This blog over at the WashPost liked this ad. So do I. (Although, truth be told, I liked him better in “In the Line of Fire.”)
Just 10 more months until my iPhone is due for an upgrade; then I can do stuff like this.
Over the weekend, I was a passenger in my wife’s car when I saw the following amazing sight, and reported it on Twitter:
Just saw a tractor-trailer do a U-turn at Gervais and Huger. Really. Brown Trucking Co. of Lithonia, Ga.
Seriously. We were several cars back from the light on Gervais, waiting to proceed eastward (with the McDonald’s on our right) and this truck, which was going the way we were, pulled out into the intersection, cut way left and swung across several lanes to turn all the way around within the intersection, and head back toward the bridge over the river. Cars converging on the intersection from four directions just froze — probably in amazement. He did it on the first try, which makes me think it wasn’t his first time.
And this got me to thinking of something. I got to thinking about how you seldom see truckers do really crazy stuff anymore.
I mean, compared to back in the ’70s, about the time of the CB radio craze. Back then, it was seemingly an outlaw culture. Driving on an interstate in a normal car (much less my Volkswagen Rabbit I had back then), was truly taking your life in your hands, with kamikaze behemoths hurtling down upon you at ungodly speeds.
If you saw a trucker doing less than 80 in those days, it meant he was climbing a steep grade and hadn’t gotten as much of a running start as he’d like.
It was SOP for truckers to bear down upon you from the rear (especially if you dared to get into the left lane to pass somebody), closing at speeds that would ensure that it was all over if you tapped your brakes. You had to veer out of their way the first chance you got; it was imperative to survival.
Then, suddenly, just a few years ago (I want to say it was the middle of the last decade), I noticed something — truckers were almost all driving at or below the speed limit. They were no longer aggressive, much less homicidal. Cars passed them, instead of the other way around. The interstate seemed much less dangerous than it had been.
Anybody else notice this? And does anyone know why it happened? Was it:
Or something else I’m not thinking of?
Theories are welcomed. Anyone who actually knows something from within the industry would be even more so.
At the worst possible time — on the eve of the social site’s IPO — The Wall Street Journal reports that General Motors plans to quit advertising on Facebook because ads there don’t get the job done:
General Motors Co. plans to stop advertising with Facebook Inc. after deciding that paid ads on the site have little impact on consumers’ car purchases, according to a GM official.
The move by GM, one of the largest advertisers in the U.S., puts a spotlight on an issue that many marketers have been raising: whether ads on Facebook help them sell more products. On Friday, Facebook is expected to sell shares in an initial public offering that could put a market value on the company of as much as $104 billion…
That aside… personally, I have trouble understanding why Facebook wants to go public anyway. Of course, I’m pretty sure Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want to — hence his childish, obnoxious gesture of showing up for business meetings on Wall Street in a sweatshirt.
But while I blame him for not dressing like a grownup, I find any reluctance he feels to go public totally understandable. I say this as someone who suffered for decades working for publicly-traded newspaper companies — and who would still be a newspaperman if his paper had not been owned by an overleveraged public company. To me, anyone who is making plenty of money from his private company would be totally insane to go public.
No one, but no one, would accuse me of being any sort of financial whiz. But I fail to see the presence of any of the usual reasons for going public. What does Facebook really need an infusion of cash for? It’s not capital-intensive like, say, a steel mill. It’s always been able to rake in the money for relative little investment.
Yes, I’ve gone out there and read explanations of why. But I’m unconvinced. So what if, for instance, going public would be a huge windfall for Facebook employees? Why would I, as an investor (if I were an investor), want to spend my money to give them that windfall? Where’s the competitive advantage in encouraging a company’s founding talent — the people responsible for making the property valuable — to cash out?
The one rational excuse seems to be that in this converging online world, the only way to compete with the other titans out there, such as Google, is to have mountains of cash on hand, so you can beat the others to the punch when it comes time to buy a YouTube or an Instagram.
In other words, it’s a necessary step in the bid to become all things to all people online. Which seems, in and of itself, a debatable goal. But hey, nobody’s asking me.
David Brooks didn’t quite go all the way to calling President Obama a Michael Corleone (as opposed to a Sonny, which is more like what George W. Bush was), but he did everything else but say the name:
The key is his post-boomer leadership style. Critics are always saying that Obama is too cool and detached, arrogant and aloof. But the secret to his popularity through hard times is that he is not melodramatic, sensitive, vulnerable and changeable. Instead, he is self-disciplined, traditional and a bit formal. He is willing, with drones and other mechanisms, to use lethal force.
Normally, presidents look weak during periods of economic stagnation, overwhelmed by events. But Obama has displayed a kind of ESPN masculinity: postfeminist in his values, but also thoroughly traditional in style — hypercompetitive, restrained, not given to self-doubt, rarely self-indulgent. Administrations are undone by scandal and moments when they look pathetic, but this administration, guarded in all things, has rarely had those moments….
Brooks said that in the process of marveling at the fact that Obama even has a chance at re-election, since so many of the fundamentals are against him. He concludes that “In survey after survey, Obama is far more popular than his policies” because of what Americans think of him as a man. Not just as a person, but as a man.
