Black People Loot, White People Find?

Boing Boing.net showed two photos of people waist deep in water, one was a black person the other two whites. In each, a person appears to be dragging a bag or box or two of food or beverages.

The images were shot by different photographers, and captioned by different photo wire services. The Associated Press caption accompanying the image with a black person says he's just finished "looting" a grocery store. The AFP/Getty Images caption describes lighter skinned people "finding" bread and soda from a grocery store. No stores are open to sell these goods.

Perhaps there's more factual substantiation behind each copywriter's choice of words than we know. But to some, the difference in tone suggests racial bias, implicit or otherwise."

I'd Like To Give The World a ...$100 Laptop!

Nicholas Negroponte has a mission. It's to outfit the third world with $100 laptops to get everybody surfing and to put the power of the internet into the hands of the poor. Men's Journal included a story by Paul Hochman about this endeavor.

"Despite its low price, the computer is not a bare-bones throwaway. "It will be a Linux-based, full color, full-screen laptop," Negroponte says. 'It will be rugged, use a wind-up charger, be Wi-Fi and cellphone enabled, and have USB ports galore. "The design challenge for producing the computer, available in 2006, centered around reducing the price of the screen, which is responsible for half the cost of the average laptop. The solution: a mechanism that resembles a minature rear-projection television. The free Linux operating system also brought down costs."

Reverse Engineering the Boat Propeller

Reading through Men's Journal on the way to Boston in the car. Came across an amazing photo of a boat with the engine facing the wrong way. Volvo-Penta has come up with a revolutionary way to improve fuel efficiency, by facing the prop 'backwards." Accelleration is increased 15%, top speed bumps up 20%, and all in all it comes down to : Why didn't we think of this until now?


Volvo's newest reverse direction boat engine. 

"The entire system can also turn like a rudder, enabling both high speed turns and precision parking. Prices start at about $300,000 for the large inboards."

Shaking his Finger at the New Yorker

Lewis Lazare wrote scathingly last week in the Chicago Sun-Times about the New Yorker's recent all Target ad issue.

"But make no mistake. Target advertising executives must be laughing all the way to the image bank because of the ad placement coup they have pulled off, while New Yorker staffers, most notably Editor David Remnick, can only wipe the egg from their faces.

What is most stunning about the issue is the New Yorker's refusal to clearly flag any of the pages and pages of copyless Target illustrations as "advertisements." And in "ad" after "ad" it would be quite easy to confuse them for New Yorker editorial content, because all of them are done in a stylish format closely resembling the cartoons and illustrations for which the magazine has become famous.

Yet, perplexingly, the New Yorker seemingly went out of its way to boldly flag with the word "advertisement" a few small house ads in the issue that no one could misconstrue as anything but ads.

Whatever the damage done to the New Yorker's vaunted editorial integrity by its first-ever single-advertiser issue, Target, already perceived as a relatively classy discount retailer thanks to its savvy advertising profile, has had its image immeasurably burnished by the practically seamless blending of its ads into the New Yorker editorial product.

But the real kicker in what has to be counted among the most shameful moments in New Yorker history is the list of illustrators involved in the Target ad campaign that appears on page 87. The ad copy above that list simply says: "Our thanks to all the illustrators who brought this project to life."

Would it have been too much to ask for the New Yorker or Target to reference this as an "advertising project," just to provide a tiny bit of clarity somewhere in the magazine? Instead, we are left to conclude that maybe the New Yorker and Target had decided the project was, in fact, something more deceptive."

The Newest Hartshorne, model 2005. 

Will Play For Food or Money

Stepping past the entertainers in downtown Northampton, MA on Friday night. 

How Flat Is the World, Really?

Joshua Clover writes in opposition to Thomas Friedman's thesis that the world is flat in the Village Voice.

"If Friedman's no global economist, one might expect him to check in with one who works his beat: Fernand Braudel, say, or Giovanni Arrighi, highly regarded "world systems" scholars who study interlocking histories of capital accumulation. They agree, commonsensically, that with each cycle—Renaissance Italy to the Dutch East India Trading Company, Britannia to the United States' "Long Twentieth Century"—the relative power of a given era's leading military-industrial regime, compared to the rest of the world, has increased steadily. That is, they believe the exact opposite of The World Is Flat. Alas, Arrighi and Braudel appear in the book's index a combined total of zero times, 49 fewer than Microsoft.

But if Friedman's in search of common sense he needn't look far afield; this spring, The New York Times featured a series called "Class Matters." In the May 15 flagship essay, his colleagues Janny Scott and David Leonhardt noted that class mobility in the United States is now less likely than it has yet been in our lifetimes. This simple, empirical fact—the playing field is tilted, and rolling uphill is harder than ever—cannot coexist with the book's thesis."

Why He Won't Wash His Hands

Peter R made the case against handwashing on errtravel.com.

"Let's assume you wash up before leaving your hotel room. Consider the germs, dirt, cleaning product residues, and other contaminants you probably picked up on your way out of the hotel, getting into and out of the taxi, paying the driver with cash, taking your shoes off and putting them back on at the security checkpoint, eating at the airport restaurant, shaking hands with colleagues going off to other flights, and so on. (And then consider the germs you pick up if you happen to rub your eyes, touch your hair, blow your nose, scratch your arm or leg, etc. during this time.)

Now you enter an airport restroom, where there's often no door to touch and with urinals that automatically flush. You touch your clothing (pretty clean) and one part of your body (pretty clean, assuming good hygiene). (Plus note that urine is generally considered to be sterile.) And NOW you're worried about what's on your hands? I'd suggest that most times, your hands are not measurably dirtier when you leave the restroom, than when you entered.

In fact, it would probably be better if men washed their hands when ENTERING the restroom, so they don't expose a sensitive part of the body to all the stuff they've picked up in getting there!"

When the Wind Really Blows

Most are familiar with Hurricane Andrew, which slammed into the Florida coast in 1992. Andrew is the costliest hurricane on record. CBS News reported on this in Sept 2004.

