I’m hanging out at a local drinkery, waiting for friends, and on the TV is Tiger Woods, who is doing pretty well in the latest tournament, but not great. As usual. THIS IS NOT NEWS!
I don’t follow golf, but even so I get all sorts of breathless “Tiger was in the middle of the pack!” articles before I can click through to actual sports. Tiger is in the middle of the pack. It’s not news anymore. Move on.
A pal of mine threw a link my way. In that article was this link to an article about the man who made Foxconn. He’s compared to Henry Ford in this article, but I don’t think that’s apt. Ford seemed much more interested in the social effects of his industry.
I wrote the title of this episode with full irony, but there really is a lot to admire about this guy. Not long ago, we would label Gou a classic success story. It is a luxury we now enjoy that we can better calculate the cost of one man’s success against the lives of others. That’s a good thing.
On the last page of the profile, we learn that Gou is diving deeper into China, to chase cheaper labor. It felt a little creepy to me at first, but there’s no reason for that to feel any different than anything else he’s done. In the end, it’s all a little unsettling.
I think I might have mentioned this before, but it’s just getting worse. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to buy a new car again.
“Look at all the shit we’ve packed in!” the marketers brag. “Techno-gizmos out the ass!”
I work for a techno-gizmo company, and I’m not against techno-gizmos. In fact, I’ve got a gizmo in my pocket that would make Spok weep. It works in my car, so I’m already set, techno-gizmo-wise.
I don’t need:
To me, all those things add cost, weight, and new points of failure. They do not improve the actual car, or its ability to move me between the proverbial points A and B. They are things I have to pay for that later I will have to pay to fix. (I have a feeling in my gut that a GPS failure will somehow cause my tires to deflate, or the turn signal will go out and I’ll have to pay a thousand bucks for some hoobajoob module.)
Ironically, the only cars I know of without all that crap are high-performance supercars. I can’t afford a car without the accessories. I think that is a reflection of their actual value.
Tonight I saw an ad on one of the silent tv’s that surround me, which prompted me to search ‘John C. McGinley broke’. I suppose it’s a credit to the robots that bring us information that I got plenty of references to the actor’s performance in Point Break. But that didn’t answer the question, “Why does a guy who had a lead role on tv for years have to do an insurance commercial as an anonymous father figure?”
Interesting note: when I plugged the quoted phrase above into the Google Monster, the top hit was Cher.
My sweetie is a fan of McGinley, and I certainly respect his “I’m an asshole deal with it or go away” persona on Scrubs. To see him in a throwaway role in a thirty-second spot makes me a little queasy. They didn’t cast him for his history or his fame, he’s just a dad in a commercial, a role he might have been excited about before he was in feature films and had a long run on a successful tv show. Now, watching that spot, I have to wonder what happened.
It’s possible, I suppose, that the writers and producers of the ad said, “Yeah! We got Jonh C. McFuckinGinley!” and went on to write a script that utterly failed to harness his charisma or even nod to his previous roles. He might have walked out of the shoot saying to himself “Holy shit that was a disaster,” sensing that everything he had built was about to be torpedoed.
Hoping that the above might explain what happened, I resolve to be more tolerant of actors reputed to be ‘difficult’. (This dispensation does not extend to actors who can’t be bothered to be on set on time.) I wonder if, had McGinley been a little more difficult, if he had insisted on letting his acting chops show, whether he could have forced them to make a better ad.
Alas, I don’t think that’s the case. I think McGinley did this commercial so he could make his next mortgage (or cocaine or whatever the bugaboo is in Hollywood these days) payment. It’s such a career downturn nothing else makes sense. The dude is a seriously good actor, but maybe he did his Scrubs role so well that people aren’t going to let go. Advice to John C.: Bad Guy in a (well-written) psychothriller. Take that ire, compress it, understate it, and slide out evil. Mellow, likable evil, the kind that makes the audience wonder if you’re actually the bad guy.
You could kill that role, Mr. McGinley. And a character like that can buy you several years on tv. After that you won’t have to prostitute yourself in a dumbass commercial ever again.
