Archive for May, 2007

News on the eye of hell used to be pretty straightforward. A guy, sitting at a desk, reading the news. Those days, however, are long gone.

I grew up on Lawn Guyland, from the mid-60s to the early 80s, and I saw a lot of the changes in the news at the flagship stations of the major networks (back when there were only three). Some were fads, but some have stuck around.

Scripted Small Talk

I remember Jim Jensen, who was the quintessential NY anchorman. For some 25 years, he had just a touch of grey on his temples. Jensen used to challenge his reporters: they’d come back from the taped segment of the report and he’d have questions to ask the reporter — real questions. You could tell that they didn’t know in advance what he was going to ask.

I remember seeing them go back to the studio after a report by Meredith Vieira (who was seriously hot back then) about abused children. Meredith was in tears, and Jim did what he could to (ahem) comfort her.

I remember, but didn’t see Tex Antoine’s last night on the air. Tex was a weatherman, and he used a character called “Uncle Wethbee” to show us what the weather would be like: if it was to be sunny, Uncle Wethbee wore sunglasses. Cold weather meant Uncle Wethbee would be wearing a hat and scarf. Tex lost his job when, after a report about a rape, Tex was to make a quick statement before they went to commercial. Rather than something to the effect of “We’ve got some wild weather coming up,” he said something like, “Confucius say if you’re going to be raped, lay back and relax.” No more Tex, no more Uncle Wethbee.

Now, just about everything is scripted. When we come back to the studio after a taped segment, the hard hitting, incisive questions asked of the reporter by the anchor are all being read off the prompter. After all, they don’t want to get stuck with some reporter not knowing the answer. Every now and then, the small talk appears not to be scripted, like when Kira Philips’ mic was left on when she went to the bathroom to kibbitz about her sister-in-law, or when Carol Costello’s needling caused Chad Myers to have a weather tantrum.

Weather Radar

This one seems to be going the way of the dodo, but you can still catch them pulling this crap now and then: Americans are stupid. We know that. When you say the word “radar” to an American, they either think of the little Iowan guy from MASH, or an image from a World War II movie of a monochromatic screen with a line sweeping around it in a circle. Apparently without that line, we don’t know that it’s radar, so when weather reporters show us images from their radar, they’ll add in that rotating scan line. It’s not actually part of the radar image; they just figure we need it to assure us.

Hand-held Camera

This is something they were doing rather a lot of maybe ten years ago: to make the news more exciting and immediate, they’d pretend that they hadn’t had sufficient time to prepare their reports, so the reporter would come bounding down a corridor and into the studio, being covered by a very shaky hand-held camera. Did it work? Of course not. But it’s not that different from…

The Control Room

The standard was always to have the reporters sit in at the big desk, next to the anchor to introduce their stories, but we see a lot of reporters sitting in what’s supposed to look like either an editing room or the control room. It shows their connection to the technical aspects of reportage, even if they have no idea how the machines there work — even if the machines are just mock-ups that don’t do anything.

Big Screens, Fake Screens, Screens Screens Screens

Anyone who’s seen CNN in the past couple of years knows that they just love gigantic video monitors over there — big ones, sometimes arrays of monitors, and sometimes arrays of big monitors. On some broadcasts, the giant video wall is completely fake. It’s just a blue screen, and when the anchor carries on a fake, scripted conversation, s/he has to pretend to look at the image of the reporter while reading the scripted conversation off the monitor, all the while looking as if they’re just talking to another person. This is why they make the big big money.

The monitors our boy Wolfie has in his Situation Room are real, and they can do all sorts of fun things with them: a different picture in each one, a single picture spanning across all of them, or breaking them up into groups. One thing they do that doesn’t make a lot of sense, however, is to point a camera directly at them, so that the array of monitors takes up the whole screen. Why do they do that, when they can just send the array of feeds out as the feed we receive? Pointing a camera at a monitor is so 1950s.