Oh, and for those who are tired of me talking about “guy stuff” this week, don’t blame me on this one; Brooks brought it up.
I don’t think either of us has precisely hit the nail on the head. I keep saying “Michael Corleone” to describe his quiet, non-blustering toughness. But of course, the president is a better man than Michael Corleone. “Mensch” doesn’t quite say it either, but it points in that direction. As for Brooks’ reference to “ESPN masculinity” (a term so important to his piece that it’s his headline) — well, I don’t even know what he means by that. Maybe I don’t watch enough sports. (I’ll confess that I also get confused with what people mean when they say “postfeminist.” Some seem to use it to refer to feminism being over and done with, and therefore “NONfeminist.” Others seem to refer to a state in which feminism is taken for granted and no longer a movement, just part of life. So the word is unhelpful to me.)
Another way to say what Brooks is trying to say — “thoroughly traditional in style — hypercompetitive, restrained, not given to self-doubt, rarely self-indulgent” — is “Gary Cooper.”
But we all want to be Gary Cooper (in “High Noon,” specifically — “I’ve got to, that’s the whole thing.”). What Brooks is saying, in a way, is that Obama pulls it off.
OK, here’s another hint as to why I’m thinking about guy stuff this week.
Did you see today’s news about baby names? It seems that “Mason” has joined the top five boy’s names this year, apparently because of something called a “Kardashian.” Which, of course, is appalling.
But mostly, the names are pretty stable.
Here are the top five for boys:
And for girls:
I looked through the Social Security Administration’s Top Five database going back 100 years, and was interested to note that:
This week, we’re going to be celebrating the particular genius of the human male — why he is special and essential, as wonderful as women may be. I mean, as wonderful as they are.
I’ll explain why later.
Here’s something else (in addition to the subject of this earlier post) a woman would never think of.
Seriously. First of all, it’s hard to get most of them even to care about video games. You may have noticed this. But to think of inserting Bo Jackson into Super Mario Brothers to run the board? That is something that only the male of the species, with his uncanny willingness to sit and think about stuff like this for hours on end, could possible conceive. And to actually spend the time turning the idea into reality? Well, you have to have that extra bone in your head that the male is blessed with to achieve it.
Watch the video, and bask in the brilliance of the concept, even if the execution is a bit lacking (obviously, Bo should have been bigger, so you could see him better — but that leaves room for the next generation of guys to improve the concept, so it’s all good).
A little motherhood controversy for Mother’s Day.
It would of course be startling enough to hear that a woman is nursing an almost 4-year-old. What’s shocking is the photograph, in which the kid looks big enough (compared to apparently petite mom) to be about 7.
But the worst thing, to me, are his eyes looking at the camera — looking out at America, in the photo that will dog him the rest of his life.
Am I saying that in high school, bullies will be pinning him down and cutting his hair against his will? I don’t know about that. I’m sort of worried about him surviving 1st grade.
A really cruel thing has been done to this boy, and at this point he has no idea. I feel bad for him.
This post is a ripoff of a post by Burl Burlingame over at his Honolulu Agonizer blog, headlined “Great Songs Are Inevitably Covered.”
I owe him a debt of gratitude because, while I had heard of the “Greatest NASCAR prayer ever,” I had never bothered to listen to it. It’s… remarkable. That is to say, it’s remarkable to me as a Catholic. Maybe you protestants pray like this all the time. But I doubt it. I went to my cousin Jason’s church for Easter Vigil this year, and there was nothing like this.
The original prayer was actually like this. The version above has been “songified” by The Gregory Brothers. I don’t know who they are, but they definitely rendered the pastor’s effort more awesome.
Here is some bare-bones explanation of the prayer, posted on HuffPost last July:
Prior to Saturday night’s Nascar Nationwide Series race in Nashville, Tenn., Pastor Joe Nelms was tasked with delivering the invocation. What happened next plays like a scene straight out of Will Ferrell’s “Talladega Nights.”
And here is a followup at The Christian Post:
A Tennessee pastor claims he was emulating the apostle Paul when he was called on to deliver the opening prayer at a NASCAR event in which he thanked God for his “smokin’ hot wife,” among other things. Some fans have called it the “best prayer ever” while critics are calling it disrespectful and possibly blasphemous.
Joe Nelms, pastor of Family Baptist Church in Lebanon, Tenn., insists that he was just trying to be like the first-century apostle, but some wonder how far Paul would go in his effort to become “all things to all men.”…
Although the prayer might have offended some people, Nelms said the prayer was not really for Christian audiences. He was more trying to reach out to the unsaved or those turned off by church.
“Our whole goal was to open doors that would not otherwise be open. There are a lot of folks who think churches are all [full of] serious people who never enjoy life and [who have] just a list of rules.”
His invocation was all about showing the world what Christian joy looks like, he said, sharing a bit of his testimony. “We who have been saved by Christ, we know that living has just begun. When I accepted Christ, that’s when I really learned what joy was.”
Despite criticism, Nelms’ evangelism effort has apparently paid off; several people have contacted him expressing a desire to give church a try.
The cover is by some kid named Roomie, who posts a lot of music videos on YouTube.
And that’s all I know.
