Right—Got That Taken Care Of....

It’s such a good idea, why didn’t I think about it?

I spent seven years working for Wal-Mart, ostensibly as an English teacher. A good part of that time, in fact, I was busy dreaming up great ideas that absolutely no one liked. The sustainable shopping bag that we were pushing all the customers to use was a great idea, but there’s one little problem: you have to remember to take them with you every time you go shopping. And what if you decide on the spur of the moment to drop into a store? Your bags are at home.

Enter the Newhouse KeyChainShoppingBag!

OK—the problem of keeping meats separate from vegetables and fruits? Easy—redesign the shopping cart!

So I’m totally impressed with two like-minded people, Simon and Jane Berry, who looked around them one day in Northeast Zambia, and realized: Coca-Cola was everywhere.

The Berry’s also put together that fact with another two. First, one in five children in developing countries will die of dehydration before their fifth birthday. Second, though a simple solution of salts and sugar will cure the diarrhea, most public health clinics are too far away, or may not have the formula.

Right—so we can get Coca-Cola to kids, but not life-saving kits?

Then they looked at the Coca-Cola crates and realized—hey, there’s a lot of space wasted there. What if we made a kit of a bar of soap (prevention, as well as cure), the oral salts and sugar formula, zinc pills, and put it all in a container that would wedge in between the necks of the Coca-Cola bottles? So the Berrys created an organization, ColaLife, which produced a product called Kit Yamoyo. Here’s what it looked like:

That way, you could simply piggyback on to Coca-Cola’s distribution system, and not have to invest all that energy on reinventing the wheel.

So Berry went running around—trying to get Coca-Cola’s attention, which proved at first difficult. Finally, he got an interview with the BBC, and the door cracked open. They met to discuss Berry’s great idea.

And like all great ideas, it had to be tweaked. The peak period for diarrhea is in rainy season, which is when Coke sells the least. As well, there may be times when Coca-Cola may prefer not to distribute to a remote location—it simply isn’t worth it. But the kids still need the medicine.

So, in the end, they decided not to distribute through Coca-Cola, but rather to use the company to learn about Coca-Cola’s distribution chain. Consider this photo:

For Coca-Cola to get its products into a small shop in a tiny town in a remote area, they have to work with a lot of people, from the local producer to the regional suppliers to smaller supplier to individuals who have a horse and cart. And many times, the break in the chain was the guy with a horse and cart; therefore, Coca-Cola started their Last Mile program. (Nice name, guys!)

So the Berrys worked with Coca-Cola, often tagging along with them and meeting the people who delivered the Coke. And they soon discovered—it would be better if the shopkeepers simply ordered the Kit Yamoyo as a regular item, like laundry detergent.

The ColaLife began its pilot project in September 2012, and so far, the results are encouraging. Here’s what Berry has to say, as quoted in The New York Times:

Thus far, ColaLife has received mostly positive feedback from customers regarding Kit Yamoyo. “People are convinced it cures diarrhea,” said Simon Berry. “They say it’s much stronger than the medicine you get at the health center. And there’s some evidence that we’re stopping chronic diarrhea.” (While conclusive data has not yet been published, Berry’s assessment is based on more than 20, 000 kits sold and surveys of more than 1000 households.) The team also found that shops that sell Kit Yamoyo are, on average, two-thirds closer than health centers — making it much easier for a mother to obtain O.R.S. (oral rehydrating salts) when a child is sick.

There’s a little problem, for which, of course, I have the answer. And that is, you say?

The kit costs one dollar, unaffordable to many people. Sales have slumped by 60 percent from when the kit was introduced free.

My answer?

I think the genius of the Berrys was to see that the Kit Yamoyo was a product and could be treated like one, not a medicine or a health care issue. So we have a product, a nice product with a terrific potential and an un-mined gold field in public relations. A nice product that Wal-Mart (ASDA in Britain) can sell for $2.49—a steal. Wal-Mart pockets 74 cents, pays ColaLife $1.75. ColaLife, in turn, can use that money to lower their price substantially. They then employ an unemployed blogger in Puerto Rico to write terrific press releases, which I will.

Yes?

Sorry, guys—gotta go. Gonna call some friends at Wal-Mart….

Famous and Unknown

There are guys who can make you laugh just by looking at you. Or repeating a word. Or making a gesture.

Consider that I have been laughing out loud in the café that became my office when Wal-Mart, during their realignment, realized that I (or my job) was outta line.

I challenge you—look at the clip below and try not to laugh. Unless you’re comatose, catatonic, or seriously, seriously depressed you’ll be chortling, giggling, laughing and finally holding your sides.

Victor Borge was born in Denmark in 1909. His father was an orchestral musician; Borge in turn becomes a child prodigy, later studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Music. He became one of Denmark’s greatest musicians, states the official website, and then turned to comedy.

Oddly, the website is the blandest of affairs (and could, incidentally, use a good editing—at one point, it speaks of “Victor borge,” another sentence manages to incorporate two mistakes….) I say oddly, because the site must have been shown to the family, who in 2008 participated in a documentary for Danish television.

And the documentary is anything but bland. Borge, for all that he appears the genial, grandfatherly character in later life, is a very talented, very handsome and…

…very nervous young man.

He plays the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto Number Two for his first big concert. Then something happens—the musician’s worst fear. He gets stuck, he goes and talks to the conductor, and covers the gaffe.

Performance is interesting. There is a part of every musician that must be a racehorse, a thoroughbred—quivering sensibility, starting if not bolting at every slightest sound, and in an agonizing awareness of the surroundings. But it also requires the abilities of the plow horse—stamina, stolid nerves, brute insensitivity.

And what happens when the mix isn’t right? A descent into the abyss that couldn’t be swifter if you greased the toboggan.

Borge’s solution?

Humor.

Which has, as you know, a dark side. A Jew, Borge wasted no time lambasting Hitler; in the words of the BBC:

His lampooning of Adolf Hitler provoked the ire of Germany long before the Nazis invaded Denmark in April 1940.

Fortunately, Borge was in Sweden at the time of the invasion. Like so many other Jews, he fled to the States, arriving with 20$ to his name.

That’s what the article in the BBC says. But he’s not quite that hard up: he arrives with his first wife, and she has family in New York. But yes, it’s a struggle, not the least of which because he can’t speak the language (his wife has written out the Danish routines into English, Borge is reading them over the radio….) He gets a big break, though, when he appears on the Ed Sullivan Show, and then the Bing Crosby Show. There, he’s slotted for seven or eight minutes, but takes 30 minutes instead.

The documentary makes it clear—he’s an absent father. In fact, one of his sons says that for some time in his childhood, he thought his father was a family friend. He is obsessed with making it, and practices for hours at a time. Notice, for example, that even when he is accompanying a singer or soloist, he frequently is playing without sheet music. Has he memorized, or is he so good that he’s improvising the accompaniment?

After twenty years, the marriage fizzles. He’s been on the road a lot; his wife has no wish to travel. He meets a young woman from a small town in Indiana, he’s entranced, they marry.

And live a very European, formal, Victorian lifestyle. The children dress for dinner, speak only when spoken to, are taught to behave in a way that will be a credit to Borge. And the family is a unit doing one thing—promoting and creating the great man’s career.

And how big is he? Well, claims the documentary, as of 2008 he still holds the record for the longest run on Broadway, some 849 shows. That’s two and a half years. Oh, and nobody had ever done a one-man show before.

He gets rave reviews. Which he can only read about the next day. His own reaction? His nerves had gobsmacked him, he thinks he’s bombed, he wants to leave at intermission. His wife has to order him back on stage, as she will later forbid him to leave the party after the show.

He is obsessive, every detail counts. He goes back to Denmark, and is received like royalty. He buys a manor house, and lives in the grand style. And then, at the end of his career, the critics turn on him.

Well, it’s gotta be said. They guy was repetitive—he must have fallen off the end of his piano stool millions of times in the span of his career. But Borge is hypersensitive—the one word “repetitive” cancels out the thousand of words of praise. He’s filled, says the photographer who followed him around for two years, with fury.

And he had a problem—the stage was his life.

As was, apparently, his strong and independent wife. “They didn’t need each other,” said his granddaughter.

Well, it seems he needed her—the photo of Borge slumped in the chair of his wife’s bedroom beams agony as strongly as, on stage, he would beam comedy. He grieves deeply but as always, goes on. He travels for one last time to Denmark in 2000, and then, hours after returning to the US, dies.

He traveled in high circles, had many honors showered on him, and lived an elegant and rich life. He had, of course, a brilliant career.

One wonders—did he have a life? There were two Victor Borges, says the photographer who gave two years of her life to him, and who weeps in the documentary filmed seven or eight years after Borge’s death. The one always interrupting, and always cracking jokes. And the one whom no one knew. If no one knew you, could you really say that you had lived?

I think of another Danish musician, Gunnar Johansen. And they were fast friends, Borge and Johansen, respected each other immensely, and had wives from small towns in America’s heartland. Borge became known as “the funniest man in the world.” Johansen turned his back on fame, went into his studio, and emerged, ten hours later. He had, perhaps, recorded another piece, or learned a new piece, or maybe just practiced. But at the end of the day, he was at home, with his beloved wife, who worshipped him.

And Borge?

More often than not in a hotel room.

His children—one of whom is the page-turner in the clip below—speak fondly of him. His grandchildren as well. There must have been something in that Pagliacci, the world’s funniest man, the man nobody knew. 

Interesting Times

Well, we live in interesting times, or maybe it’s just that now, with our technology, we can see just how interesting the times are. Peering into CNN this morning, I saw a guy who was totally carried away. Why? For the first time a giant squid has been seen! And we have footage! Wow! He could barely sit in his chair—by comparison, kids on Christmas morning are blasé.

Well, the giant squid is interesting. I didn’t know that it had been the subjects of myths for centuries—a giant sea creature that swarms up and devours boats. They don’t—apparently—but they are big. Until now, they’ve only been seen when they washed ashore, dead. But they can get to be 60 feet; that’s several school buses.

Have a look—not at a giant squid but at the largest squid of all: the colossal squid.

Something to see, right? You’d remember that day of fishing….

Of course, you’d also remember being in Manila yesterday. That’s because nine million people decided to celebrate the procession of the Black Nazarene.

I can hear the question….

The Black Nazarene is a sculpture made in Mexico in the early 1600’s. It was transported to the Philippines by a galleon that, according to legend, caught fire, blackening but not burning the statue. So three times a year, six to eight million people walk barefoot—in honor of you-know-whom—through the streets of Manila. Well, maybe not walk—“jostle” is the word Wikipedia used. Oh, and “trample” as well, at times resulting in death. The deal? Wiping a white towel on the statue—it’s supposed to bring you good luck.

Listen, everybody, I would hate to antagonize my Philippine readership, and you know that I tiptoe on the topic of religion—but is this rationale? Sorry, forgot that the Philippines is also where they nail people up on crosses every Good Friday. So maybe Manila wasn’t the place to be, yesterday.

Of course, where you REALLY didn’t want to be was with the guy in clip below. But how fascinating to watch someone so fascinated and seemingly so fearless.

There is something compelling about a polar bear…..