STFD, or the Finger Clasp

I think we can blame Blitzer for this too, although someone else may have done it before him: for many anchors, the anchor desk is no more. Sometimes they’ve got a stool, but often it’s their job to just stand there. I suppose sitting down implies that they’re too lazy for the exciting world of journalism. The problem is that back when they had their desk and chair, they could lay their hands on the desk or hide them under it. What are they to do with their hands now that everything is so out in the open? Some choose to hold a few pieces of paper. They don’t read them, of course — that’s what the prompter is for. But if they don’t hold anything in their hands, it seems that the trend is for them to stop their hands from wildly swinging about in the studio by gently clasping the fingers of one hand in the other. Some of them seem to take this very seriously indeed. If their fingers ever slip out of the proper clasped position, they seem to go into a tiny panic attack until they find their way back. Maybe some guy in the control room is responsible for reminding them about it, shouting “FINGERS! FINGERS!” whenever they slip.

It’s 2:30 am on Thursday, and I’m fucking livid over the way the Democratic leadership completely folded on the issue of funding Bush’s war. And what do they have to say about it? I go to the party’s site and there’s no mention of it on the home page. The latest blog post is ten days old and it’s about DoD blocking soldiers from accessing YouTube and MySpace. There are three press releases dated May 23, but their headlines are:

• Statement by DNC Chairman Howard Dean on the Kentucky Primary
• McCain’s Missed Votes Elicit Call for His Resignation From Home-state Republican
• Giuliani’s Credibility Crumbles As Granite State Voters Learn More About His Influence-Peddling Ways

Maybe there’s something about it The Gavel, the blog published by Pelosi’s office… Nope. They’ve got “International Climate Cooperation” and a bunch of clips from Monica Goodling’s testimony. Not a word about this.

Next attempt: democrats.com. Is that an official party site? No, their “About” page says

Democrats.com is an independent community of Democratic Party activists. We proudly support the Democratic National Committee (http://democrats.org) and its chairman Howard Dean.

Democrats.com was launched at the 2000 Democratic convention in Los Angeles by two veteran Democratic consultants Bob Fertik and David Lytel. (Lytel left at the end of 2002 to launch ReDefeatBush.com.)

Our vision was to create the leading news and community Web site for the progressive base of the Democratic Party, in order to lead the fight against the radical right and the Republican Party. We called ourselves the “Aggressive Progressives.”

So what do the Aggressive Progressives have to say about this?

Why did Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi surrender to Bush on the Iraq War Supplemental? Not because they wanted to – both Reid and Pelosi are passionately opposed to the war. Unfortunately, there are simply not enough Democrats and Republicans in Congress who are willing to join them in standing up to Bush.

…

More importantly, what can we do to change those numbers? How can we get pro-war Democrats and Republicans to change and vote against the war?

We thought we sent Congress a loud-and-clear message in 2006 when we swept pro-war Republicans out and swept anti-war Democrats in. Unfortunately a majority in Congress didn’t get the message, so we have to do it again in 2008.

November of 2008. Are they fucking kidding? If the votes aren’t there, then obviously we have to wait to get the votes. That’s not the point. The Democratic leadership knows full well why they were given the majority: the war. Their job is to do everything in their power to stop the war. If they can’t stop the war, that doesn’t mean they should sit back and tell us all to wait for the next election. How many people are going to die between now and then?

It’s an absolute betrayal for them to simply give up like this. They need to keep this in front of absolutely everything else. Even if Bush isn’t bluffing, they still have to call him on it by not allowing a bill that gives him what he wants to get to his desk. Keep sending him bills to veto, and don’t let him spread the lie that you’re endangering the troops by doing so. The nation wants the war over, and it’s your job to keep hammering that message into the heads of anyone in DC who’s either detached, dishonest, or dumb enough to see it any other way.

Olbermann, as usual, says it better than I do:

This is, in fact, a comment about… betrayal.

Few men or women elected in our history — whether executive or legislative, state or national — have been sent into office with a mandate more obvious, nor instructions more clear:

Get us out of Iraq.

