Category Archives: Business

Anybody get any valuable messages via LinkedIn?

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I tried asking this on LinkedIn, and I was just about to post it when I decided to check one point, and in trying to get to that information, I lost what I’d written.

So I’ll ask it here, to the best of my memory…

Have you ever gotten a direct message — or pretty much, any message — via LinkedIn that was relevant to you? I mean, one from someone you know, or need to know, about something that you have any sort of interest in?

Pretty much all I get is “cold-call” attempts to sell me some unsought service or other, sent to me by strangers. Usually the strangers are attractive young women, but they’re not like the random, unknown attractive young women who reach out to me via Twitter. These have their clothes on and everything — businesslike clothes —  which commands a bit more respect.

And I’d like to help them. I have enormous sympathy for people forced to engage in such painful, thankless labor. Also, they’re often from troubled places in the word. I got a couple recently from a lovely young lady in Ukraine, and y’all know I’m all about helping Ukraine. But I just wasn’t in the market for whatever she was trying to sell. I forget what it was. That was the bit of information I was seeking when I lost my message earlier, so I’m not going to go hunting for it now. It was some kind of business thingamabob, I’m assuming.

And since she was a stranger, I had no way of knowing whether she was legit. She said she was in Kyiv, but how was I to know? She could have been with the Russians, too. (Her first name, or the one she was using, was “Svetlana.”)

Anyway, that’s essentially what I was trying to ask, and I particularly wanted to hear from actual LinkedIn users. Maybe some of y’all are among those.

I’ll ask an additional question beyond that one, and I think I’ve asked this one before: Do you ever find LinkedIn useful? I doubt you have, unless it’s helped you get a job, or helped you hire someone else for a job.

To me, its one useful function is to be a sort of online complement to your C.V. And it’s only useful for that if the user keeps the page updated, which too few do…

Hey, UAW and Big Three — how about us consumers?

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Yep, these are USED. Note that I blocked out the dealer’s name, because it would be unfair to suggest this dealer is the problem. These are quite typical.

You know — the hundreds of millions of people who will be affected by what y’all come up with…

I’m being a little facetious here, but it’s in service of a larger point. So bear with me. Let’s start with the news. And in keeping with my new resolution to link, as often as possible, to things you don’t have to subscription to read or hear, I’ll refer you to NPR:

With less than 24 hours left before current strikes expire, the United Auto Workers’ union and the Detroit Big 3 automakers have not yet reached a deal.

The companies say it’s still possible to work out a viable compromise before 11:59 p.m. on Thursday. The union, meanwhile, has started laying out its strike plan – an unusual one, at that….

Follow the link for the rest.

I’ve been watching this in recent days, while I’ve also been doing something else. My youngest daughter has just moved home from Dominica, and started a new job a week ago. She’s been driving to work in our 1998 Volvo, which, let’s say, is not in what you’d call tip-top condition. So she’s been trying to buy a decent, reliable used vehicle that she can afford. And I’ve been trying — so far unsuccessfully — to help her, which is what made me think to post this about these labor negotiations:

OK, I was kidding there — a little. I’m not asking that the interests of the companies and the workers — be subordinated to Brad’s interests. Anyway, no matter what they do, I expect decent used cars will continue to cost more than I paid the last time I bought a new car. (After all, I’ve only bought used ones since 1986.)

But I was thinking that there’s ONE way for the union and the companies to get everything they want — to jack up prices even further, and by a LOT. And I was thinking there are a LOT more consumers who would be paying for that than there are auto workers or corporate executives combined.

Consider this just another blow struck for thinking about issues in something other than binary, one-and-zeroes terms.

As for the two parties we’re all focusing on… For my part, I’d like to see both sides get what they want, to the extent possible. This country needs a thriving auto industry, and the workers deserve a square deal.

What we don’t need, in my view, is CEO’s making $29 million a year. Nor do we need workers to continue to be paid, for decades, to show up at a plant that’s been shut down, and sit around playing checkers. This is called a “jobs bank,” and after wisely giving them up to keep the industry in business the UAW has recently talked about wanting this arrangement back.

Maybe somewhere in there, y’all can find a way to get what you both actually deserve, and maybe give the rest of us a break, too. Or at least not make the price situation worse.

Anyway, good luck with your confrontation, folks. Here’s hoping that after all the rhetoric and posturing — and probably suffering before it’s all over — you work out something fair to all…

I’d forgotten Adolf Hitler was ‘woke’

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McMaster et al applauding the Scout deal. Photo from Henry’s Twitter feed.

If I ever knew it, that is. Guess I need to go back and read my history some more, after reading this this morning:

Gov. Henry McMaster on Monday defended South Carolina’s $1.3 billion incentive deal with Volkswagen subsidiary Scout Motors after a group of conservative lawmakers this month criticized the company as “woke.”

Woke? Scout Motors? The subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group? Here’s how that company got started:

Volkswagen (meaning ‘People’s car’ in German) was founded in Berlin as the Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagens mbH (‘Limited Liability Company for the preparation of the German People’s Car’, abbreviated to Gezuvor) by the National Socialist Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labour Front) and incorporated on 28 May 1937.[14][15][16] The purpose of the company was to manufacture the Volkswagen car, originally referred to as the Porsche Type 60, then the Volkswagen Type 1, and commonly called the Volkswagen Beetle.[17] This vehicle was designed by Ferdinand Porsche‘s consulting firm, and the company was backed by the support of Adolf Hitler.[18]

Whatever der Führer‘s role (and see the photo below), if you say a company got started in Berlin in 1937, the last word I think of is “woke.” Although there was, to be sure, an element of populism in the production of an affordable “People’s Car.” But as we all know, populism is a persistent feature of both the left and the right.

Folks, I can think of reasons to oppose this Scout deal, if you press me. But I can also think of a number of reasons to support it, and I suppose those win out.

But this “woke” business?

You learn something new every day. Or at least  I do…

1938: Hitler lays the foundation stone of the first Volkswagen plant…

Cool it on trying to start a run on banks, people

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Like most days lately, I don’t foresee a lot of time today for blogging. So I’m just going to offer this, which I tweeted yesterday, as a topic for discussion:

About the time I posted that, I was somewhat comforted by the fact that the hourly NPR news summary started with this, far more consequential, story. Of course, the second story was further yammering about the banks.

Then, this morning, I was really dismayed to see the first screen of my Washington Post app covered with additional headlines about the banks.

We’re not having a general run and a national economic collapse yet, but keep pushing, everybody. Maybe if you keep trying, you can make the average person nervous enough…

Has Ford sped past Tesla? This writer thinks so…

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Admittedly, only 15,617 of these have sold, but that’s 15,617 more than the Cybertruck.

One of the greatest challenges I have on this blog is that I’ve largely lost interest in writing about the things that tout le monde is yammering about — the front-page stuff, which I usually find unbelievably repetitive and boring. But the world is still full of interesting things, things I’d like to discuss.

Unfortunately, the interesting ideas are usually here or there and coming from a single source. Which would have been fine back before newspapers figured out that their business was now online and that had to put up paywalls. (When I started blogging 18 years ago, that was not the case, except maybe for The Wall Street Journal.)

So when I see something I want to talk about, it tends to be in something I subscribe to, and others don’t.

That’s true of today’s topic, but I think I can summarize it easily enough to give everybody the idea. And I’ll try to quote from it within the vague Fair Use standard.

It was a “guest essay” in the Opinion section of The New York Times over the weekend, and it was headlined, “A 120-Year-Old Company Is Leaving Tesla in the Dust.” It’s written by Ezra Dyer, a columnist for Car and Driver magazine.

His point is that while everyone remains dazzled by Tesla, and while Elon Musk is making a spectacle of himself with his efforts to destroy Twitter, Ford has quietly sped past Tesla by such critical measurements as driverless and electric vehicles.

He starts off admitting that he once thought Tesla was the cool company, not only because it sold the only EVs you could drive for a reasonable distance without recharging, but also apparently because of the razzle-dazzle:

It made cars that performed animatronic holiday shows using their lights and power-operated doors. It came up with dog mode (a climate control system that stays running for dogs in a parked car), a GPS-linked air suspension that remembers where the speed bumps are and raises the car automatically, and “fart mode” (where the car makes fart sounds)….

But then, as a journalist covering the company, he started noticing that the people who worked there, his sources, were terrified to talk to him, being as evasive as spokesmen for a totalitarian government.

If you want to work for a flexible, modern company, you don’t apply to Tesla. You apply to 120-year-old Ford.

Tesla’s veneer of irreverence conceals an inflexible core, an old-fashioned corporate autocracy. Consider Tesla’s remote work policy, or lack thereof. Last year, Mr. Musk issued a decree that Tesla employees log 40 hours per week in an office — and not a home office — if they expected to keep their jobs. On Indeed.com, the question, “Can you work remotely at Tesla?” includes answers like, “No,” and “Absolutely not, they won’t let it happen under any circumstances,” and “No, Tesla will work you until you lose everything.”

But on the other hand, the cars make fart noises. What a zany and carefree company!…

More substantially, he noticed how Tesla lagged on the actual product front. He says Ford’s self-driving equipment is actually farther along than Tesla’s — and Tesla charges $15,000 for its feature that doesn’t fully work (he says the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has referred to it with the charming words, “Full Self-Driving Software May Cause Crash“), on the premise that it may work sometime in the future. As for EVs:

Tesla’s long-promised new vehicles, like the Cybertruck and a new version of its Roadster, also keep getting delayed. The Cybertruck was unveiled in 2019, and on Tesla’s most recent earnings call Mr. Musk admitted that it won’t be in production this year, which is becoming an annual refrain. Sure, Ford sold only 15,617 electric F-150 Lightning pickups in 2022, but that beats the Cybertruck’s sales by, let’s see, 15,617…

Anyway, I thought all that was interesting. I don’t know that Tesla is slipping, but I’m impressed at what I read about boring ol’ Ford. I guess it helps not to have a, shall we say, problematic eccentric in charge. Although, of course, Ford once had that problem, too.

Personally, I drive neither a Tesla nor an F-150. But by way of full disclosure, I do drive a 2000 Ranger. It doesn’t do anything fancy. It’s a four-cylinder straight shift, and it doesn’t even have power windows. But it keeps running, and I hope it does so for years to come…

Meanwhile, I gather from the column, this model can make fart noises!

Yet another way baseball could save America

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One of my grandfather’s baseball teams. That’s him squatting on the right. Note that some guys wear jerseys that say “P.O,” while others don’t.

My wife brought this story to my attention this morning, knowing I would like it: “Companies worried about worker turnover could try baseball.”

It’s about how measures that employers instituted at workplaces a century ago might help with today’s Great Resignation problems. A number of things were done to make workplaces more pleasant, but this was my (and the headline writer’s) favorite step:

Goodyear President F.A. Seiberling … embraced employee welfarism with a wide-reaching program in Akron, Ohio, that included an improved working environment, a thrice-a-week employee newspaper, a housing development and even a company baseball team to make workers feel like part of the “Goodyear family.” Confronted with the same problems, his crosstown competitor Harvey Firestone followed suit.

