<![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, 30 rock]]> http://tags.gawker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/gawker.com.png <![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, 30 rock]]> http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/30rock http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/30rock <![CDATA[Tracy Morgan Joins Medium Designed Expressly for Him]]> Tracy Morgan joined Twitter. Like, mere hours ago. The microblogging service is the perfect forum for a man known for his entertainingly insane 30 Rock non-sequiturs. Plus, there's already a thriving Twitter sub-culture devoted to Morgan sightings. They are gifts.

OMGICU has been on a campaign to bring Morgan to Twitter since Tuesday, according to the Wall Street Journal, after collecting such stalker sightings as these:

  • "tracy morgain [sic] is walking around soho eating blueberries looking confused."
  • "Just saw Tracy Morgan driving a Yellow Lamborghini with a blond woman listening to Sade."
  • "Tracy Morgan at the Bowery whole foods. I smiled but he gave me a mean look back. He was with a lady."

Welcome to Twitter, Tracy. Every week is Shark Week!

Oh look! He just delivered his first tweet:


Poetry.

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<![CDATA[The Creepy Corporate Cult Behind Last Night's 30 Rock]]> Who's the newest Six Sigma expert? Tina Fey. The cultish quality process observed by her employer, NBC Universal, is a predictable source of profitable laughs for her show, 30 Rock and all too real.

Six Sigma has been part of America's corporate culture for a couple decades now; some 80 percent of the 100 largest American companies now use it. But General Electric, NBC's parent, is particularly famous for its Six Sigma fetish. GE does not think it's a laughing matter: "It is not a secret society, a slogan or a cliche," GE's website harrumphs.

What does it means in practice? As Universal found out after GE bought the Hollywood studio, it means lots and lots of meetings. "They are very focused on results," Universal Studios president Ron Meyer said of his new owners to the Times in 2004, after the acquisition. "They don't want surprises."

The idea behind Six Sigma is that every process of a business should be executed with as few errors as possible — the target Six Sigma aims for is 3.4 errors in every 1 million attempts. Now, lots of companies follow silly management philosophies. But Six Sigma takes on religious overtones at G.E. because of its followers fervent belief that it is a universal belief, enforced in every facet of the corporate empire. Even, at one point, according to a (maybe apocryphal) well-told anecdote to comedy writing. Former GE chief executive Jack Welch is said to have once ordered the counting of the number of laughs each episode of NBC's sitcoms.

Eliminating deviations is entirely wrongheaded when the audience wants something fundamentally new. Six Sigma's not a bad practice for industrial manufacturing, but it's not easily applied to fields like information technology, entertainment, R&D, or startups — in other words, everything that increasingly drives what's left of our economy.

Then again, maybe Fey, who bought a copy of Six Sigma for Dummies, is learning something. When 30 Rock launched in 2006, Fey sprinkled episodes with Six Sigma jokes. One of her comedic predecessors, David Letterman, delighted in mocking GE after it bought NBC. Here is a process that can be defined, measured, analyzed, improved and controlled: biting the hand that feeds you. It delivers a laugh every time. The black belts would be proud.

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<![CDATA[Obviously fake Tina Fey Twitter account annoys Internet]]> This can't be real, can it? Since last week, a sporadically updated Tina Fey account on Twitter has seen more action, with more-frequent messages emanating from the supposed 30 Rock star and Saturday Night Live veteran. But whoever's updating it is far from clever enough to imitate Tina Fey. Unless this is actually Fey doing a bad impression of herself, thereby demonstrating how moronic most Twitter's users seem in the 140-character format the microblogging service limits them to. That's an idea actually funny enough to come from the mind of Tina Fey.

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