Andrew Palmer
speaker
66 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 18 Jun
Andrew Palmer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
It could be a potato.
The Admiral's potato is something that people in the Navy referred to.
And it's the idea that when someone is coming aboard again to inspect a ship, a potato is left out.
It's there only for the Admiral to spot it, tell it to be tidied up.
put up and the inspection can then proceed.
And then a final variation on the idea of Atwood's Duck.
And this has the memorably unpleasant name of the hairy arm.
This came from Arnold Peterson, who emailed from California, to say that in the business of TV commercials,
The hairy arm refers to the deliberate insertion of a hand model with a hairy arm.
It gives someone at the agency a very obvious thing to ask to be removed.
Everything else is left untouched, the commercial goes out, just as the producers wished it would.
I wasn't expecting any more duck-based correspondence, but the letters kept on coming.
Steve Rafe wrote to talk about his experience when he was the managing director of a business in Jamaica in the early 1990s.
He says that his factory manager there would paint the bottom of the coconut trees which lined the long driveway every time someone grand was visiting from headquarters.
The point of this painting was to impress the higher-ups with the neatness of the environment and to distract them from the real issues.
Steve called this management by paint, which is a great phrase.
Bruce Manford wrote in to point out that sometimes the duck survives.
He told the story of a friend who was working in-house for a Canadian oil exploration company and had to advise on an exploration agreement.
The contract draft went back and forward, and Bruce's friend suspected that absolutely nobody was reading it.
So he inserted a clause into the draft, which required that certain heavy equipment had to be transported to the wellhead by horse and carriage.
Showing 21–40 of 66 · page 2 of 4
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