February 1, 2010
Business summaries.com Oops
About the Authors
20 Life Lessons from the Fiascoes That Shaped America By Martin J. Smith & Patrick J. Kiger, Harper Collins Books, 2006
O Martin J. Smith is an award-winning journalist and magazine editor. He is a senior editor at the Los Angeles Times Magazine and lives with his family in southern California.
Patrick J Kiger has written for GQ, Mother Jones, the Los Angeles Times Magazine. One of his articles made the 2004 Best Writing of the Year list at www. rockcritics.com. He also is the co-author of Poplorica: A Popular History of the Fads, Mavericks, Inventions, and Lore that Shaped Modern America.
ops may be the only American cultural history to ever include flaming elephants, government-funded psychics, and a cutting-edge cinematic technology known as “Smell-O-Vision.” This chronicle of often overlooked snafus will delight fans of popular culture who appreciate that Americans’ failures are as spectacular as their successes: bridges that collapse; flying cars that crash; sports promotions run amok; deodorant that nearly destroyed the earth; even failures that failed to happen! Veteran journalists Smith and Kiger select twenty miscues, goofs, complications, and failures that shaped modern America and reveal the life lessons these gaffes
Oops | Martin J. Smith & Patrick J. Kiger
What’s Inside: WHY YOU NEED THIS BOOK
ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE: HOW THOMAS EDISON INVENTED TRASH TALK
teach, including: • Accentuate the Positive: How Thomas Edison Invented Trash Talk • Understand the Market: The 1967 Monkees-Jimi Hendrix Concert Tour • Desperation is the cradle of Bad Ideas: Cleveland Indians’ TenCent Beer Night • Sweat the Details: The SixtyStory John Hancock Guillotine Enriched by handy clip-‘n’-save “Recipes for Disaster”, Oops proves that when it comes to failure, truth is a stranger than fiction.
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The Nutshell WHY YOU NEED THIS BOOK This book offers twenty complementary lessons about the general conduct of life – lessons that can be used for everything from a personal mantra to a philosophy of business. ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE: HOW THOMAS EDISON INVENTED TRASH TALK Recipe for Disaster – Edison’s Elephant Flambé Ingredients: 1 fresh rogue elephant 1 lost cause 1 sore loser (conscience removed)
Despite those cautionary words more than a decade ago, consumers today are being manipulated by a virulent new strain of trash talkers who employ ever more sophisticated techniques and media such as television, talk radio, and the Internet. But, the truth be told, they’re all just following the lead of the American icon who made “negative” so much more than an electric term. UNDERSTAND THE MARKET: THE 1967 JIMI HENDRIX-MONKEES CONCERT TOUR Recipe for Disaster – Concert Fiasco Flambé
About the Book
Marinate loser in lost cause for 15 years. When done, char elephant for 10 seconds at 6,000 volts using alternating current. Serve immediately as cheap entertainment, or on film as an appetizer for your next big venture. The legacy of Edison and the Topsy debacle extends far beyond the actual event, of course. America still runs on AC electricity, as it pretty much has for the past century. Edison’s endorsement of electrocution as a humane way to execute condemned criminals led to more than 4,300 legal executions by electricity in the US during the 20th century.
Oops | Martin J. Smith & Patrick J. Kiger
Authors: Martin J. Smith & Patrick J. Kiger Publisher: Harper Collins Books, 2006 ISBN: 13 978 0 06 078083 8 285 pages
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Ingredients: 1 masterfully marketed, minimally musical pop group 1 provocative, R-rated opening act 10,000 or so teenyboppers with short attention spans Alcohol and controlled substances to use Marinate opening act in generous quantities of alcohol and drugs. Mix with impatient teenyboppers and let simmer on open flame until the pot boils over. Serve pop group separately. Hendrix’s failure to connect with the Monkees’ fan base also freed him from further commercial pressure to appease mainstream tastes. Instead, despite being plagues by management and money squabbles and drug abuse, he pursued his avantgarde muse on a wild ride from psychedelic rock to blue to pop, to the borders of jazz fusion. It was a trip, tragically, that would be cut short. Despite his humiliating experience on the Monkees tour, Hendrix didn’t nurture a grudge against the Prefab Four themselves. In September 1970, he even attended a party in London for Mike Nesmith. It was the last social appearance he would make before his death a few weeks later as the result of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills.
