Multi-thousand foot drops, a one-foot-wide walkway comprised of wooden boards nailed together 700 hundred years ago, the Daily Mail profiles China’s Chang Kong Cliff Road on Mount Hau. The path was made by Taoist hermits in search of contact with Chinese Immortals.

Briar Maclean

Reason:

Thirteen year-old Briar MacLean tackled a knife-wielding bully who was attacking a classmate. Instead of praising MacLean’s intervention, the Calgary school officials admonished him for playing hero. As the National Post reported:

Briar MacLean was sitting in class during a study period Tuesday, the teacher was on the other side of the room and, as Grade 7 bullies are wont to do, one kid started harassing another.

“I was in between two desks and he was poking and prodding the guy,” Briar, 13, said at the kitchen table of his Calgary home Friday.

“He put him in a headlock, and I saw that.”

He added he didn’t see the knife, but “I heard the flick, and I heard them say there was a knife.”

I heard the flick, and I heard them say there was a knife

The rest was just instinct. Briar stepped up to defend his classmate, pushing the knife-wielding bully away.

The teacher took notice, the principal was summoned and Briar went about his day. It wasn’t until fourth period everything went haywire.

“I got called to the office and I wasn’t able to leave until the end of the day,” he said.

That’s when Leah O’Donnell, Briar’s mother, received a call from the vice-principal.

“They phoned me and said, ‘Briar was involved in an incident today,’” she said. “That he decided to ‘play hero’ and jump in.”

Ms. O’Donnell was politely informed the school did not “condone heroics,” she said. Instead, Briar should have found a teacher to handle the situation.

“I asked: ‘In the time it would have taken him to go get a teacher, could that kid’s throat have been slit?’ She said yes, but that’s beside the point. That we ‘don’t condone heroics in this school.’ ”

Instead of getting a pat on the back for his bravery, Briar was made to feel as if he had done something terribly wrong. The police were called, the teen filed a statement and his locker was searched.

Rea the whole thing.

Democratic Western societies have obviously developed a fatal habit of placing people with ideological and personality disorders in positions of authority. Canada has some great hunting & fishing, but I could never live there.

Hat tip to Sarah Jenislawski.

Now that the Boy Scouts of America has opened its membership door to 10-and-11-year-olds who have concluded that they are Gay, the determination of Americans’ sexual identity is being made earlier and earlier, as The Onion reports:

EDMOND, OK—Following weeks of deliberation during which he carefully considered what sort of life he wanted for himself, 4-month-old baby Nathan Reynolds announced Wednesday that he had decided to be homosexual.

“I thought about it for a long time,” said Reynolds, who took into account both how his peers would view him and how he would be treated by society at large before determining his sexual orientation. “I weighed the pros and cons of homosexuality, and ultimately I decided that it was the right thing for me.”

Obligatory Zegna tie.

Niccolo Machiavelli, Vice President at Goldman Sachs, offers some helpful career advice to this year’s male summer interns via the GSElevator blog:

1. If your boss smokes, smoke.

2. If your boss is Indian or Pakistani, learn the rules of cricket. He probably also smokes, so see #1. But be careful, if he doesn’t, he’s a vegetarian yogi.

3. Don’t wear Hermes ties, ever. You have to earn it.

4. Buy a decent suit or 3, but no cuffed or pleated pants. And don’t wear a tie unless you might have a meeting. No one likes that kind of kiss-ass.

5. Learn how to tie a double Windsor; just make sure the knot’s not too fat.

6. Keep your shoes shiny, but don’t let anyone see you having your shoes shined. You have to earn it.

7. If you went to a decent boarding school, subtly find out if anyone who matters went to the same school. Boom, he’s your rabbi. At this point, no one cares about college credentials; it’s a given.

8. As it relates to fellow interns, make no mistake about it – it’s war:

Let’s be clear. It’s impossible to compete with female interns. And it’s not cool. So don’t bother trying.

When a fellow intern leaves his desk, change his screen (or screens) to rolex.com, porsche.com, or morganstanley.com.

Come up with dismissive nicknames for fellow interns (Chico, Bud Fox, Fredo, Bubba, etc.). Hope that it catches on.

When a fellow intern leaves his computer unlocked at the end of the evening, change the signature on his Email settings. Using white font, add any variety of obscene words. No one will see it… except for IT and HR.

9. Don’t be too good to do the coffee runs. It shows confidence. Just don’t fuck it up. If you can’t be trusted with coffee, how can you sell bonds or manage risk.

10. Call Bloomberg and have them give you a tutorial on functions. It’s free. And most EDs and above are still using functions and short cuts from 5+ years ago. It’s an easy way to impress them. And many of the Bloomberg girls are hot.

11. Leave a jacket on the back of your chair at all times. While you are at it, keep a tie in your drawer. Zegna is a good choice.

12. Ask the secretary for the travel schedules of the senior members of your group for the week ahead. She’s dumb enough to think you are being proactive. But now you know when you can sleep in, hit the gym, or beat the traffic to Southampton.

