Some Chilling Tales for Halloween

Big Mac Departs Iceland:  Effective this weekend, Iceland is losing all three of its McDonald’s franchises.  Victims of the nation’s financial crisis (and the fact that everything from cheese to special sauce needs to be imported), Micky D’s is departing the island.

Here’s the real hitch, though: In The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman noted that that no two countries with McDonald's had ever fought a war against one another. 

Without the giant of Fast Food on its shores, can peaceful Iceland be far from joining the “Axis of Evil”? 

By the way, the closest Big Mac to Reykjavik?  Dublin, 900 miles away.

Chill with Sting: The Police frontman is out with a new album this holiday season, If On a Winter’s Night. . . .  Sting says it features “any genre that mentioned snow, ice, Christmas, winter, frost.”  The website (here) even feels chilly.

The Third Man Factor: I was running the other morning, listening to a podcast from NPR about The Third Man Factor, a new book by John Geiger.  It discusses this eerie phenomenon that occurs to people in moments of extreme stress, or life & death situations. 

An article by Michael J. Ybarra in the Wall Street Journal describes it well:

In 1953, Austrian mountaineer Herman Buhl became the first person to climb Nanga Parbat in the Himalayas—at 26,660 feet, the ninth tallest peak in the world. He climbed by himself and not far from the summit was forced to spend the night out in the open without a sleeping bag or tent. It was an agonizing bivouac, but Buhl survived—in part, he later wrote, because he sensed that he shared the ordeal with a companion. "I had an extraordinary feeling," he wrote, "that I was not alone."

Accounts of experiencing a supportive presence in extreme situations—sometimes called the "third-man phenomenon"—are common in mountaineering literature. In 1933, Frank Smythe made it to within a 1,000 feet of the summit of Mount Everest before turning around. On the way down, he stopped to eat a mint cake, cutting it in half to share with . . . someone who wasn't there but who had seemed to be his partner all day. Again on Nanga Parbat, on a 1970 climb during which his brother died, Reinhold Messner recalled being accompanied by a companion who offered wordless comfort and encouragement.

It was all I could do, as I was jogging, not to turn around and see if I had a companion running behind me.  There I was, sweaty and tired, and the hair on the back of my neck was absolutely standing on end--especially when the author described a similar “third man” situation that occurred as one of the survivors of 9/11 made his way down a smoky stairwell. 

I want to buy Geiger’s book in the worst way but am afraid I’ll no longer venture out my door in the morning to exercise.  (There are already enough excuses, no?)

World Series: This is the first year I can ever remember seeing both Christmas commercials and a snowstorm before the first pitch of the World Series.  How about we scale-back the baseball season from 162 to, say, 120 games and play the World Series in September?  When I was young and played a lot of baseball, I can remember hitting the ball on a cold April day and feeling like my hands would fall off.  It can’t be much fun to hit a 98 MPH fastball in 40 degree weather at 9 p.m. on a November evening in the Bronx.

Book Wars: Finally, you already know chilling if you’ve worked in the book publishing industry over the last decade.  Two weeks ago, though, things took a decided turn for the worse when an online price-war broke out among Walmart, Amazon and Target, resulting in ten of the season’s presumed bestsellers (like Grisham, King and Palin) being offered for $8.99.  These are hardcover books that might normally go for $25-$35, with the publisher receiving 50%. 

This first round of discounts is coming out of the hides of the online retailers, a kind of loss-leadership sure to impoverish them all (think: airlines)--not to mention Borders, and Barnes and Noble, and the corner bookstore, which will also get hammered during this jolly Christmas season.

The most chilling scenario for publishers, of course, is that consumers begin to perceive hardcover best-sellers as being worth only $8.99.

I'm guessing that was what McDonald's would have had to charge for a Big Mac had they remained in Iceland. Or about my top price for a ticket to see a nighttime World Series game in November.

All of which I'd do before I bought John Geiger's book and scared myself silly. (Not that you shouldn't buy it. Just keep it to yourself.)

Happy Halloween!

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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