The Myth of Excellence

Its about three on a somewhat chilly Sunday afternoon. Emanuel Ax is on the player, my wife just woke up (she worked in the wee hours this morning), and I am sitting here drinking flavored water and reading The Myth of Excellence, which has as its central premise the concept that companies cannot and should not try to compete on multiple criteria -- that consumers tend not to believe a company that says it has, for example, both the best quality and the lowest price. It also seems, at least initially, to want to talk about the sociological implications of a materialistic society, saying that regardless of how many or what type of possessions people accumulate, regardless of how much better their lives are objectively, people are finding that subjectively their lives aren't as good as they used to be -- that something is missing. And, they say, business can exploit this feeling to become more required, perhaps even indispensable, to consumers. Have to admit, that thought didn't sit well with me, but the book is young; we'll see how it goes.

I'd like to take notes while reading, but I don't have an easy way to do it. I read a post on the Geeky Mom blog about that concept just the other day. I said that for me, 3x5 cards still work best, which is probably a reflection of what I grew up with. Then again, my daughter consumes them by the packet.

The biscotti is in the oven for the first bake. I'm guessing it'll take about another hour, with cutting, rebaking, and then dipping into the melted chocolate. That last is going to be tricky; we want to waste the minimal amount of the chocolate, so simply dipping each cut piece into it seems not the best way -- but we don't know of a better one. We do have a tall, thin vase that I suppose we could fill with chocolate, then use that as a dipping chamber, but somehow I don't think that's a good solution either.

Bean bake tonight -- classic comfort food for me. Not that I need comforting at the moment, but I'll never turn it down.