Yet after six months of preparation and execution — half a year gathering the strands of public support; translating into action, the collective will of the nearly 70 percent of Americans who reject this War of Lies, the Democrats have managed only this:

• The Democratic leadership has surrendered to a president — if not the worst president, then easily the most selfish, in our history — who happily blackmails his own people, and uses his own military personnel as hostages to his asinine demand, that the Democrats “give the troops their money”;
• The Democratic leadership has agreed to finance the deaths of Americans in a war that has only reduced the security of Americans;
• The Democratic leadership has given Mr. Bush all that he wanted, with the only caveat being, not merely meaningless symbolism about benchmarks for the Iraqi government, but optional meaningless symbolism about benchmarks for the Iraqi government.
• The Democratic leadership has, in sum, claimed a compromise with the Administration, in which the only things truly compromised, are the trust of the voters, the ethics of the Democrats, and the lives of our brave, and doomed, friends, and family, in Iraq.

You, the men and women elected with the simplest of directions — Stop The War — have traded your strength, your bargaining position, and the uniform support of those who elected you… for a handful of magic beans.
You may trot out every political cliché from the soft-soap, inside-the-beltway dictionary of boilerplate sound bites, about how this is the “beginning of the end” of Mr. Bush’s “carte blanche” in Iraq, about how this is a “first step.”
Well, Senator Reid, the only end at its beginning… is our collective hope that you and your colleagues would do what is right, what is essential, what you were each elected and re-elected to do.
Because this “first step”… is a step right off a cliff.

And this President!
How shameful it would be to watch an adult… hold his breath, and threaten to continue to do so, until he turned blue.
But how horrifying it is… to watch a President hold his breath and threaten to continue to do so, until innocent and patriotic Americans in harm’s way, are bled white.
You lead this country, sir?
You claim to defend it?
And yet when faced with the prospect of someone calling you on your stubbornness — your stubbornness which has cost 3,431 Americans their lives and thousands more their limbs — you, Mr. Bush, imply that if the Democrats don’t give you the money and give it to you entirely on your terms, the troops in Iraq will be stranded, or forced to serve longer, or have to throw bullets at the enemy with their bare hands.
How transcendentally, how historically, pathetic.
Any other president from any other moment in the panorama of our history would have, at the outset of this tawdry game of political chicken, declared that no matter what the other political side did, he would insure personally — first, last and always — that the troops would not suffer.
A President, Mr. Bush, uses the carte blanche he has already, not to manipulate an overlap of arriving and departing Brigades into a ‘second surge,’ but to say in unequivocal terms that if it takes every last dime of the monies already allocated, if it takes reneging on government contracts with Halliburton, he will make sure the troops are safe — even if the only safety to be found, is in getting them the hell out of there.
Well, any true President would have done that, Sir.
You instead, used our troops as political pawns, then blamed the Democrats when you did so.

Not that these Democrats, who had this country’s support and sympathy up until 48 hours ago, have not since earned all the blame they can carry home.

“We seem to be very near the bleak choice between war and shame,” Winston Churchill wrote to Lord Moyne in the days after the British signed the Munich accords with Germany in 1938. “My feeling is that we shall choose shame, and then have war thrown in, a little later…”

That’s what this is for the Democrats, isn’t it?

Their “Neville Chamberlain moment” before the Second World War.
All that’s missing is the landing at the airport, with the blinkered leader waving a piece of paper which he naively thought would guarantee “peace in our time,” but which his opponent would ignore with deceit.
The Democrats have merely streamlined the process.
Their piece of paper already says Mr. Bush can ignore it, with impugnity.

And where are the Democratic presidential hopefuls this evening?
See they not, that to which the Senate and House leadership has blinded itself?

Judging these candidates based on how they voted on the original Iraq authorization, or waiting for apologies for those votes, is ancient history now.

The Democratic nomination is likely to be decided… tomorrow.
The talk of practical politics, the buying into of the President’s dishonest construction “fund-the-troops-or-they-will-be-in-jeopardy,” the promise of tougher action in September, is falling not on deaf ears, but rather falling on Americans who already told you what to do, and now perceive your ears as closed to practical politics.
Those who seek the Democratic nomination need to — for their own political futures and, with a thousand times more solemnity and importance, for the individual futures of our troops — denounce this betrayal, vote against it, and, if need be, unseat Majority Leader Reid and Speaker Pelosi if they continue down this path of guilty, fatal acquiescence to the tragically misguided will of a monomaniacal president.

For, ultimately, at this hour, the entire government has failed us.

