Entries from April 2005 ↓

A student carried a suspicious long package into a Clovis, New Mexico junior high school today. The SWAT teams were summoned a la Columbine. The police were amused to discover what the threatening object was.

It turrned out to be a 30-inch burrito wrapped in aluminum foil and a t-shirt. It was an advertising project for school, advertising a restaurant creating oddly-shaped burritos.

Is that a burrito in your pocket or — oh, never mind.

I See Dead People Restaurants.

Read all the sad details in this op-ed piece in The New York Times. A landmark for almost fifty years, the Howard Johnson’s at 46th and Broadway (1551 Broadway) will be closing.

While anyone who visited this eatery thinks of it as simple American food, a kind of home cooking away from home, the article is by renowned French chef Jacques Pepin, who worked for Howard Johnson’s early in his culinary career, refining HoJo’s recipes with the help of Pierre Franey, another famous French chef, known to many as the 60 Minute Gourmet of the Times.

The property will be used as retail space with “a great signage component, ” according the the real estate broker for the deal. About a dozen (actually nine and counting) of the familiar orange and aqua roadside restaurants remain, according to an earlier Times article. The chain seemed everywhere along America’s highways, since its founding in 1925 in Quincy, Massachusetts as an ice cream shop. HJ was one of the country’s first franchises.

Moveon.org, the vitriolic anti-Bush political group, has issued a new call to arms. It’s a TV spot — first aired yesterday — where rogue elephants destroy the White House, both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court.

It’s about as creepy as an animated commercial can get and certainly a lot scarier than anything Disney has done.

Supposedly, “radical Republicans” — to use the commercial’s phrase — are attempting to pack the courts with more extremist judges.

Some Republicans are trying to eliminate the right to filibuster on judicial nominees. As the rules are now, 60 votes in the Senate are needed to end a filibuster. If the rules are changed, a simple majority, 51 votes, will be needed to confirm a nomination.

Filbustering — unlimited legislative debate — is used by a minority to prevent an issue from being voting upon by the entire Senate. Historically, both the House and Senate had have the privilege of unlimited debate, but over the years, the House has put rules in place curtailing it. It has remained in the Senate, though the votes needed by law to end a filibuster have been reduced from 66 to 60.

Bob Dole in The New York Times has some thoughts on the filibuster rule, and the need for a speedy up or down vote on current judcial nominees. (He favors a yay or nay vote, after adequate debate.)

Given the likelihood that there will be some U.S. Supreme Court vacancies in the next few years, a bad judical confirmation can last a lifetime — the judge’s lifetime.

See the :30 spot fueling this debate at AdAge.com.

It was created by Zimmerman & Markman, political consultants, of Santa Monica and produced by FlickerLab in New York.* I guess that makes it a bi-coastal attack on the President.

*By the way, FlickerLab produced the spot in only 44 hours!

One of most interesting high-tech well-travelled blogs is that written by Joi Ito.

He’s touring the world now: having left Japan; he’s just hit les blogs in Paris.

He praises Seth Godin and his latest book All Marketers Are Liars. The idea is that facts don’t sell products: the story behind the products sells them.

That’s true, for lots of products from things as inexpensive as cola to things as expensive as automobiles. (Consider the safety story of Volvo. It’s probably a well-engineered safe car, but the way Volvo has taken the high ground about safety makes the consumer think it’s the safest car — a very different thing.)

Another useful book by Godin is Free Prize Inside!: The Next Big Marketing Idea which stresses the power of small improvements to give a product a selling edge. Godin calls this “soft innovation.”

They’re pushing a new diet book, The 3-Hour Diet(tm). The author, Jorge Cruise is a handsome, mid-thirties fitness guru. Quite a hunk and yes, formerly fat. He’s been there.

According to a New York Times article, diet books can be perennial best sellers, and so they are big business. The book and its spinoffs running its course now is The South Beach Diet. While the new book marketers feel that SBD has run out of steam, the hardcover is still number 28 at Amazon.com. The paperback is lagging at number 223 of all book titles at Amazon. The South Beach Diet and its spinoff volumes have sold 14.5 million copies in two years.

The new book — meant to take a year to write — was hurried out in several months to catch the supposed backlash against the Atkins Diet and its low-carb progeny. (The death of Dr. Atkins, decades after he wrote his first diet book, has hurt sales of the latest generation of Atkins diet books.)

