It’s company policy to give you…the plague – Mr. Burns

Will wonders never cease? Despite my being rather annoying, people are still kind enough to send me birthday gifts. The latest (and hopefully last) comes from Stuff and Stuff’s original Blog Madame, Erica.

Two books that promise to be amazing arrived. The first, Picture This by Joseph Heller, one of my favorite authors, and writer of Catch-22:

Rembrandt painting Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer was himself contemplating the bust of Homer where it stood on the red cloth covering the square table in the left foreground and wondering how much money it might fetch at the public auction of his belongings that he was already contemplating as sooner or later going to be inevitable.

Aristotle could have told him it would not fetch much. The bust of Homer was a copy.

It was an authentic Hellenistic imitation of a Hellenic reproduction of a statue for which there had never been an authentic original subject.

There is record that Shakespeare lived but insufficient proof he could have written his plays. We have the Iliad and the Odyssey but no proof that the composer of these epics was real.

On this point scholars agree: It is out of the question that both works could have been written entirely by one person, unless, of course, it was a person with the genius of Homer.

The second, The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley, the GM of IDEO, and a product designer’s hero:

…many companies shy away from novel solutions. Moreover, they tend to believe that truly creative individuals are few and far between. We believe the opposite. We all have a creative side, and it can flourish if you spawn a culture to encourage it, one that embraces risks and wild ideas and tolerates the occasional failure.

Thank you!