These companies met others on baseball fields in a league they organized that spanned at least two other states. The brick stadium where the Firestone Non-Skids played (named for the company’s first treaded tires, “non-skids”) seated 4,500 cheering workers, and it still stands in front of the old company headquarters. The idea was that when employees sat in the stands and cheered for the company, they’d be more loyal, and as a result, they were encouraged to do so. Goodyear told workers in 1920, for example, that attending the games alone wasn’t enough; “moral support, organized cheering, [and] boosting 24 hours a day” were critical as well.

The quality of baseball had to be good enough to attract these fans, though. In rising industrial cities like Akron and Michigan’s Flint and Grand Rapids, where there were no professional teams, fans typically watched amateur clubs compete. Industrial teams played as part of that environment, and so increasingly, companies hired men who were good baseball players. During World War I, Frank Stefko remembered hearing from a fellow soldier, Glenn “Speed” Bosworth, that Goodyear was hiring ballplayers in Akron, so after the war, he traveled to the Rubber City from Scranton, Pa. The personnel office said the company didn’t have openings until he mentioned Bosworth’s message. “Oh, you’re the ballplayer!” They hired him on the spot….

It worked. Employee morale and longevity improved, as did productivity. Employers did this not just to be nice guys, but because it was good for business. It also helped stem union efforts — until the Depression led to cutbacks in such expenditures, so the great heyday of unions arrived in the 1930s.

My wife knew I would like the story because of my grandfather. She never met him — he died of lung cancer when I was four — but he found some time to teach me some basics of baseball before we lost him.

And playing baseball on the workplace team is a big part of his legend. I’ve told you all this before, but I’ll tell you again, because I love these kinds of stories from the days when this was a baseball-loving country. Here’s something I wrote about it before, with a picture of the house where my grandmother lived with her family before her marriage:

Here’s how she met my grandfather — she would see him walking past her house on the way to the train station each day in a suit and straw boater, carrying a bag. She thought he was a salesman, and the bag contained his wares. Actually, he was a ballplayer, and bag contained his uniform and glove. He worked for the Post Office, but he only worked there so that he could play ball for its team. He was a pitcher. Gerald “Whitey” Warthen would eventually be offered a contract with the Senators, which he turned down to work in his father’s business.

A couple of minor corrections: He worked, I think, for the Railway Post Office, which I take it was some subset of the P.O. we all know. More importantly, he wasn’t just a pitcher, as I have learned since reading about him in recent years in old copies of The Washington Post and other local papers. He was also an infielder. Basically, he played anything as long as it was baseball. Oh, and before he launched on this working-for-baseball period, he had been captain of the team at Washington and Lee.

Anyway, I guess I am genetically predisposed to see baseball as a great way to attract employees. Unfortunately, the end of that story in the Post sounds a discouraging note:

Today, companies are also experimenting with ways to boost worker welfare in the context of the Great Resignation. Baseball spectatorship has been replaced by team-building activities that include workplace climbing walls, wine-tasting events, table tennis, family picnics, free lunches and special doughnut days. At the turn of the last century, employers experimented to identify which perks resonated with workers. While the jury is still out on whether such programs will be successful today, companies are following in the footsteps of NCR, Goodyear and Kellogg’s in experimenting with programs that employees find meaningful and useful — enough so to stay in their jobs.

You see that? No baseball. That’s the sad state of America today. Baseball is no longer seen as a way of pleasing the masses. Is there any hope for us?

The Rolling Stones love me so much, they’re going to let me buy something!

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Don’t you love these kinds of come-ons?

I just got an email — and y’all know how much I love having people send me email — from Spotify headlined, “The Rolling Stones made you something special.”

Below that was a pic of the lads — the unbelievably ancient-looking lads, but as we all know, they’ve looked that way since they were very young — looking at me oh, so fondly. You know, because we’re such mates and all. (Except that Ron Wood. He’s looking off to the side for some reason. Oh, well. We were never that close. I still think of him as that guy from Rod Stewart’s band.)

And then below that was this message:

Thanks for being a fan

To celebrate their 60th anniversary, The Rolling Stones have designed an exclusive t-shirt and mug for their top fans on Spotify.

A limited quantity is available for this offer – until August 7th or while supplies last – so act quickly!

And below that, the critical button that said “BUY MERCH.” Here’s where it leads, although you may not be able to call it up, if you’re not as tight with Mick and the guys as I am. Sorry. You should make an effort to be cooler in the future.

Anyway, clicking the button offers me the chance to buy both a T shirt and a coffee mug for only $48! This is amazing because the T shirt costs $40 alone, while the price of the mug alone is $20!

I’m overwhelmed. But sorry, guys — I’ve been buying a bunch of stuff lately. Also, I already have a lot of T shirts. And a lot of coffee mugs — more than I need, if you can believe it.

But thanks for thinking of me. It really touches me to think of y’all putting down your guitars and such and making these things for me with your own hands and all. Get back to me when your 70th anniversary rolls around. Or maybe your 75th, OK?…

Roy Rogers and Wonder Woman! You can’t beat that…

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OK, I was kinda ragging on Google Adsense the other day for the “older women” ad they put on my blog, but here’s one I actually like.

Not enough to click on it, mind you — that’s against the rules. I just like it as a visual enhancement of the blog.

My childhood hero Roy Rogers, with the best Wonder Woman! (No offense to Gal Gadot, but this one was pretty special.)