I spent Easter weekend at the beach with some of my family. We stayed at the beach house that my grandfather built in Surfside Beach. It’s on a small, narrow freshwater lake — the twins call it “the river” because it is so long and narrow that that’s what it looks like — with the ocean a couple of blocks beyond.
I don’t get there often, but we made it this time. The weather was beautiful. We had the whole day free Sunday (at least, until we had to drive back), having attended Easter Vigil Mass at my cousin’s church in Conway.
Between the Easter egg hunt with the twins and dinner, I managed to find a few quiet moments to lie in the hammock right next to the lake. Conditions were perfect. The breeze was perfect. I put some early Steve Miller Band on my iPhone and set it next to my head (I had no earbuds) as I prepared to snooze. I was right on the verge of doing something unusual for me — thoroughly enjoy the outdoors.
Just then, the roar of a riding lawnmower started up about 20 feet from my head, over on the lot next door. The guy on the mower was not the owner of that property, but a stranger. He was doing this for pay, on Easter Sunday.
I went inside fuming about it, but took solace from the fact that with that riding mower and he being a professional, it couldn’t take more than 10 minutes for him to mow that yard. I even found myself making excuses for him in my mind: Poor fellow must be desperate for the income to be mowing lawns today…
Then I headed back outside and resolved to escape the noise the way Huck Finn escaped the things that he didn’t like about “sivilization.” I got into the jon boat and pushed off with an oar to drift across the lake. It’s only about 40 yards across. As I drifted, I realized to my horror that some unseen fiend was using a leaf blower on the far side. Which sounded even worse.
I turned back as the first guy stopped mowing, only to see that the heathen mercenary had started using a weedeater.
I changed course again and started rowing perpendicular to the line between these two abominations.
As the first guy put down his weedeater and picked up a leaf-blower of his own — to blow the yard trash he had cut out onto the surface of the lake — I paused to write the following on Twitter:
Forget the Constitution: Anyone operating obnoxious power tools on such a beautiful Easter Sunday should be drawn and quartered, then fined.
I was reTweeted and received supportive replies from several folks (one who totally got into the Swiftian spirit of the thing wrote, “And then punished in a manner that could be considered cruel and unusual for such a crime.”). Good to know there are some sane people left in this world.
I was intrigued by this question that The Washington Post posed on Twitter today: “Could the Web generation uncover a Watergate-type scandal?”
I followed the link and saw that the piece was based on a panel discussion featuring Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. They had their doubts:
“One of the colleges asked students in a journalism class to write a one-page paper on how Watergate would be covered now,” said Bob Woodward, “and the professor — ”
“Why don’t you say what school it was,” suggested Carl Bernstein, sitting to Woodward’s left in a session titled “Watergate 4.0: How Would the Story Unfold in the Digital Age?”
“Yale,” Woodward said. “He sent the one-page papers that these bright students had written and asked that I’d talk to the class on a speakerphone afterward. So I got them on a Sunday, and I came as close as I ever have to having an aneurysm, because the students wrote that, ‘Oh, you would just use the Internet and you’d go to “Nixon’s secret fund” and it would be there.’ ”
“This is Yale,” Bernstein said gravely.
“That somehow the Internet was a magic lantern that lit up all events,” Woodward said. “And they went on to say the political environment would be so different that Nixon wouldn’t be believed, and bloggers and tweeters would be in a lather and Nixon would resign in a week or two weeks after Watergate.”
A small ballroom of journalists — which included The Washington Post’s top brass, past and present — chuckled or scoffed at the scenario…
I also enjoyed the way the piece, written by Dan Zak, characterized the Woodstein legacy:
Tuesday’s panel briefly reunited the pair, whose untangling of the Nixon administration inspired a generation of journalists who have since been laid off or bought out in large numbers. Woodward and Bernstein’s main point was evocative of a previous, plentiful era: Editors gave them the time and encouragement to pursue an intricate, elusive story, they said, and then the rest of the American system (Congress, the judiciary) took over and worked. It was a shining act of democratic teamwork that neither man believes is wholly replicable today — either because news outlets are strapped or gutted, or because the American people have a reduced appetite for ponderous coverage of a not-yet-scandal, or because the current Congress would never act as decisively to investigate a president.
For the record, while I may indeed be one of those “who have since been laid off or bought out in large numbers,” I didn’t get the idea to go into journalism from these two guy — however much their example may have encouraged me. I was already working as a copy boy at The Commercial Appeal when I first heard of them…
"Make it noon."
I’m beginning this post at 11:19 a.m. on the Ides of March. That is, it’s 11:19 in real time, sun time. According to every time-keeping device within reach of me, including this laptop, it’s 12:19 p.m. (OK, 12:21 now, as I stopped to look something up.) But that’s because every time-keeping device in my vicinity lies. They are required to do so by law.
The law is the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which extended the lying practice of observing Daylight Saving Time for four weeks more out of the year. You know why? Because Senator Michael Enzi and Michigan Representative Fred Upton thought it would be a fine idea to move the end of it later in the fall so that kids could go trick-or-treating in daylight. Really. (As if any self-respecting spook would venture forth before darkness has fallen.) I don’t know the excuse for moving the start from April to before the middle of March, but I’m sure it is also a doozy.
