Saturday, June 6, 2009

Weekend Tids and Bits

How Low Can You Go? Gillette, the Proctor & Gamble razor company, has answered the question with a popular video offering below-the-belt guidance for men seeking a really close shave so “when there’s no underbrush, the tree looks taller.” Videos are also available to guide shaving other areas, including the face, armpits and back. I was unable to find a Gillette video for shaving the palms of your hands, but you can check at http://gillette.com.

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Attention Republican National Committee The elephant has long been the symbol of the GOP, but while they’re pondering new and untested directions, including winning elections, they might consider changing the symbol to a squirrel. The AP reports that a squirrel in Port Huron, MI, has been stealing the small Memorial Day flags from a local cemetery and using them to line its nest. Although wrapping yourself in the flag while you line your nest is a time-honored Republican strategy, the squirrel’s patriotism might mark it for higher things, perhaps the vice president spot on the next Republican ticket. There is, after all, precedent.

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With All Deliberate Speed the arrest of a retired worker for the State Department and his wife took place this week after a three-year investigation. The couple was charged with spying for Cuba since 1979. An explanation for the lightning-quick counter-intelligence reflexes of every administration since Jimmy Carter was president wasn’t immediately available. Some insiders suggested it was one more effort in longstanding U.S. covert operations to do harm to Fidel Castro, in this instance tempting him to laugh himself to death. Determined to deal sternly with what was characterized as a “serious” breach, the indictment wants the 72-year-old spy’s State Department earnings back and even his rollover IRA account.

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Good Old American Entrepreneurial Spirit still shines in Nevada, where the Las Vegas Sun reports the Shady Lady Ranch is seeking to revive a slumping brothel business by hiring male prostitutes who would “entertain” women for rates probably beginning at $500 for a two-hour minimum. The Sun quotes Shady Lady owner Bobbi Davis as saying “We feel this is an untapped resource.” Conservative Republicans who grumble about government meddling stifling innovation should rally to the Shady Lady’s banner, since a possible stumbling block is prostitution regulations that only envision boy-meets-girl, boy-pays-girl.

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Last Week We Discussed:

n Saudi Arabia is just being a swell friend to the United States, never mind all that oil, and never mind their distressing habit of beheading folks or marrying eight-year-old girls to men in their 40s. It’s at http://larryblaskosaid.blogspot.com/2009/06/with-friends-like-these.html

n The General Motors Bankruptcy is just one more of the old certainties circling down the toilet hole as we spend our lives in “interesting times” at http://larryblaskosaid.blogspot.com/2009/06/interesting-times-endgame-may-you-live.html

n Newspapers being burned at the stake for failing to adapt can’t see that the next stake over at The Final Barbeque is occupied by the print advertising business at http://larryblaskosaid.blogspot.com/2009/06/newspapers-advertising-burn-at.html

n Just because you can say more things doesn’t mean you have more to say was said at http://larryblaskosaid.blogspot.com/2009/06/more-talk-less-to-say-communications.html

n California has let the gay marriage issue turn it into The Rube State at http://larryblaskosaid.blogspot.com/2009/06/california-rube-state-you-know-youre.html

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Friday, June 5, 2009

California -- The Rube State

You know you’re old when you remember when California was trendy and progressive.

That’s where all the latest things once started – some good, like Casual Friday and surfer music, some bad like the drug culture, and some intensely annoying like “Have A Nice Day!”

California was the liberal opposite of the hidebound, narrow-minded, culturally repressed American Gothic folk who inhabited places like Iowa, or Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire or Connecticut. You know, the Rubes.

California was Haight-Asbury and Flower Power and 77 Sunset Strip and Disneyland and Hollywood and, in a word, possibility. The dream-dreamers and dream-makers lived there.

Those other places were the spirituals heirs of the Puritans and the farmers. Their thought ran in straight rows like the furrows of their fields, and woe betide the weed or wild idea that tried to sprout in that ground. California thought was far too vigorous for straight rows, and ran in bold twists and splashes like tie-died clothes.

