….”Flat is the New Up,” a “Ramen Moment” and MORE.

No Longer Just for College Kids
Low sales of Girl Scout cookies signaled an impending down economy. Now ramen noodle sales reflect that economy.

OK, that may be a stretch, but “we are living in a ramen moment,” GQ magazine’s food critic told the Associated Press last week.

Nearly four decades after the first instant ramen noodle factory opened in the U.S., ramen noodles are now commanding as much as $15+ per bowl in some New York noodle shops. In 2007, 738 million pounds of ramen noodles were devoured in the U. S. alone. That is a 4 percent increase over 2006 and translates to about 4 billion individual packets.

Worldwide, the demand for the instant noodles is huge, with estimated annual sales of more than $3.2 billion. China, where the dish originated, consumes the most, followed by Indonesia and Japan.

The Next Big Bubble to Burst?
Earlier this week, some “top business leaders” testified before Congress about the worsening recession, “demanding the government provide Americans with a new irresponsible and largely illusory economic bubble in which to invest.”

Reports one Web site:

The current economic woes, brought on by the collapse of the so-called “housing bubble,” are considered the worst to hit investors since the equally untenable dot-com bubble burst in 2001. According to investment experts, now that the option of making millions of dollars in a short time with imaginary profits from bad real-estate deals has disappeared, the need for another spontaneous make-believe source of wealth has never been more urgent.

From The Onion, of course.

The Evolution of Buzz
What started as a one-off quip to the media about the steep decline in ad revenue in print magazines has now quite possibly become the year’s hottest buzzphrase in business: “Flat is the new up.”

If you’re thinking what I’m thinking, that means a new square for your business meeting-related games.

Indignation Within Organizations
A few-years-old academic study has been getting a bit of newfound attention this week. Marc Abrahams, organizer of the Ig Nobel prize, calls it “the most satisfying, most incisive academic study of the past century.”

The study is called “You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation Within Organisations,” and it was discussed in a column in this week’s UK Guardian and then picked up by Fark among others. (Robin Abrahams, author of Boston Globe Magazine’s weekly “Miss Conduct” column and Marc’s wife, discussed the same study in May.)

Professor David Sims, who published it in the journal Organisation Studies in late 2005, is head of the faculty of management at Cass Business School in London.

“Our patience with forming interpretations and reinterpretations of others’ behaviour is not unlimited,” Sims writes. “The time comes when we lose interest in trying to understand, and conclude that another person is behaving in a way that is simply unacceptable.”

The paper “explores the narratives that go with immoderate indignation, even for those best versed in the idea that they should attempt to understand the perspective of the other.”

No. 1 Need for Space Science: Lots of No. 1
A space program contractor is seeking 30 liters of urine a day from workers at Houston’s Johnson Space Center as part of its work on the new Orion space capsule, according to an internal memo posted on the Web site NasaWatch.com.

Designers of the Orion, which will park unoccupied in space for up to six months while astronauts work on the moon, have to figure out how to get rid of stored urine, John Lewis, NASA’s head of life support systems for Orion, tells the Associated Press. NASA has long collected samples from its workers to help design better space toilets because “you can’t make fake urine,” Lewis said.

The company building the Orion toilet needs the large volume of urine to work on urine acidity issues, the Associated Press reports.

Fun Fact: It can take an astronaut 30 minutes to put on a 91 lb. spacesuit, according to NASA. So does it take at least 60 minutes if the astronaut forgot to pee first?

Fun Fact 2: Earlier this year, a Japanese astronaut tested high-tech boxer shorts to determine whether they (the undergarments) could boost comfort levels on the International Space Station. During the two-week test, the astronaut wasn’t allowed to bathe.

Cheers.