Bombers.

Tonight, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers lived up to their name. Sadly, they lost the Grey Cup but, to my untrained eye, they played incredibly well. It all came down the last few seconds of the game and I was truly rooting for them. The Saskatchewan Roughriders won, 23-19.

Candy for Andy.

As I was explaining to my yoga class earlier this evening, I’ve been suffering the consequences of indulging in my daughter’s proclivities for acquiring large amounts of candy on Halloween. I can’t help it. The candy is there and so am I. The two want to meet.

In the bigger picture, I’ve now recognized that my sweet tooth will eventually get the better of me. I’m not going to give up on chocolate or anything. But I realize that buying high-end chocolate (e.g. like Hershey’s Extra Dark, a bar that is unlike anything found in the States yet can be bought in Canada at any regular supermarket) will satisfy my craving without forcing further indulgence and ingestion. I’m sure there’s some science around this.

My own paranoid theory around mass-market candy is that companies (including Hershey, of course) use just enough quality ingredients to sate the palette but the real pleasure is in the sugar itself. This leads to some satisfaction but, ultimately, the body requires a bit more of the goods and, well, there goes 3 bite-sized Snicker bars, 4 Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and 3 Wunderbars. Down the hatch.

Taxes.

There's nothing on television tonight, so I'm making sure that The Onion is still funny. It is.

Here are a few valuable pages and their highlights:

Talking Tax Reforum
"With e-filing, the government's seizure of nearly half my assets was quicker and easier than ever this year."

Microsoft Vista Released
"Promise of broad, open-minded future or some bullshit"

Item Found In Garbage To Be Turned Into Lamp Someday
"But when I saw that pipe, I immediately pictured it as a lamp. I'm so psyched that I snagged it before somebody else did."

Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can't Index
"We believe that Google Desktop Search is the best way to unlock the information hidden on your hard drive," Schmidt said. "If you haven't given it a try, now's the time. In one week, the deleting begins."

NASA wants to know if there are 'lessons to be learned'
"We hope that the public will keep an open mind about what the facts will eventually show and that the legal system will be allowed to run its course."*

United Nations Pledges $1.2 Billion In Indigestion Relief For U.S.
"Dubbed 'Operation Soothe and Coat,' the massive C-130 airlift is expected to provide millions of American indigestion sufferers with cartons of precious, life-giving antacids by week's end. Much of the $1.2 billion will also go toward emergency helicopter and truck mobilization, distributing alkalides to a network of temporary stomach trouble 'crisis centers' set up across the American countryside."

White House Quietly Retracts Entire State Of The Union Address
"'This includes all components of the address, and is not limited to the president's congratulations to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi or his plan to give more Americans affordable health care through tax cuts, which has since been deemed infeasible,' the statement read in part."

*Headline and quote from CNN—not The Onion.

Windows 386 is Cool.

My friend, D.C., sent me this today and it's for real. Microsoft sent this video to various retailers to promote its new operating system in 1987. As the original poster of the video says, "boring until the 7-minute mark when the production is taken over by crack-smoking monkeys." Dirty monkeys, I say.

More Troops, More Toys, Please.

I wake up this morning to read that there is an incredible amount of chatter in the techie "blogosphere" about Apple's new products. I admit, I'm semi-excited to see what the company has up its sleeve on Tuesday. The company's home page indicates that it could be a flashlight of some sort or maybe they're going to resurrect 2001: A Space Odyssey. Apple's stock has been all over the place but I'm assuming the new iPod phone or iTV machine they're about to release will be, at the very least, pretty.

At the same time, in the political "blogoshere," there's a torrent of speculation about President Bush's expected "surge" of 30,000 more troops going to Iraq, while Afghanistan is falling apart at the seams. Although the two announcements are not complimentary nor comparable, the conversations, indeed, are.

• Both are conducted largely by men.
• Both are largely based around the Internet because anonymity reigns here.
• Both conversations are based on secreted information and highly-paid public relations officers.
• Both enjoy the privilege of hyperbole, using desire and anxiety to fan the flames.
• Both rely on limited systems of language about technology and not about lives lived.

I'm as curious as the next blogger to hear the news.

Nietszsche BNG 12.

Here's one of my favorite quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche translated using the The English-to-12-Year-Old-AOLer Translator:

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

AND WE SHUD CONSIEDR 3VERY DAY LOST ON WHICH W3 HAEV NOT DANCED AT LEAST ONCA!11!11 WTF AND W3 SHUD CAL 3VERY TRUTH FALS3 WHICH WAS NOT ACOMPANEID BY AT LEAST ONA LAUGH!1!1!!1!1 OMG LOL

Thanks to John Gruber for the tip.

Every Breath You Take.

The average adult human breaths 12 to 20 breaths per minute.

The average income of an adult human in the US is about $24,000.

1 year = 525,600 minutes

Therefore, every breath earns an average adult human living in the US about half a penny.

Go Fish.

I just purchased, and ate, for the first time, a little smoked goldeneye fish, whole. It was the color of gold and tasted even better. I pulled off the skin with a fork, and then pulled off the pink flesh from the bones beneath. Slowly, the flesh peeled from the skeleton and, safely on the fork, it went into my mouth. It was a delight and I was horrified at the fact that I was eating near-live flesh.

No More 9/11 Posts.

This is it, I can only watch some of this video shot from a nearby tall apartment building. It's graphic and horrifying. The last post on 9/11 for a long time.

This video, entitled "September 11, 2001: What We Saw" would do better as "Empire."

I feel like I'm there all over again.

It's All Temporary.

I've been thinking quite a bit about those who are currently alive and sitting and breathing and those, among us, who will not, in short time. It could be a bomb, a grenade, a coronary, a clip, or a crash but these lives who inhabit tomorrow's news live in the same world of wonder that wil never be fully known and never be fully lived.

There is a photo. It's a piece of the universe. And in that piece there could be part of us.

Five.

As a thought experiment along the lines of Merlin Mann's interesting 5ives.com site, I thought I'd take a stab at listing five things that, as a designer, I don't know anything about.

(Admissions are all the rage these days—Tom Cruise eating placenta, Donald Trump getting paid for baby photos, former White House administrators calling out their boss, etc.—so why not.)

1. How color settings work best in Photoshop.
2. How browsers technically render HTML markup.
3. Whether it's actually easier to read sans serif type online.
4. Why the color purple is rarely used as a link color even though, early on, it was determined that purple links are the default "visited" state.
5. Why the American flag, in its design perfection, actually looks like the United States.

WTC WTF.

I listen to WNYC.org every day. It's a relic of my experience there, though I live very far from the city. I heard that there are a number of families protesting the production of the new Oliver Stone exploit World Trade Center.

I had a dream about a week ago. It was very vivid. I was inside an apartment on one of the top floor of the WTC. The apartment was huge and took up pretty much the whole floor of the building. I think this, in itself, is a remnant of the studio program on the 93rd floor that I visited in early 2001. The whole floor was pretty open and you could walk from one small artists' studio to the next and then look out the windows to see Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, New Jersey, and Staten Island. The views were spectacular and harrowingly high. Anyway, the dream: I was in this huge apartment on a top floor and all the well heeled were there - lots of people with a lot of money. And the building was turning slowly, rotating. It was moving clockwise and, by standing next to the large window, you could see the landscape around you. At one point, it picked up a good deal of speed and it was kind of fun and almost unsafe. Then, it was time for dinner and a huge buffet was served on lots of tablecloth covered tables. The food was odd, like a fusion of fusion foods. There was an eggroll that had asparagus stalks sticking out of it. Other finger foods looked unfingerable. The building slowed down around 5:30 p.m. I realized that the building stops spinning around dinnertime so that people could digest their foods more easily.

At a certain point, I didn't want to be at the party anymore and I left to go down the stairs and I promptly got lost. The stairways were huge and complicated and then I saw concrete tunnels that led to large public areas that were carpeted and pretty, just like they really used to be. Red carpets, a few security guard stations, a couple of fine stores and lots of people bustling around hither and thither. The concrete tunnels were really hard to navigate, though, and every time I got to a concourse, I could not find an exit. When I did find an exit finally, it was blocked by a ladder or some obstruction and I could not get out. I just wanted to go home but there was no way to leave. At some point, I asked someone directions for how to exit the World Trade Center and they pointed me in the right direction, down the red carpeted stairs and then through a small hole and then I was outside. I saw some friends or colleagues outside and we looked at the two buildings, which were now spinning, clockwise, together, quickly. The towers were actually in the water, close to the edge of the island, and they looked very, very large, looming.

