“Friday Levity” returns on Thursday (not necessarily back by popular demand).

Check out the following photo from a Chinese website selling English language lessons.

Always good for models in an advertisement to exude friendliness.

The fellow waving “hi” to the reader looks fine.

But the girl’s wave is so close to her face it looks like she’s thumbing her nose at the reader (missing the old nose by an inch or so.)

This prompted me to pull up the definition of:

“thumb one’s nose at someone or something” 

(From http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/thumb+nose+at.)

Whether you prefer the literal or figurative definition, I suspect this isn’t what the company had in mind. 

Note: If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy “I Think They Missed the Picture … Literally” (powered by my hit-and-miss memory)

Anyone can create a video and gain access to millions of viewers. 

The barriers to entry consist of nothing more than a video recorder and an Internet connection. 

But the rise of anyone-can-make-a-video has generated a fair amount of dreadful stuff. 

It’s especially challenging for a B2B company to create a video that stands apart from the standard fare. 

By stand apart, I mean a video that goes beyond the inform/educate objective and actually amuses the viewer. I think it’s fair to say that floating-point operations per second (FLOPS), content management systems and field programmable arrays aren’t intrinsically entertaining. 

That’s why a SolarWinds (client) video deserves a shout out. 

Playing off the Dos Equis campaign, “The Most Interesting Man in the World,” SolarWinds came up with “The Most Incredible IT Man in the World.” 

The video shows even an IT management company can bring a little levity to the scene.

The typical product review has a happy ending.

By that, I mean the end of a review usually calls out one product as the best choice.

In spite of the “happily every after” - at least for one company - you don’t associate the product review genre with storytelling.

Instead, these articles strive to clinically attach a value to different features and functions with the objective of helping potential buyers make their decisions.

That’s why a recent review by David Pogue in The New York Times caught my attention.

Anyone who touches the consumer electronics space knows Pogue and his gift for humor. His comparison of Windows Vista to the Mac OS back in 2006 - “I’m going to prove that Microsoft did not steal ideas from Mac OS 10″ - remains a classic and must-watch video:

But it’s interesting to see his quest for levity play out in a print product review called “Big Sensor, Tiny Camera, Nice Results” (don’t think Pogue wrote the headline; perhaps a byproduct of the SEO jockeys).

The review goes old school with the lead ‘graph:

Centuries ago, a young boy in Japan was preparing for a long journey. “You will need much drinking water,” said his master. “Construct a barrel that will catch the rain.”

You can almost sense David Carradine flashing back to his Grasshopper days, an allusion that keeps as the story unwinds:

After a quick run to his local Pagoda Depot for supplies, the boy built a large barrel, open at the top. When it rained, the barrel filled quickly.

“Good,” said the master. “Now pack it up.”

“But master,” the boy protested. “This barrel is much too big and heavy to take on my journey — it might not even qualify as carry-on! I need a much smaller, lighter container!”

Nice turn of a phrase, “Pagoda Depot.”

Sensing that an allegory is taking shape:

“A wise observation,” said the master.

“And yet,” said the boy, “a smaller container means a smaller opening, and it won’t catch nearly as much rain.”

And now, the payoff with Pogue intersecting Grasshopper with today’s digital dilemma:

The master nodded again. “Excellent, my son,” he said. “Now you understand the trade-off between digital S.L.R. cameras and pocket cameras. The S.L.R. is big and heavy, but it has a huge sensor that collects much light; you can get sharp photos even at twilight. The pocket camera has a tiny sensor that’s blurry in low light, but at least you won’t slip a disk trying to carry it around.”

The rest of the review offers the obligatory compare and contrast of several cameras.

Of course, every story must have an end.

Naturally, Pogue ties back to the drinking water quandary:

In the end, the boy began to cross Japan with only a tiny water flask on his back.

The master was aghast. “But you will die of thirst, my son!”

The boy smiled as he continued walking. “I’m not too worried about it, old man. Technology has a way of making all things possible.

Right. There’s no way a Japanese boy is going to call Kwai Chang Caine an “old man.”

But the boy saying “please don’t worry master” doesn’t quite have the same verve.

Like all master storytellers, Pogue expects us to suspend belief.

I’m OK with this for a product review that shakes up the status quo. 

Back in 2008 I wrote it’s not enough that Warren Buffet has become one of the richest men in the world. He’s also a world-class storyteller. (If it makes you feel any better, at least he’s not handsome.)

Nowhere does this gift go on public display more than in his annual letter to shareholders.

It’s worth setting aside 30 minutes to absorb the 20 pages like a novella.

But I’ve cherry-picked the slices of narrative that I found particularly amusing, starting with Buffet’s philosophy:

Long ago, Charlie laid out his strongest ambition: “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.” That bit of wisdom was inspired by Jacobi, the great Prussian mathematician, who counseled “Invert, always invert” as an aid to solving difficult problems. (I can report as well that this inversion approach works on a less lofty level: Sing a country song in reverse, and you will quickly recover your car, house and wife.)

He’s right.

I just tried this with a Merle Haggard tune and it works, a sad reminder that no matter how many times I played the Beatles song “I Am The Walrus” backwards, I could never make out “Paul is dead.”

