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On the NY Times small business blog, Bruce Buschel shares 50 things restaurant servers and staff should never do.

1. Do not let anyone enter the restaurant without a warm greeting.

2. Do not make a singleton feel bad. Do not say, “Are you waiting for someone?” Ask for a reservation. Ask if he or she would like to sit at the bar.

3. Never refuse to seat three guests because a fourth has not yet arrived.

4. If a table is not ready within a reasonable length of time, offer a free drink and/or amuse-bouche. The guests may be tired and hungry and thirsty, and they did everything right.

More establishments should heed the advice of #4.  The list is handy for not just restaurant servers and owners, but also customers.  It’s a nice road map for determining if a place goes above and beyond.  There are too many restaurants in your city to eat at a place that doesn’t provide excellent service.  The next 50 will follow next week.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, gives his 10 rules for surviving an unpredictable world with dignity.

1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants… or (again) parties.

9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

It’s interesting that this isn’t the usual work hard, blah blah kind of list.  Number two essentially advocates for being social and networking face to face.  It’s true that you never know what will happen when you meet a random stranger at a party or at the bus stop, etc.  It’s a playful list, but there are some decent nuggets therein.

Taleb is kinda like Malcolm Gladwell, as a reference point.  But I did like this quote from the interview and thought it should not be wasted:

“Scientists don’t know what they are talking about when they talk about religion. Religion has nothing to do with belief, and I don’t believe it has any negative impact on people’s lives outside of intolerance. Why do I go to church? It’s like asking, why did you marry that woman? You make up reasons, but it’s probably just smell. I love the smell of candles. It’s an aesthetic thing.”

Actually, the entire profile of him is worth a read.

It’s not Machiavelli or Sun Tzu, but there’s lots to soak in from the great jazz master for music lovers and regular people alike. In many ways this is musical zen.

Like: “You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig?” or “whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along and do it.  A genius is the one most like himself.”

Most of the rest of his advice or rules to himself were about making everyone else in the band better.  It was about staying within yourself.  As a piano player, Monk was all about making the drummer sound better, about filling in the parts the bass player couldn’t get to, about playing the bridge to bolster the rest of the song.

Having grown up with Roger Ebert on television, waking up every Sunday morning to catch his show At the Movies, I never imagined how skillful a writer Ebert actually was.  Back then, oh my gosh before the internet, you couldn’t read any writer or newspapers from other cities and so any film criticism aside from your local paper was strictly television.  And Ebert (along with Siskel and then Roeper) was the best.

Since his health problems began a few years ago and then after he was unceremoniously dumped from At the Movies (only to be replaced by two mid-twenties nitwits) his writing has been sharp, perhaps one of the few must reads.

Recently, he offered some pointed advice for the next generation of film critics, but it seems aimed particularly at one dumbass.  The one young critic who really  seems to need the guidance would benefit greatly from reading Ebert’s piece.  Some highlights:

Provide a sense of the experience. No matter what your opinion, every review should give some idea of what the reader would experience in actually seeing the film. In other words, if it is a Pauly Shore comedy, there are people who like them, and they should be able to discover in your review if the new one is down to their usual standard.

Keep track of your praise. If you call a movie “one of the greatest movies ever made,” you are honor-bound to include it in your annual Top Ten list. Likewise, for example, if you describe a film as “the most unique movie-going experience of a generation,” and “one of the best films of 2007, and of the last 25 years,” it’s your duty to put it in the Top Ten of 2007. This is doubly true if you have published two separate lists naming 14 of the year’s top 10 films.

Respect the reader’s time. For example, in reviewing “City of Ember,” a film about a city of the future buried deep beneath the surface of the earth,” you must not say it “looks like it was shot on a sound stage.” As Louis Armstrong said about jazz, some folks they know, and the others, you can’t tell ‘em.

Be wary of freebies. The critic should ideally never accept round-trip first-class air transportation, a luxury hotel room, a limo to a screening and a buffet of chilled shrimp and cute little hamburgers in preparation for viewing a movie. If you go, your employer should pay for the trip. I understand some critics work for places that won’t even pick up the cost of a ticket, let alone a taxi fare, and are so underpaid they have never tasted a chilled shrimp. Others work for themselves, an employer who is always going out of business. Yet they are ordered to produce a piece about Michael Cera’s new film. I cut them some slack. Let them take the junket. They need the food. Also, I admire Michael Cera. But if they work for a place that is filthy rich, they should turn down freebies.

Be prepared to give a negative review. If you give one to the work of a friend, and they’re not your friend any more, they weren’t ever your friend. As Robert Altman once told me, “If you never gave me a bad review, what would a good review mean?” He was a great man. He thought over what he had said, and added: “But all your bad reviews of my films have been wrong.”

It’s great stuff all around and worth reading whether you are a burgeoning film critic or a burgeoning journalist or just interesting in a lifetime’s perspective on doing anything with integrity and honor.

Everyone in my generation sorta grew up with Mike J. Fox.� Alex P. Keating was our big brother on Family Ties, made us think we could travel in time and just how friggin’ cool that would be, made being a teenage werewolf seem appealing, tricked us into thinking we’d easily be able to work our way up from the mailroom to the boardroom.

In many ways he’s never left us because he was there on Spin City as we were just starting out in college and then when our own family members were diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease he so bravely announced to the world that yes, he too had the disease and that he would shoulder the burden for all those who suffered from it and do what he could to help fix the problem.

It’s odd to think of Michael J. Fox as a family member, but in this crazy time we live in when so many musicians and actors feel like family, well, it’s nice to know he can pass on a little wisdom.� His candor is a breath of fresh air. Via: Kottke

It started the summer before last summer, when the president vetoed the first Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act. He had these families around him, these �snowflake babies,� which presented it like it was an either/or situation and the two were mutually exclusive. It was just such manipulation, and it just pissed me off so much.

When I see pictures of Lindsay Lohan in the car or Paris Hilton — the level of glee and the level of viciousness — wow. We�ve got a war goin� on. We�ve got people dying. And we�re all up in arms about this girl.

No matter how much fame you have, it�s not something that belongs to you. If I�m famous, that doesn�t belong to me — that belongs to you. If you can�t remember who I am, I�m no longer famous.

I was never big on lunch boxes and all that stuff, and I look at it now and think, God, how much money I turned down. Oh, fuck, I�d do it in a heartbeat now.

I can�t always control my body the way I want to, and I can�t control when I feel good or when I don�t. I can control how clear my mind is. And I can control how willing I am to step up if somebody needs me.