The Bears.

Bears are big news here in Manitoba. Now, it seems, they're news everywhere, in part because they may not exist for much longer.

New Rules for Vice Presidents.

Mr. Cheney came "out" today, saying that he shot his "wad" in the face of his friend.

I've been thinking about some new rules for the Vice President's Office that may be applicable now that this transgression is (maybe, possibly) over:

1. Don't shoot guns. They could hurt someone–even someone you like.
2. Don't kill animals that can't kill you. It's just kind of bad karma, dude.
3. If you have to be out with a gun, try to keep the thing above your head. Lots of shit can happen when you carry guns and stuff.
4. If, for whatever reason, you shoot someone in the head, tell the police and be manly. It's hard to admit shooting someone in the head, I know. But it's important that you explain what happened, if it does happen.
5. Try rubber bullets. They're pretty cool and they can still kill things. Sometimes they kill people even though they're, like, rubber.
6. Don't tell folks, after you shot someone, that you wish the person you shot well. It's probably better if you kind of hang out at their hospital bed for a few days and make amends.
7. If the person doesn't get better soon, send a card. But make it a personal one and don't have your press secretary make jokes or anything.
8. If you really do want to shoot guns and stuff, overall you can be a lot more useful in places like Iraq or Iran where they need the help. But if you can't make it that far, that's cool. Get your kids to go do that shit.
   Posted by Andrew at 5:26 PM

The Beauty of Night

There have been a lot of relatively smart (and high quality) productions of late, both fictive and non-fiction about the frightening present and future. A lot of these draw on the raging paraonoia going on the blogosphere (both right and left) but it takes a pound of reality to make an ounce of real fear. Without further editorial, here are a few of the more interesting ones:

Epic: The Web in 2014

Anti-Semitism in today's Arab Media

The Office promo from "NBC"

Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council's 2020 Project

Old

I'm suffering from a massive cold and in the spirit of unfriendliness and overall dissatisfaction with my recently becoming late 30s guy I have the following news:

I am now old.

Here's why:

• I can't understand the appeal of ringtones.
• I don't know why little girls love pink and purple and why companies take no risk when they market to girls with those colors.
• My head feels just a little bit smaller and more congested than it ever has before and I'm sure it's because earlier practices are now paying off unkindly.
• My upper torso is shape shifting all by itself.
• Very soon I will ask the barber if he can just shave my head to 2 mm of stubble. This will make balding less an issue, they tell me.
• I have lately worn slippers.
• For my birthday a year ago, I was given a fanny-pack by my parents.
• For this birthday, I was given gift cards to nice online clothiers. My understanding is that the family no longer can predict my shirt size.
• I visit the Web for news and information.

Hello, Goodbye

Goodbye:

• Crowded apartment full of books and computer parts, paper swimming amongst the magazines and toys.
• Crappy election year, full of spite and below the belt politics.
• Terrible twos.
• Non-product-oriented business opportunities (the sneak peak can still be had here).
• Numerous magazine subscriptions.

Hello:

• Brand new, unjaundiced, bright-star year full of hope and possibility.
• Year ending in an odd number. Odd years have proven, in general, to be better for me, historically speaking.
• Trippy threes.
• Shiny new faces, replete with goodness, grace, and generosity.
• Numerous magazine subscriptions.

A happy and healthy and peaceful 2005.

Giving Good Call

In the past week, I've had some unexpected success with calling the customer service departments of a few large companies. In contrast to earlier times, like during my customer service caveman era when I spoke with an Apple technical assistant in Bangalore who kept putting me on hold to ask his cubicle-mate questions, these are much brighter days indeed! During this same shadowed era, a call to Washington Mutual to request ATM cards was greeted with a request on their part for us to visit our local WAMU branch office to order these cards ourselves -- as they couldn't place ATM card orders over the phone.

First, a call to AT&T to inquire about an extra month's charge. It turned out that they were right and I was wrong. Who knew? I did not. But then the customer service representative said, "Let's see how we can save you money each month" and she actually did: about $40.00 per month with another phone plan. [Why they couldn't have just called me first about this deal, I don't know.]

Second, a call to T-Mobile, my new bad mobile service provider (Sprint was the old bad one). Customer service reps at T-Mobile are nearly always cheerful (even giddy) and cut to the quick. They tracked down an order, made sure the service was good by asking if it was good, and promptly won my well-worn threads of mobile loyalty.

Third, a call to Chase (a.k.a. JP Morgan Chase) to start a new bank account. For some reason, the genius programmers there did not test their Java applets on Safari or Firefox (on Macintosh), so my online application got lost in the digital shuffle. But in calling them, they quickly picked up, put me through to a kindly man named Michael who took down my most personal Federal information and told me that the account would be ready to set up and sign in a few days time.

Are these three examples of good reverse patronage a sign of our times in some way? Do they represent a fearful workforce forced to be smiling at all times at work lest they frown at home forever alone? Do these examples spell the return of jobs to the United States where "friendly Americans" can again cater to our friendly American needs?

More interestingly, perhaps, I wonder if other countries are as equally fond of finding good customer service and, more darkly, I wonder if Americans' fondness for good customer service is connected with our slave-holding past.

Process

It's been a while since I've posted. My wife has been sick and I've been swamped with work and things. While we're all recovering slightly, here's Errol Morris' version of Donald Trump talking about Citizen Kane and the unnature of wealth.

Arafat 101

If you've ever taken a basic course in leadership, you're told that Rule Number 1 for building sustainable communities is to ensure that you have a successor. That person should be groomed, educated, and assured that they will maintain the values, objectives, and aspirations of a community if the leader is, for whatever reason, absent. This rule holds whether you're a president, activist, CEO, radical, athlete on a team, military officer, executive director, or chairman.

Mr. Yasser Arafat, moving through the crowd in a bulletproof coffin, had a tremendous amount of time to ensure that his complex constituency would be represented and empowered. As in his life, in which he surely represented the dreams of many Palestinians but could never get past his intransigence to earn his people real peace, he has failed in his death to be a leader of substance and action. It's a sad judgment and a sad day for many people but I actually believe the future for Palestinians may start today.

Long and Lost

It appears that my old high school friend, D.S., is coming to town. I haven't seen him in a while, perhaps two point five years in fact, when he threw himself a goodbye party at a little bar near Canal Street, a stone's throw from where I used to work and smell the collapse of the Twin Towers daily. He moved to Berlin, which was not an untoward move.

Alas, his return (or not) comes at a time when I feel very much without many of my old friends and colleagues. There are so many people who I once "hung out" with, sat with, drank with, movied with, talked with, commiserated with and they are all alive, thankfully, living their actions in good order. But I have to say that time has put a bridge between me and them and I do miss them, each and every one. Not dramatically or desparately - just plain old miss them.

(I don't think most people want to admit that they had friends that they don't see or correspond with anymore because it's painful to know that this string of (perhaps natural) failures is a precursor to nursing home culture.)

I thought about compiling a list of the individuals who I miss and posting that list here. But then I thought about the categories of "missing" with which I might organize that list. The categories might be something like:

• Phoned in the past six months
• Has kids, no longer available
• Been over three years, no idea
• Former girlfriend, thankfully
• Hasn't called or written me (their fault)
• Haven't called or written them (my fault)
• Lives in another country (Europe)
• Lives in another country (Canada)
• Might as well live in another country (California)
• Went insane
• Had a falling out with, no love lost
• Nothing in common but college
• Emotionally tight but geographically far
• Common experience under duress, now not
• Godless heathen
• Hopeless aristocrat
• Artist and too busy to meet up
• Artist and too smart to meet up
• Artist and too cool to meet up
• Only does e-mail these days
• Only does IM these days
• Won't remember me
• Willfully won't remember me
• Hopes I never contact them
• Hopes I do contact them but won't themselves take the initiative
• Still in college

Blocks

My daughter and I were playing on the carpert with a set of 16 blocks today. We started building one big tower and then she remarked that we should each build one and then we did. Each of our little towers got up to 5 blocks high. Then upon each of us adding the sixth, the two fell into each other and all the blocks fell to the ground. There was laughter but not from me.

My CPAP 2

Was on CPAP last night.

Nasal pillow made of silicon gel.

Slept 6 hours. More than before.

Tube got in way of head.

No facial markings.

Saw, before sleep, blue areas mixed with bright green.

Awake like a nicotine addict on lettuce smokes.

The elephant machine.

Sad But Jew

It's making the rounds. When you type the word "Jew" into Google's main search window, you get this page, which shows at the top of the rankings a site called "Jew Watch," an anti-Semitic site.

Google took out its own little ad to comment on it and it has further links to more information. Does this mean that the JewWatch.com website is more popular than any other Judaism-related website? If Google's objective and automatic rankings are correct, and they probably are, the answer is yes.

But what's maybe equally sad is that beneath Google's ad is another ad titled "Jew prints." What could the sponsor, AllPosters.com, possibly seek to gain from this?

Extreme Schnoz Modification

I was priviliged to watch 45 minutes of tonight's Extreme Makeover, wherein a future husband and wife decided to undergo tremendous amounts of plastic surgery on screen.

It's quite obvious that the dominant aesthetic that ties all of these "medical" and radical surgery procedures together is a Northern European one. In each case of "after," the men and women look more white, their noses straightened, their eyes enlarged, their chins made stronger. I studied Greek and Roman art many years ago (as did many Germans in the 1930s) but our unspoken and unacknowledge popular inheritance of racist preferences seems unstoppable.

Just when we were starting to think miscegenation is okay and that Latinos can look white and that Jews can look Arab, we have to undergo (or go under) the knife yet again.

The Residential Real Estate Bubble

Over the past year, I've come to the widely thought but rarely spoken and never-printed conclusion that we are living in a very speculative housing market bubble. I know that some will disagree, especially those who buy and sell real estate, those who are realtors, and those actually know how markets work and study real estate for a living.

In my very unscientific research, the following findings confirm for me that no three bedroom co-op in Brooklyn is worth $985,000 (plus $850 per month maintenance), as I saw posted in our Park Slope neighborhood:

• The baby boomers, who control most of the political and monetary capital in the U.S., will not want their large houses forever. They will need to sell them at some point in order to move to warmer climes. Who will they sell them to? The Village Voice recently published a long article about debt for those in the 18 to 34 year old demographic and noted that "the average collegian ... is $20,000-plus in the hole thanks to student loans and credit cards." Not them
• Health insurance continues to sky rocket, increasing 13.9 percent last year, far outstripping what folks can possibly earn in overtime. If it's health insurance or mortgage payments, I imagine there will be many home defaults in the coming years. People will abandon their large homes and mortages in order to stay alive.
• A Google Search on the real estate bubble finds very little of substantive discussion by the media. This is because the media, by and large, relies tremendously on real estate agents and advertisers to fund their publications. I can't remember the last time I saw an article in the New York Times about speculative real estate. Even the Village Voice doesn't dare to speak the possible truth on this one.
• Politicians sometimes go out on a limb to talk about the coming burden of health care and Social Security for the coming boomer retirement. But they will never point to the fact that Gen X and Generation Y will need to pay for those soon retiring. Taxes will need to go up on the young to pay for those on Social Security. And without safe, lucrative jobs with health insurance, they won't be able to afford homes if taxes are high.
• I learned today of yet another person I know who is going to real estate "school" to buy and sell the stuff. This makes a total of about 6 folks within my little circle of friends and acquaintences who either want to study real estate or have completed their coursework. In 1999, I read many stories of folks taking courses in "beating market timing." But that was a different and well publicized bubble.
• Brian Lehrer said something interesting the other day on his WNYC show: that if you don't own real estate, you're essentially paying a tax because investing in other products (e.g. IRAs, mutual funds, stocks) will assure you of a lower and riskier return. This is true especially in major metropolitan areas like NYC but is coming true even in upstate New York.
• The housing pricing market just does not reflect anything going on in the rest of the economy. Jobs are leaving the States or are not growing statistically. 13% of the population is in poverty. The stock market is doing well but and is nervous about the next attack on U.S. soil.
Posted by Andrew at 8:54 PM

Busy Signals

Instead of going to cool converences, like the current SXSW in Austin, or visiting the sets of Law & Order as my cool pal Jake Dobkin did, or reading what looks a great new book on improving websites usability by the 37signals folks, or putting up the new superbly excellent artist of the month, Ruth Root, on The Site at MANOVERBOARD, I've been working.

My Pal D.

Every once in a while, New York City pulls a very fast one on us, and it is never pretty. The mayor did it a few days ago with his education buddies (a good idea, imho), the restauranteurs and their dishwashers have fun with us (with their special sauces), and now my old high school buddy, D. Strauss, comes clean about New York's latest crappo artist: House of Scams and Fog, Or How to Break Into Your Own Apartment. Published in this week's New York Observer, it will either break your heart or break your supposedly hearty New York spirit.

Dishes

There are so many dishes in the sink. And all I can think about are two things:

a. The huge pile of work I have to attend to tomorrow, digital piles on top of piles on top of ruins of email.

and

b. The fact that Coca-Cola never patented its formula, because to have done so would mean that the copyright would have expired and we would all be making Coca-Cola syrup on our stove top. Coke does, however, tell you how Coke is made. After reading it, I estimated that a bottle of the stuff costs them about $0.16 to make.

Saddam's Execution

Two nights ago, I dreamt that my wife and I were invited to witness the execution of Saddam Hussein. We were given a call by a U.S. Government official and told to come down to the Barnes and Noble at a certain address in Brooklyn.

When we went inside the store, we were directed downstairs to the basement and then to a hidden chamber where we waited on the floor for the room to fill. We sat there, on the carpeting, for a few minutes and soon there were perhaps 20 or 30 other people in the room. I didn't know what to expect and then all of a sudden a large, white sheet was pulled away from right to left and there was Saddam Hussein standing, staring, still. He looked very pale and looked straight ahead. He was tall and his hair was short and his moustache prominent.

I was astounded by his presence. My heart was pounding at that moment and my immediate thought was what happens if he tries to escape or kill or hurt one of us in the audience. Where were the guards? Where were the justices? They couldn't be found. Yet I knew they were there. I woke up and I wasn't sure how he was supposed to die, but it was clear that we were there to know his non-existence.

Car Chase

I was at the laundromat just now and had the opportunity to watch a live car chase on television. A guy in an SUV (what else?) was driving very scarily around trucks, into cars, into pedestrians (apparently) and across median strips. The driver then flew down small streets in small neighborhoods in Jersey City, New Jersey as a few bright white cop cars followed in tow. My heart pounded while I watched the inanity because I feared for a poor inadvertant kid crossing the street to get a misplaced soccer ball. In truth, I worried that I would be the inadvertant witness to a live death on television.

The whole thing came to a slightly riotous end as one policecar smashed into the tail of the SUV as it slowed and forced the driver into a driveway, whereupon the driver ran and was overrun by a swarm of police. The helicopter that filmed this escapade focused on the maelstrom from above. (I looked for a link but there are no stories posted yet -- the chase ended at 5:07 p.m.) Time to go for a walk.

CBS

Boy, CBS sure isn't doing politically well these days, between its so obviously intentional breast revelation and its refusal to air moving ads supported by MoveOn. (I wrote about these ads earlier.) It serves the execs at CBS right, with its refusal to air "The Reagans," starring James Brolin as the former President, and the company's terrible programming generally.

Can

I hate to post things about pure evility and I'm repulsed, but I'm amazed about this report (about which I had not heard about until tonight) of a man willling to die and be eaten by another, in Germany of all places. The two met over the Net. Now the cannibal is speaking and may make some money.

The Good and The Bad

Listening to the stunning voice of Beth Gibbons, lead singer of phenom-band Portishead, on her new album called Out of Season, I'm also reading Arianna Huffington's piece in Salon called America's Final Wakeup Call.

First, the good. Gibbons, while no longer straining to sound more passionate than she already is, has put together with former Talk Talk (you read that correctly) bassist Paul Webb, aka Rustin Mann. Their album together is alternative rock put to blues with a huge and haunting dose of 1920s-era musical nostalgia and references to a more choral moment. Most impressive are the backing vocals which make a soft heart ache.

Next, the bad. Huffington reviews former CEO of Alcoa's incredible revelations about the Bush administration in the new book The Price of Loyalty by Ron Suskind. It turns out that you don't need a progressive voice to note how fanatical Bush, who is again revealed to truly be a Cheney puppet, and his friends are. I actually think I could stomach the book itself.

Is there a relationship between the new album and book? No.

To get or not to get

Boy, these Handspring Treo phones sure are nice. They take pictures, work with Macs, are Palm-enabled, have browsers and email clients, and you can talk to people with them. They even work with multiple carriers. I'm tempted, I'm so tempted. The best thing that every happened to Handspring is that they were bought by Palm.

What has happened to me?

Simple

I had the good fortunate of catching the first
The Simple Life on Fox tonight.

My curiosity about the show focuses on the issue of cynicism and ignorance and I really wonder which of the two parties is framed as the more "ignorant" or "cynical." The obvious, or intended, option is that Paris and Nicole are born into the privilege of skeptical assurance based on a life of certainty and self-awareness. But it can be easily argued that the family on the farm (whose names I cannot identify right now) were also born into a kind of cynical self-righteousness that's every bit as silly and dark as that of their guests.

Ignorance knows no class boundaries, but in the end, of course, I wonder if I'm the dupe. The funniest line in the show was when Paris thought that Wal-Mart maybe sold "walls."

Vaccine

I took my daughter in to get her flu shot today. Apparently she was one of the last people in New York that can get one right now because of what the nurse described as a "kind of panic." Then I see this article in today's Times titled How Not to Pick a Flu Vaccine and while I'm reading it, the doctor's office calls to cancel my appointment for my flu shot tomorrow.

I'm not so aghast as I am disgusted. If there was ever a real need for biological deterrants, wouldn't influenza, which kills 36,000 people per year even today, be a very clear focus of government and the pharmaceutical industry? What does the Department of Homeland Security and the Centers for Disease Control do for a living?

Wal*Mart

When I lived in Troy, in upstate New York, I went to the local Wal-Mart often and always felt sleazoid about it, as if I was hurting someone with every "low price" item I chose. I was cognizant that the land that once stood where the ware-box is was once gorgeous farmland. I also knew that the nice, older gentleman who greeted me at the door was a retiree who looked kind of out of place, yet he seemed happy.

The cover story in this month's Fast Company, called The Wal-Mart You Don't Know, puts the truth to my uncomfort. While the low prices I admired were quite nice, the economic impact of Wal-Mart's global pricing strategy is overwhelming. Some stats: almost 10% of all Chinese exports go to Wal-Mart. 12% of the economic gains in the late 1990s "can be traced to Wal-Mart" according to McKinsey. None of this is, in and of itself, terrible. But, in its desire to own world commerce, the company has essentially driven all retail production to factories where labor is hardly an issue to be reckoned with. Moreover, manufacturers like Levi Strauss, one of my favorite brands, is now selling its cheap-o Signature line there, killing its more quality-driven labels, and putting all of its factories across the border. What does all this mean? My guess is that Levi Strauss will be out of business in 5 years. And so will all of its employees, here and abroad. The race to the bottom only goes one way.

The Sprint

Today I received my first email ever from Sprint PCS President Len Lauer that reiterated how happy the company is to have me as a customer. The headline was "Your loyalty is appreciated." I do appreciate the nicely designed email newsletter that went out to all of its customers today and the facts the email enumerated. They are, for instance, building 1700 new cell towers this year -- where I don't know but probably not in NYC where I live and work.

I also appreciate the fact that they are offering better customer service. And mostly I appreciate that Sprint is the first to line up for my valued loyalty, which on November 24, 2003, will be splintered into a newly traded commodity.

M.J.

Here is a random series of thoughts that will make sense if I let them:

I just slipped on a small, rubber frog. I bought a new product today called "Miii Milanos" by Pepperidge Farm, but I ended up eating more of them than I would have if I bought regular Milanos. Michael Jackson's initials are "M.J." I'm watching the Bachelor choose his wife now; we all know it's going to be Kelly Jo and that his parents are liars. I had a headache all day today but managed to come up with some really nice designs for a client. My daughter spilled chocolate milk in the bathtub which was kind of beautiful. The rain is coming down hard and they killed another big tree for Rockefeller Center.

Matt Lauer

I always wondered when an erudite commentator would write a fine article about the illiteral rise and shine of the morning shows. It's happened in last week's (or was it two weeks now) issue of The New Republic.

