I'm amazed at the commentary about "opinions" versus "verifiable facts." Every opinion contains implied facts; every fact probably reflects some opinion.
You may decide that it is safe to say that Joe was often late for work, since you can prove that he punched in late at least once a week -- but if being on-time isn't important at your company, and you allowed employees to adjust their own schedules, your "verifiable fact" is actually misleading and is essentially a lie (or at least a jury may so decide).
Were you satisfied with Joe's work performance?
If you say yes, you are representing that he did his job competently, but in fact he is human and he made mistakes, and failing to disclose that is maybe a misrepresentation to the new employer.
If you say no, then Joe will pull out the fact that you continued to employ him for 6 years without even a warning, so obviously you were satisfied with his work performance and so you were lying when you said no. (Oh, yeah, and when you pull out the written evaluations showing that he was below-par, he'll say they were fabricated just to defend this lawsuit, he never saw them, and his signatures on the things are forgeries.)
You may decide that your opinion that you "just didn't think that Joe was up to the project we were working on" is a safe opinion, but Joe may present the job description showing the project requirements, and he may show that he fulfilled all those requirements, and bingo now your statement was factual.
You may decide that it's safe to say that Joe worked from December 1995 through July 2000, and his highest title was Director of Marketing, but then someone pulls out a printout of the sales presentation you gave in 1999 where you identified Joe as "Vice President, Marketing," and Joe is now annoyed that he didn't get the new job because the new employer was shocked that he had misrepresented his prior job as being the VP of Marketing.
You say "Look, all I am permitted to say is that Joe worked here from November 1999 to August 2000, and our lawyers won't let me say any more," and of course any sensible person might conclude that there must be something to say, if you actually had to check with your lawyer about it.
In the case of an employment reference, you must worry about "reading between the lines."
With a written reference, your artful wording may be construed to mean something different than you intended. And of course, the written reference is right there in writing, and it's impossible to dispute the words there, though anyone can dispute their meaning -- which means that anyone can turn even the slightest ambiguity into a lawsuit.
With an oral reference, it's your word against some stranger's as to what you said. Maybe they "mis-remember" and attribute to you a statement that some other employer said about some other employee. And eventually some jury will make the decision two years from now, and they will assume that you are just lying about what you said to cover your ass.
Life isn't fair, and employment is a terribly sensitive subject. I don't think there is any employment-law attorney who would recommend that you share any opinions about former employees, ever, or that you share any facts other than dates of employment and maybe title.
I think some employers do ask the former employee for some kind of signed release -- basically, saying "if you want us to give a reference, you must waive your right to sue us if you disagree with out reference." I doubt that such a release would be effective unless you attached the text of the written reference for the employee to accept or reject, and then if people know of this policy, they would just assume that any employee who didn't sign the release must be trouble, and now there's another implied negative statement.
This kind of crap is, of course, the reason I gave up litigation, and eventually the practice of law entirely.
If you have no legal duty to give a reference at all, your best practice is to refuse all requests for references. (Of course, your state's law may require certain disclosures about past employment, and some states might provide "safe harbor" laws for certain reference information. That's why you pay money to lawyers.)
If you say anything useful, you are opening yourself up for a lawsuit.
Be careful about this: you know that if you say "Fred is a crook who embezzled funds," you are facing a lawsuit from Fred, but even a POSITIVE reference can be a problem, if the hiring company decides that you concealed the employee's known problems (for example, praising the fellow's work but failing to disclose your knowledge of his DUI convictions and his embezzlement).
I'm not an employment law specialist, but the usual advice is to either say NOTHING AT ALL, or take only a slight chance by confirming only the dates of employment and perhaps the official job title (but beware even that, if your company has ever issued business cards or web-site staff lists where titles differ from the official title listed in the personnel file). And darn it, even the dates of employment can be fuzzy, if it turns out that your file shows that employment ended on August 8, 2001 but in fact Fred was given a continued salary in order to keep him from going to work for a competitor until at least January 15, 2002.
We all want to be helpful, and we all know that if everyone worries about lawsuits, nobody will ever say anything about anyone. But employment-related lawsuits are filed every day, and quite often they are fired by people who know the suit is groundless but they know they will likely collect a nice $10,000 or $20,000 settlement because it would cost $50,000 or $150,000 to litigate the case.