Can’t say I appreciate the slight suggestion that there’s something salacious going on (“opens up about his life”), this being Roy and all. I mean, he’s just being polite posing for a picture. The photographer probably said, “Pretend she’s Trigger!” and Roy obliged.

Of course, she’s not Trigger, but I don’t hold that against her. Not her fault at all. She’s doing her best, and her best is pretty good…

My favorite Google AdSense ad this week

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AdSense doesn’t allow me to click on the ads it posts on my blog, but this one made me so curious I had to resort to a workaround: I right-clicked, copied the link to the site, and called it up on a different browser.

It was disappointing. The chainsaw being advertised isn’t really that small. Dang. Although it looks like it could be useful for certain tasks, and the tiny one doesn’t seem too handy. Just cool. Or hilarious. Or something. In any case, it made me look.

In any case, gimme more of these kinds of ads, Google. I like them better than, say, the one I’ve been seeing all week tying critical race theory to Marxism. It was getting kind of tedious…

How are y’all doing with the supply chain these days?

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Kind of moody and overly dramatic, don’t you think? But it was the only horizontal image I could find that I figured I’d be allowed to use.

This is an update to my July post on the supply chain problem. Then, I was celebrating the fact that my shoes I had waited for for months had finally come.

Now, this issue is fresh in my mind because I’m waiting for my new iPhone. It’s supposed to arrive today.

My “old” phone is an iPhone 8 that I got on my birthday in 2018, during the campaign. In fact, I think James and Mandy were the first people I spoke to on it, sitting in the parking lot in front of the Verizon store. I remember thinking there was something wrong with it because I wasn’t hearing as clearly as usual. That’s because I didn’t have the center of the phone over my ear, because I was used to the narrower iPhone 5. It was fine.

But not any more. Among other problems, the camera has been acting up. Sometimes, when I touch the virtual shutter release button, the camera app shuts down, and no image is recorded. Which is bad. We grandfathers have to have a fully functioning camera at all times. And I also frequently use the camera for work.

But HARK — the UPS man was just here, and the phone has arrived!

So I’ll get back to you later, beyond making my point: Which is that when I went to Verizon on Oct. 12, they told me I’d have to wait until possibly Oct. 29.

Oh, sure, if I’d wanted to spend almost two Gs on an iPhone 13 — for which they had displays all over the store — I’d have probably been OK. But since I’m a sensible guy who thinks the most insane thing Apple has ever done was get rid of the home button, I was getting an SE 2020. So I had to wait.

But apparently the chain wasn’t quite as stressed as they thought, since it just arrived.

So y’all go away and let me play with my new toy. In the meantime, how’s the supply chain acting for y’all now, beyond driving up prices and such?…

Enough with the threats, OK? I’ve got enough going on…

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If this blog disappears, it will be because TSOHOST got fed up waiting for me to pay them, and shut it down.

Which will be amazing, since:

Despite all that, on Columbus Day (the real one, not the Monday), I received the first of not one, not two, but six emails telling me that an invoice for £10.99 was due on “14/10/2021.” Perhaps I should have written back to inform those folks that there are only 12 months in the year, but I wasn’t in the mood for facetiousness. I’ve been very busy dealing with a lot of stuff in recent days.

The last few messages were threatening. In an understated, British sort of way. No active statements such as “We will shut you down.” No, they said “suspension is imminent,” as though they were observing that the weather looked dodgy.

I logged into their site this morning and sent a “ticket response” to the earlier message from the guy who had acknowledged that I had cancelled, asking him to inform his colleagues and get them off my back. We’ll see if that produces action.

Barring that…

If they somehow succeed in carrying out the threat, well, goodbye. Otherwise, I’ll be seeing you later…

The story of how Myers-Briggs happened

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OK, enough with the complaining!

I do occasionally find things to read in my various newspapers and magazines that I actually enjoy. And while I find myself clicking through the stories on NPR One rather quickly and impatiently these days, I occasionally run into something I can dig there as well.

Like this…

I was flipping through the aforementioned NPR app while walking, and found something fun. Longtime readers know about my interest in the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator. I’ve written about it often enough. And of course, I know a lot of smart expert types look down on it. But I like it, possibly for some of the reasons they hate it. More about that in a moment.

Anyway, I ran across this three-part podcast about how the MBTI came to be, and I was immediately hooked. Really. Go listen to the first few minutes, and see if you don’t find it intriguing, even if you thought it was an excruciatingly stupid topic before.

Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, early 1900s

Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, early 1900s

One of the first things you learn about the test is that it wasn’t whipped up in a psych lab by a couple of nerdy colleagues in white coats named Myers and Briggs. No, it’s named for the eccentric, uncredentialed woman who developed the test, over the protests of experts, based on the theories of her own equally-if-not-more eccentric mother, Katharine Cook Briggs. The mom, born in 1875, was unusually well-educated and only had one child who survived infancy — and then dedicated herself to discovering innovative ways to raised the perfect child. The daughter was named Isabel, and she married a man named Myers. She developed the personality-type inventory — based on her mother’s ideas about types — as a way of figuring out why she and her husband were so wildly different and incompatible. It saved her marriage, and gave rise to possibly the most widely-used personality test in the world — which she named for her mom and herself.

Why is the test so popular? Well, one thing you learn is that the system tells everybody, from INTPs like me to our irritating opposites, the ESFJs, that we’re all fine. None of our personality quirks are problematic. We just all have different strengths. The test offers us ways to understand each other and work together better, with an appreciation of the differences that helps us not throw lethal objects at each other. Everybody feels affirmed by what they learn. (I suspect this is sort of related to why LGBTQ people like to go to “Pride parades.” Everyone feels affirmed, and we all like that, right?)