Sure, California sometimes gave the rest of the country a lesson in opposites. Sometimes the leader was Governor Jerry (Moonbeam) Brown. Sometimes it was Governor Ronald Reagan. But those opposites both pointed to a future better than the Hidebound Back East. No more.

Scientists tell us that the Earth’s magnetic poles reverse every cosmic now and then, and California and the Hidebound Back East have switched ends on the political scale. And what did it was gay marriage.

Boiled down and stripped of both Bible-thumping and the Feather Flaunting, gay marriage comes down to a simple question of equal protection under law.

If two persons of one moral persuasion can have the state bless the union of their affections, bodies and property, then the state must so bless any two persons of any persuasion. If the law does not protect all equally, it is not law – at least not the law of those who declared to a tyrant and to the ages “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

As a nation, we haven’t been universal in living up to that truth. It took us some time before we all agreed it included women, longer still before we really included people of color, but we’re still working. That’s been the case since we all agreed to “to form a more perfect Union,” recognizing in the Constitution’s preamble that it would remain a work in progress.

Progress was certainly made in New Hampshire this week when the governor signed a bill legalizing gay marriage, joining the Granite State to five others that had reaffirmed equal protection under the law.

California, of course, has been different. First, its Supreme Court said the state constitution meant that marriage licenses could be issued to same-sex couples. Then the voters floated and passed Proposition 8, which said nuts to that, it’s the boy-girl way or the highway. And the California Supreme Court said, yeah, well, the voters have spoken, but those 18,000 or so of you caught in the crossfire are still married.

And now, California voters, who get more propositions than a tourist at Hollywood and Vine, will probably have to address the issue again.

Much to the amusement of the hip and trendy – and liberty-loving and patriotic – folk in Iowa, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire and Connecticut.

What’s the matter with those rubes in California? Don’t they get it?

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Thursday, June 4, 2009

More Talk, Less To Say

 

 

Communications technology has proven beyond doubt that having the ability to say more does not mean that you have more to say.

 

The old ways of communication were slow and limited, forcing judgments on what was worth a slice of a limited delivery pie. Newspapers had the daily “news hole,” the space left over after the ads. Broadcast journalists had a time slot governed by both the clock and the sales staff ‘s success in finding sponsors. Even those of us who did our print journalism for wire services were constrained by 66-words-per-minute printers.

 

The result was that a lot of stories died when someone said there wasn’t enough space in the paper, or on the newscast, or on the wire for something that trivial.

 

That sometimes excluded the Obscure But Important. For the most part, it defended us all against the Obscure And Deservedly So.

 

No more. The steady clack of an old wire service machine that managed to work a full 24 hours without a break or breakdown could deliver just a tad more than 95,000 English words in a 24-hour day.  That’s about 4.5 million bits in a digital world – or slightly less than a broadband home internet connection can transmit in a second.

 

And that’s nothing like higher speeds now in professional use. So what does this communication bounty bring us?

 

n  From Granite City, IL, comes the news that a man and his daughter were arrested after a fight involving some folks she brought home from a bar. This is clearly worthy of attention because no other fights after bar visits have ever been recorded in Granite City or elsewhere.

 

n  A Massachusetts medical device maker has gone bankrupt, so arrangements are being made to dispose of the nine cadavers it used for training. The knee-slapper is that they were listed among the company’s assets in bankruptcy proceedings, clearly making it worth worldwide dissemination.

 

n  A rural Taiwanese man got bitten by a snake when he tried to use his toilet. And yes, it bit him there, which news helped mankind’s advance in ways not immediately apparent.

 

n  A lawsuit involving a man who may or may not have been deliberately kicked by a stripper after he may or may not have slapped her bottom too hard is clearly an important part of covering the nation’s judicial system, not to mention the behinds of all parties involved.