• Mr. Reid, Mr. Hoyer, and the other Democrats… have failed us.
  They negotiated away that which they did not own, but had only been entrusted by us to protect: our collective will as the citizens of this country, that this brazen War of Lies be ended as rapidly and safely as possible.
• Mr. Bush and his government… have failed us.
  They have behaved venomously and without dignity — of course.
  That is all at which Mr. Bush is gifted.
  We are the ones providing any element of surprise or shock here.

With the exception of Senator Dodd and Senator Edwards, the Democratic presidential candidates have (so far at least) failed us.

They must now speak, and make plain how they view what has been given away to Mr. Bush, and what is yet to be given away tomorrow, and in the thousand tomorrows to come.

Because for the next fourteen months, the Democratic nominating process — indeed the whole of our political discourse until further notice — has, with the stroke of a cursed pen, become about one thing, and one thing alone.
The electorate figured this out, six months ago.
The President and the Republicans have not — doubtless will not.
The Democrats will figure it out, during the Memorial Day recess, when they go home and many of those who elected them will politely suggest they stay there — and permanently.
Because, on the subject of Iraq…
The people have been ahead of the media….
Ahead of the government…
Ahead of the politicians…
For the last year, or two years, or maybe three.

Our politics… is now about the answer to one briefly-worded question.
Mr. Bush has failed.
Mr. Warner has failed.
Mr. Reid has failed.
So.
Who among us will stop this war — this War of Lies?
To he or she, fall the figurative keys to the nation.
To all the others — presidents and majority leaders and candidates and rank-and-file Congressmen and Senators of either party — there is only blame… for this shameful, and bi-partisan, betrayal.

I know, Pelosi is against this, and she’s not going to vote for it. She’s the speaker. She shouldn’t allow this crap to come up for a vote.

An article in the Globe a few days ago pointed out that new Boston Convention Centre, which opened about three years ago, was supposed to earn the Commonwealth some cash through the sale of its naming rights, but Repugnicans say the Convention Centre Authority is holding off on the task so they can name the centre after Mayor Mumbles once he retires.

“It is clear to people familiar with the situation that the Convention Center Authority is very reluctant to put the naming rights out to bid because they want to eventually name the facility for Mayor Menino,” said Senate minority leader Richard R. Tisei, a Wakefield Republican. “There is no other reason. It is a lot of money to leave on the table.”

I’ve written about this issue before, and my opinion hasn’t changed. Mind you, this is one of two convention centres in Boston, and the other one is named for a former mayor: John B. Hynes. Lots of stuff in Boston is named for historical figures, a recent example being the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge (the widest cable-stayed bridge in the world, kidz). I was actually hoping the bridge would be named for Seiji Ozawa, even though I still haven’t forgiven him for ditching us for Vienna.

Really, I think the only local public structures for which the naming rights have been sold are the Garden (recently the Fleet Centre and now the TD Banknorth Garden) and the Metropolitan Theatre, which became the Music Hall, which became the Met Centre, which became the Wang Centre and is currently the Citi Wang Theatre (feh).

Personally, I’d much rather live in a city with a Mumbles Menino Convention Centre than one named after Cheez Wiz or Jiffy Lube.

Tags:
Boston,
Menino,
Naming Rights,
Politics

I found this at You Aint No Picasso, who found it at Boing Boing, who found it at the site of the Stanford University Law School Center for Internet and Society, who got it from Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University (lovely page, professor), an English professor who runs the school’s Film Studies program. That’s Faden over there.

What is it? Why, it’s a brief explanation of US copyright law, presented by characters from Disney films.

I received a piece of snail mail today from the State Office of Tourism up in Maine (home of the Mainiacs). The flyer references travelinmaine.com, but if you try going there you’ll just be redirected (a 302, if you care about such things) to the site I’ve linked to.

The redirect isn’t what prompted me to write about it, though. I’ll give you the content inside the brochure, and you see if you can figure out what caught my attention.

We could give you
countless
reasons
to visit Maine.

But this format really
lend itself better to like
four.

So here we go.