That’s how it was offered to all of us editors at The State in the early 90s. We had a newsroom managers’ retreat — and back then, there were more editors with managerial responsibility than there are employees today at the whole newspaper. Anyway, an HR person out of Knight Ridder headquarters in Miami tested us all, and then released the results about everybody to the whole group.

People who look down on the MBTI tend to think it runs on the Barnum effect. Sort of like fortune cookies in a Chinese restaurant. It tells you something vague and nonjudgmental that is allegedly about you, and no matter what it says, you tend to nod and cry, “So true! How did they know?”

Well, I did feel the test pegged me, particularly on the first two categories, because I am about as introverted and as intuitive as people get. (On the other two, I’m closer to the middle.) But personally, I feel like I learned a great deal about my co-workers as well, and while it didn’t revolutionize the way we worked together, it helped explain some things. For instance, there were certain people who I knew I tended to irritate, sometimes a lot. And I wondered about it. It turns out they were all S types, who tended to think we intuitive types were, for instance, just making stuff up and trying to foist it on them without justification. I couldn’t change the way they were or the way I was, but at least I could better understand the cause of the friction. And maybe I could explain my conclusions more patiently — show more respect, for instance, for steps 2, 3, and 4 in making my wild leaps from 1 to 5. That is, if wanted to. (We extreme introverts are known for not caring very much about other people’s opinions of us, yet another irritating thing about us — especially when combined with the intuition thing.)

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Oops — just realized I posted this at some point when I meant to save it as a draft. Oh, well. I was almost done. I wrote all of the above yesterday when I had only heard the first two installments, and today I heard the third. Anyway, I recommend it. It’s a good listen. Give it a try…

My first ad ever in Spanglish, I think

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spanglish

I sometimes see ads in Spanish, probably the result of some small signal I’ve sent out to the cloud — such as the fact that I follow the Pope’s Spanish Twitter feed (after all, it’s his native language) as well as his English one, or something like that. They come and they go.

But this was the first ad I’ve noticed in Spanglish. It came up when I clicked on the wrong thing on my Spotify app, or something. I don’t know why it popped up.

Anyway, after I click on the link offering it en español, the ad looks more normal (except that, weirdly, the logo is still in Spanglish: “MÁS QUE A MONTH”). But that page offers a link to “English,” and I click it and find myself back on the Spanglish page. It once again says things such as “It’s building forward juntos,” and “Meet the creadores.”

I prefer it to be one way or the other. I don’t care which very much. It’s just that I’m a bit of a purist when it comes to languages. Gimme real Spanish, or real English…

in Spanish

 

 

‘Carl… what have you done?’

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Switching to lighter subjects… (Actually, I had written most of it much earlier, and was nearly done with it over the weekend, but set it aside to work on the Afghanistan post. Since it was just sitting here, I’m posting it.)

In many ways, the TV commercial has had its day, and that day was a long time ago. Personally, I don’t even see as many of them as most people do. I generally don’t watch TV news, and since I’m seldom offered a baseball game on the few broadcast channels I get, I don’t see much sports. And beyond those two things, I can’t think of any reason anyone would watch live, commercial TV.

But I do watch Hulu sometimes, and since it’s not a premium account, I do see ads. And mostly, I’m unimpressed, if not put off entirely after seeing these things over and over (remind me never, ever to drink Grand Marnier, not that I think you’ll need to). I can tell the makers of these things are trying really, really hard — too hard, really. They try so hard to be creative, I often can’t tell you afterward what the product was they were trying to sell. Other times, I wish I couldn’t tell — such as the one with the young guy who sits there and earnestly explains that he started a company to help people with “erectile dysfunction” because of his own problems getting things up and going. Which. I. Did. Not. Need. To. Know. (By the way, I hope y’all appreciate my sacrifice here. I did a couple of searches to find a link to that ad, not knowing the guy’s name or the name of his company, so you know what the internet is going to be showing me from here on out, every time I look at a screen…)

But there are highlights. Geico can still, occasionally, make a good one. And sometimes they outdo themselves. The one they call “Lining the Field” is the best since the wonderful “Was Abe Lincoln Honest?” spot. And that’s saying a lot.

I don’t know who the genius was who decided they had to do an ad using the song “Build Me Up Buttercup,” but the Geico team took several stabs at it — and then, surprisingly, actually released several of them instead of just the best one. The others are… OK. (Here’s one. Here’s another. There are more.) But this one is brilliant. They just got so many things exactly right.

So many things that, when I first thought about writing about this a couple of months ago, I kept putting it off because there were so many things to mention, and, you know, it’s a pretty lightweight, silly topic. But pop culture interests me, and one of the things about it that interests me is the way I can hear a pop song my whole life, and then suddenly, I realize for the first time how awesome it is. And I wonder what causes that to happen. I’ve written about it before (in another lightweight post that took a LOT of time to write). Is it that my judgment has matured? Some new chemical in my brain? Or had I just not heard it in a sufficiently appealing context?