 

There are so many more examples available every day that it’s difficult to resist the impulse to scream – until you realize that doing so would cause someone to file 250 words on it for breathless (and brainless) relay around the world.

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Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Newspapers, Advertising

Burn At Adjoining Stakes

 

Newspapers thrash and wail as they are burned at the stake of change. Most were too dumb to arrange for a quick garrote before the flames started, and now the crackle, smoke and sizzle of dying assumptions is the chorus to their final screams.

 

Which keeps them too preoccupied to do some basic reporting and look at the next stake over, where the print advertising business is the unwilling guest of honor at a final barbecue of its own.

 

When it’s not busy holding the most publicized secret meetings since Eliot Spitzer and Friends, the Newspaper Association of American collects data. Some recently released stuff gives details on advertising, the source of almost all the money in the newspaper game.

 

According to NAA’s figures, the value of print advertising in 2005 was $47.408 billion. In 2008, that was down to $38.704 billion – a drop of more than 18 percent over the three-year period. That’s bad enough, but the NAA’s figures show an accelerating year-to-year decline.

 

In 2006, the decline was 1.7 percent. In 2007, that had increased to 9.4 percent and by 2008 it was 17.7 percent. In the first quarter of this year, the rate of decline for print sales was 29.7 percent, and even online sales declined 13.4 percent.

 

While print journalism wraps itself in the First Amendment to cover an otherwise naked lust for the First Annuity, equally profound changes have been rocking advertising.

 

First, if all those print ads are not being placed, it means lots of folks are not being paid to create, produce and place them. You know, the folks in the advertising business. Which in turn means that the advertisers themselves are getting along without those mass-market print ads.

 

Well, yes, there was a severe recession that now seems to be ending, but the betting is that neither mass-market print journalism nor mass-market print advertising will rebound to track with the economy.

 

And the reason for both is the same, although it’s small comfort as they crackle and pop on adjoining stakes. They are no longer needed.

 

Individual consumers want to read only news and ads of interest, but the technology of our past didn’t permit that, except in a clumsy way. That meant herding both news and ads into special sections of a newspaper or to niche magazines or direct-mail demographics.

 

In all cases, the consumer got some of the wanted information along with lots of the unwanted, while the advertiser got some potential customers along with lots of those who just weren’t interested. And both paid.

 

The internet changed that in important ways. First, the consumer decides what interests them and now has the tools to exclude what doesn’t, which goes for both news and ads. Second, for both news-providers and advertisers, there is an instant-feedback loop that tells publishers exactly what got read and what didn’t and advertisers not only what got read, but whether or not that resulted in a sale.

 

You can’t do that with mass print journalism and the advertising that once supported it.

 

So both consumers and advertisers have stopped paying for news and eyeballs they don’t want and can’t use.

 

What, if anything, either group will pay for in the future has yet to be confirmed. In the meantime, if you’re looking to invest in a growth industry, get into stakes and kindling. It’s a booming business.

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Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Interesting Times Endgame

 

May you live in interesting times” was once thought to be a translation of an ancient Chinese curse – but it turns out that the phrase can’t be found in English much earlier than the mid 1930s, and can’t be found in known ancient Chinese sayings at all.

 

That tracks with the fate of many of the “everyone knows” certainties that once ran society, sometimes badly, but always in control.  Most are gone now and the rest are going, but we have created nothing to replace them.

 

General Motors filed for bankruptcy Monday.  In the early 1950s, that would have been as plausible a statement as “states legalize same-sex marriage.”

 

GM was the largest employer in the world if you didn’t count the Soviet Union, and when GM President Charles Wilson was nominated for secretary of defense, he could tell a Senate committee that he didn’t see any looming conflicts "because for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa." The Senate found that reassuring, not funny.

 

Bob and Bill not only didn’t marry in the late 40s and early 50s, they couldn’t marry; same-sex marriage would have been as illegal as mixed-race marriage, then banned in 30 of the 48 states. And if Bob and Bill did decide to live together in some quiet, out-of-the-way place, they were “roommates,” and in any event weren’t going to trumpet their arrangement in the social columns of the local newspapers.

