Time To Sober Up

People always like to tell success stories, like the yarn of teenage girls making millions selling trinkets on eBay. But real life's a bit more complicated.

The Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) character in the "Social Network" movie about the origin of Facebook is brutally honest when he narrates at net speed the 43 second tale (between 01:21:17 and 01:22:00) of how things really work:

"A Stanford MBA named Roy Raymond wants to buy his wife some lingerie, but he's too embarrassed to shop for it in a department store.
He comes up with an idea for a high-end place that doesn't make you feel like a pervert.
He gets a $40,000 bank loan, borrows another 40,000 from his in-laws, opens a store and calls it Victoria's Secret.
Makes a half million dollars his first year. Starts a catalog, opens three more stores,and after five years, he sells the company to Leslie Wexner and The Limitedfor $4 million.
Happy ending, right?
Except two years later, the company's worth $500 million, and Roy Raymond jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge.
Poor guy just wanted to buy his wife a pair of thigh-highs, you know?"

Is that a parable? So asked the young Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jess Esienberg). We have our own tall tales in town, like the son of a Prime Minister who made Brigadier General, also at net speed, despite skipping Section Leaders' Course and missing 4 months of Officer Cadet Training. Does anybody know anything at all about the poor sap who threw himself into the MRT train tracks? The T-shirt tells it all: "Life's A Bitch, Then You Die". After all the revelries, that should sober up the year end partying crowd.

Anaglyph 3D image of a lesson in life