1. The incredible outdoor activities, like mountain biking, hiking, fishing, beach bumming, bird watching, golfing, boating and so much more.
2. The food. Lobster, clams, mussels, chowder, blueberry pie and tons of other yummy treats.
3. The shopping. We’ve got it all from quaint seaside boutiques to incredible outlets to the one and only L.L. Bean.
4. The short travel time. Take a train or come on up in your car. Either way, you’ll get here faster than you can say dream vacation. Oh, and if you do make the trip, you’ll find out what other great things Maine has to offer.

Did you, like, catch it? No, it’s not the fact that it actually takes longer to get to Maine than it does to say “dream vacation.” I’ll cut them some slack on that one.

It’s that “but this format really lends itself better to like four” bit. Like four? Just who is the target of a travel brochure that uses that sort of grammar? Admittedly, I slip in a “like” every now and then, although I’m happy to say that the only time I use “totally” in a context like “it’s totally raining out there” is when I’m mocking the people who actually think that statement somehow communicates more than saying, “it’s raining out there”. However, I don’t think that a printed brochure that uses “like” instead of “about,” “around,” or “approximately” is better at targeting me or anybody else. It’s not as if they chose to do the whole thing in slang. True, there are plenty of sentences that aren’t sentences, but we see that in practically every piece of advertising (“New. Just for you.”)

Honestly, I don’t know what they were going for. It certainly didn’t make me want to like spend time like up like there. Totally.

Tags:
Maine,
Travel,
Tourism,
Marketing,
Slang

Dear BMW,
One of your current spots on the eye of hell asks,

If the road designed a car, what kind of car would it be?

You then answer your own question with a bunch of hoohah about speed, thrust, torque and whatnot, but I’m guessing that you’re just kidding. If the road designed a car, don’t you think it would design it to be very light, and not to move? Or do you think the road is some kind of masochist?

Tags:
BMW,
Cars,
Advertising,
Commercials

We’re all aware by now of the adventures of at&t (formerly known as AT&T), Cingular, SBC, et al and the question of which company owns which, which name they’re going to use, how much they’re spending to rebrand themselves, etc. I’d show you that great Stephen Colbert video about it, but YouTube had to delete it when Viacom raised a stink about the copyright. Thanks, Sumner.

I noticed something in a Cingular spot on the eye of hell a few days ago: they’ve changed the tagline at the end of their commercials. A month ago, if you saw a Cingular commercial you’d hear the announcer intone “Cingular is now the new at&t — your world, delivered” at the end. The new ads end with “Cingular’s name is now at&t.”

It made me wonder about the process that’s involved in rebranding something this big. Obviously, it has to be done step by step. You change your company name without telling anybody, and you’re lost. But do you have to work out a path in advance in order to lead people to understand what’s going on?

1. Put out a press release.
2. Announce in public advertising that a change is coming.
3. Announce in public advertising what that change is.
4. Assure established customers that the name change means nothing.
5. Assure potential customers that the name change means everything.
6. Run ads stating that X has joined with Y.
7. Run ads stating that X is now part of Y.
8. Run ads stating that X is Y.
9. Run ads about Y without mention of X.

And somewhere along that line, the old website has to be redirected to the new one, signs have to be changed, and customer service people have to start answering the phone with the new name. Do the CSRs report back to management on the percentage of callers who respond to the new name with “huh?” or just hang up?

Is this all planned out in advance? What about contingency plans? If customers aren’t following along do they need to change tactics, or do they stick with the plan? Sometimes when a new film is being marketed,
you can see a clear act of desperation: one week the film is being advertised as a mystery, and the next the background music in the advertising has changed, a few edits have been made, and they’re pushing it as a comedy. This actually happens, although I can’t think of an example off the top of my head. The satires like the one below are based on reality.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmkVWuP_sO0]

So is this latest change just a step along the path, plan B, a Hail Mary play, or what? And when will the day come when we hear of Cingular no more and we’re expected to have gotten the message?

Tags:
Cellular,
Mobile,
Cingular,
AT&T

‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.

We all know what Juliet meant. Romeo is the one she loves, even though his name is Montague, and she’s not supposed to love a Montague. A rose would smell the same no matter what it was called. But is that true?