Lobbying for this change were “the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, the National Association of Convenience Stores, and the National Retinitis Pigmentosa Foundation Fighting Blindness.” Lobbying against, unsuccessfully, were “the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, the National Parent-Teacher Association, the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium, the Edison Electric Institute, and the Air Transport Association.
I had no idea that my church’s bishops were against it, but of course that makes perfect sense, as all right and moral people would be.
There are few measurements of time that are based in the natural world. There is the day, and the year, which both make sense as long as one is earthbound. Divorced from the cycles of the moon, months are nonsensical — just arbitrary devices we’ve agreed to pretend are real. The hours of the day make sense in only one way — if noon occurs at the height of the sun. In the days of sail, in the Royal Navy at least, noon was the occasion of some ceremony — the official beginning of the naval day. The captain would assemble his midshipmen on the quarterdeck and they would all shoot the sun with their sextants, and when there was agreement that indeed it was noon, the captain would say to the quartermaster, “Make it noon,” and a marine would strike the bell, and the foremast jacks would be piped to their dinner. Noon was real, it was grounded, and it provided a reference point for giving every other hour of the day meaning.
Now, the time of day is arbitrary, and I see little reason to respect it. Particularly when it robs me of an hour of sleep on my weekend, then causes me to rise before the sun every day for most of the year. Then — and this is the thing that bugs me more — it completely eliminates any enjoyment of the evening. I don’t know about you, but I am completely uninterested in eating my last meal of the day while the sun still shines. I’m a busy guy, and I continue being busy until the setting of the sun tugs at my attention. (This is rooted, I suppose, in all those years of newspaper work, when the climax of the long working day occurred in the evening.)
So the sun goes down, and we eat supper, and… it’s time to go to bed. No relaxing evening. No downtime. It’s all over. And I know I’ll have to get up an hour early in the morning. Which I resent.
I’m feeling this with particular force this week because I recently started working out everyday (I have a new elliptical trainer at home), and this week was when I started trying extra hard to do my workout in the morning rather than at night. I get that initial boost of energy from the workout, then I eat breakfast and about mid-morning I crash, and feel tired the rest of the day. I blame this on having to do my workout before the sun is up.
Some say it’s just an adjustment. Even people who don’t hate DST say the first few days are hard. I say stuff to that. I’ll hate it until the first week in November arrives.
You know, it’s not inevitable. Since DST is a false construct of man, it can be undone by man (arrogant man, who thinks he can revoke the movement of the spheres). They don’t put up with this tyranny in Arizona:
Arizona observed DST in 1967 under the Uniform Time Act because the state legislature did not enact an exemption statute that year. In March 1968, the DST exemption statute was enacted and the state of Arizona has not observed DST since 1967. This is in large part due to energy conservation: Phoenix and Tucson are hotter than any other large U.S. metropolitan area during the summer, resulting in more power usage from air conditioning units and evaporative coolers in homes and businesses.[citation needed][disputed – discuss] An extra hour of sunlight while people are active would cause people to run their cooling systems longer, thereby using more energy.[8] Local residents[who?] remember the summer of 1967, the one year DST was observed. The State Senate Majority leader at the time[citation needed] owned drive-in movie theaters and was nearly bankrupted by the practice. Movies could not start until 10:00 PM (2200) at the height of summer: well past normal hours for most Arizona residents. There has never been any serious consideration of reversing the exemption.
Did you read that? They’ve figured out in Arizona that it costs more money, because it makes you run air-conditioning longer. Well, duh. DST might, just might, make some sense if you live in Minnesota. Or back in 1918, before air-conditioning.
But it makes no kind of sense now, in South Carolina. Where are all these neo-Confederates who want to nullify every sensible act of the Congress when it comes to a useless act such as DST? How dare those damnyankees tell us to build our entire days upon a lie against God’s creation? Why, it offends all decent sensibilities.
People just accept things, as though they were sheep. Are there no men among us anymore?
I don’t know, but I wish somebody would do something. I would, but I’m too blamed tired…
Just a couple of days after I posted a video of the director of the Ayn Rand Institute, that organization sends out this release:
Apple Should Be Free to Charge $15 for eBooks
WASHINGTON–Apple and five top book publishers have been threatened by federal antitrust authorities. According to the Wall Street Journal, they are to be sued for allegedly colluding to fix ebook prices.
According to Ayn Rand Center fellow Don Watkins, “Traditional books may come from trees but they don’t grow on trees–and ebooks and ebook readers such as the iPad definitely don’t grow on trees. These are amazing values created by publishers and by companies such as Apple. They have a right to offer their products for sale at whatever prices they choose. They cannot force us to buy them. If they could, why would they charge only $15? Why not $50? Why not $1,000?
“There is no mystically ordained ‘right’ price for ebooks–the right price is the one voluntarily agreed to between sellers and buyers. Sure, some buyers may complain about ebook prices–but they are also buying an incredible number of ebooks.
“What in the world justifies a bunch of bureaucrats who have created nothing interfering in these voluntary arrangements and declaring that they get to decide what considerations should go into pricing ebooks?”