Anyway, this ad was kind of a multimedia earworm, and here are some of the reasons it grabbed me:

  • First, the song. Remember it? If you’re my age you certainly do, but I don’t recall ever taking the slightest notice of it before. I didn’t even know who wrote or performed it. When I first saw the ad and started thinking about it, I thought: East-coast beach music. It sounded like something out of the same moment and place as “Can’t Help Myself” — something that was on the radio constantly when I was at the Grand Strand in 1965. And now that I was listening to it for once, I realized it rivaled that Four Tops masterpiece in sheer pop awesomeness. But it wasn’t the Four Tops. It wasn’t even beach music, East Coast or West. “Build Me Up Buttercup” came out at the end of 1968! And it was by, of all things, a British band that hadn’t even existed in ’65 — The Foundations! This demonstrated the extraordinary degree to which I had ignored the song at the time. Since we moved every year or two when I was a kid, I can usually remember when a song was a hit by recalling where I heard it. But that didn’t work at all with this.
  • The Foundations — I knew nothing about them! So I started Googling, and right away found another great song I had ignored at the time: “Baby Now That I’ve Found You.” Yeah, it’s a lot like the other one — so much so that when both of them were stuck in my head (a double-earworm!) when I was at the beach in June, one would pop up and I’d have to softly sing a few lines to myself, walking along the shore, to remember which one it was. (Is this the one from the ad or the other one?) But I’m not complaining. None of their other songs reached out and grabbed me in the same way, but I’m happy just to have fully recalled and finally embraced these two.
  • Syncopation? I’ve learned quite a few things over the last 67 years or so. As have y’all. Or most of y’all, anyway. 🙂 But there are some things that, try as I might, I’ve just never gotten straight in my head. A lot of them have to do with music, and one of them is “syncopation.” But I keep trying to wrestle with it. For instance, listening over and over to “Build Me Up Buttercup,” I focused on the hesitation in the opening lines, the pause in lyrics after “build me up”– and again after “let me down” — and I thought, is that syncopation? But I don’t think so. I read the descriptions of the musical phenomenon the word describes, and I really don’t think so. I tried looking it up, again. I watched a video or two, and I thought this one was good. So that’s syncopation, huh? Yeah, it sort of fits the descriptions I’ve read. That’s not what’s going on in the song, I don’t think — is it? I looked at the sheet music, and didn’t see any indication something unusual was happening in the beat structure. (But can you see syncopation on sheet music? Maybe not.) What my brain perceives as hesitation (since I’m a word guy, who thinks in terms of complete sentences) is apparently just space for the background vocal. I think. But I could be wrong. Maybe it is syncopation that creates that hook that pulls you right into the song. But I can’t tell. My damaged brain isn’t up to the task. Of course, it wasn’t back before it was damaged, either. Whatever it is, I like it.
  • Casting. I have no idea who the actor who plays Carl is. (So far, Google hasn’t told me; I’ve tried.) But he’s amazing. I’m not saying he’s necessarily an amazing actor in general — he might not make an impression in a Shakespearean production. But he’s perfect for this. Or maybe it’s not him. Maybe it’s the direction, or the skillful editing. But the dialogue is perfect, and perfectly delivered: “Think anyone will notice?… Yeah. (hesitation). Yeah they will.” He’s not tearing himself apart with remorse or anything; he’s just acknowledging a point, with complete honesty. The comic timing is exactly right. Which could be all him, or could be the one out of 100 takes that the makers of the ad chose. But it’s great.
  • The helmet. Of course, “Carl” is hilarious way before that, before you even know what’s really going on. That unbelievably goofy smile as he, in his imagination, rides his bike down the curving road and really, really gets into singing the song. Not just the smile, but the way he bobs up and down over the handlebars and cocks his head to the side as he sings “and mess me around…” Just digging it. So, more good work by the actor. But you know what? I think the helmet adds a lot to it. It makes him look so different from the guy lining the field (even though his hair is kind of helmet-like) that it almost introduces an element of imperfection to the ad, since your brain has to adjust a bit to realize it’s still him. Especially since in his imagination, his smile is even goofier, has an entirely different quality, as he rides down the road. But helmets can do that. They often make people look wildly different, and hilarious in surprising ways. Just ask poor Michael Dukakis. Perhaps this is why all those goofballs protest against helmet laws. They’d rather have their brains splattered on the pavement than look like that.

OK, I’ll stop now.

I’m (rather obviously) not writing this as some kind of expert on TV commercials. Because I’m not. Oh, I wrote a few forgettable spots for an ADCO client several years back. But I’m a writer and an editor, and that’s about it.

But I know what I like, and I often spend a ridiculous amount of time thinking about why I like some scrap of ephemera that zips past me as I go through life. This one’s been loitering in my head most of the summer, and I thought I’d go ahead and try to evict it…

"... and mess me around..."

“… and mess me around…”

 

My shoes came! How are Y’ALL doing with the supply chain?

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My new shoes. I need to break them in, but they're feeling pretty good...

My new shoes. I need to break them in, but they’re feeling pretty good…

My new shoes finally came! I’m wearing them right now. They feel pretty good so far, although it will take a while before they’re as comfortable as my old ones.

The old ones are a somewhat tattered pair of Salomon “Fellraisers,” which I got shortly before going to Thailand in 2015. I think of them as my “Thailand jungle shoes,” because when I got them, I was thinking about that day we planned to spend hiking through Khao Yai National Park. (Which was awesome.) Salomon calls them “trail-running shoes,” with knobby things on the bottoms meant to provide traction on natural, unpaved surfaces. I’m not planning on hiking through any tropical seasonal forests in the near future, but when these started wearing out on me, I wanted some more, for one simple reason:

They fit my feet better than any pair of shoes I’ve ever worn in my life. Far and away. It’s like they were painted onto my weird, narrow feet, for which I’ve always had trouble finding shoes that even come remotely close to fitting.

One problem: Salomon quit making the Fellraiser. (You may not know this, but the entire global economy seems to be built largely upon one little-known principle: Produce a product that Brad Warthen really, really likes. Wait until he realizes that, and truly appreciates the product. Then stop making it. I plan to write a post about this later.)

