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…and Elvis has left the building!

Back in the 90s and pre-internet, I knew nothing about numbers stations. One time I borrowed my dad’s hefty portable radio, which he used for listening to Vin Scully doing the play-by-play of Dodgers games, but it was the off-season, so I took it for a few months.

Back then I lived in a cabin right on the edge of my town, and I’m a night owl, so I was utterly alone one night at around 2am, when I came across one of these numbers stations right in the act of doing its’ thing with a robotic female voice, just for a few minutes before regressing to static noise.

The whole experience spooked me, it stayed with me. On subsequent nights I scanned the dial again and again, to see if I could stumble across this thing again, but I never did catch it live again. It was years later that I found The Conet Project website and finally knew what the hell that transmission was about, sort of.

Nancy…
Adam…
Susan…
Nancy…
Adam…
Susan…

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.

HELLOOOO TULSA OKLAHOMA!!!
TONITE I’M GONNA ROCK YOU TONITE!!!

137 times more powerful than the Electromagnetism you try and use to tear them apart, behold the Strong Pasta Friendship Force!

“But why?”
“Because we have to stretch the goddamned season from 12 to 24 goddamned episodes, that’s why. We have to go back because we have to burn airtime meandering in pointless circles, that’s why. That and Mystery Box™️!!!”

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.

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.

Where’s that bottom image from? I can’t place it, but if I was a betting man I’d say that’s from the flash-forward in the finale of the penultimate season of LOST, when the doctor is back in the real world, popping pills and swigging Jack Daniels.

The stuffy Englishman scoffs at the French, while pinching his snuff.
An image as old as the Enlightenment itself.
“Oy, guv’nor! Taking the piss out the Frogs again, are we?”

In other words - everything she accused the “others” of being.
What was it that she called them, again? I can’t be bothered to look it up, let’s see if I can remember…

Empathists? Philanthropists? Something like that.

EDIT: altruists!

Oh, I have a doozy for ya. I’ve got a beauty!

THELMA & LOUISE
in theaters in Mexico, back in the early 90s
was
(wait for it…)
UN FINAL INESPERADO (AN UNEXPECTED ENDING)

Seriously… how dumb do you think your audiences are if you feel the need to hold their hand and spoon-feed them like this? This is taken to a level that doesn’t make sense anymore, the so-called “solution” is so much worse than the perceived “problem”.

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.

Oh will you look at that?

People are
talking about,
talking about,
talking about.

Some people even say!