I can't recommend this piece highly enough. In it, Lee Siegel brilliantly and so cogently deconstructs the awkward ties between the emotional and monetary oddities that play out on shows like The Today Show, where Matt Lauer's thin hair is a point of dishonest shamefulness (unlike my own) and Katie starts to look a bit like a stuffed animal. Siegel makes the point that, as the morning shows have eclipsed all other "news" programs on television, the strained and self-conscious faces of the commentators have taken on a reality that everyone can bear, particularly in the morning. I've always thought that it was odd that these people are pretending to be like our jagged morning selves and because they're tired and well-paid, they are. Just a few excerpts, which do so much more justice to the entire affair:

Diane Sawyer is the master of the endearing awkwardness, sometimes forgetting which way to walk on the soundstage. (She always remembers when to forget.) There is even a kind of daily duel between her and her office-husband, Charles Gibson, over who is a more flawed and ordinary human being.

and

Matt Lauer makes Sammy Glick look like Khalil Gibran. The new haircut, revealing the thinning hair, gives his anxious pushiness both justification and pathos. His facial expression is always one step ahead of his conversation. He is a man whose eyes have never been introduced to his tongue. If he is talking with someone who just lost a child, his expression indicates that he is thinking about his next guest, who just made a new movie.

and mostly:

Gide said that you cannot appear sincere and be sincere at the same time.

The Tiffany Mark

A number of years ago, I along with my many former OVEN Digital colleagues, worked on the Tiffany & Co. website. Tiffany was a good client and their jewelry really is as impressive as they want you to think it is. Today I received a massive marketing piece from TCO (as we used to call them) introducing The Tiffany Mark. It's actually a book, filled with gorgeous photos of new watches that, yes, any man would buy if he had an unlimited flow of dollars. The book is carefully composed, as are all TCO collateral, and there are even Gray's anatomy-like diagrams of the watch innards, complete with plastic overlays. The photographs are stunning, the text crisp and persuasive, and the heavy black binding would leave a bookbinder bound. The level of detail, and the fact that the book was published and sent prior to this "fall back" Daylight Savings weekend, is remarkable. What does it all mean? Nothing.

Visual $

This one is making the blog rounds, but I couldn't help but post it -- on one web page the author visually demonstrates how much money $87 billion dollars is and what it looks like. It's a lot.

Sticker Shock

I noticed on a walk today a bumper sticker (on a car). This, in and of itself, is quite unusual as the bumper sticker has gone the way of fingerless gloves on young ladies. It seems that today the only folks that wear bumper stickers on their cars are ideologues who don't mind getting stares and odd fingers pointing at them. Face it: it takes courage to have a bumper sticker. There's nothing uglier, though, than a 1994 VW Jetta GLS sedan with rainbow stickers and an "I Love Clinton" bumper sticker. A few observations:

1. The "clean" aesthetic that we are all so fond of has essentially obliterated the possibility of the bumper sticker truly coming back. Cars these days just don't have flat, black vinyl bumpers that look as if they need a decal of some sort or another.

2. On the other hand, I think a candidate for the upcoming elections should pioneer the peelable bumper sticker, which would temporarily be affixed to the car. This way, at the end of the election, you could say bye-bye to that red, white, and blue stripe and move on to other issues. In this way, too, bumper stickers might become slightly stylish again.

3. The bumper sticker I saw today read "God Bless America!!" I mistook the "!!" for "II," thus thinking that we are now in America II, which maybe we now are what with no bumper stickers around and 9/11 being the new beginning of everything.

Time

A series of random sites connected by thought:

It just seems that there is never enough time in the day. Ever feel that way? Of course. The laundry list gets longer, the laundry gets piled higher, and the list bears lists.

So what to do? Well, a lot of small companies have come up with software to help you keep track of notes, dates, passwords, and boyfriends names. Other folks tend to use tons of Post-It (R) notes. Still others like to put their Palm to use.

I do all of the above and still to no emotional avail, with my lists burgeoning, my Palm bloating, and my sticky paper billowing. And the truth is, I'm one of the most fortunate people sitting on the face of the earth.

Words That I Just Don't Like A Lot

Every once in a while, it's good to use a weblog to purge oneself of natty, unfortunate ideas and thoughts. Or every day, which ever comes first.

Without further ado, here's my ultimate short list of words that are not good. Just in case you want to find out more about each and every gem, I've Googlized them:

Colitis
Funsacks
Nutsacks
Supper