So I kinda freaked. But then I settled down, and started writing to Salomon to ask, as politely as I could, “What do you still make that is as much like the Fellraiser as possible?” They were helpful, and eventually I settled upon the Speedcross 5 Gore-Tex. I went for the color they somewhat ludicrously overdescribed as “Martini Olive / Peat / Arrowwood” (stuff like that always reminds me of Elaine Benes writing ad copy for J. Peterman, which makes me smile). They seemed the closest to my old ones, which in my unimaginative way I call “green.”

This was back in April. But I just got the shoes. Why? Because of the way the global supply chain got backed up by COVID. They told me in April to get back to them the second week of July. So I did, and it worked out, and that’s great.

But I was wondering what sorts of supply-chain problems the rest of you have been running into. Because this goes way beyond shoes.

COVID did (and is still doing) a lot of a lot of stuff to the economy, and one was that it knocked its rhythm off.

New York magazine recently laid it out this way:

At the beginning of the pandemic, it felt like everything essential was in short supply. Toilet paper, hand sanitizer, dumbbells, flour, and even baby wipes were nearly impossible to find as we all hunkered down for what we had no idea would be more than a year of quarantine. But now, as pandemic restrictions ease in the U.S., so too does our once-overwhelming inclination to hoard. If our lives are (slowly) returning, shouldn’t the availability of the things we want to buy get back to normal too?

As it turns out, no. Soaring demand from our lockdown lives and fewer workers have left suppliers strapped for major materials like lumber and aluminum — not to mention the semiconductors that power everything from our cars to our laptops. Those shortages trickle down into less-major things, too, which means that, Girl Scout cookies aside, lots of products are hard to come by. If you’re among the millions of Americans who bought a pandemic house, you may be struggling to get materials to build a new deck or repair a fence. Or maybe you’re just trying to get your hands on a can of your dog’s favorite wet food, a set of patio furniture for under $1,000, or a Playstation 5. Maybe you’ve finally decided to buy a used Subaru, if you could just locate a dealership that has one, or you went to re-up on your go-to organic cotton underwear, only to find the price has risen $2 per pair. Whatever your need, if you want something right now, you may well have to either pay a lot more to get it or find a suitable alternative.

On a more personal level, I go to the store now, and usually can find what I need — but I can’t help noticing how thinly populated the shelves seem. I keep hearing from family members about their troubles finding basic things that would not normally be hard at all to find, seeing as how we’re not actually living in the Soviet Union of circa 1980.

Anyway, as I said, I wonder what y’all are seeing…

My old shoes, when they were new. This is the morning we were about to set out in Khao Yai. The canvas things were issued to us to protect against leeches.

My old shoes, when they were new. This is the morning we were about to set out in Khao Yai. The canvas things were issued to us to protect against leeches.

 

I’ll think about that when you open an Apple Store here

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apple

That’s all I want to say, in response to this email come-on today.

The nearest Apple Store is in Augusta.

You know, in Georgia.

Augusta has an Apple Store, and we do not. So do Greenville and Charleston, last time I looked. For all I know, so does Florence by now.

And no, I don’t know what they mean by “2-hour delivery.” I turned away in disgust when I saw the Apple Store part.

Let me know when you remedy this absurd situation. Don’t send me any more ads until you have done so…

 

I guess actual humans never even glance at these things before they go out

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jamessmith

Why isn’t this site performing better, Jessica?

I get a LOT of unsolicited emails from people offering to help this blog perform better.

Usually, they start with some nonsense about how the sender has been looking at my site, and finds it utterly fascinating, but could help me make it better for a very reasonable price. Then, it always, always, fails to give me any reason to believe that the sender has ever so much as glanced at the blog.

Sometimes I get one for some other site to which I have a connection. Today, I got this one:

Hello Jamessmith.com Team,
 
I would like to have a discussion with you regarding the web promotion strategy for your website Jamessmith.com. We wish to work out a proposal to strengthen the online presence of your website, via a strategically planned web promotion campaign. In today’s online era, you should be focusing on the new revolutionary ways of generating traffic (and subsequently, leads).
 
We are curious to know if you are aware that a few issues bugging your website and sorting out these will help you get the best returns out of your website.
 
1. Your website seems to be attracting traffic, but this traffic is almost stagnant and limited, which affects potential sales as you move forward.
2. Your website doesn’t feature in Google’s first search page for some of the major keywords in your niche, which affects visibility and your business.
3. Your website has been diagnosed with On-Page and On-Site issues, which affects the ranking.
4. Your backlinks profile is not efficient enough to help your search engine visibility.
5. Your website is currently not being properly promoted online according to Google’s new guidelines (after latest Google Panda & Penguin update), which is affecting your marketing strategy and goals.
6. Your presence in the social media platform is minimal. This is depriving you of a huge market of prospective referral clients.
7. Your website may be penalized by Google.
8. Social media profiles are not updated regularly.
9. A low number of internal and external quality links present on your website.
10. Not updating fresh contents for your website and blogs as per the latest Google guideline (Penguin & Panda).
And many more…
 
We are expert in running a promotional online marketing campaign for websites. We have a host of ethical services and techniques, which you can utilize to improve your website’s performance. 
 
Also, let me update you that our service prices are very affordable and cost-effective which will come up within your budget. 
 
We are also doing website designing and redesigning at affordable cost and fast delivery within 2 weeks. As we are familiar with search engine guidelines, so the website will be search engine friendly and technically sound. Also, we are giving 3 months of free website maintenance service.
If there is/are any bad reviews regarding you/your website, our ORM campaign will help you to push down the bad reviews from 1st page to 3rd page within 45 days of the campaign.
 