Wait…
In less than twenty-four hours fuego pointed me to two news articles that directly affect my plans for building a hotel on the moon. The first was about a space elevator, and I was excited until I realized that the company involved hadn’t progressed past the press release stage of research. It was nothing more than attention whoring. Carbon nanotubes are the material du jour for building this thing, and when mankind can build them economically I expect we’ll have us a space elevator. That makes me happy.
Except for the problem of the huge transverse force at the base of the elevator to conserve the angular momentum of the Earth. As we move stuff up the ladder, the Earth has to slow down. Not much, but a little. The force to slow the Earth is transmitted through the base of the cable. Our friends the nanotubes are really strong when you pull them, but will snap like toothpicks when stressed to the side as the elevator car rises.
I really want to think of the answer to that one.
Meanwhile, fuego sent me a link to another credulous article, this time about robots which could build structures on the moon, using the materials at hand. Well, duh. You’re not going to carry bricks to the moon to build your house, you’re going to use the materials that are already there. Also, it makes complete sense to have a robot do the work. There is a cool video of a wall-building robot. Apparently the breakthrough that inspired this particular article is an animation of hypothetical robots building hypothetical structures on the moon. Wow! That’s some serious progress! I do note in the animation, however, that past the perimeter wall, the lunar landscape is untouched.
The first moon colony may not even have windows, and even if they do, the inhabitants will likely cover them up, because the construction scars that dominate the landscape will outlive mankind. The first house on the moon will have a view of a junkyard. On their days off the first lunar inhabitants will say, “Let’s go find someplace without footprints.”
They will go to my hotel.
One of the best things about modern advertising is the fine print. This is the craven cover-your-ass verbiage that expensive lawyers advise their clients to put under an ad to limit the advertiser’s liability. Here is a list of things I’ve been advised not to do:
Some of those things would be pretty stupid (and expensive) to attempt. Yet if I were to take all the automotive admonitions seriously, I wouldn’t be able to drive anywhere, ever. The sum of the auto warnings is, “Don’t use our product.”
Last night an ad reminded me not to drive very fast in a straight line on an unused runway, but oddly neglected to admonish me not to release a wild cheetah without taking measures to protect myself.
The ski slope barrel roll warning was actually phrased playfully, with the implied “yeah, we know this is ridiculous, but we’re going to do it anyway.”
People will blame our litigious culture for these silly admonitions, but except for a few well-publicized (and usually misrepresented) cases, I don’t think someone sliding a pickup truck down a ski slope has much hope of suing Toyota, warning or not. I think there’s a culture of fear that makes boardrooms timid, just as parents drive their kids to school despite ample evidence that the kids are better off walking. It’s all about worst-case thinking.
Who benefits from that fear? Some guy on retainer to Mazda who gets paid five thousand bucks to look at the latest ad and say, “Put ‘Professional driver on a closed course. Do not attempt.’ at the bottom.” Based on Mazda’s lawyer not altering the text to mention angry carnivores, I wonder if he even watched the ad before submitting his careful analysis. What does Mazda get in return? The VP of marketing can tell the board “we asked a lawyer” if someone gets upset.
My strongest argument for why this is corporate cowardice rather than a reflection of our litigious society lies in Hollywood. There are no disclaimers in movies. Stupid people have died replicating stunts in movies. There was a movie where people lay on the double-yellow in the middle of a road. When a kid died replicating that stunt, the studio was not sued out of existence.
In the face of ample evidence that disclaimers are unnecessary and not even that useful when things do go wrong, advertisers still tell me not to operate my car in any circumstances. Hollywood is simply braver than Madison Avenue, as hard as that is to believe.
My sweetie and I will watch the occasional on-demand movie, and last night we decided to watch Hedwig and the Angry Inch
It is very, very rare for my sweetie and me to be so wrapped up into a movie that we don’t make the occasional comment or at least exchange looks. Somewhere along the way in Hedwig, we were both sucked in completely. You really feel for Hedwig, and the music is pretty sweet.