Check your insurance policies -- you might be breaching the terms of one of your policies if you give references.
The bottom line: whenever you give a reference, you are opening yourself up to legal risk, and there is absolutely no benefit to you from giving the reference. Heck, the guy calling you for the reference may even refuse to give references when people call him!
Re: In the Company of Good and Evil (sucks)
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I must disagree: I just spent two days reading "In the Company of Good and Evil," forcing myself to work through it, and it is absolutely the most hateful book I've ever read.
What's really interesting, is that the authors succeeded in persuading me that the evil villains were responsible for destroying Value America -- but I easily concluded that the authors were more evil, and more responsible, than those they blamed.
The authors spent a lot of time and energy blaming the people they hired for problems, and provide just enough detail to prove that those folks were incompetent fools. But the authors deliberately (almost artfully) omit the key information: they blame their "opponents" for buying millions of dollars of newspaper advertising, but they started the campaign and apparently spent even more. They fault their opponents for scheming and lying, but reveal that the authors were also lying and scheming even earlier.
My point was that there were cycles of favored categories for investing, and many companies would announce their transformations to adopt the most current favored theme, in the form of buzzwords in business plans. Early on, the hot companies were the ISPs, but after the first wave of consolidation/mergers, investors were wary, so then the investments went to "e-retailers" (business-to-consumer sales), but then B2C fell out of favor with the Venture Capitalists, so new themes and buzzwords were adopted to attract funding.
Once the financial community started moving through a series of "different" business models, the failure of some of the early companies could be blamed on that now-disfavored business model, allowing new funding to pour into the new dot-coms even as some of the older ones were collapsing.
Re:Wrong - this is a very good book. Read it.
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Okay, let me make this clear: I found dozens of factual errors throughout the book, DESPITE the fact that I wasn't looking for them after the first two major errors I read in the first chapter. I certainly agree that the two major errors I cited were NOT really relevant to the dot-com industry, but they just happened to be the first two major errors I encountered, and I did not think it would be helpful to prepare a catalog of all the factual errors I noticed.
I believe that if I were inclined to actually check the facts cited in the book, I would find dozens of additional factual errors (indeed, I would be surprised if I did not find at least 100 factual errors).
There are three separate roles that failed here: editing, fact-checking, and proofreading. The book industry usually relies on a book's author for fact-checking. Many publishers devote very little money for editing, and that's a business decision that they make. The proofreading is absolutely the SOLE fault of the publisher.
In the end, the question is whether the published book provides a benefit to readers. In this case, I found no benefit from this book, and I don't think that most consumers, investors, or business people would benefit from reading this book. For the people who somehow "missed" the dot-com boom-and-bust during the past 8 years (folks who lived on a desert island, or who were locked away in a basement writing Cobol code for the last 8 years), this book would be informative, but its factual errors make it unreliable even for that audience.
Re: Check your facts (Altair, Star Wars/Trek, FP
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I'm sure you are right that there was an earlier reference to Altair in Forbidden Planet, and I don't know what the Altair's namer actually used as his source. I had often heard the story that it was based on "Star Trek," and there was one episode in which Altair is mentioned as a star system.
The key here is that while the "Star Trek" and "Forbidden Planet" sources are each plausible, the idea that a computer released in 1975 was named after a non-existent "character" in the movie "Star Wars" (which was released in 1977) is a very obvious mistake that MANY readers will notice (okay, maybe only 1%) and the publisher, editor, AND proofreader should be embarrassed for letting it slip through. The other mistakes were failures of fact-checking (which most book publishers no longer do, trusting the authors).
Re:Wrong - this is a very good book. Read it.
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"knowing there are two minor errors in the book . . . doesn't detract from the rest of it"
That could be true, but in fact I only cited those first two major mistakes, in the first section of the first chapter, as examples that should cause anyone to lose confidence. In hindsight, perhaps I should have cited a few other factual errors from his writing about dot-com companies specifically.
I found MANY more factual errors (major and minor) throughout the book, and I didn't even pay a lot of attention to many factual details (after the first section of the first chapter) since I had already concluded the book was unreliable as a source of historical facts.
But I don't think anyone would benefit from a complete catalog in a review (why kick a dead horse?).