If my proposal sounds interesting for your business goal, feel free to email me, or can provide me with your phone number, Whatsapp number or Skype Id and the best time to call you.
I would be very glad to hear back from you.
 
Best Regards,
Jessica
Search Engine Consultant

These things crack me up. I mean, look at all those specific suggestions, meant to give me the impression that ol’ Jessica has been burning the midnight oil studying jamessmith.com with great zeal and intensity. She knows all about it! And she’s an expert! She’s going to fix it!

Of course, if an actual human being with a modicum of experience on this planet — or on the Web, for that matter — had looked at the site for 30 seconds, she would have concluded that:

  • This site is defunct, and has long stopped performing its original function. The homepage is a shell from which all links lead to empty pages without content. Which disappoints me because sometimes I’d like to refer back to those releases I put up during the campaign, but they’re gone.
  • This is not a site aimed at “sales.” It’s a political campaign site.
  • The campaign was in 2018. That datum might not be on that page, but a few seconds on Google would tell you right away. Which is a step any human wanting to know anything about this would take, long before sending anyone a 456-word email in an effort to make a “sale.”
  • “Your presence in the social media platform is minimal.” Say what?!?!? Assuming that this is 2018 — which is what you seem to be assuming — I’m pumping out social media like a madman! Social media is one of several full-time jobs I’m killing myself doing, day and night! Oh, wait… I had a little flashback there. You almost made me forget for a second that this is 2021….

And so forth…

Pretty much every bullet point can be dismissed with, “Yeah, that might be interesting if this were October 2018…”

OK, I know you’ll say, “Then why don’t you take down the whole site?” Well, first of all, I don’t have that job any more. I’m not even sure I have the access.

I don’t know why that shell is still operating. I don’t much care. It’s not bothering anybody. Maybe I’ll ask James next time I run into him (which doesn’t happen often, because pandemic). Or maybe I won’t. This isn’t a question likely to stay in my head long. For that matter, I have no particular reason to think he even knows that homepage is still up.

I have sympathy for Jessica, assuming there is a Jessica. Back during my newspaper career, I thought that having to sell something to people would be the hardest thing in the world (the people in advertising always had my pity). I had it slightly wrong. The hardest thing in the world is selling by way of cold calls. Mind you, this isn’t the worst kind of cold-calling — that would involve actually talking to busy people, in person or on the phone. But it’s still a thankless task.

Sympathy aside, though, this is ridiculous…

No more anachronistic prices, thanks to Netflix!

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updating

It’s not a big deal, but this happy notice from Netflix sort of cracked me up.

They’re “updating” our subscription price!

Finally! I had grown so sick of having to pay them every month in drachmas and Deutschmarks. We’ve all known the frustration of searching under seat cushions in the hope of finding doubloons, or at least pieces of eight, with which to finance our streaming. First, they were hard to find, and second, even having to look for them made me feel so passé, so… anachronistic.

Finally, modern prices, which apparently I can pay with modern money! I feel so up-to-date, so hip, so with it!

And only $13.99! Think of it! That would only have been $1.47 in the month when I was born. Sure, it’s a higher number now, but that’s because it’s updated! Take comfort from that…

Today is Alexa’s Christmas and Easter, all in one…

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cyber

I just asked Alexa about the weather, and she told me what my glances out the window had caused me to suspect: Those little sunshine icons I saw on my phone yesterday were misleading. Today, it will be damp and cloudy, at least until mid-afternoon.

No big deal.

But then she added, unbidden:

By the way, it’s Cyber Monday. To shop Amazon deals, just ask.

For me, today is the day after the first Sunday of Advent. For Alexa, the universe is shaped differently.

From a first-week-of-Advent perspective, we might ask ourselves, “Why did God make you?” turn to the Baltimore Catechism and be told that “God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him for ever in heaven.”

But Alexa was created by Amazon, and Jeff Bezos made her to sell stuff.

It gives her a whole different perspective on existence.

All of that said, we might ask what meaning “Cyber Monday” has in the universe of 2020. I mean, isn’t every day kind of Cyber Monday? Or Tuesday, or whatever?

As I recall, the idea — as ecommerce first came into its own — was that after the execrable “Black Friday,” the first day that people were back at “work” and sitting at their computers, they spent a scandalous (from the perspective of their employers) amount of time ordering stuff online.

This seemed to fit with what I saw after I started blogging in 2005: People read blogs and commented during what we generally thought of as office hours. Nights and weekends? Forget it — no point in posting anything then.

But we’ve just spent a whole year in which millions worked from home. And in which people avoided stores and bought more and more stuff online every day.

So… what’s special about Cyber Monday now?

Maybe nothing. I went to Amazon on my browser, expecting to see a huge display showing how exciting Cyber Monday allegedly was… and was greeted by the rather boring display of administrative functions you see below. No mention of a special day of any kind.

I had to click again on the Amazon logo in the upper-left corner to see the deals you see above. And I had to scroll down the page to see those. The top of the page was a promo for some made-for-Prime movie called “Uncle Frank.” (I saw a preview for that, and couldn’t tell what it was about, so I’m kind of doubting I’ll watch it.)

So maybe it’s not such a special day after all. But no one told Alexa. Perhaps they didn’t want to spoil her childlike wonder. She’s young, so she’s like a kid this time of year. You say good morning to her, and she’s all “Santa Claus is coming!”

Which would be adorable, were she actually, you know, a child…

routine