Many of you out there have heard me rail against the verb ‘login’. You would never say ‘I loginned to the Interwebs.’
‘Log’ is the verb. In the case of technology the verb is followed by a prepositional phrase starting with ‘in’ or ‘into’ to describe where the logging happened.
Thank you, Adobe Systems, for taking my pet peeve to the new absurdity. In an official communication I have been instructed as follows (copy-paste here, so the capitalization is also theirs): Login into Your Account with the ID listed above
Yeah. Login into. Is anybody reading this before it goes out?
I’m in a bar, and on one silent TV I’ve watched the same helmet-to-helmet tackle over and over. This is a big deal in American Football these days, as folks realize that slamming your hardened plastic shell into someone else’s hardened plastic shell causes both brains to rattle around in their fluid suspension dangerously.
Helmet-to-helmet is not good for brains.
So I’m watching this incident in super slo-mo, and it looks petty bad at that speed. The guy that got hit lay flat on his back for a while, took a breath, and got up. One of his larger teammates came over to encourage him and no doubt express admiration for his toughness. He did this by — wait for it! — slapping his quarterback on the helmet.
Got a message from YouTube today, saying they missed me terribly and wished I would *ahem* login *cough* now and then. So I did. I’m an agreeable sort of fellow.
Google, who now holds almost my entire music collection, whose business mandate is to use data about people to make money off them, suggested that I might enjoy watching the latest Beyoncé video. Or Lady Gaga, perhaps? Or maybe Justin Bieber.
Google, seriously. What the Fuck? You know all the songs I’ve listened to for the last month. Justin Bieber was notably absent. Ravonettes, 50 foot wave, Sex Pistols. Nothing remotely like the Beib came down the wire.
If you’re going to collect data about me and then try to sell me stuff, as least do it right.
I was watching (without sound) some show that features a guy who may (or may not) be the the showbiz illusionist Chris Angel. The show was called something like “I’ll wear anything and fight anyone to get on TV.” Nothing to do with showbiz magic. Probably-Chris Angel’s job was to chat with the other host and interview stupid people. (I assume they were stupid; I suppose they may have been discussing quantum mechanics.)
What struck me as I watched this silent farce was the remarkable brightness in Angel’s eyes compared to everyone else’s. His eyes caught the light from the camera in a way no one else’s did. Was this intentional? I don’t know. But he focussed intently into the camera, and his dark eyes did the rest. The result was that he just looked… special compared to everyone else.
Tonight I set up a twitter account. My twitter ID is JerrySeeger.
Why did I finally do it? Here’s my first (and to date, only) tweet, addressed to Antonio Gonzalez of the Associated Press:
The other day I opened the cabinet to grab some cold cereal. I wasn’t sure which specific cereal I was going to have, I just knew that a bowl full of yummy not-too-sweet flakes with some almond milk splashed over them would be tasty. Probably I’d slice a banana over the cereal.
So, surveying the candidates with an open mind, I was confronted with… anonymous boxes. Black-and-white panels of nutrition information. I selected a cereal and resolved to put it away with the other edge showing, so my poor tired eyes could identify that box better the next time.
It turns out the other side was no better, and I realized that all the cereal boxes in the cabinet used the side panels as junk space.
Big mistake, I say. In the case of cereal, all the marketing is on the front of the box, with stuff on the back of the box to keep the kids without TV in the kitchen occupied. The packaging designers are missing an important opportunity.
There are two phases to marketing a box of cereal; first you get it off the store shelf and into the shopping cart. That’s what the front panel does. But the marketing isn’t over then; cereals are still competing to get from the box to the bowl. The winner of that contest empties the box faster. It’s about selling the next box.
That competition is all about the side panels. If I were king of a cereal company, the boring stuff would be on the back, and the side panels would be devoted exclusively to “Hey! Look at me! I’m yummy!”
The Title of this episode commonly appears as fine print in television commercials, where the advertiser wants to make sure no one holds them responsible for someone else being stupid.
I may add to this post, but here’s the one that forced me (yes, forced) to write this little episode:
I know you were going to.