Read more from Don Watkins at his blog.
I didn’t know what the Institute was on about until I saw this Wall Street Journal piece:
U.S. Warns Apple, Publishers
The Justice Department has warned Apple Inc. and five of the biggest U.S. publishers that it plans to sue them for allegedly colluding to raise the price of electronic books, according to people familiar with the matter.
Several of the parties have held talks to settle the antitrust case and head off a potentially damaging court battle, these people said. If successful, such a settlement could have wide-ranging repercussions for the industry, potentially leading to cheaper e-books for consumers. However, not every publisher is in settlement discussions.
The five publishers facing a potential suit areCBS Corp.’s Simon & Schuster Inc.;Lagardere SCA’s Hachette Book Group;Pearson PLC’s Penguin Group (USA); Macmillan, a unit of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH; and HarperCollins Publishers Inc., a unit of News Corp. , which also owns The Wall Street Journal….
This is truly a fight in which I do not have a dog. I think. And it should please the Randians that my own attitude has to do with market forces. I can’t conceive of paying $15 for a book when, after the transaction, I don’t actually have a book.
So I can approach this dispassionately, and ask, to what extent is this a monopoly situation? After all, Apple has competitors — such as Amazon, which actually pioneered this business of selling “books” to people electronically. The WSJ story addresses that:
To build its early lead in e-books, Amazon Inc. sold many new best sellers at $9.99 to encourage consumers to buy its Kindle electronic readers. But publishers deeply disliked the strategy, fearing consumers would grow accustomed to inexpensive e-books and limit publishers’ ability to sell pricier titles.
Publishers also worried that retailers such as Barnes & Noble Inc. would be unable to compete with Amazon’s steep discounting, leaving just one big buyer able to dictate prices in the industry. In essence, they feared suffering the same fate as record companies at Apple’s hands, when the computer maker’s iTunes service became the dominant player by selling songs for 99 cents.
Now that sounds more like what I would think the market would bear, if the market were like me. $9.99 sounds closer to what I might conceivably be willing to pay in order to have access to the contents of a book without actually getting a book. But it still seems high.
Yes, I can see advantages to a e-book. You can store more of them in a smaller space. They don’t get musty, which for an allergic guy like me is nothing to sneeze at. And you can search them, to look up stuff you read, and want to quote or otherwise share. That last consideration isn’t that great for me because I have an almost eerie facility for quickly finding something I read in a book, remembering by context. But… once I’ve found it, there’s the problem that if I want to quote it, I have to type it — which is not only time-consuming, but creates the potential for introducing transcription errors. Far better to copy and paste. (At least, I think you can copy and paste from ebooks. Google Books doesn’t allow it. See how I got around that back here, by using screenshots of Google Books.)
But I still want to possess the book. Maybe it’s just pure acquisitiveness, or maybe it’s a survivalist thing — I want something I can read even if someone explodes a thermonuclear device over my community, knocking out all electronics.
In any case, all of us are still sorting out what an ebook is worth to us. Let Apple set the price where it may, and try to compete with Amazon. Then we’ll see what shakes out.
Never mind what was said here about LinkedIn earlier today. LinkedIn brought this to my attention, and this is pretty cool…
I slipped and did something the other day that I didn’t mean to do.
Normally, I keep two browsers running (with multiple tabs going on each) at the same time, and it helps me keep track of what I’m juggling. There are certain things I only do on Google Chrome, and certain other things I only do on Mozilla Firefox. An example of how that helps: On Chrome, I have myself permanently logged in to my Twitter feed, so that when I click on my Twitter bookmark, it’s up and ready to go (although actually I use Tweetdeck mostly for composition of Tweets, I find the regular browser version easier to use for looking up followers and such). On Firefox, Twitter thinks of me as the author of ADCO’s feed, so I’m automatically logged into that one.
Earlier this week, I broke protocol. For some reason, an invitation to do something on LinkedIn came in on my ADCO email (Firefox). That was weird, because normally I deal with LinkedIn only on Chrome. And I thought LinkedIn only had my blog email address, which I only look at via Chrome. Some prospective connection must have manually entered the ADCO address on an invitation; I don’t know.
In any case, since it had never come up on that browser before, LinkedIn treated me like someone who had never been to the site before, and among other things invited me to send invitations to all my contacts. I’m quite sure that, faced with the prospect of invitations going out to a couple of thousand people, I clicked on the option that said not to do that. I did it quite deliberately.
But I must have clicked on something wrong at some point along the way, because all week, ever since that day, I’ve been getting responses to LinkedIn invitations from people I never (with intent, anyway) sent such invitations to.
Which is fine, on some level. Some of these were people I probably should be connected to in that way, as part of a balanced social media strategy. But others were nice people, friends of mine, who are just not into that kind of stuff at all. People I would never dream of bothering with such a request.
Some of them took the time to write me thoughtful emails (and in one case, a voicemail) thanking me for having thought of them (which, I hereby confess, I had not done, at least in this context), but explaining as nicely as they could — letting me down easy — that they just didn’t do stuff like that.
My first instinct, in each case, was to write back and apologize for having bothered them. But then they would know that I hadn’t been thinking of them, and that might make the situation even more awkward than it was.