Finally, to kick the horse some more, I think that attributing the invention of the modem (a hardware device) to two software programmers (Christensen and Seuss, whose contribution (creating the XModem file-transfer protocol and the first BBS software) is actually greater), is a serious factual mistake, not an "over-simplification."
Sorry, but
Oops, I didn't change the headline on the prior response. I absolutely think that Dot.Bomb is the best book I read in 2001. It's fun, it's insightful, and it's genuine and real.
Re:Those who fail to learn from history...
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I absolutely agree that "a post-mortem analysis" is warranted, and should be written by someone who can write accurately. The awesome number of factual errors make this book dangerous as history, and while some of the author's analysis is interesting, none of it is original and he really doesn't actually commit to any conclusion. When a football game is over, they recount the highlights and name the MVP and the goat, and they suggest how some plays could have been done differently; Cassidy fails to name any MVPs or goats, and he doesn't offer any insight as to how things might have been done differently (though he does explain why the irrational bubble may have simply been inevitable).
(And yes, the title "Dot.Con" makes it hard to search for, especially searching on a system like slashdot which doesn't index the three-letter words.)
Re:Fatbrain link, profits, Slashdot, and dot-org.
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The notion that dot-org means "non-profit" was abandoned several years ago, though it continues to be honored by the majority. Back when Slashdot.org was sold for a bunch of money to Andover.net (see http://news.com.com/2100-1001-227793.html), I was surprised that anyone would take the heat for acquiring a business that "appeared" to be a non-profit. Slashdot.org is now owned by OSDN.com (which is owned by VA Software Corporation). It is NOT a non-profit company, and doesn't pretend to be a non-profit company.
I wasn't aware that Craig Winn was writing a book, but now I see that it's scheduled for publication later this month. I guess "Stultsinator" had access to an advance copy. I'll certainly read the book, if only because I did think that Kuo's account lacked a technical perspective (though I'm doubtful that Winn's account will offer more technical insight, it may at least blame problems on the programmers;-)
Re: No, Dot.Con has major errors;is is NOT history
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I agree that "this book actually stands a good chance of being the standard history of the dotcom boom-and-bust." That's why I was upset enough to write a review: I expected a "competent journalist's account," but what I got was a book riddled with factual errors -- mistakes that future readers might accept as true and repeat.
I also don't think Cassidy really "tied it all together," other than by putting events on pages that all lie within the same binding. He offers no insight, no conclusions, and as I wrote, no real "Con" nor any actual blame for anyone.
I think 'history' would be better served by a bound set of internet-boom-and-bust articles from Forbes magazine, or Fortune, or Business Week, since at least the mistakes in a magazine can often be forgiven due to tight deadlines.
(FYI, the full, unedited text of this review appears at my own site at http://www.markwelch.com/perspective/dotcon.htm.)
I absolutely agree that a book on Linux written specifically for folks who are fluent in Windows, would be VERY useful.
I was faced with the decision, back in early 1999, of which OS to use for a new colocated server, and I tried Linux.
The various books on Linux were adequate (not ideal) for teaching Linux, but it was quite frustrating that there was NO possible way to relate my knowledge of MS-DOS and Windows to the new environment. This meant that I'd essentially need to start completely from 'scratch' if I intended to set up a Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL server.
After poking and prodding a little, and asking for some advice from some folks familiar with Linux, I concluded that I'd need to spend over 1,000 hours to learn Linux and Apache and PHP and MySQL and Bind and everything else.
In contrast, with my existing knowledge of Windows, I could spend $1,500 on a license for Windows NT Server, use the Windows driver for Microsoft Access, learn IIS Administration using some well-written books, and have my first server up and running in about 40 hours.
I went through the same experience when I was in charge of choosing the OS to be used in developing an e-commerce site: for Linux, we would need to hire "gurus," and our founders would be unable to poke under the hood -- but with Windoze, bad as it is, we could make sense of what was going on and we could even tell sometimes when our outside developers were feeding us bullsh*t.
Of course, someone with a Unix background would face the exact same problem migrating to Windows, and the learning curve might be just as bad (but maybe not, since even the most dedicated Linux user has probably been exposed to Windows).
So yes, give us a book about "Linux Desktop for Windows folk", plus a separate book on "Linux Servers for Windows Server Regufees" (maybe it's a family of books, if you separate "Apache for IIS users" and "MySQL for Microsoft SQL Server administrators").