This next one isn’t as entertaining but shows the power of conversational language:

We tend to let our many subsidiaries operate on their own, without our supervising and monitoring them to any degree. That means we are sometimes late in spotting management problems and that both operating and capital decisions are occasionally made with which Charlie and I would have disagreed had we been consulted. Most of our managers, however, use the independence we grant them magnificently, rewarding our confidence by maintaining an owner oriented attitude that is invaluable and too seldom found in huge organizations. We would rather suffer the visible costs of a few bad decisions than incur the many invisible costs that come from decisions made too slowly – or not at all – because of a stifling bureaucracy.

There’s no double-talk.

He explains his approach to management, acknowledging the periodic downside.

BTW, I defy you to find another shareholder letter that includes the word “magnificently.”

But quintessential Buffet occurs when he turns to self-deprecation as a mechanism to disarm:

And now a painful confession: Last year your chairman closed the book on a very expensive business fiasco entirely of his own making.

For many years I had struggled to think of side products that we could offer our millions of loyal GEICO customers. Unfortunately, I finally succeeded, coming up with a brilliant insight that we should market our own credit card. I reasoned that GEICO policyholders were likely to be good credit risks and, assuming we offered an attractive card, would likely favor us with their business. We got business all right – but of the wrong type.

Our pre-tax losses from credit-card operations came to about $6.3 million before I finally woke up. We then sold our $98 million portfolio of troubled receivables for 55¢ on the dollar, losing an additional $44 million.

GEICO’s managers, it should be emphasized, were never enthusiastic about my idea. They warned me that instead of getting the cream of GEICO’s customers we would get the – – – – – well, let’s call it the non-cream. I subtly indicated that I was older and wiser.

I was just older.

Forget the shareholders.

Imagine how this mea culpa played with Geico’s executives who were originally overruled. Something about seeing the big boss fall on his sword allows everyone to move on.

And I love the pacing of this narrative.

Deeper in the letter he discusses the over supply in the housing market:

There were three ways to cure this overhang: (1) blow up a lot of houses, a tactic similar to the destruction of autos that occurred with the “cash-for-clunkers” program; (2) speed up household formations by, say, encouraging teenagers to cohabitate, a program not likely to suffer from a lack of volunteers or; (3) reduce new housing starts to a number far below the rate of household formations.

The man has a sense of humor and he’s not afraid to use it, a trait that surfaces again in this ditty:

Naturally, our fellows caved in and agreed to this value-destroying deal. “We need to show that we are in the hunt. Besides, it’s only a small deal,” they said, as if only major harm to shareholders would have been a legitimate reason for holding back. Charlie’s reaction at the time: “Are we supposed to applaud because the dog that fouls our lawn is a Chihuahua rather than a Saint Bernard?”

Of course, the letter is peppered with one-line zingers like:

Charlie and I enjoy issuing Berkshire stock about as much as we relish prepping for a colonoscopy.

Even if you’re not a middle-aged man, you get the drift.

Stepping back, what allows the storytelling to come through?

First, Buffet is true to himself. To borrow from the social media world, he’s absolutely authentic which comes through in his narrative.

Plus, he writes with a conversational tone. He’s not trying to come off as the smartest guy in the room.

And finally, he uses an element in short supply in business, humor. I’m not talking Robin Williams nanu nanu humor but the type of that makes you crack a smile.

Note: I penned a guest post on this very same topic that ran on VentureBeat yesterday. In the home-turf version, I drop in large chunks of Buffett’s narrative so you can see how the words are strung together. I suppose this version also goes for an extra-cheap smile (laugh is too strong a word).

An essay in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal makes an argument that U.S. students need to spend more time in the classroom.

We learn that kids in China attend school 41 days a year more than their American brethren.

The author, Chester E. Finn Jr., goes on to roll out stat after stat - the typical American youth spends 53 hours per week on TV, videogames and the Internet versus 30 hours in the classroom; required courses in France took up 3,280 hours versus 1,460 hours in the U.S., etc. - with the upshot being our kids need to spend more time in school.

I think Mr. Finn’s sour disposition would perk up if he was aware of the literary “prowess” being developed in America’s high schools.

Back in January I posted on a listing of metaphors and analogies purportedly from high school essays, which didn’t exactly pull in the readers (to put it kindly).

With this in mind, I thought I’d take a second shot, pulling out of my favorites for Mr. Finn:

“She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.”

Shrewd to align storytelling with a timely topic like food contamination. But why Canadian beef? If you’re striving for the exotic angle, should have gone with Argentinean stuff.

“She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.”

The blending of Lauren Bacall and Old Yeller makes for narrative you don’t see every day.

“Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.”

On one hand, you shouldn’t feel like you’re taking the SAT to figure out a love story. On the other hand, the ambiguity pulls you in because you can’t be 100 percent sure when the lovers will actually collide.

“He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.”

You don’t often see young authors pursue the mafia genre. While not exactly Mario Puzo, the personification of the East River shows promise.

“It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.”

You have to admit, fathers armed with chainsaws and the like deliver stronger imagery than men running around with wood paddles.

Back to the big picture, would this storytelling be stronger by spending more time in the classroom?

Let me study essays from those kids in China who spend 41 more days in school and I’ll get back to you.