 

Not that the local newspapers would have printed such things, most being “family-oriented,” and almost all being such rock-solid money-making machines that they were passed from generation to generation as a princely inheritance.

 

Families consisted of a Dad, who worked, and a Mom who took care of the home and the children. Single parents, unless they were widows or widowers, were not mentioned in polite society.

 

The list of What Was Certain Then could go on because most things then were certain or at least unquestioned, which amounted to the same thing. Looking back, some of them now seem quaint and laughable, some of them now seem evil and unforgiveable, but in their time they were as certain as the next sunrise.

 

The problem of our time is that we have pretty much tossed the list of What Was Certain Then, but we search in vain for a list of What Is Certain Now.

 

We have deliberately rejected many of the old certainties and time has whittled down others, but nothing has been created in their place. We have replaced a shared concept of “ideal” with a list of options, being careful not to let one seem more attractive than the other.

 

A world of infinite options isn’t sustainable. As long as our universe is governed by a concept called Time, one of those options must always be selected.

 

Call them “interesting times” or “perilous times” or “times of uncertainty” or anything else that give you a convenient mental coat-hook, but whatever they are called they now face all of us as across a chess table and say “Your move.”

 

Endgame, anyone?

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Monday, June 1, 2009

With Friends Like These. . .

 

Saudi Arabia is the best friend the United States has in the Arab world. And it has oil.

 

President Obama plans to meet June 3 in Riyadh with King Abdullah. The two leaders last met April 2, and the White House said of that meeting:

 

The President met with King Abdullah bin Abd al-Aziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia today in London. The leaders reaffirmed the long-standing, strong relationship between the two countries. They discussed international cooperation regarding the global economy, regional political and security issues, and cooperation against terrorism. The President reiterated his appreciation for Saudi Arabia's leadership in promoting the Arab Peace Initiative. He and King Abdullah agreed to continue close consultations on a range of bilateral and regional issues.

 

It’s not known whether consultations were involved before Saudi Arabia on May 29 beheaded a man convicted of two murders and then put his body on public display in a “crucifixion.” By count of The Associated Press, that’s 35 beheadings so far this year, which suggests 2009 is behind the pace set in 2008, with 102 beheadings.

 

The beheadings are done in public with a sword, but CNN’s reporting assures us that the crucifixion isn’t like the image at the heart of Christianity. No crosses involved – the head is just sewed back on and the body displayed on a pole or a tree.

 

All of which upsets many, including Amnesty International, but Saudi Arabia is the best friend the United States has in the Arab world. And it has oil.

 

In March a Saudi court sentenced the 75-year-old Syrian widow of a Saudi man to prison and 40 lashes because she had asked a couple of men unrelated to her to bring her five loaves of bread. The men were also sentenced, the crime of all three being “illegal mingling.”

 

For a 75-year-old, 40 lashes is life-threatening, but after all, the woman is single and she was talking with men who weren’t her relatives. A Saudi high court refused to ratify the sentence in May and sent it back to the lower court, where the outcome remains in doubt.

 

That an elderly widow and two men could be sentenced to anything over five loaves of bread troubles many, but it may not come up during the June 3 meeting between President Obama and King Abdullah. Saudi Arabia is the best friend the United States has in the Arab world. And it has oil.

 

And it is also in Saudi Arabia that women aren’t allowed to drive. And it’s permitted for a husband to slap a wife who spends too much, a judge ruled recently. That judge is part of a judiciary that twice ruled against an eight-year-old girl trying to divorce her 47-year-old husband, before finally relenting after international criticism. And Saudi Arabia is where amputation of hands and feet is in the lists of punishments. And  stoning.

 

But that probably won’t come up on June 3 between President Obama and King Abdullah because Saudi Arabia is the best friend the United States has in the Arab world. And it has oil.

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