DESPERATION IS THE CRADLE OF BAD IDEAS: THE CLEVELAND INDIANS’ TEN-CENT BEER NIGHT Recipe for Disaster – Beer-Battered Insanity Ingredients: 1 mostly empty stadium 2 feuding baseball teams 25,134 disgruntled fans 60,000 ten-ounce cups of beer Pickle fans in beer. Let simmer in stadium for several hours. Mix vigorously with rival team. Call police. While not directly related to the events of that summer evening in 1974, antialcohol sentiments rippled throughout the culture in the years and decades that followed. Mothers Against Drunk Driving was founded in 1980, the year that individual alcohol consumption in America peaked, and a federal law signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 raised the legal drinking age in all states to twenty-one. The new temperance movement spearheaded by Betty Ford and Nancy Reagan lasted through the 1980s and 1990s, and into the new millennium. But if you’re waiting for a total ban on beer
If you’re waiting for a total ban on beer sales at baseball stadiums, better plan for a long wait. Oops | Martin J. Smith & Patrick J. Kiger
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sales at baseball stadiums, better plan for a long wait. Besides, in an age when increasingly fast and extreme sports have conditioned fans for a constant adreno-rush of action, it’s harder still to imagine watching nine innings of baseball without at least a little help. SWEAT THE DETAILS: THE SIXTYSTORY JOHN HANCOCK GUILLOTINE Recipe for Disaster – Debacle Under Glass Ingredients: 1 historically delicate location 1 towering ego 60 stories of sleek modernist architecture 10,344 defective windows (500 pounds each) Moderate wind “Duck!” Choose delicate location upon which to impose modernist architecture, combine with ego, and let rise. Glaze with defective windows. Add moderate wind. Serve with duck and cover. Court files still bulge from the explosion of litigation triggered by the project, legal fallout from which continued until 1981. The final settlement agreement forbade the players from talking about its terms, though details eventually were released. In arguing why those terms and similar sealed agreements should be made public, attorney Barry LaPatner used language
Oops | Martin J. Smith & Patrick J. Kiger
that might just as well apply to any failure, large or small: “Good judgment is usually the result of experience. And experience is frequently the result of bad judgment. But to learn from the experience of others requires those who have the experience to share the knowledge with those who follow.” What to do with more than five thousand undamaged but unusable windowpanes measuring 4 1/2 by 11 ½ feet and weighing five hundred pounds each? According to Robert Campbell of the Boston Globe, the still-intact double-pane mirrored windows from the original tower design were sold for $100 each through bargain outlets in Hingham and Lynn, Massachusetts, as well as in Maine. “Many are now tabletops, picture windows or greenhouses,” he wrote. “As for the plywood [that replaced the broken and suspect windows], much of it went to the Boston Redevelopment Authority, where it was used to board up abandoned buildings. Life goes on.” BEWARE OF UNPROVEN TECHNOLOGIES: THE LINGERING REEK OF “SMELL-O-VISION” Recipe for Disaster – Cream of Reek Soup
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Ingredients: 1 mediocre comedy-mystery film 1 theater full of curious moviegoers 30 different perfumes 1 mile of tubes Tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of pumps and other gadgetry Combine comedy-mystery film and moviegoers in crowded theatre. Douse with indecipherable succession of perfumes. Kiss money good-bye. Smell-O-Vision was just one of many outlandish gambits tried over the years in the movie industry. Among the others: • CinemaScope. The Robe, a ponderous 1953 religious epic, was the first film to use special lenses, one on the camera and another on the projector, that squeezed a wide-angle camera image down to 35mm size and then expanded it again on a gigantic screen that was two and a half times as long as it was tall. The action was supposed to be more vivid; instead, it was grotesquely distorted. Director Fritz Lang once joked that it was fit only for photographing snakes or funerals. • Cinemagic. An attempt to exploit the hype around 3-D. In the 1959 film The Angry Red Planet, producer Sid Pink added a filter to the projector, which was supposed to make the screen image seem surrealistically distorted. Instead, it was simply hard to look at.
Oops | Martin J. Smith & Patrick J. Kiger
• Percepto. B-movie horror director William Castle, who never saw a cheesy gimmick he didn’t like, tried to put some electricity into his 1959 film The Tingler by rigging a few seats in the theatre to give unsuspecting patrons a mild shock. • Hallucinogenic Hypno-Vision. Ads for the 1964 film The Thrill Killers (also known as The Maniacs Are Loose) claimed that it featured a hypnotic effect, which would supposedly fool audiences into thinking the crazed killers were running around in the theatre. • Sensurround. The 1974 film Earthquake and 1977’s Rollercoaster used low-frequency sound to create the illusion of violent movement. And you thought that footage of Shelley Winters swimming underwater in The Poseidon Adventure was nauseating? FIASCOES THAT FAILED TO QUALIFY FOR OOPS The “Crash at Crush” This was perhaps the dumbest publicity stunt in history. In 1896, the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad hired William G. Crush, a protégé of P.T. Barnum, as its promoter. His idea to draw attention to the struggling railroad was to stage a spectacular collision between two speeding locomotives. Most of the fifty thousand people who gathered for the 1896 spectacle survived, though many with painful injuries from the rain of hot metal
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upon the makeshift frontier town of Crush after the locomotives’ boilers exploded. Willie Crush was fired the same day, but the disaster ultimately did boost the railroad’s name recognition, launching the loathsome “any publicity is good publicity” public-relations ethic that still persists today.
with nervous twitches while putting. In the patent sketch, the putter resembles an upsidedown Y. The top slides under a golfer’s chin, and one of the prongs serves as a stabilizer while the other strikes the ball. Clever, yes, but it’s hard to imagine the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews ever approving this one. Equine Sushi Ice Cream
CIA Assassination Plots Against Castro Incensed by the failure of the Central Intelligence Agency – organized invasion of Cuba in 1961, the Kennedy White House let the agency know that it wanted something done about the island’s defiant, hirsute dictator. G.I. Nurse Action Girl After the twelve-inch “action figure” G.I. Joe became a hit for Hasbro in the mid-1960s, the toymaker sought to expand the franchise, with mixed results. One particularly short-lived spin-off was G.I. Nurse Action Girl, a bendable blonde clad in a white uniform and nylon stockings. G.I. Nurse has a few design flaws – from the chest down, as one collector has noted, she was actually identical to a male G.I. Joe, only smaller.
Unlike wasabi spice and teriyaki-style cooking, Bashasi vanilla ice cream has yet to be imported to America – and it’s unlikely that it ever will. The flavor, which reportedly was offered in 2004 at Tokyo’s Ice Cream City trade fair, has a special ingredient: chunks of raw horsemeat. *** 2010 BusinessSummaries.com
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The Chin Putter A patent was issued in 2003 for this ingenious, albeit unorthodox, remedy for golfers afflicted
Oops | Martin J. Smith & Patrick J. Kiger
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