So I did nothing, except to write, “That’s all right” to one or two of them.
This happened on Monday. So far, I’ve heard from about 40 people, either accepting the connection or politely refusing. I don’t know how many are still hovering out there.
I don’t know about you, but so far, LinkedIn hasn’t done much for me. Twitter and Facebook have helped me build my blog readership, and I just really enjoy Twitter as a medium of expression. But LinkedIn… smart people tell me that it’s an important part of a professional personal brand strategy, so I have dutifully recruited 863 connections so far. But I have yet to get anything out of it that I haven’t gotten from other social media tenfold.
Anyway, if you are one of the unfortunate who received an invitation this week, I didn’t mean to send it. Not that I don’t think of you all the time. I just wasn’t thinking of you that way…
Speak out, you got to speak out
against the madness,
you got to speak your mind,
if you dare.
But don’t no don’t try to
get yourself elected
If you do you had better cut your hair.
— Crosby, Stills and Nash
Pursuant to our previous discussion of ponytails and their relationship to credibility (in a specific context, not in general), Kathryn Fenner shares this article:
Hair style and dress sense are the only issues where politicians present a narrower range of options for voters than policies. Their political conservatism is reflected, and possibly shaped by, their follicular safeness. If you like, you can research this yourself. But you will find, after inspecting candidates’ heads at the local, state and federal level, there are very few afros, perms, ducktails, beehives, streaks, mop-tops, hi-top fades, curtains, asymmetrical fringes, Mohicans, pony-tails, dreadlocks, cornrows, Jheri curls, devilocks, liberty spikes, rat tails, bowl-cuts, under-cuts or mullets.
Tony Blair BEFORE thinking up New Labour.
If you are one of the thousands or millions of men with one of these things on your head, voting can be a lonely and frustrating process.
Today’s politicians don’t actually have a thing against long hair per se, since a lot of them are deserters from the long-haired community. Look at old pictures of Barack Obama with an afro, Bill Clinton’s shaggy mop and Tony Blair in his Mick Jagger phase. But they visited the barber before they ran for office because politics is an annex of the banking, legal, military and other notoriously short-haired professions.
The political establishment and its associated industries simply use a candidate’s appearance as a means of weeding out people who don’t act in their interests. So we end up with phrases like “presidential hair,” which means, on a more subtextual level, that the man underneath it won’t be out of place pressing flesh at a Wall Street dinner or engaging in bonhomie with military personnel. In short, these industries want to make sure the candidate is one of their guys, and in their antiquated world of alpha masculinity, something approaching a buzz cut is essential. Considering their election campaigns — especially the fundraising part — are essentially a series of job interviews with a panel of generals, bankers and super-rich lawyers, it’s not surprising that candidates scissor themselves as soon as their name gets near a ballot paper.
On a previous post, we got into a discussion of the importance of character in political candidates. (I have come over time to believe that it is paramount, to the point of paying far less attention to policy proposals by comparison. And of course, as you know, I am positively inimical to ideologies.)
We had a good discussion, and achieved some degree of synthesis. Along the way to that, Phillip happened to mention the fact that many in politics use military service or the lack thereof as a shorthand marker for character. This is certainly true. But as we discussed the relationship of such service to character, I went on a tangent… and decided it would be worth a separate post, as follows…
I believe that our politics started becoming dysfunctional, in the ways that I decry (hyperpartisanship, adamant refusal to listen to, much less work with, the “other side”), when we ended the draft.
Before that, you didn’t find many men (most officeholders today are men, and it was more true then) who had not spent at least a portion of their youth in the military. That certainly exposed them to having to work with all sorts of people from different backgrounds (as Phillip noted here), but it did something else: it forged them into something larger than those differences.
The WWII generation in particular may have had its political differences, but those guys understood that as a country, we all share interests. They may have been (in fact, were) liberals or conservatives or Northerners or Southerners or what have you, but they understood that they were Americans first. For those who served after the war, when the military was on the cutting edge of integration, it helped give black and white a sense of shared identity as well. (Indeed the shared experience of the war, even though it was in segregated units, helped lay the groundwork for the next generation’s gains toward social justice.)
As the first wave of young men who had NOT served (starting with those who were of an age to have served, but had not, such as Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich) arrived in the top echelons of political power in the country, they brought with them a phenomenon that we hadn’t seen among their elders… a tendency to see fellow Americans who disagreed with them politically as the OTHER, even as “the enemy,” and a practically dehumanized enemy — one that must be opposed at all costs.
That said, Bill Clinton does deserve credit for rising above that new partisanship in many cases (welfare reform, deficit reduction) in order to accomplish things. And Newt Gingrich often worked with him to accomplish such goals.
But below them, among the young guys coming up in politics — the ones hustling around statehouses and working in campaigns — there was a generation rising that really could not think of the OTHER SIDE as someone to be communicated with, much less worked with.
I really believe that if those young guys had had the experience of being thrown together, outside of their communities, their cliques and their comfort zones, their heads shaved and put into uniforms, and required to work together in a disciplined manner toward common goals — THEY would be different, and consequently our politics would be different.