"John Gurney of the National Weather Service says, “Hurricane Andrew dwarfs all other storms we've had: $26 billion in damage by Hurricane Andrew, parts of Florida were devastated by that storm.”

At $7 billion - about a quarter of the cost of Andrew, Hugo was the second most expensive storm in history. But when everything is totaled, last month's Hurricane Charley will probably bump Hugo out of the No.2 position.

A hurricane's devastation isn't always measured in dollars. The costliest hurricane in lives happened in the year 1900 in Galveston, Texas. At least 8,000 people died.

Weather 2000 meteorologist Jeffrey Schultz says, “Before the day of computers before the day of satellites, hurricanes were able to gather up a lot of strength and almost come out of nowhere and without any warning, bringing along a storm surge, high winds and heavy rains and actually killed a lot of people.”

The storm surge was responsible for the majority of those deaths, which is true of most hurricanes.

Gurney notes, “Historically, nine out of 10 fatalities have been related to storm surge. Storm surge is basically the rising of the water due to the hurricane's central pressure and also the winds pushing the water on shore.”

High winds aren't as deadly as you might think. For example, 1969's Camille packed winds at a whopping 190 miles per hour. It was one of only three Category 5 hurricanes to hit the U.S. this century. Yet neither Camille nor Andrew rank in the top 10 for deadliest storms on file."

Vietnamese Vignettes

Amanda Hesser, the NY Times magazine's food editor, wrote about a trip to Vietnam in Sunday's paper.

"Hoi An, which means "peaceful life union," is a sleepy place easily traversed on foot. Down an alley off of Phan Boi Chau, we saw a man who stood in the center of the road, tossing bricks up to the second floor where another man caught them. A house was being built, one brick at a time. When we strolled through the central market one afternoon, nearly all the vendors were napping, some lying on bags of rice, others with feet propped up on piles of dried beans, heaps of cucumber.

But the inevitable reorientation to tourists has begun, and it is hard to escape the town's many energetic tailors. More than one woman grabbed me by the arm and tried to drag me to her store.

I was more charmed by Xuan, a tailor on Hoang Dieu, who simply posted a sign in English, which read: "Stop looking, you've found the most honest, friendly, non-pressuring + accurate craftswoman in Hoi An. Surpassed all expectations with her creative flair. Gucci move aside!!!"

Hoi An's charm is its historic buildings, whose architecture was heavily influenced by immigrants from Japan and China. At Fujian Assembly Hall, a Chinese-style community center, a wooden model of a junk stood near sculptures of the man of the sun and the woman of the moon, two magical Chinese gods. At the back of the hall were altars to deities for beauty, wealth and social position.

A group of young men wearing T-shirts that said "Netnam" - the Microsoft of Vietnam - crowded in behind us. They were there to pray to Tan Tai Cong, the tycoon deity who determines people's financial future. If an entrepreneur's prayers are granted, he is supposed to return to thank the deity. If he fails to, it is certain death - or, at the very least, social ostracism."

We've Been Doing it Like Banshees--Now he's Yours

Augusten Burroughs is a brilliant writer who lives nearby in Northampton, MA. He wrote a column in this month's Details magazine about various kinds of f**cks.

"Turns out, the day the divorce had become final, Amanda and her now ex-husband had spent the afternoon in bed, in what was now Amanda's home. "We've been f**king like banshees," she said, "We've been meeting up at lunch. At hotels." Amanda detailed hours of determined felatio and crusty french bread spread with Brie. "When we were married, we never had sex in the shower. Now? Let me tell you that the man will never think of hair conditioner the same way again."

"That evening, Amanda called the home of her ex-husband and spoke to the girlfriend, the mother of the other baby. And she said, "I just wanted you to know that your boyfriend has been f**king me every day for three weeks. And he's just today told me that he loves me and wants to come home. But I don't want him, and I'm officially giving him to you."

Amanda had successfully pulled off the Revenge f**k."

Less Destruction in the Amazon for the Year

Good news came out of Brazil from the AP yesterday.

"The destruction of the Amazon rain forest has slowed dramatically this year, the government said, but environmentalists said it was too soon to celebrate and urged caution with the statistics.

Preliminary data indicate that 3,551 square miles of rain forest was destroyed between August 2004 and July 2005, the Environment Ministry said Friday. The figure was half the area the ministry initially said was razed the previous year a total that was later revised upward to 10,190 square miles.

The ministry attributed the decline to a stronger police presence in the Amazon and tougher fines for illegal deforestation. Last year, the government launched a $140 million plan to reduce Amazon destruction.

Environmental defenders applauded the decline in destruction but warned that many factors including an off-season for farming may have contributed to a one-time drop.

A sharp decline in international soy prices has prompted less soy planting in Brazil, the world's second-largest producer after the United States. Expanding soybean plantations are a big cause of Amazon destruction."

The Beach by the Seine Will Have to Suffice

The number of French vacationers has risen continuously, growing from an estimated 30 percent of the population in 1950 to more than 70 percent in the early eighties, Froidure said. CNN Travel had this sad story in today's editions.

"After stagnating for about two decades, these numbers appear on the decline. Nearly four out of every 10 French people don't go on vacation -- nearly half of them because they can't afford it, according to a 2004 study by the Tourism Ministry.

All European nations guarantee employees between four and five weeks' paid vacation a year. The United States and Australia are the only industrialized countries without national minimums on the length of vacations, according to the International Labor Organization.

The French average seven weeks of paid vacation a year -- two more than the country's labor laws stipulate. They work an average of 1,441 hours per year, compared with 1,661 hours for the British, and 1,824 for Americans, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reports.

In August, France all but shuts down. In Paris, so many shops, restaurants and pharmacies close that those staying open often put up signs: "We're here in August."

But things are changing. The number of people unable to get away is on the upswing, and worried officials are starting to respond.

For a fourth year, Paris has transformed a 3.5-kilometer (2.1-mile) stretch of the right bank of the Seine into a temporary beach, trucking in tons of sand and palm trees and drawing hoards of well-oiled, bikini-clad stay-at-homes.

Last year, a record 3.9 million people -- Parisians and tourists alike -- visited the riverside beach."

The Gaulic Dismay: "We were Robbed"

The New Yorker's August 22 'all Target ads issue' included among the creative uses of the red and white bullseye, a look at the sour mood in France by Adam Gopnik. He writes.

"When the name "London" was announced, a punch-in-the-stomach silence struck Paris. The French Olympians insisted that the British has somehow cheated, or failed to show "fair play"--an idiom borrowed from English and used regularly in French. Almost unbelievably, Bernard Delanoe, the green-gay mayor of Paris, was still making the accusations of English trickery and cheating four days after the truly horrible news from London arrived---a failure of decency and common sense that had left-wing newspaper Liberation, a natural ally, lecturing him on the meaning of 'sore loser' and reminding its readers that no instance of British Olympic treachery has even vaguely been discovered."

Further in the story, Gopnik discusses the French tendency to throw out whoever was the incumbent. 'veering wildly from the left to the right side of the road, like Cary Grant trying to drive while drunk in North by Northwest. 'We and North Korea are the only countries left that still have a military parade on their national holiday,' adds Alain Minc, of the Le Monde newspaper, who says the stock market in France, despite all the naysayers, beat out New York, London and the rest of the world in gains this summer.

Would You Pay Half a Buck for A Short Story?

David Utter writes in WebProNews about Amazon's new Short Story Shorts.

"For less than the price of a Coke Zero, customers can purchase short stories by a selection of published authors.

It's an experiment in little payments for little stories. 49 cents will gets the buyer a dozen pages by John Twelve Hawks, or 14 by medical thriller author Robin Cook. Established authors reign in Amazon.com's Shorts pages.

Amazon Shorts offers works in several genres:
• Biography & Memoirs
• Literature & Fiction
• Mystery & Thrillers
• Nonfiction & Essays
• Science
• Science Fiction & Fantasy

The online retailer delivers the works in digital format. Customers can receive PDF, HTML, or an emailed text version of the short. Shorts purchases remain in an Amazon customer's 'digital locker' for future retrieval.

The works offer a way to take an inexpensive look at an established character like F. Paul Wilson's "Repairman Jack," in 33 pages for 49 cents. For an established author, the program offers a gateway for readers unfamiliar with their work to get interested in purchasing and reading longer works in published form.

Currently, Amazon only wants to hear from published authors who want to be considered for the Shorts program. It will be interesting to see if they open the program to a wider pool of writers, and if Amazon can grow the body of Shorts beyond its current numbers."

Takes a Lotta Time to Write Reality Shows

On his first day as a story assistant for the reality TV series "Renovate My Family," Zachary Isenberg said, his bosses made an unusual request: Fill out your time card for the next three weeks of work.

Isenberg was puzzled. How could he estimate his hours before he worked them?

"They said, 'It's crazy in production and the accountants need the paperwork right now,' " the 32-year-old writer recalled. So Isenberg, who hoped that the job would further his prospects in TV, did as he was told.

Thus allegedly began a 2 1/2 -month ordeal — marked by interminable workdays spent in overheated, cramped offices — that is part of the basis for a lawsuit filed Tuesday by Isenberg and nine other writers and editors on seven reality TV shows.

Reality TV producers have disputed allegations that their employees toil in sweatshop conditions. They say writing for a reality show, which often involves plotting out story lines and editing interviews as much as writing dialogue, isn't the same as working on a scripted program.

Guild officials contend, however, that writers for reality TV play an integral role and deserve similar benefits to those enjoyed by their peers in movies and scripted television.

Joined by Petrie and other guild officials, Isenberg and two other plaintiffs held a news conference Wednesday. Isenberg described conditions on "Renovate My Family" as "unbearable." Working as many as 80 hours a week left him "so dazed all the time I never had a chance to rest or recuperate," he said.

To meet the deadline, Isenberg recalled, he found himself working six days a week, often until 10 p.m. Occasionally, the writers would stay past midnight to screen footage for Fox executives. Isenberg said one story assistant was so distraught after working 28 hours straight that she broke down in tears and had to be sent home.

"Everybody wanted to do a good job and work hard," Isenberg said, "so people felt very frustrated and angry."

Through it all, Isenberg continued to receive the same pay, about $900 a week. Under state labor laws, the suit alleges, he and his fellow writers should have received several thousand dollars in overtime pay.

After 2 1/2 months, Isenberg quit. He is now working on another reality TV show.

"It was a difficult choice," he said. "I'm not a quitter. But they treated me like I was nothing." The LA Times' Richard Verrier reported this story today.

Dining on Gino's Chicken to Honor the Man

Gino Piccin is a legendary salesman who taught me many things about the business. He was in the news recently, being honored by his fellow Dante clubbers in West Springfield, Tom Shea wrote about him in today's Republican. Gino's famous chicken with herbs will be cooked up by his brother Dino, at a Sept 9 Supper in Gino's honor. He is battling leukemia, but his spirits are good, and the treatment is working. I remember Gino used to have one finger that was cut off, at the top knuckle, he said it happened in his dad's bakery, the Venetian.

I met Gino in 1980, and he taught he how to sell Val-pak direct mail advertising. We had a memorable time once when we went to a convention on Cape Cod with our girlfriends. We went deep sea fishing in Buzzard's bay, got sun tanned and drank a lotta beers and made it back to Western Mass by 2 am Sunday night. It was a dreamy, fun four-day weekend.

Throughout the years I run into Gino from time to time, and we always laugh and both fondly recall our earlier days. He would always say, "after you've got the sale, get out!...don't hang around and mess it up." He bought and sold Val-Pak franchises, and bounced back twice working for competitors, selling the same concept of coupons by mail. Gino is a wonderful man, and I wish him the best.

What We Really Want

Attention is becoming the holy grail of mankind, the thing we most strive for but get the least. I predict that there will be a surge in demand for someone's full and undivided attention...and a valueing and delineation of this. This special thing will be what advertisers crave but rarely ever get.

Split multitaskers are never focusing on just one thing these days. They talk on the phone while browsing the web, chat in IM while writing in Word. Those times when you get someone's FULL attention are becoming rare...and valuable.

Today as I am typing and reading stories on the web, the tv in the background is churning out a dramatic urban nighttime soap opera. A story set during the Iraq war, with soldiers, and embeds, and bad guys who wear black or red hoods.

Paying attention some day will count for much more than it does now.

Travel Vandals Invading Venice

Venice illustrates some of the complicated political and economic issues involved in tourism. The city receives 16.5 million tourists a year, most of whom shuffle down the main route from St Mark's Square to the Rialto Bridge. The latest plague there is the cruise ships. Forbe's Anna Somers writes in the latest issue.

"They come through the deep-water channel that has been carved across the lagoon and is one of the reasons why this is turning from shallow water in to something closer to open sea conditions. This contributes to the flooding that is undermining the survival of the city, but the town council dares not close the Port of Venice to big ships for the jobs that would be lost.

These cruise ships disgorge hundreds upon hundreds of tourists, most of whom go to Saint Mark's Square and feed the pigeons, a not so minor ecological problem in itself. Venice cannot take this number of people, let alone any increase, and remain tolerable for the permanent residents, and so the population goes down, year on year: from 150,000 in the 1960s to 60,000 today.

The easy money from the visitors has corrupted the locals to the extent that they even serve up bad food in the restaurants--something that goes against every Italian's natural instinct--because they have learned to despise their clients. After all, what does it matter if somebody complains; there are plenty more to take his place. And so the city dies, spiritually and physically.

A gorilla-tracking permit in Uganda costs $250, which has led to gorillas being treated with much more respect by the locals, quite apart from the revenue generated. In West Virginia, a white-water rafting tax is collected from everyone who goes on commercial rafting expeditions. The fee goes to studying the ecological effect of the rafting and cleaning up the river banks several times a year.

There should be a charge to visit Venice, although with the same kinds of concessions that museums give to students and the old. Through imposing or withholding charges, you could encourage tourists to go off the beaten track and thus spread the numbers around. It should be cheaper, for example, to visit the whole of the Louvre, but without the Mona Lisa, than to see just the Mona Lisa. If it is free to visit Bologna, a wonderful town of medieval towers, great art and the best food in Italy, but which has never been on the Grand Tour circuit, then the busloads may decide to go there rather than Florence, where a charge should again be levied.

Lastly, tourists should better educate themselves about where they are going, so that they respect it more and get more out of it. Slower, better informed travel, with the readiness to put something back in the way of direct contribution to improving and protecting the experience is the way to be a tourist."

A Tiny Town Kinda Tale

The Boston Herald editorial staff wrote a doozer today, on their website.

"So does anyone think Aramark Concessions went to the Yellow Pages and by chance picked a security firm owned by a Suffolk court official who also happens to have a sister on the Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission?

No? Well, that's what's wrong with this whole business, which is beginning to smell worse than a keg of stale beer.

It's no secret how this town works. Why should the folks who pump the beer at Fenway hire some Joe Schmoe without connections? What's the point? Maybe hiring a firm owned by Suffolk County Register of Probate Richard P. Iannella and his wife doesn't guarantee a thing. And maybe sister Suzanne Iannella does indeed recuse herself as one of three ABCC commissioners when any matter involving Fenway Park comes up. But community activists insist she was quite interested in Red Sox plans to use Yawkey Way as an outdoor beer garden, which doesn't exactly sound like a hands-off arrangement to us.

Then there's the register himself, who can't seem to remember how long his firm has held the Fenway contract to help oversee alcohol sale compliance. Iannella told Herald reporter Kevin Rothstein he got the contract last year. Aramark officials say the firm was hired three years ago.

And how an allegedly full-time court official finds time to run a full-time business is another intriguing question. (Gosh, those nights and weekends must be brutal.)

This is a deal court officials and the state Ethics Commission need to take a closer look at."

Like the Song Says, Women ARE Smarter!

A smart woman named Cindy emailed me this story from the International Herald Tribune by Thomas Fuller.

"Christopher Clarke, the president of a headhunting company cites studies showing that women are better at performing many things at once, or multitasking, and that they have more sophisticated emotional intelligence, like being able to recognize another person's feelings more accurately than men.

"There's a lot of evidence that says that women are superior in evaluating people, in managing their ego, in calming aggression in others," Clarke said in an interview. "These are precisely the characteristics you need in a modern corporation."

Clarke said companies seemed more interested in hiring top-level female executives, especially after the scandals at companies like Enron, Parmalat, Tyco and WorldCom. These companies might have avoided "aggressive types of behavior," Clarke said, if they had had more women as directors.

The most recent data show a small increase in the percentage of women on corporate boards, to 8.2 percent today from 7.1 percent in 2003, based on a survey of 1,600 companies worldwide. The sharpest increases have been in Scandinavia.

Clarke says it is in companies' interest to recruit more women into their boardrooms because more diversity means broader perspectives and "better decisions."

"The days of the dominant 800-pound gorilla steel magnates who built huge monopolies by roughriding over everybody are gone," he said. Traditional corporate executives are like dominant male apes who have to collude with allies to cast rivals out of the troop, he wrote.

"As we share 98 percent of our genes with the great apes," Clarke wrote, "it is no surprise that in today's boardrooms we can observe much similar behavior."

Yippee! Good News for Newspapers' Websites

The Internet has proved to be a moneymaker for traditional newspapers, as they ring up big-time online ad revenue. David Utter reported today in Web Pro News.

"Quiet the carillons and stop the procession. Newspapers aren't quite dead yet. Readership of the printed page may be down, but the online versions have pulled in over $500 million in ad revenue for the second quarter of 2005, according to MediaPost.

The Newspaper Association of America was cited as noting a jump in ad revenue of 29 percent from the same period last year. Overall, ad revenue for the papers only grew 2.8 percent from last year.

2005 online ad revenues for papers could see a figure of $1.4 billion if forecasts by eMarketer prove correct. Newspapers have been seeing this growth come at the expense of print advertising, a much more costly medium."

Hey, What About the Wedding?

Agents seized $700,000 in fake U.S. postage stamps and blue jeans worth several hundred thousand dollars, FBI Deputy Director John Pistole said, in a report on AOL News today. They also got 42 million in viagra, meth amphetamine, and fake cigarettes. Eight of those charged were arrested on their way to the fake wedding, called for 2 p.m. Sunday, off the Jersey coast. Operation Royal Charm was named for the yacht.

The affair was seven months in the making, and the bride and groom were actually undercover FBI agents who worked with the accused smugglers for several years, said Christopher J. Christie, the U.S. attorney in New Jersey.

"Invitations were sent out, a date was given and RSVPs were received from different points around the world," Christie said at a Justice Department news conference.

"One guest even brought a pair of gold Presidential Rolex watches," New Jersey FBI Special Agent in Charge Leslie G. Wiser Jr. told reporters in Newark.

They were assured transportation would be provided to the yacht. They were taken into custody instead. Some of the men arrested Sunday appeared in U.S. District Court in Camden, New Jersey, on Monday in clothes that looked appropriate for a wedding.

The containers carried phony manifests identifying the goods inside as toys, rattan furniture and other items, Richter said.

Will the Handles Fall Off?

Philip Wartel is out of business, and after two years he has nothing good to say about the funeral directors in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts who ran him into the ground. Wartel opened Pioneer Valley Casket Co just a year ago, and has faced the wrath of the funeral directors who didn't like him undercutting their prices by $1500-2000 per casket. Today's Recorder newspaper details the sad story.

"David Quinn Sr., of Kidder Funeral Home in Northfield,
confronted a grieving widow at her husbands wake and told her he hadn't signed earlier in the day for receipt of the casket they'd purchased from Wartel because "I won't be responsible if the handles fall off or the bottom falls out after you leave. You chose to buy the casket elsewhere; you should be here to sign for it when it arrives."

Wartel said the incident was a violation of the funeral home rule that says homes can't require purchase of a casket along with purchase of other funeral goods and services. Another funeral director said Wartel's caskets 'were seconds, they squeaked, and they were faded and/or damaged, and some were used before.

Under 1994 federal rules, people can provide their own caskets and can request a preprinted price list for services and products from funeral homes.

No More Lectures. Only Conversations

Chris Waddle, director of the Knight Community Journalism Fellows writes in the Annistonstar.com, delivering more bad news to newspapers.

"Modern media advocates from the American Press Institute love to stump newspaper executives by asking if they can identify Craig Newmark. Few can. Too bad. He’s the inventor of craigslist.org, the highly successful classified ad alternative spreading like a virus on the Internet. When editors asked the head of Knight Ridder newspapers what keeps him awake at night, he answered “online advertising.”

It’s not just the loss of revenue. Buying stuff online is a major activity of the young, non-readers of newspapers. Ads are news too. So attract the youthful pocketbook and you’ve got a new customer for a virtual information community.

Most newspapers try to please existing readers instead of potential ones, according to journalist and scholar, David T. Z. Mindich in “Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don’t Follow the News.”

Seeking different readers is why multiculturalism is so important in the newsroom.

When a news organization consists of white people speaking to white people about black people, as an example, its influence on public affairs such as school reform may diminish in a multi-cultural community of communities. Economic influence with advertisers may diminish if ads don’t reach young consumers.

The generational shift means editors can no longer talk down to readers or define news without consulting readers. No more lectures. Only conversations."

Beefing About Life in Uganda

Marie Javins has written a lot for GoNOMAD and she has moved to Uganda. Here is a slice of her life there with HM, her partner.

"Sunday mornings are the quietest time at Paraa, the small ranger/tourist village at Murchison Falls National Park where I share H.M.s home. Mornings are beautiful, as he has set up the bed (covered in a mosquito net) on the screened verandah, which faces east.

Hippos grunt from the Nile, which is located right down the bushy hill. Birds chirp cheerfully and relentlessly. The eleven warthogs that roam the grounds battle for pack supremacy, using strange grunts and wheezes as war cries. The sunrises are frequently dramatic, and thanks to the 7 a.m. Nile ferry that acts as a daily alarm clock, we never miss them.

H.M. works daily from 7:30 to 5:30, but no one works from noon to 2 as this is the hottest part of the day. He comes home and lays in the hammock while I cower in the shade of the house, hunched as usual over the laptop and whatever comic book emergency I am dealing with at the moment.

Food is usually one thing cooked in a variety of ways: just beef. Beef, beef, and more beef. It’s good and cheap and plentiful in Uganda. I foolishly showed up in Masindi the first time and said to H.M.: “Where can I buy some chicken breasts?”

He pointed to a live caged chicken by the side of the road.

“There is your chicken.”

At this point, I decided to stick with his steaks he’d bought in Kampala. I don’t know how to kill or butcher a chicken. And vegetarian options are limited to using whatever is on sale in Masindi that week. Right now, avocados are big and mango season has passed us."

Calvin Broadus Livin' Large

Calvin Broadus is everywhere. The famous rapper by the name of Snoop Doggy Dogg has made the mainstream....you see him on Chrysler commercials, teeing off with Lee Iacocca, and you read about his new youth football league, that's poaching all of the best coaches from the other kids leagues. His rail thin body is lithe and his stoned out visage is compelling.

Snoop is also an accomplished pornographer, he appears and produces films wearing clothes with women who are naked. Snoop has a demeanor that appeals to middle class whites, even though some of his songs such as "control yo ho" can grate on anyone's sense of woman's rights and feminists should probably hate him.

I find it fascinating that Snoop has climbed up to such a mainstream place that he can call up Chrysler and demand a free car...and they send him one!

While Googling the Snoopster I found a court case from 2001 where two recordings were sampled. Damn if that first one (the complainer) didn't sound just like Snoop's song (the defender). But they both took their melody from Otis Redding's Hard to Handle, published decades earlier.

Pity the Man behind the Pump

Jay Fitzgerald writes in today's Boston Herald that gas station owners are hurting despite the huge price increases we are seeing at the pumps.

"Huge rivals such as Wal-Mart and Stop & Shop that now sell gasoline at cheaper prices to draw customers into theirlarge stores. But the biggest current problem for gas-station owners is that the more prices rise at the pumps, the worse the cash flow is for station owners. Gas stations don't charge motorists a percentage of pump prices to cover their costs. They usually charge from 5 cents to 12 cents a gallon.

But they still have to shell out tens of thousands of dollars up front each time a huge truck tanker pulls in to refill underground tanks at stations.

``The margin in this business is at its worst point in history,'' said Paul O'Connell, executive director of the New England Service Station and Automotive Repair Association and owner of the Lunenburg Exxon station.

``It's killing them,'' said Paul Fiore, executive vice president of the Service Station Dealers of America and Allied Trades, referring to the multitude of pressures on small service-station owners.

The numbers bear that out.

Tens of thousands of service stations have closed in recent decades across the nation, industry figures show. According to the Massachusetts Standards Division, there were about 7,500 licensed fuel sellers in the state in 1995 – and today that number is about 6,500."

What it Takes to Get 'Em In the Seats

Symphony orchestras are becoming a hard sell to time pressed, distracted Americans. But some orchestras have begun introducing novel ways to stem the outgoing tide..with martini bars, free buffet lines, speed dating and special event tee shirts.

The rub is that the biggest drop is in the subscriber numbers. People are willing to go, but in the true spirit of 'bowling alone' won't subscribe for the whole series. These are the lifeblood of the symphonies.The NY Times included this long account in Sunday's arts section.

Another factor is that there are many more concerts being performed than ten years ago, without a corresponding rise in concertgoers. Too much product.

But there has been success in adding elements of other popular pasttimes, like video screens projecting the orchestra members flailing their arms and close ups of them playing their instruments.

Have More Kids--Please!

Some villages in South Korea "haven't heard babies crying in 18 years," said Lee Kwon Hee, an official who was quoted in today's NY Times. So the country has changed its national health care plan to cover reversing vasectomies and tubal ligations, in order to spur more couples to have more children.

"In South Korea, the decline has been so precipitous that it caught the government off guard. Policies designed to discourage more than two children, like vasectomies and tubal ligation, were covered. 'In the next two or three years, we won't be able to increase the birthrate,' said Park Ha Jeong, of the Health ministry. 'But we have to stop the decline or it will be too late.

Unlike many western countries, Korea doesn't have immigrants coming in who have more babies. Some of the elementary schools are down to a tenth of the number of students as in the 1970s. When one young couple in the village of Seokdong celebrated the birth of twins, they were given $1100 as a cash incentive.

More of the Good, Less of the Bad

My mother Valerie visited us last week, and showed me a column by David Brooks from the NY Times. Apparently there has been a huge increase in virtue in America.

According to Brooks, family violence in all forms is way, way down. Violent crime overall is down by 55% since 1993, and violence by teens is down 71%, according to the Justice dept. Drunk driving fatalities have declined by 38% (this has to be related to airbags, though), even though we're driving 81% more. Even our consumption of hard liquor is down, by over 30 percent. Teen pregnancy has also declined, more than 28%, also down are teenage births.

Brooks says we're in the midst of a moral revival, despite our media which prefers to play up the negative. Nice to read it, even though it feels made up.

Don't Have a Quarter for the Meter? Use Your Cell

Donna Goodison writers in today's Boston Herald about an ingenious idea. "It could answer Boston's pesky parking meter woes.

Instead of fishing for a quarter to feed the meter - or jamming it - dial your cell phone. Representatives of a Finnish company were in the Boston area this week pitching its cashless cell-phone parking technology, first introduced in high-tech Nordic countries in 2001. Nextpark Corp.'s system - billed as fraud- and vandal-proof - eliminates the need for parking meters or ticketing machines altogether.

After finding a parking space, drivers with a Nextpark account use their cell phone or other wireless device to dial the Nextpark service number. They select the corresponding parking spot and how long they expect to park.

When their time is about to run out, Nextpark makes a call or sends a text message to their cell phones. Drivers can then opt to extend the time by phone - no need to dash out of a business meeting to put more quarters in the meter.

Parking enforcement officers are equipped with a mobile phone or special hand-held device that can download data to monitor against scofflaws. It was recently reported that more than 25 percent of the city's 7,000 parking meters are out of service on a given day.

It Was a Very Good Year

Lakshmi Mittal had a good year. He made $19 billion in profits from his, the world's largest steel company, by acquisitions of other mills. Forbes gave details about this $25B Rich Dude.

"Mittal's Wharton-educated son, Aditya, is the group's president and chief financial officer. But it was Mittal's other child, his daughter Vanisha, who attracted the spotlight last June.

Mittal threw a lavish wedding party for 23-year-old Vanisha, who married Amit Bhatia, a Delhi-born investment banker based in London. More than a thousand guests were flow in from around the world. The invitations were 20 pages thick and encased in silver, and the festivities lasted five days spread across some of France's most famous settings, including the chateau built for Nicolas Fouquet, King Louis XIV's finance minister. Indian press reports tagged the cost at $60 million.

Mittal is no stranger to extravagance. He paid $127 million for a 12-bedroom mansion in London's tony Kensington Palace Gardens, a record price for a private residence. The home was formerly owned by Formula One racing boss Bernie Eccleston.

But Mittal and his family can well afford it. Mittal Steel is planning to pay a 40-cents-a-share dividend this year. Mittal and his family own 97% of the company, which would give them a $260 million payout, one of the largest dividends ever paid to a family-run business. Going forward, the family is understood to be diversifying by selling 11% of the company for $2 billion, reducing their holding to 88%.

Apple's iBod can't afford iPod

Carla M. Collado writes in today's Boston Herald:

"The woman behind the striped bikini silhouette that launched millions of iPod sales says she sees herself everywhere but still can't afford one of the digital tune toys. Mandy Coulton, 26, a dancer and nanny from Los Angeles, was paid $1,500 to have her iBod photographed for Apple's highly successful ad campaign. However, that still wasn't enough for her to get one of the popular, white ear-budded gizmos.
I would like one – but $400 for an iPod is too much for me at the moment. I can't justify spending that much money when I have day-to-day stuff to pay for like the car and rent,'' she told The New York Post.

Meanwhile, in addition to dancing, Coulton, who lives with her husband, Chris, in Sherman Oaks, Calif., has to work as a part-time nanny to pay the bills.
``Nannying puts the money in my pocket. My dance jobs are very sporadic,'' Coulton told the Post, ``But I'm not bitter or anything.''

Coulton auditioned alongside hundreds of other people in Los Angeles last March, and was one of just 10 chosen by Apple executives for the campaign. Apple has sold more than 20 million of the music players since its introduction in 2001."

Can Jane be Jane without Jane?

"The magazine should be called 'Brandon,' after the new editor. Jane doesn't exist. Jane has left the building," says Robin Steinberg, director of print services for Publicis Groupe's MediaVest..."I will definitely monitor to understand the audience's reaction," she adds. Today's Wall Street Journal weighed in:

Tradition says that magazines named for their editors tend not to survive for any significant period of time without those editors," says Roberta Garfinkle, director of print strategy at TargetCast tcm. Indeed, Mirabella, a women's magazine launched by former Vogue editor Grace Mirabella, lasted five years after Lagardère's Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. acquired it from News Corp. in 1995. Ms. Mirabella gave up her role as editor in chief of the magazine before it was sold to Hachette.

But some media buyers wonder whether Jane, whose ad pages have been relatively flat lately, may be better off with Ms.Brandon Holley. Jane's total paid circulation for the first six months of 2005 was off 4.5%. Although newsstand sales were up 15.6% for the period, that came only after Jane cut its newsstand cover price.

Fairchild is working to bolster Ms. Holley. The publisher took out a six-page ad in its own Women's Wear Daily touting the editor and playing up her "Jane" personality. "Music-obsessed? Check," reads the ad, which says of Ms. Holley, "She's so Jane." Fairchild planned to stencil Jane-related phrases on sidewalks outside certain advertisers and media-buying firms last night.

Let's Drop Dropping the F-bomb

In May a New York television reporter who apparently thought he was off the air lit into two men who had intruded on his shot, broadcasting a word-bomb to the five boroughs. From the New York Times Style section July 31

"This month a card player at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas made his name by launching a word-bomb across the table early in the tournament.

And all that art, if you want to call it that, reflects life, if you want to call it that. In the schoolyards kids bomb the pencils, the books and the teachers' dirty looks. Outside office buildings smokers bomb their bosses, and nonsmokers bomb the smokers. On the streets T-shirts bomb milk in favor of marijuana, bomb the space between the words New York and City and even bomb you just because "we're from Texas."

In the workplace, where so many of us spend our time, we are on the verge of a neo-Victorian age," said Anthony J. Oncidi, a Los Angeles labor lawyer with the firm Proskauer Rose. "Anybody can now take the position that they are subjected to a hostile work environment, and a hostile work environment can be made up of profanity."

In one case, now before the California State Supreme Court, an assistant who worked in the writing room for the television show "Friends" based a sexual harassment complaint in part on profanity. A lower court had said that a defense of "creative necessity" may apply, Mr. Oncidi said.

In advertising you hear it all the time," said Linda Kaplan Thaler, the chief executive of the Kaplan Thaler Group, an advertising agency, and a conscientious objector to word-bombing. "This is an agency that is run by women, and we weren't brought up to talk like truck drivers."

Truck drivers, sailors or pirates; it doesn't matter. The stand-ins for riffraff change, but plenty of people are still genuinely offended by profanity, not posing. James Bovino, chairman of the real estate investment firm Whiteweld, Barrister & Brown, says he watches only G-rated movies and has fired people for cursing. That's walking the walk, and it sends a message as unmistakable as a bow tie's."

Here, You Want More Coffee?

Jackie Mason on his least favorite coffee shop, Starbucks.

"You want coffee in a regular coffee shop, they'll give you all the refills you want until you drop dead. You can come in when you're 27 and keep drinking coffee until you're 98, and they'll start begging you: "Here, You want more coffee?" Do you know that you can't get a refill at Starbucks? A refill is a dollar fifty, two refills $4.50...

'And there's no chairs in those Starbucks. Instead, they have these high stools. You ever see these stools? You haven't been on a chair that high since you were two. Seventy-three year old Jews are climbing and climbing to get to the top of the chair. And when they get to the top, they can't even drink the coffee because there's 12 people around one little table, and everybody is saying 'excuse me, excuse me...then they can't get off the chair. Old Jews are begging Gentiles, "Mister, could you get me off this?"

Mind if I Brush?

Esquire Magazine has begun arriving in my mailbox, and I am usually impressed with their ribald mixture of anecdotes, intriguing photos and plain common sense. In this month's Seven Most Remarkable Things about Culture, they included this tale about the world's most famous blond.

"She was wearing a diaphanous, totally see-through black negligee, her feet were bare and she was holding a hairbrush in her hand. In a few minutes the interviewer arrived,and...Marilyn asked the woman if she minded if she brushed her hair. "Of course not," the woman replied, and when she looked up, Marilyn was brushing her pubic hair."

From Marilyn Monroe, photographer Eve Arnold's visual and anecdotal account of her experiences photographing the actress.

Pot Farms Destroying Sequoia Nat'l Park

Famed for the biggest trees in the world, Sequoia National Park is now No. 1 in another flora department: marijuana growing, with more land carved up by pot growers than any other park. Joe Robinson wrote about this in the LA Times.

"Parts of Sequoia, including the Kaweah River drainage and areas off Mineral King Road, are no-go zones for visitors and park rangers during the April-to-October growing season, when drug lords cultivate pot on an agribusiness-scale fit for the Central Valley.

"I've had meetings with law enforcement throughout the state, and everybody just sits there with their mouths open. Nobody can believe this has happened on the scale that it has," says William Ruzzamenti, a 30-year Drug Enforcement Administration official who heads up the Central Valley High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a program that spearheads drug investigations and has provided support to Sequoia and Kings Canyon.

Pot plantations have surged as Mexican-affiliated drug cartels adapt to increased border security since 9/11 and cash in on the rising price of high-grade weed, now more profitable than methamphetamine, according to investigators."

Fighting a Crowd for a $50 Laptop

An estimated 5,500 people turned out at the Richmond International Raceway in hopes of getting their hands on one of the 4-year-old Apple iBooks offered for $50 apiece recently. The Henrico County school system was selling 1,000 of the computers to county residents. New iBooks cost between $999 and $1,299. Kristen Gelineau of the AP reports on the fracas.

"Officials opened the gates at 7 a.m., but some already had been waiting since 1:30 a.m. When the gates opened, it became a terrifying mob scene.

People threw themselves forward, screaming and pushing each other. A little girl's stroller was crushed in the stampede. Witnesses said an elderly man was thrown to the pavement, and someone in a car tried to drive his way through the crowd.

"It's rather strange that we would have such a tremendous response for the purchase of a laptop computer _ and laptop computers that probably have less-than- desirable attributes," said Paul Proto, director of general services for Henrico County. "But I think that people tend to get caught up in the excitement of the event _ it almost has an entertainment value."

Wireless Dreams Coming True

A few years ago, cities wanted to be wired. Now it’s all about being wireless.
Tempe is at the forefront of what is going to be the next big thing in municipal oneupmanship: Making your entire city a WiFi hot spot. Tom Gibbons writes in the East Valley Tribune yesterday.

"Tempe likely will become the first city in the United States with border-to-border access to high-speed, wireless Internet.

And it looks like a pretty good deal for the city. The contractor, MobilePro Corporation of Bethesda, Md., is using city light poles and the like to attach the equipment. No charge to the city. MobilePro gets to showcase its wares.

When completed, visitors and residents with laptops with wireless capability will be able to access the Internet from anywhere in town. They will be able to view city and ASU Web pages free. For anything else, they’ll need an Internet Service Provider.

Other cities will follow quickly. Philadelphia plans to become the first big city with citywide wireless capability. The mayor of San Francisco wants every citizen to have it. City-wide wireless will be an issue in the upcoming New York mayoral election.

Yes, this will be the latest rage in the competition among cities."

Hurricane bearing down on a ship going the wrong way in a storm. 

Beer lugger. 

Wouldn't It Help to See a Photo on the Map?

David Utter in Web Pro News reports on the latest in search engine schemes. Showing actual photos of the blocks and stores you might find when you use their mapping features.

"Fargo, ND, made it onto the list of major cities getting the Block View treatment from Amazon's search engine, A9. The company has dispatched specially equipped trucks to take pictures of buildings as they pass by.

Oh yeah, they included places like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago as well. According to Pandia.com, A9's efforts will help that company as it begins to sell ads for Yellow Pages results. Those ads could be complemented by "click to call" links; searchers could instantly connect via VoIP to a business.

And the street level photos would be a boon for people who need driving directions. It's great to know where you're going, but even better will be seeing a picture of what you should expect to find at the end of the trip.

A9 has taken roughly 35 million pictures of those cities. Bigger rivals like Google and MSN have been implementing satellite photos into their mapping solutions. But A9 feels a street level view will be more useful to users.

A Recipe for Keeping Newspapers Alive

Michael Socolow, a professor at Brandeis, serves up a recipe for success, and explains some of why newspapers are in so much trouble in this article from the Baltimore Sun.

"Yet other key, but too often ignored, issues in the history of the newspaper business have played a role in the industry's problems. Very few Americans - or even journalists - realize that Congress passed, and President Richard M. Nixon in 1970 signed into law, the Orwellian-titled Newspaper Preservation Act. That law (essentially) allowed local newspaper monopolies to flourish throughout the country. In all but a handful of markets, dominant newspapers would employ tactics that in other industries would be considered restraint of trade in order to corner their local markets for newspaper advertising.

Joint operating agreements between newspapers that otherwise would have been competitors became legal. The cost certainty of operating in a noncompetitive environment allowed these "hometown" newspapers to grow fat with advertising revenue. New sections were added. Newspaper chains such as Gannett and Knight-Ridder scooped up these profitable properties around America. The chains grew accustomed to profit margins that would have been impossible to achieve in a truly competitive environment.

By desperately trying to serve its core - but dwindling - audience, the newspaper business is shortchanging that audience. Most newspapers are offering little more than a comfortable rehash of events that their consumers are already aware of. Instead, newspapers should be challenging their readers by providing difficult-to-obtain firsthand reports from around the world that are unavailable anywhere else. They should combine that reporting with bracing, counterintuitive commentary that would provoke thought and discussion in the civic arena."

Cindy's Impeachment Tour Stops in Crawford

Tom Engelhardt writes on tomdispatch.com about the phenomena of the Soldier's mother who is haunting Bush on his long Texas vacation.

"And then, if matters weren't bad enough, there was Cindy Sheehan. She drove to Crawford with a few supporters in a caravan of perhaps a dozen vehicles and an old red, white and blue bus with the blunt phrase "Impeachment Tour" written on it. She carried with her a tent, a sleeping bag, some clothes and evidently not much else. She parked at the side of the road and camped out - and the next thing anyone knew, she had forced the president to send out not the Secret Service or some minor bureaucrat, but two of his top men, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin.

For 45 minutes, they met and negotiated with her, the way you might with a recalcitrant foreign head of state. Rather than being flattered and giving ground, she just sent them back, insisting that she would wait where she was to get the president's explanation for her son's death. ("They said they'd pass on my concerns to George Bush. I said, 'Fine, but I'm not talking to anybody else but him'.")

She's been called up from the Id of his own war: a mother of one of the dead who demands an explanation, an answer, when no answer he gives will ever conceivably do; a woman who, like his neo-con companions, has no hesitation about going for the jugular. And, amazingly, she's already made the man flinch twice."