Still Atkins diet books are popular: they’ve sold 21 million copies in the 33 years since Dr. Atkins wrote his first diet book.

The hook for this new diet book? Eat small meals every 3 hours on the theory that this schedule tricks the body into not storing fat.

Hmm, it’s time for my mid-afternoon meal.

Here’s a site about the olden days of Google when it was first introduced, and eerybody was using Altavista or HotBot as their search engine of choice.

It has a link to the Stanford research paper done by the founders of Google on how their search engine would work. Back in those days (1998), you couldn’t submit to Google: it would find you eventually by crawling the web.

The highest Page Ranks were amazing. No zero to ten. No, this went all the way to 11,589. That was the ranking of the Netscape Download page. Second was 10,717.70 for www.w3.org. (The average webpage was assigned the value of one.)

“My category is browser downloads and I want to outrank just one other site …”

There’s a popular article in The New York Times about the trend toward expensive jeans.

Apart from 19th century antiques, the current leader seems to be a Japanese brand Evisu that’s $625 for a hand-painted pair of jeans. That’s up there with the current record high price to gas up your SUV. The company was founded in 1991 by a Japanese tailor tired of paying high prices for classic US jeans.

“Every consumer decision now carries with it class and status implications in a way it didn’t used to,” according to Barry Schwartz, the author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, flipping Mies van de Rohe’s maxim around. This multiplying of choices turns the customer into an endless, frustrated seeker of status and cool.

The only advertising for these luxury goods I’ve found is on the Evisu website itself. By the way, the name and logo come from the Buddhist god of money (and fishing.)

Both seeking for status and money seem to me, as a non-Buddhist, so against Buddhist teachings. Where is the meditation in search of deep and transforming insight?

By the way, is this product so buzz worthy that there is no advertising for it? (I do not read women’s fashion magazines that would be the most likely advertising medium.)

There’s a great commercial by two adguys, touting the same two adguys. It’s at www.ad-rag.com The art director is Tom Millar, and the copywriter is Marc Guttesman. It’s a mini saga of how ad people would handle jobs in other fields. It’s a hoot.
(Of course, only the silliness of the art director is true to life; a copywriter would never really act like that.)

A Swedish firm, GB Glace, has apparently released a new ice cream that pushes the bounds of good taste in the English language. (Personally, I wouldn’t go to Sweden to study the finer points of English.)*

There’s an attack and defense (defence?) going on, stating that these ice cream bars are or are not offensively named: Nogger and Nogger Black. Apparently Nogger means nougat in slang Swedish English and now the addition of a licorice coating makes the ice cream on a stick a Black Nogger. Sheesh.

The Center Against Racism in Sweden is protesting the product name.

*I really thought this was a British product as company making it is called “GB” as if it were the writer’s shorthand for Great Britain.

I’ve been watching Michael Apted’s remarkable documentary series that follows a group of British kids throughout their lives.

Beginning with the thirst-quenching 7 Up in 1964, every seven years another installment in the lives of these UK folks is released. So there’s 14 Up, 21 Up, 28 Up, 35 Up, and now 42 Up. The series begain with fourteen kids, but only eleven are currently co-operating. (Heck, are these the eleven most proud of their lives? Scary thought.)

There are flashbacks in each of the lives to the earlier interviews. They all seemed to have peaked at about 28.

If sad movies cheer you up, because your life is never that bad, this should be a real upper for you.

Amazingly, for the intentionally wide range of classes, ambition, abilities, good luck and bad, all these people seem to be just getting on with it. Lots of divorces, big money troubles, living on the dole, chronic illness, etc. No one is a target for bounty hunters yet, but maybe that’s in the next installment.

Don’t just blame the UK class system or their economy, because the few expats filmed living in the US seem to be making do as well. OK, there is one fabulously successful barrister profiled in the film.

The Amazon reviewer touts their “humanity and strength.” How about “day-to-day dicey struggle” instead?

Apted directed The World is Not Enough, the big-budget James Bond film, so the director is having success. By the way, Apted is 16 years senior to his documentary subjects.

He also directed Coal Miner’s Daughter for which Sissy Spacek won an Oscar for best actress, Continental Divide, and the marvelous Gorky Park based on the Martin Cruz Smith novel.

So the Up series of movies are not only poignant cinema documents of people’s lives over several decades of struggle, but also the warm-up exercises of an accomplished filmmaker.