Venusberg | That's not your heart, it's a piece of helicopter casing

Friday, January 27, 2006

Along with the many cruel and unmerited innuendi delivered on the subject of Ultra Magnus' sexuality, we occasionally hear voices raised in opposition to his leadership skills. In particular, there is a general supposition that his periods of leadership do not compare well with the more familiar management style of an Optimus Prime.

However. it's worth mentioning, I think, that the presence of Ultra Magnus in an executive capacity indicates that something has already gone very seriously wrong. Realistically, most of the Decepticons' plans, while incontestably evil, are also pretty useless. Hypnotic car washes, hugely energy-intensive ways to create energy, robot insects and so on. Left to their own devices, the natural state of a Decepticon is failure. It's sad, but there you go. That's what happens when you don't listen to Soundwave.

As such, if the Autobots found themselves in a situation where Ultra Magnus was in charge, it was ipso facto a situation on top of which Optimus Prime had already clearly failed to get, resulting in his deactivation, incarceration or abduction into a cyborg monkey-oriented hallucinatory parallel dimension. This is the very opposite of management by exception - referring problems that have proven too great for one executive to a second executive with significantly less management experience.

By the same token, any situation that Ultra Magnus found himself dealing with had already spiralled wildly out of control, requiring vast resources and crisis management skills to bring under control. Given how tough it must have been for him in a largely homophobic giant robot environment, it's amazing how well he did.

As a reward for those of you who got through that and have Macs (and if not, why not etc), I've been enjoying tickr, which runs a stream of Flickr images by tag, title or user name across your screen. Very nice.

0 Comments: