Today I got a call from someone I know who is living abroad. I have not had much contact with him for a few years, and really we have not been close for at least 10. I was working and the call went to my voicemail, so the information was brief. But let me tell you what the content was.
He wanted to borrow money. He carefully worded his message to appeal to my heart as he always does. He is good at that. And I know him to be cunning and eloquent enough to talk the fuzz off a peach so it was a good story. This is a person who received a giant sum of money in a settlement from a car accident with a commercial vehicle a few years back. This is a person whose life has been dominated by drug problems for more than 30 years. He has a long list of friends who will not speak to him. He has had more cell phone numbers than I can count. He has two grown children who have no life skills at all because he spent such a large percentage of his time high and trying to get high that he was unable to actually raise them.
And yet he is a great person to be around. He has something interesting to say about a variety of topics. He is intelligent and funny. He is caring, generous, kind. He has a lot of love in his heart, and I have a wealth of fond memories of him.
So when I got a message that he has no money for food, it was heart that immediately wanted to inquire how I can help. But when my brain chimed in with reason, I wanted to know how I can change my phone number. It was my brother's voice I heard in that message. It was his familiar style of creating a picture of a man down on his luck. Of a guy who has finally got his future in order, if only he can get some help in the short term. He would be able to pay it back this time. But there won't be a this time because it was the drugs that asked me for money, not my brother. It has been a long road for me to get here. Even just a couple of years back there was enough of my brother left that I might be convinced to lend a hand in hopes, albeit slight, that I can believe anything he says. But not this time. I hurts so bad, but my heart will lose this struggle with reason because I know the drugs have been the boss of him for many years now. They make the decisions and the phone calls. And I won't give anything to them.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Category: duh
If you do not have kids, let me tell you something that is going to drive you batty when you do. "Sippy cups" are cups with a top and (if they are the expensive ones) a gasket thingie that prevents any liquid from passing through without suction. That is, the toddler sucks the way he or she would suck a nipple to get the drink. You end up buying these things en masse because the gaskets disappear like sunglasses or socks. So in time you end up with lots of big cups with lids and no purpose because they leak all over. Every brand has their own implementation of this technology, so there is no mixing and matching either. Here is my solution...sell spare gaskets. Duh! If one company did this, I would buy only their sippy cups for that reason alone since they are all basically the same thing. Then fire the dill weeds whose job it should have been to figure this out instead of me.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Category: advertising
I am very happy right now, so I am just going to give a out little morsel to chew on. It seems the curmudgeon in me doesn't come out when my wife is next to me and we are enjoying a quiet moment pursuing our interests in good company. So I will be brief.
How is it that you never actually read a critic rave when you are getting the review first hand? Raving is speaking or writing with wild enthusiasm. So who is in charge of classifying a critics' words as wildly enthusiastic? No one in particular of course. That, my friends, is free entry into the scoundrel zone for these guys. If a critic writes anything positive or even neutral about a restaurant, film, TV show, car, or anything, you can bet some enterprising scoundrel will find a way to spin it into a "rave". No matter how mundane the critic's original meaning, and no matter how obvious it is to the audience, his/her words can be spun into a "rave" when an advertiser mentions the review in a commercial. And it is not technically lying or even mischaracterization of words since their meanings are in the eyes of the beholder - the ad exec's eyes. Then he gets to change the meaning of those words into whatever suits him when he relates them to the rest of us. It's a twisted game of telephone.
"Rave" is a word that has been stolen by advertisers. There others...
How is it that you never actually read a critic rave when you are getting the review first hand? Raving is speaking or writing with wild enthusiasm. So who is in charge of classifying a critics' words as wildly enthusiastic? No one in particular of course. That, my friends, is free entry into the scoundrel zone for these guys. If a critic writes anything positive or even neutral about a restaurant, film, TV show, car, or anything, you can bet some enterprising scoundrel will find a way to spin it into a "rave". No matter how mundane the critic's original meaning, and no matter how obvious it is to the audience, his/her words can be spun into a "rave" when an advertiser mentions the review in a commercial. And it is not technically lying or even mischaracterization of words since their meanings are in the eyes of the beholder - the ad exec's eyes. Then he gets to change the meaning of those words into whatever suits him when he relates them to the rest of us. It's a twisted game of telephone.
"Rave" is a word that has been stolen by advertisers. There others...
Monday, November 22, 2010
Category: advertising
Have you walked into a store lately? It is three days before Thanksgiving and you can scarcely find a single piece of evidence that it is nearly upon us. By contrast, the Christmas advertisements have been in full swing since the very day after Halloween. The stores are elaborately displaying all kinds of items for sale. If you were relying on retailers to be your holiday calendar, you could be forgiven for forgetting Thanksgiving even existed every single year. I am confident that this would be just fine with the highly paid marketing departments of every single retailer in this country. Why?
The answer is simple: there is nothing to sell you at Thanksgiving. Oh, most gatherings will have some version of the traditional feast. There is the turkey that you pay for by the pound, that has been fed so many steroids that you would not want to square off with it in a dark alley. It had to be conceived in a test tube because its parents were so muscular they could not mate naturally. It is then injected with water and stuffed with dismembered, inedible parts (not even necessarily from the same turkey) to tip the scales at some completely unnatural number. Also the casseroles, cranberry sauce, stuffing, potatoes, greens, pies, etc. And perhaps a new table cloth. But that works out to a paltry figure compared to the shopping frenzy that is Christmas. Stores want the world to be one more reason to spend extra money after another. If a major holiday does not provide that they strive to remove it from the conscious of the public in favor of a more profitable one. And it works. Radio stations have been following suit for many years now, and we have become accustomed to seeing commercials as early as October for Christmas paraphernalia. By contrast, my kids' schools (which are not really even allowed to talk about Christmas any more) spend copious amounts of energy pushing the Thanksgiving myths upon them. They have nothing to sell. I wonder if this were somehow no longer going on in schools - if the active [mis]education of our children about the ways of Thanksgiving was happening as part of the curriculum - would this holiday slowly sink into obscurity alongside Groundhog Day and May Day?
Marketing trends control many more parts of our culture than most people are savvy to. Don't let them dictate to you what you should spend your money on. When I was a child, we made our Halloween costumes from odds and ends and we used a pillowcase for a sack. I can't remember the last time I saw a creative homemade costume. And my kids used plastic pumpkin buckets that we bought for their candy this year. Ghosts made of clothes balled up in a sheet have been replaced by increasingly elaborate Halloween spreads on front lawns. All can be purchased at your local big box store. Marketers are sculpting holiday "traditions" to encourage more consumerism. In the years to come, look for the "traditional" Thanksgiving gifts to relatives if they can't manage to get us to forget the holiday completely. And expect "traditional" New Years' dresses and suits to become fashionable.
The answer is simple: there is nothing to sell you at Thanksgiving. Oh, most gatherings will have some version of the traditional feast. There is the turkey that you pay for by the pound, that has been fed so many steroids that you would not want to square off with it in a dark alley. It had to be conceived in a test tube because its parents were so muscular they could not mate naturally. It is then injected with water and stuffed with dismembered, inedible parts (not even necessarily from the same turkey) to tip the scales at some completely unnatural number. Also the casseroles, cranberry sauce, stuffing, potatoes, greens, pies, etc. And perhaps a new table cloth. But that works out to a paltry figure compared to the shopping frenzy that is Christmas. Stores want the world to be one more reason to spend extra money after another. If a major holiday does not provide that they strive to remove it from the conscious of the public in favor of a more profitable one. And it works. Radio stations have been following suit for many years now, and we have become accustomed to seeing commercials as early as October for Christmas paraphernalia. By contrast, my kids' schools (which are not really even allowed to talk about Christmas any more) spend copious amounts of energy pushing the Thanksgiving myths upon them. They have nothing to sell. I wonder if this were somehow no longer going on in schools - if the active [mis]education of our children about the ways of Thanksgiving was happening as part of the curriculum - would this holiday slowly sink into obscurity alongside Groundhog Day and May Day?
Marketing trends control many more parts of our culture than most people are savvy to. Don't let them dictate to you what you should spend your money on. When I was a child, we made our Halloween costumes from odds and ends and we used a pillowcase for a sack. I can't remember the last time I saw a creative homemade costume. And my kids used plastic pumpkin buckets that we bought for their candy this year. Ghosts made of clothes balled up in a sheet have been replaced by increasingly elaborate Halloween spreads on front lawns. All can be purchased at your local big box store. Marketers are sculpting holiday "traditions" to encourage more consumerism. In the years to come, look for the "traditional" Thanksgiving gifts to relatives if they can't manage to get us to forget the holiday completely. And expect "traditional" New Years' dresses and suits to become fashionable.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Category: entertainment
It's way too early on Sunday morning. Baby DJ is only making the gentle moans that go on for about a half hour before he actually wants to wake up. The girls have not burst in the room yet. And the wife is not due back from her overnight shift for another hour. By all rights I should be sleeping, but damnit my body is trained. With one bleary eye opened, my hand fumbles around the large box that has served as my wannabe nightstand for over a year. I find the clicker and I am surfing. I am very familiar with what is on at 6:44 Sunday morning, but I go through the motions anyway. After going through every channel once or twice, my threshold for entertainment has sunk to the point that a music video seems appealing. I quickly realize that I am in the scoundrel zone.
I have no idea what the song is.
...or the "artist".
It sounds catchy though. I have never heard it before, and yet it is so familiar that it finds its way into the trite category along with anything by Kanye West or Justin Timberlake. The reason, of course, is that you have guys with expensive shoes and an ear for music that stops abruptly at the end of a purse string making creative decisions at somewhere along the line. And teenagers drive this market. Don't tell me the channel is aimed at that market. I know that. Everything is aimed at that market, and that is the problem. I can hear myself sigh as I realize there will probably never be a new song that is ever produced by the bazillion dollar pop industry that is to my tastes. Oh, there will be catchy tunes. They are good at that. But the content of the lyrics and the message of the songs will always be drivel. It's new to teenagers. It was new to me when I was a teenager.
I think that is why adults are drawn to the music of their generation. We remember the music of our youth because it was tailored by the New York suits for us. They needed us to like it because we were the youth demographic that made them money on advertising. And everything since then is the same crap repackaged and tailored for someone else. It looks like our suit. It has the same sleeves and cut. But it is made for minds and sensibilities that have not heard it all before. What I am saying is that all pop music is aimed at that market, not for artistic reasons. Not because that is the natural way of things. Not because the youth are the best at producing the highest quality music or demand it. But because that is what execs want. And they only want it because the advertisers do.
blecccccchhhhhhhhhhhh
It's way too early on Sunday morning. Baby DJ is only making the gentle moans that go on for about a half hour before he actually wants to wake up. The girls have not burst in the room yet. And the wife is not due back from her overnight shift for another hour. By all rights I should be sleeping, but damnit my body is trained. With one bleary eye opened, my hand fumbles around the large box that has served as my wannabe nightstand for over a year. I find the clicker and I am surfing. I am very familiar with what is on at 6:44 Sunday morning, but I go through the motions anyway. After going through every channel once or twice, my threshold for entertainment has sunk to the point that a music video seems appealing. I quickly realize that I am in the scoundrel zone.
I have no idea what the song is.
...or the "artist".
It sounds catchy though. I have never heard it before, and yet it is so familiar that it finds its way into the trite category along with anything by Kanye West or Justin Timberlake. The reason, of course, is that you have guys with expensive shoes and an ear for music that stops abruptly at the end of a purse string making creative decisions at somewhere along the line. And teenagers drive this market. Don't tell me the channel is aimed at that market. I know that. Everything is aimed at that market, and that is the problem. I can hear myself sigh as I realize there will probably never be a new song that is ever produced by the bazillion dollar pop industry that is to my tastes. Oh, there will be catchy tunes. They are good at that. But the content of the lyrics and the message of the songs will always be drivel. It's new to teenagers. It was new to me when I was a teenager.
I think that is why adults are drawn to the music of their generation. We remember the music of our youth because it was tailored by the New York suits for us. They needed us to like it because we were the youth demographic that made them money on advertising. And everything since then is the same crap repackaged and tailored for someone else. It looks like our suit. It has the same sleeves and cut. But it is made for minds and sensibilities that have not heard it all before. What I am saying is that all pop music is aimed at that market, not for artistic reasons. Not because that is the natural way of things. Not because the youth are the best at producing the highest quality music or demand it. But because that is what execs want. And they only want it because the advertisers do.
blecccccchhhhhhhhhhhh
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