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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (April 24, 1986)
\ K I s \ INI I K 1 MNMI NT oid you—from infancy to old age The pay choiogist produced fantasy present* a vari ety of experience* to the player, from the lint temptation to shoplift to the question of whether you want to Unite a friend’s strawberry lipstick "the fun way ” Your <fecuion»~~Ko ahead, or chicken out?—af fect everythin# from the kind of people you can date to the kind of job you get, just as chokes pattern real life. Entertainment software is not just games; a rash of recent programs turns computers into the life of the party, allow ing them to play music, produce animated cartoons and even converse RacU*r/Mind mope, Inc $44 95) blends its own random responses with snatches of keyboard en tries in its verbal Cuisinart; the* resulting stream-ofconsciousness non sequiturscan be hilarious When asked, "Who wrote the book of love’" Racter’B answer (author Jes sica Mttfordi was followed by this screed: "Anyhow my reflection is loving. Yet when disgusting eagles soar and fly, their own love is always quizzical and loony. Ha! ha! ha! ha! Enraged hater! I’m afraid of en raged tapeworms What are you afraid of?” Kacter even "talks" on voice-synthesizing machines like the Macintosh and Amiga— but do you really want to listen to some thing that sounds like a well-educated schizophrenic with sinusitis? You know the computer age is maturing when someone starts releasing Golden Old ies (Software Country. $29 95 $34,951 Holy K-Tel! l>es Crane, a former deejay and talk show host, has repackaged four games that were created in the dinosaur days of micro chips—including good old Pong John Schwastz TELEVISION TV’s New Alien In a new ABC sitcom, Balki Bartokomous has unexpectedly arrived in America from a mythical Mediterranean island and moved in with his distant American cousin, Larry Appleton. ABCcalls the show "Perfect Strangers.” You might be tempt ed to call it "Balki & Mindy” or "My Favor ite Balki.” Television has long considered the new alien in town—whether from the planets Ork or Mars, or even a Mediterra nean island—a situation ripe for comedy. While this particular variation might not make you forget Mork or Uncle Martin the Martian, it does have its bright mo BOOKS The Fastest Track of All The ’49ers struck gold The claw the dollar* fell on." That's what Fortune magazine called the 1949 graduates of Harvard Business School on the occasion of their 25th re union. At that point, one out of every five men from the class (women weren’t ad mitted to Harvard Business School in 1947) were millionaires From this group came chairmen and/or chief executive officers of Xerox, Johnson & Johnson, Blooming dale'* and Capital Cities, as well us a chair man of the Securities und Exchange Com mission. As Iourence Shames expluins in hi* excellent book "The Big Time" (226 pa#ea. Harper <f Row $17.95), '49ers were blessed in several ways They were the first postwar class at the B-School, they earned M B.A.’s when the degree wus truly u gold s' passport and they exited into an econo n.v that wus beginning a prolonged boom Shames details the business ups and d' wns of the ’49ers. Peter McColough, for f -'ample, has known both—he took a < iance on a nascent photocopier compuny ••■died Haloid, and rose with its success (under the new name of Xerox) to chair man and CEO, only to steer the company through some disastrous excursions into ■nputers and electronic typewriters I '-se personal stories make for vivid read ing. but Shames goes beyond the business ol business He goes into the broader im pact of the class of '49—how, for exumple, Bsyond the business of busimss: Shames they defined success for many Americans during the go-go years. Shames doesn t let the class of ’49 off lightly: he criticizes them for being unuble to adupt to the changing business world, particularly the growing emphasis on investment banking and corporate raids. Yet he finds them to be, in many respects, superior to the narcis sistic. Yuppified M.B.A.’s of today. "The Big Time" may be such an uncom mon book about business and businessmen because Shames is such an uncommon per son to write on the subject. When a Harper & Bow editor asked him to take it on, says Shames, "1 said, 'I’m not a business writer. 1 don’t have a business education, and I’ve never had anything to do with the Harvard Business School.’ She said, 'That’s exactly why you should do the book’.” She was right—and maybe "The Big Time” should be a case-method lesson for publishers everywhere. Ron Givens Ancient Demigod Comes to Visit Classics majors, rejoice! Now comes the newly translated saga of "Hercules Amongst the North Americans’’ (80 pages. Penguin. $5.95) Mark Marek has quirkily illustrated these little-known ex ploits of the demigod—from Hercules’ at tempt to find an apartment in Manhattan to the 349th labor of the mighty Greek, keeping the boiler going in the basement of the Omega-Hilton Hotel in West Beach, Fla. As a man of his time, Hercules often has trouble with the American way: when he sees the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, he slays Bullwinkle, suspecting the giant balloon is a Trojan moose. But Hercules also likes the convenience of his Mr. Coffee ma chine. At times, propounds Marek, Hercu les is "a legendary figure from ancient timesandyet a man in touch with today .’’