I think Stein’s “a rose is a rose is a rose” is taken by most people to mean the same thing — whatever it is, it is what it is. That’s apparently not how Stein herself saw it:

When asked what she meant by the line, Stein said that in the time of Homer, or of Chaucer, “the poet could use the name of the thing and the thing was really there.” As memory took it over, the thing lost its identity, and she was trying to recover that – “I think in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.”

This guy would probably tell you that names matter. He started his career as Ricky Schroder, crying his little eyes out and telling us “I want the champ!”

Some twenty years later, by the time he joined the cast of NYPD Blue, he’d decided to go with the more adult “Rick Schroder.” I think that’s quite understandable. There has to be a point in everyone’s life when they decide to grow up. They stop clipping mittens to their coats and switch to gloves that they may actually lose, they tell their mothers that they’re perfectly capable of buying their own underwear, and they drop the kiddie version of their first name.

Why is he Ricky again? Beats me. He’s not even 40 yet, so it’s much too early for him to be seeking to get his youth back. Maybe it’s different for actors, as it is with professional athletes (Chipper Jones??)

Is that true of politicians too? National politicians? Can someone with a silly name run for president? Bush used that cutesy pseudo-Texan pronunciation of his middle initial to portray himself as folksy, which always seemed odd to me. The “dubya” stands for Walker, after all, and that isn’t Walker as in Walker, Texas Ranger. Nope, it’s Walker as in Walker’s Point, the family’s old money yankee estate in Maine, named for W’s great-grandfather, the St. Louis banker George H. Walker .

So… Tommy Thompson. It’s not completely his fault. His parents gave him one of those stupid x, son of x names, so even if he called himself Thomas or Tom (which would at least be a bit more grown up), he’d still be Tom Thompson, or Thomas Thompson. Wikipedia says his full name is Tommy George Thompson. He could go with T. George Thompson, or even drop the T and just be George. Nobody would mind. But I’m sorry. We’re simply not going to elect somebody called “Tommy Thompson” president. Ain’t gonna happen.

And then there’s this mofo. His first name is actually Willard, as I understand it, and apart from associations with paranoia, anger issues and homicidal rats, it’s a relatively harmless name. It’s better than his middle name, which he actually chooses to use instead. A mitt is a big glove — not unlike the ones clipped to the sleeves of a child’s coat. And of course, if you drop one of the t’s, you get the German word for “with,” and that always puts me in mind of a conversation between the owner of a bakery in Munich and one of his customers:

Baker: Guten morgen.
Customer: Guten morgen. Ein Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte, bitte.
Baker: Mit Schlage?
Customer: Nein, danke.
Baker: Mit Romney?
Customer: Ja, ja, natürlich!

Is that presidential? I don’t think so. And if a rose was called a “poopy flower” it wouldn’t cost so much.

Tags:
Names,
Nicknames,
Politics,
Tommy Thompson,
Mitt Romney

On May 28, 2004, I made a bold prediction about the future of Google:

Here’s one. I got it from a “very reliable source”. Google’s decided that to compete properly with Yahoo they’re going whole hog into the portal biz. If you allow cookies, going to google.com will log you into MyGoogle, which will feature your local news and weather, your gmail inbox, and a selection of online games.

The whole thing will be introduced this summer in a series of TV ads starring Paris Hilton, who will look into the camera and ask, “Wanna see my google?”

I can’t link to it because it’s in a password-protected area of the forum, but I referred to the prediction again in May of last year.

Was I close or what? Today Google announced that the service heretofore known as the Google Personalized Homepage has been redubbed iGoogle.

The only error I made was to predict they’d pick up Microsoft’s “My” rather than Apple’s “i”, and I think they may regret that choice. We’ve already discussed how Google’s not exactly thrilled with the concept of its name being used as a verb, and just like iVillage in that other post, I think we can expect iGoogle to be viewed as a statement regarding an activity. It’s certainly not the same as Apple’s i-for-internet bit, since there’s no non-i Google, right?

So that means that iGoogle is going to strengthen the idea that one can google: I google, you google, he/she/it googles.

What’s that you say? I was wrong about Paris Hilton? Trust me, it’s only a matter of time. But I guess her tagline will have to be changed. How about “iGoogle. Do you Google? Wanna Google with me?” That’ll work.

Tags:
Google,
iGoogle,
Personalization,
Search