Mind you, I’m not saying we should reinstitute the draft in order to make our politics more civil (although there may be other reasons to have one). But I am saying that I believe today’s extreme polarization is in part an unintended function of that development in our history.
Maybe you consider the end of the draft to have been a good thing. What I’m asking you to do is consider that even good things can have unintended ill effects. The opposite is true as well. Y’all know how deeply opposed I am to abortion on demand. But it seems reasonable that it would have the effect claimed in Freakonomics of reducing crime over time (by instituting a sort of pre-emptive capital punishment of unwanted children, who are more likely than the wanted to become criminals). Just as it has had the undesirable effect in parts of Asia of drastically reducing the number of females in society.
Good actions have good and bad consequences; so do bad ones. It’s a complicated world.
Time now flies to the point that it’s achieved escape velocity.
Today, it is 50 years since my 3rd-grade class was herded into the auditorium to watch John Glenn take off in Friendship 7 to orbit the Earth.
And look how far we’ve come… today, Glenn marks the anniversary by chatting with American astronauts who are … visiting our moon colony? landing on Mars? pushing to the outer edges of the solar system?… no, merely orbiting the Earth in a space station. And not a cool, elegantly-revolving-wheel space station like in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” but something that looks like a cross between a bunch of tin cans fitted together and the kind of TV antenna we used to have affixed to our houses in 1962.
So, in other words, we haven’t come very far at all. In fact, looking at our sad, tentative little foothold in space, we haven’t moved at all. In fact, we’ve regressed.
Sure, it was primitive to seal an astronaut into that little nonaerodynamic capsule like “Spam in a can” and throw it into space, but today we don’t even have a functioning capsule. The United States doesn’t have a single spacecraft of any kind in service. Remember the terrible Russkies whom we feared dropping atom bombs on us from Sputnik like rocks from a highway overpass? We have to hitch rides with them now.
When Glenn made his flight, anything and everything seemed possible — and because it seemed so, it was so. We were going to the moon, even though many technical barriers remained to doing so. We weren’t entirely sure when we started that it could be done, but we were going to do it. And we did. And then we pulled back to Glenn-like riding around the block. And then we even quit doing that.
No one could possibly have predicted, 50 years ago, that we would be so earthbound now. It was impossible to conceive. Back then, Robert Heinlein assumed we would have made two expeditions to Mars by the end of the century (even with a third World War delaying us), and that was totally doable. Of course we would! If we could go to the moon in a decade, surely we could make it to Mars in four!
But today, people make fun of Newt Gingrich for even talking about it. And between the left and its preference for social programs and the right with its not wanting government to do anything, it’s hard even to remember a time when we knew, for a fact, that we could do it all. And did it.
Now, we’re all about what we can’t do, or don’t want to do, which amounts to much the same thing.
It’s just not as exciting to be an earthling now as it was that day 50 years ago.
“Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?”
Here’s something that has frustrated me, and maybe some of y’all can advise me.
Several times, I’ve wondered what a word cloud of my whole blog — since I started it in 2009 — would show in terms of what has obsessed me over these last three tumultuous years. Or, more practically, what verbal habits I need to dial back on.
But all I can ever get, when I enter my URL, is a cloud made of the last few posts, as you can see above. That’s pretty useless. I mean, I know what I’ve written about today. What I want to see is what sort of result I get over time. That might actually tell me something.
Anyone know how to make that happen?
In politics, particularly during the presidential primary season, when each step determines your momentum for the next, expectations can be everything. If you’re expected to win big, and you win modestly, then you lose. And so forth. Silly, but that’s the way it works.
By that standard, “The Ides of March” was for me a dud.
In fairness, I must cite the hyperbolic buildup. At dinner on the night that E.J. Dionne was here for the Bernardin lecture, there was a lot of buzz about the movie at my table. My good friend Moss Blachman made it sound like it was the greatest movie he’d seen in years. So I was eager to see it. Not eager enough to pay today’s exorbitant ticket prices to view it in a multiplex, but eager. I finally got it from Netflix this weekend.
And was disappointed. I had expected a cross between Robert Redford’s standard-setting “The Candidate” and some of George Clooney’s best recent work. Something with the depth of “Michael Clayton,” and the perception of “Up in the Air.” I felt like politics was due for that sort of treatment.
But I didn’t get that. Instead, I got a rather facile “ripped from today’s headlines” middling drama about… what was it about? Lost innocence? A descent into cynicism? Maybe. But it wasn’t a very deep descent. Or at least, the protagonist didn’t have far to descend from where he started.
What was missing? Well, first of all, any sense of why the campaign strategist played by Ryan Gosling thought the candidate played by Clooney was special. There are references to the fact that he does — that he has to believe in a candidate, and this is one he believes in (thereby making any disillusionment painful). But nothing happens or is said to make me believe it. The candidate seems pretty facile to me, nowhere near the kind of subtly redeemable character that I’ve seen Clooney play.
As for the protagonist — well, he seems pretty garden-variety, really. When his moment of shocked discovery comes, I simply don’t believe that he’s shocked. Nothing I’ve seen has persuaded me that he possesses enough of a moral sense to be shaken on a profound level. The character I’ve come to know by this point wouldn’t have a stunned look on his face; he would simply say, “OK, here’s a problem; let’s deal with it.”
