My friend Marilyn sent me an article from the New Yorker (What Happens When a Bad-Tempered, Distractible Doofus Runs an Empire?) about Kaiser Wilhelm II.  I don’t like heavy handed comparisons, but it made for an interesting read.  Sent me to the Wiki page on Kaiser Wilhelm II, in particular his personality.  A quote from a biography:

… gifted, with a quick understanding, sometimes brilliant, with a taste for the modern,—technology, industry, science—but at the same time superficial, hasty, restless, unable to relax, without any deeper level of seriousness, without any desire for hard work or drive to see things through to the end, without any sense of sobriety, for balance and boundaries, or even for reality and real problems, uncontrollable and scarcely capable of learning from experience, desperate for applause and success,—as Bismarck said early on in his life, he wanted every day to be his birthday—romantic, sentimental and theatrical, unsure and arrogant, with an immeasurably exaggerated self-confidence and desire to show off …

Not many things shock me these days.  The death of Anthony Bourdain did, though.  My brother, who is a restaurant guy, turned me on to Kitchen Confidential when it first came out.  I have been a fan ever since.  A good article from last year in the New Yorker about Bourdain.

Profiles
February 13 & 20, 2017 Issue
Anthony Bourdain’s Moveable Feast
Guided by a lusty appetite for indigenous culture and cuisine, the swaggering chef has become a travelling statesman.

By Patrick Radden Keefe

Let’s wrap this Top Ten album thing up.  Been a fan of Buffett for a long time.  I like lots of his albums, but let’s put his early live album out there.  Maybe not well known today, but a good mix of fun and ballads around the time Margaritaville came out.  The first Buffett album I bought and still a good one.  I might have to stick one more post out here with runners up.

A song written about my wife’s Rum Cake (yes, it is that good).

A couple of article in Stratechery about Platforms and Aggregators.  Took me a while to digest this and understand the distinction.  The two articles are:  The Bill Gates Line and The Cost of Developers (which discusses the Microsoft acquisition GitHub).  The (paraphrased) Bill Gates quote discussing Facebook maybe sums it all up:

“This isn’t a platform. A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.”

I came across the New York Dolls via David Johansen’s solo work.  They were glam, punk, art and hard rockers before most of it even had a name.  Still love this album.  The first notes of Personality Crisis hit hard, and it never lets up,  but in a fun way.  Gotta go back and listen to Johanssen’s live stuff again, though lots of it is Dolls covers.  Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Just something that caught my eye today at work.  A pile of arms used to hold computer monitors.  I see I still have two more albums to go …

Almost as much as Blonde on Blonde, the Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bullocks stunned me.  My first reaction was:  what is this noise?  Then I played it again.  And again.  Hard to put it in context, but the radio was filled with bloated prog-rock from the previous generation.  These guys were loud and angry.  It was a hurricane of fresh air and a peek at where things were going.