Why in the world would Dr. Pepper offer to pay you for a sponsorship, if you are already promoting their product for free? Currently, your endorsement is unpaid and that makes it worth MORE than a paid endorsement. (I dunno what it is worth, whether a nickel a year or $5 million, but unless you announce a plan to switch to Mr. Pibb, don't expect Dr. Pepper to offer a penny.);-)
About a decade ago, a law was proposed in California to ban the inclusion of any tobacco or alcohol product logos in any video game. The author's goals were laudable, but how could a game author accurately depict an auto racetrack if the use of such logos was prohibited? (Also, several provisions of the bill were patently unconstitutional.) At the time, the video game
makers claimed that there had never been any paid
placements in video games (I wonder if the California legislature put the idea into their heads).
At that time, I wrote a letter to each member of the committee reviewing the bill. Chris Crawford actually attended the hearing in Sacramento, and apparently he was a hit because at least one of the legislators was familiar with one of his games.
In the end, the bill was amended so that the enacted law only prohibited PAID placements in video games by alcohol and tobacco companies, mirroring the prohibitions of such paid advertising on TV.
Product placements are still going strong in movies and TV (ever since the success of the placement of Reese's Pieces in E.T.). If you see a logo'd product in a movie or on TV, you can almost guarantee that it's a paid placement, though some movies (especially) do include Coke cans and Marlboro cigarettes and so on, without payment, for realism.
As noted, the successful placements are in context. When there is a product placement that is out of context, it detracts from the movie and it probably also provides no benefit for the advertiser.
I will be interested to see if paid product placements WITH LINKS may emerge in some online or internet-enabled games. Imagine being able to click on that corporate logo! Golly!
Slashdot Mirror
- You may decide that it is safe to say that Joe was often late for work, since you can prove that he punched in late at least once a week -- but if being on-time isn't important at your company, and you allowed employees to adjust their own schedules, your "verifiable fact" is actually misleading and is essentially a lie (or at least a jury may so decide).
-
Were you satisfied with Joe's work performance?
- If you say yes, you are representing that he did his job competently, but in fact he is human and he made mistakes, and failing to disclose that is maybe a misrepresentation to the new employer.
- If you say no, then Joe will pull out the fact that you continued to employ him for 6 years without even a warning, so obviously you were satisfied with his work performance and so you were lying when you said no. (Oh, yeah, and when you pull out the written evaluations showing that he was below-par, he'll say they were fabricated just to defend this lawsuit, he never saw them, and his signatures on the things are forgeries.)
- You may decide that your opinion that you "just didn't think that Joe was up to the project we were working on" is a safe opinion, but Joe may present the job description showing the project requirements, and he may show that he fulfilled all those requirements, and bingo now your statement was factual.
- You may decide that it's safe to say that Joe worked from December 1995 through July 2000, and his highest title was Director of Marketing, but then someone pulls out a printout of the sales presentation you gave in 1999 where you identified Joe as "Vice President, Marketing," and Joe is now annoyed that he didn't get the new job because the new employer was shocked that he had misrepresented his prior job as being the VP of Marketing.
- You say "Look, all I am permitted to say is that Joe worked here from November 1999 to August 2000, and our lawyers won't let me say any more," and of course any sensible person might conclude that there must be something to say, if you actually had to check with your lawyer about it.
In the case of an employment reference, you must worry about "reading between the lines."Life isn't fair, and employment is a terribly sensitive subject. I don't think there is any employment-law attorney who would recommend that you share any opinions about former employees, ever, or that you share any facts other than dates of employment and maybe title.
I think some employers do ask the former employee for some kind of signed release -- basically, saying "if you want us to give a reference, you must waive your right to sue us if you disagree with out reference." I doubt that such a release would be effective unless you attached the text of the written reference for the employee to accept or reject, and then if people know of this policy, they would just assume that any employee who didn't sign the release must be trouble, and now there's another implied negative statement.
This kind of crap is, of course, the reason I gave up litigation, and eventually the practice of law entirely.
If you say anything useful, you are opening yourself up for a lawsuit.
Be careful about this: you know that if you say "Fred is a crook who embezzled funds," you are facing a lawsuit from Fred, but even a POSITIVE reference can be a problem, if the hiring company decides that you concealed the employee's known problems (for example, praising the fellow's work but failing to disclose your knowledge of his DUI convictions and his embezzlement).
I'm not an employment law specialist, but the usual advice is to either say NOTHING AT ALL, or take only a slight chance by confirming only the dates of employment and perhaps the official job title (but beware even that, if your company has ever issued business cards or web-site staff lists where titles differ from the official title listed in the personnel file). And darn it, even the dates of employment can be fuzzy, if it turns out that your file shows that employment ended on August 8, 2001 but in fact Fred was given a continued salary in order to keep him from going to work for a competitor until at least January 15, 2002.
We all want to be helpful, and we all know that if everyone worries about lawsuits, nobody will ever say anything about anyone. But employment-related lawsuits are filed every day, and quite often they are fired by people who know the suit is groundless but they know they will likely collect a nice $10,000 or $20,000 settlement because it would cost $50,000 or $150,000 to litigate the case.
Check your insurance policies -- you might be breaching the terms of one of your policies if you give references.
The bottom line: whenever you give a reference, you are opening yourself up to legal risk, and there is absolutely no benefit to you from giving the reference. Heck, the guy calling you for the reference may even refuse to give references when people call him!
What's really interesting, is that the authors succeeded in persuading me that the evil villains were responsible for destroying Value America -- but I easily concluded that the authors were more evil, and more responsible, than those they blamed.
The authors spent a lot of time and energy blaming the people they hired for problems, and provide just enough detail to prove that those folks were incompetent fools. But the authors deliberately (almost artfully) omit the key information: they blame their "opponents" for buying millions of dollars of newspaper advertising, but they started the campaign and apparently spent even more. They fault their opponents for scheming and lying, but reveal that the authors were also lying and scheming even earlier.
I have written and posted a lengthy review of the book at http://www.markwelch.com/perspective/good_and_evil .htm.
Once the financial community started moving through a series of "different" business models, the failure of some of the early companies could be blamed on that now-disfavored business model, allowing new funding to pour into the new dot-coms even as some of the older ones were collapsing.
I believe that if I were inclined to actually check the facts cited in the book, I would find dozens of additional factual errors (indeed, I would be surprised if I did not find at least 100 factual errors).
There are three separate roles that failed here: editing, fact-checking, and proofreading. The book industry usually relies on a book's author for fact-checking. Many publishers devote very little money for editing, and that's a business decision that they make. The proofreading is absolutely the SOLE fault of the publisher.
In the end, the question is whether the published book provides a benefit to readers. In this case, I found no benefit from this book, and I don't think that most consumers, investors, or business people would benefit from reading this book. For the people who somehow "missed" the dot-com boom-and-bust during the past 8 years (folks who lived on a desert island, or who were locked away in a basement writing Cobol code for the last 8 years), this book would be informative, but its factual errors make it unreliable even for that audience.
The key here is that while the "Star Trek" and "Forbidden Planet" sources are each plausible, the idea that a computer released in 1975 was named after a non-existent "character" in the movie "Star Wars" (which was released in 1977) is a very obvious mistake that MANY readers will notice (okay, maybe only 1%) and the publisher, editor, AND proofreader should be embarrassed for letting it slip through. The other mistakes were failures of fact-checking (which most book publishers no longer do, trusting the authors).
That could be true, but in fact I only cited those first two major mistakes, in the first section of the first chapter, as examples that should cause anyone to lose confidence. In hindsight, perhaps I should have cited a few other factual errors from his writing about dot-com companies specifically.
I found MANY more factual errors (major and minor) throughout the book, and I didn't even pay a lot of attention to many factual details (after the first section of the first chapter) since I had already concluded the book was unreliable as a source of historical facts.
But I don't think anyone would benefit from a complete catalog in a review (why kick a dead horse?).
Finally, to kick the horse some more, I think that attributing the invention of the modem (a hardware device) to two software programmers (Christensen and Seuss, whose contribution (creating the XModem file-transfer protocol and the first BBS software) is actually greater), is a serious factual mistake, not an "over-simplification." Sorry, but
If anyone cares (and I'm sure most do not care), I wrote a review of Dot.Bomb, posted at http://www.markwelch.com/perspective/dot_bomb.htm.
(And yes, the title "Dot.Con" makes it hard to search for, especially searching on a system like slashdot which doesn't index the three-letter words.)