Of course, by the end, what at the moment of revelation was indeed a garden-variety, way-of-the-world scandal has become something truly horrific, mainly because of the way our vapid antihero has mucked everything up.
Anyway, at the end of it all, there’s no one left standing that I can possibly care about — Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s character was the only admirable one we met along the way (the guy just refuses to turn in a bad, or even mediocre, performance, doesn’t he?). And we have learned nothing about politics, or human nature, or anything.
The thing is, we could really use a movie today that asks, and genuinely tries to answer, difficult questions about the state of politics in this country today. We’re still waiting for that film.
All that said, it was probably a B-minus or C-plus movie, an absolute score that doesn’t sound too bad. But I had expected an A-plus. So that means it failed.
Two weeks ago, when I arrived back at CAE from my trip to Key West, I saw an unusual sight in the baggage claim area. A woman had brought two children to greet an arriving man — husband and father probably, but I have no way of knowing — and the kids were in their pajamas. Fine. Made sense, I suppose, being a little before 9 p.m.
But here’s the thing — the woman I took to be the Mom was in her bathrobe and slippers. Presumably, also pajama-clad beneath the robe.
This seemed a bit much. It’s not like the arrival was not scheduled, and/or was taking place at 3 a.m.
Then, I ran across this on the Web:
Pajamas are on the rise. Across the land, according to the Wall Street Journal, teenagers have taken to wearing PJs all day, even in public—even to school! Apparel companies like Abercrombie & Fitch and American Eagle are cashing in on the trend, stocking their stores with leggings and sweatpants and other comfortable, flowy, elastic waistbanded apparel. Pajamas are even popping up in high fashion: Here’s Sofia Coppola happily, gorgeously stepping outside during the day in Louis Vuitton pajamas, and here’s designer Rachel Roy attending a movie premiere in her own brand of jammies. Last week Shopbop.com, a women’s clothing site that tracks new “looks,” exhorted its customers to “get comfortable with pajama dressing.” Among its wares were several silk blouses selling for more than $200 each; a pair of silk drawstring plaid pants with elastic cuffs for $495; and these $845 (!) wide-leg print pants constructed out of sateen, a fabric that I think is mostly used to make bed sheets.
As you might expect, a whole lot of silly and just-plain-mean people aren’t happy about this nascent pajama craze. A number of school districts have banned sleeping clothes on the theory that they somehow inhibit students’ motivation. The idea, I guess, is that taking the time to dress up for school makes you ready to learn—which sounds plausible until you think about it for five seconds. Isn’t spending time worrying about what you’ll wear an even bigger distraction from academics?
Some people are so upset with pajamas they want to bring in the law. Michael Williams, a commissioner in Louisiana’s Caddo Parish, won national headlines a few weeks ago by calling for a ban on pajamas in public. Under Williams’ proposed ordinance, people caught wearing pajamas—which he defines as clothes sold in the sleepwear section of department stores—would be forced to perform community service. (I wonder if they would be required to wear orange jumpsuits—which look like very comfortable pajamas—while serving their sentences.) Williams told the Journal that the daytime pajama trend signaled America’s dwindling “moral fiber,” and then added a nutty slippery-slope argument to bolster his point: “It’s pajamas today; what is it going to be tomorrow? Walking around in your underwear?”
Precisely. And there’s nothing nutty about it, given that that’s precisely what I wear to bed, and I’m guessing a lot of guys are with me on that. I have only this to say about the PJ trend: I don’t hold with it. I mean, come on, people — make an effort. Count me among the “silly and just-plain-mean people.” Somebody’s gotta draw a line somewhere.
There are related phenomena which I will also decry. Saturday night, I saw an SNL rerun from just before Christmas. The musical guest was someone unfamiliar to me, a Michael Bublé. He is apparently a crooner who aspires to the Sinatra-to-Tony Bennett spectrum. Although I’m thinking Andy Williams-Wayne Newton is more like his speed.
Anyway, he was perched on a barstool with a microphone, dressed in black tie. Which was appropriate, this being well after 6 p.m. But here’s the thing: He hadn’t shaved in a day or two. And if his close-cropped hair had ever known a comb, it was not obvious. He kept smiling at the audience in this particularly smarmy manner, and all I could think was, Hey, you want to ingratiate yourself? Take a minute to shave. It’s not that freaking hard. It takes less time than putting on a tux. Give it a try.
I really don’t know what is supposed to be achieved with the “I can’t be bothered to shave” look. It wasn’t even careful, Sonny Crockett can’t be bothered to shave. It was actually like he got up that morning and looked in the mirror and said, Nah. Not gonna do it. I’m just going on live national TV, and my thing is to look like somebody from the 40s, when men were carefully barbered, but nah…
Back to the PJ thing. Ladies, if that’s what you want to do, go for it. But be advised — full-length PJs are not a good look, for anybody.
As for guys, I’ve gotta ask — how many guys even wear pajamas to sleep? I’m thinking, not that many. I mean, what’s underwear for? I know that nobody wants to see me in public in what I wear in the sack, and I respect that. So should everybody else.
