent, well, writing stories about ice XI for Feedback…
WINNER of the Feedback “stating the obvious” award this week is Perry Vlahos, spokesman for the Astronomical Society of Victoria in Australia.
Eric Salter tells us that in a Sydney Morning Herald piece in September about NASA’s doomed UARS satellite, which was travelling over Melbourne on its way to crashing to Earth, Vlahos had the opportunity to pass on some of his astronomical expertise to the newspaper’s readers.
“It’s a little difficult to ascertain where it will come down,” he said, “because there are so many variables involved but it will definitely come down in some part of the world.”
Incomprehensible product claim
TWO questions for our readers: one, do you understand the following quote? Two, do you believe it?
The quote is from the website of , which reader Carla Cripps hesitantly alerts us to.
“Premier Research Labs is known internationally as the pre-eminent manufacturer of excipient-free, premier quality nutraceutical formulations, super food concentrates and the world’s first producer of quantum cellular resonance products that are capable of restoring quantum coherence to the body’s inherent biofield.”
FINALLY, in response to the article “Easing bedbug anxiety” in the Healthbeat newsletter from Harvard Medical School in Boston, Mark Pearson makes the following comment: “As a good liberal, I do believe that we should be concerned for all creatures, even ones as apparently unlovable as Cimex lectularius… but I am struggling to get as concerned about their mental state as much as Harvard Medical School believes I should.”