Bombs Away
As Northrop prepares to roll out the first B-2 Stealth bomber on Tuesday in Palmdale, Crown Publishers has rolled out an “uncorrected manuscript” of the first Stealth bomber novel, “Storming Intrepid.”
A promotional letter about the upcoming book asks, “What would it be like to be on the receiving end of the Stealth bomber?” Presumably, it would not be very pleasant, since the aircraft carries a load of 16 nuclear bombs.
A Northrop spokesman said he had not heard about the book, which is authored by Payne Harrison. The Northrop bomber has become an object of growing public fascination, having also played a prominent role in a television commercial for Honda automobiles.
Fresh Meat for Thanksgiving
If you’re thinking of quitting cold turkey this year in favor of buying a fresh bird for Thanksgiving, there are plenty of toms and hens strutting their stuff out there. “The only problem is getting them to market,” said a Los Angeles meat buyer.
“It’s always a problem at Thanksgiving because everyone’s pushing at the same time,” the buyer explained. “They have to move into the stores in a two-week period because of a lack of shelf space at the store level.”
The Sound of Wealth
Run-of-the-mill corporate debuts feature live music; say a string quartet or a nice duo. When the Boston Co. courts Los Angeles, it hires an orchestra.
The East Coast financial institution opened its West Coast headquarters here last week to offer personal banking and investment services to Southern California’s richest residents--only individuals with a net worth in the upper 1% of the country need apply.
Befitting the targeted market, a 66-piece orchestra played at a reception for 1,000 one night at the firm’s spiffy new downtown offices at California Plaza. The next day, a more select roster of clients and prospective clients was treated to lunch at Rex Il Ristorante, one of the city’s most expensive restaurants. The bank bought out the place for the occasion.
The only fly in the ointment was the economic forecast delivered during dessert by the company’s well-regarded chief economist, Allen Sinai--interest rates are likely to rise one or two percentage points in the coming months.
What’s Next--Lard Disks?
What do you give the propeller head who has everything? Last holiday season it was the Chocolate Chip, a few ounces of cocoa molded to resemble an integrated circuit. The year before it was the computer bug, a darling micro insect soldered from electronic components. But this year it’s “Nerd Perfect,” a $9.95 novelty aspiring to pet rock status in the computer world.
Playing off a popular word-processing package called WordPerfect, Nerd Perfect looks and feels like any other piece of cheap software. But when you go to plug the diskette into a computer, you discover there is no magnetic disk inside the envelope. In his humorous, pun-filled instruction book, David Moss of Fallbrook, near San Diego, describes his product as “nerd processing vaporware.”
Vaporware, of course, is high-tech lingo for software that has been promised and promoted, yet simply does not exist. But the joke does, and is available from VaporSoft in Portland, Ore.