13. Never tell racist jokes. Always repeat racist jokes in the proper company and be sure to credit ‘the other intern’ who told you.

Read the whole thing, Bubba.

Hat tip to Lynn Chu.

In connection with the 36th Anniversary (on May 25th) of the opening of the first Star Wars movie, Alex Jay chronicles (in detail) the evolution of the Star Wars logo.

Lucas turned to Suzi Race to design a new Star Wars logo. She wrote about her involvement in a two-part post on her site: part one and part two. The Star Wars Poster Book (Chronicle Books, 2005) had a short account of her role:

…Though the poster contained no painted imagery, it did introduce a new logo to the campaign, one that had been designed originally for the cover of a Fox brochure sent to theater owners….Suzy Rice, who had just been hired as an art director, remembers the job well. She recalls that the design directive given by Lucas was that the logo should look “very fascist.”

“I’d been reading a book the night before the meeting with George Lucas,” she says, “a book about German type design and the historical origins of some of the popular typefaces used today—how they developed into what we see and use in the present.” After Lucas described the kind of visual element he was seeking, “I returned to the office and used what I reckoned to be the most ‘fascist’ typeface I could think of: Helvetica Black.”

Glenn Reynolds solidified his nerd credentials by forwarding this oldie-but-goodie chem lab story.

The reaction behaved beautifully – exactly as in literature procedure – the color transitions and all, and even the product distilled pure in a good yield in the end as a highly refractive clear, thin liquid. But the smell – right at the moment when we quenched (in a hood of course) we were pushed back by the solidity of the reek. I got to know many evil chemical smells over the years but nothing comes anywhere close. With the other stinkers, at least one can imagine what sort of unwashed, putrid, fishy, skunky, human-waste object those smells are related to. But I never encountered anything as nauseating or alien like PhePHMe: The memory is stil with me – the most sickly and sweetish smell of rancid gasoline combined with rotten water melons, with undertones of stale sweat, pig carcass, a hint of garlic, moldy oranges, russian-made aftershave and a cheap household air freshener… its a whole package, and rather sweet one – like isonitriles or cyclopentadiene but magnified thousand times. A whiff of that thing and you feel that your nose just suffered a stroke and will hopefully die and peal off so that you never smell that thing again. Inconceivable – and it does not get any better when wearing off; quite opposite in fact – just like with butyric or isovaleric acid, the reek is developing a more alarming depth and complexity with the dilution.

Boy! If I had not gotten rid of my lab equipment a few years ago, I’d be (out in the yard, rather than the basement) having a go at making this stuff right now.

Hat tip to Kathleen Wagner.

Cary Grant, perhaps the all-time leading exemplar of male charm.

The selection of the loutish Vince Vaughn to play a television role previously performed by James Garner provokes Benjamin Schwartz to contemplate the apparent near extinction in today’s America of what he describes as an “amoral virtue,” masculine charm.

[C]harm—with its emotional, even aesthetic, detachment—could hardly have retained its social sway after that most overwrought of decades, the 1960s. Any culture that celebrates youth necessarily provides stony soil for charm, which is by definition a quality reserved for adults: the young can be charming, which is an inadvertent attribute; they cannot have charm.
Most men hold charm in vague suspicion: few cultivate it; still fewer respond to it; hardly any know whether they have it; and almost none can identify it.

Of course, all of these social and cultural shifts, which are themselves inimical to charm, are rooted in a more basic change—the ever-widening infection of social relations by market values. That development, whether good or ill, indisputably makes for blunter and more crudely utilitarian manners. After all, in a way, charm is just small talk.

More important, charm, for all its appeal, isn’t a moral virtue—it’s an amoral one. Americans, especially American men, have always been, for some very good reasons, ambivalent about charm. It’s an attribute alien to many men because they are ingenuous, a quality that can itself be either admirable or unlovely. Many American military men deserve our esteem; the many I have known indeed do, but I have never met one with an ounce of charm. Indeed, what American hero has possessed it? The quintessential modern American hero, the eternally jejune and earnest Charles Lindbergh, who became a god when not yet a man, was in every way the antithesis of charm. America’s entire political history has been in some basic way a struggle between Jefferson—self-righteous, humorless, prickly, at once intellectually ardent and woolly—and Hamilton, a man foreign-born, witty, stylish, coolly brilliant, generous, possessed of a rare rapport with and an understanding of women. And just as Hamilton’s political vision triumphed, so did Jefferson’s political style. To be sure, we’ve always had sports heroes—Sonny Jurgensen, John McEnroe, Jim McMahon, Arnold Palmer—whose sly irony and authority-defining insouciance lends them the adolescent glamour of Peck’s Bad Boy, a posture that, while sometimes winning, can be mislabeled as charm. (Its limits are clear in the persona of a non-sportsman exemplar, Bruce Willis.) Indeed, sports—youngsters’ games pursued in earnest—essentially lack charm. The seriousness with which American men take sports both confirms and exacerbates their suspicion of charm.