The notion that dot-org means "non-profit" was abandoned several years ago, though it continues to be honored by the majority. Back when Slashdot.org was sold for a bunch of money to Andover.net (see http://news.com.com/2100-1001-227793.html), I was surprised that anyone would take the heat for acquiring a business that "appeared" to be a non-profit. Slashdot.org is now owned by OSDN.com (which is owned by VA Software Corporation). It is NOT a non-profit company, and doesn't pretend to be a non-profit company.
I wasn't aware that Craig Winn was writing a book, but now I see that it's scheduled for publication later this month. I guess "Stultsinator" had access to an advance copy. I'll certainly read the book, if only because I did think that Kuo's account lacked a technical perspective (though I'm doubtful that Winn's account will offer more technical insight, it may at least blame problems on the programmers ;-)
I agree that "this book actually stands a good chance of being the standard history of the dotcom boom-and-bust." That's why I was upset enough to write a review: I expected a "competent journalist's account," but what I got was a book riddled with factual errors -- mistakes that future readers might accept as true and repeat. I also don't think Cassidy really "tied it all together," other than by putting events on pages that all lie within the same binding. He offers no insight, no conclusions, and as I wrote, no real "Con" nor any actual blame for anyone. I think 'history' would be better served by a bound set of internet-boom-and-bust articles from Forbes magazine, or Fortune, or Business Week, since at least the mistakes in a magazine can often be forgiven due to tight deadlines. (FYI, the full, unedited text of this review appears at my own site at http://www.markwelch.com/perspective/dotcon.htm.)
I was faced with the decision, back in early 1999, of which OS to use for a new colocated server, and I tried Linux. The various books on Linux were adequate (not ideal) for teaching Linux, but it was quite frustrating that there was NO possible way to relate my knowledge of MS-DOS and Windows to the new environment. This meant that I'd essentially need to start completely from 'scratch' if I intended to set up a Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL server. After poking and prodding a little, and asking for some advice from some folks familiar with Linux, I concluded that I'd need to spend over 1,000 hours to learn Linux and Apache and PHP and MySQL and Bind and everything else.
In contrast, with my existing knowledge of Windows, I could spend $1,500 on a license for Windows NT Server, use the Windows driver for Microsoft Access, learn IIS Administration using some well-written books, and have my first server up and running in about 40 hours.
I went through the same experience when I was in charge of choosing the OS to be used in developing an e-commerce site: for Linux, we would need to hire "gurus," and our founders would be unable to poke under the hood -- but with Windoze, bad as it is, we could make sense of what was going on and we could even tell sometimes when our outside developers were feeding us bullsh*t.
Of course, someone with a Unix background would face the exact same problem migrating to Windows, and the learning curve might be just as bad (but maybe not, since even the most dedicated Linux user has probably been exposed to Windows).
So yes, give us a book about "Linux Desktop for Windows folk", plus a separate book on "Linux Servers for Windows Server Regufees" (maybe it's a family of books, if you separate "Apache for IIS users" and "MySQL for Microsoft SQL Server administrators").
Why in the world would Dr. Pepper offer to pay you for a sponsorship, if you are already promoting their product for free? Currently, your endorsement is unpaid and that makes it worth MORE than a paid endorsement. (I dunno what it is worth, whether a nickel a year or $5 million, but unless you announce a plan to switch to Mr. Pibb, don't expect Dr. Pepper to offer a penny.) ;-)
At that time, I wrote a letter to each member of the committee reviewing the bill. Chris Crawford actually attended the hearing in Sacramento, and apparently he was a hit because at least one of the legislators was familiar with one of his games.
In the end, the bill was amended so that the enacted law only prohibited PAID placements in video games by alcohol and tobacco companies, mirroring the prohibitions of such paid advertising on TV.
Product placements are still going strong in movies and TV (ever since the success of the placement of Reese's Pieces in E.T.). If you see a logo'd product in a movie or on TV, you can almost guarantee that it's a paid placement, though some movies (especially) do include Coke cans and Marlboro cigarettes and so on, without payment, for realism.
As noted, the successful placements are in context. When there is a product placement that is out of context, it detracts from the movie and it probably also provides no benefit for the advertiser.
I will be interested to see if paid product placements WITH LINKS may emerge in some online or internet-enabled games. Imagine being able to click on that corporate logo! Golly!