Virtual Memories

This morning, I read a neat article about co-op advertising in bookstores (better known as “pay for play”, which helps insure that deep-pocketed publishers get the most exposure for their books).

Then, on a whim, I hit Amazon’s “most-preordered books in Literature and Fiction,” when I came across this. Evidently, The Testing of Luther Albright “heralds the beginning of what bodes to be a substantial writing career” for MacKenzie Bezos.

I wonder if the publisher (Fourth Estate) has to pay co-op advertising for the book on Amazon, SINCE THE AUTHOR’S HUSBAND IS AMAZON CEO JEFF BEZOS. I also wonder if the Amazon.com reviewer felt any pressure to, um, say the book is any good.

Anyway, there are a bunch of reasons that I closed down Voyant Publishing, my “literary” imprint. This sorta stuff was a contributing factor, to say the least.

Last night, I discovered that an acquaintance of mine (friend of a friend) is serving nearly 2 years in the penitentiary at Fort Dix. I’ve been researching both the pen and prison life in general.

Here’s the website of a prisoner named Michael Santos, who’s serving 26 years (he’s supposed to finish his sentence in 2013). He educated himself in prison and writes pretty well (prosaically, actually) about the day-to-day ugliness of prison life. Santos was a prisoner at Fort Dix, and wrote about it pretty extensively.

During my researches, I also discovered that the Bureau of Prisons has a federal inmate locator, and that some of the forums at Prisontalk.com are monstrously depressing.

I’ve also discovered that I will, for the rest of my life, do my utmost NEVER to get sent to prison.

As a guy who allegedly writes for a living, and one who tends to go for humor, I’m finding it awfully difficult to write to a friend-of-a-friend who’s in prison. But he oughtta know that people on the outside are thinking of him. I mean, life on the outside can be pretty lonely.

Nicholas Kristof of the NYTimes is insanely pissed off at the media for ignoring the genocide in Darfur:

When I’ve asked television correspondents about this lapse, they’ve noted that visas to Sudan are difficult to get and that reporting in Darfur is expensive and dangerous. True, but TV crews could at least interview Darfur refugees in nearby Chad. After all, Diane Sawyer traveled to Africa this year - to interview Brad Pitt, underscoring the point that the networks are willing to devote resources to cover the African stories that they consider more important than genocide.

If only Michael Jackson’s trial had been held in Darfur. Last month, CNN, Fox News, NBC, MSNBC, ABC and CBS collectively ran 55 times as many stories about Michael Jackson as they ran about genocide in Darfur.

Read on.

I read BusinessWeek, the Economist, and some other bizmags and econobloggers a lot (can’t say enough about the New York Post’s John Crudele). Outside of my own industry (as a Pharma observer), I like to see read interpretations of how industries function, how business works, and why money does what it does. I haven’t come to any grand conclusions about this stuff, but I am gratified that elegant design of consumer goods is on the upswing. Virginia Postrel writes about this a lot, and I plan to read her recent book on the subject, The Substance of Style, later this year.

All of that is a preface to saying that BusinessWeek has just launched an Innovation & Design site, covering all those subjects that I adore. So check it out sometime.

Looks like my music-laden alter ego has struck again! It’s a new Mad Mix!

When I write my annual Top 20 Pharma Companies & Top 10 Biopharma Companies report (this year’s edition is soon to post at the website of my day job), I read a lot of annual reports, along with industry analysis, news coverage, and other neat sources.

The annual reports have two parts: the glossy front half, hyping the company to the general public, and the fine-print back half, breaking down a lot of the numbers and providing SEC-mandated information (litigation issues, executive compensation, accounting policies, etc.). It took a couple of years before I started to understand a little of the subtext in the reports.

I’m still no expert with this stuff (or I’d be making a lot more money), but I do find it pretty fascinating. For example, virtually every company I profiled this year included a variation on the following:

On October 22, 2004, President Bush signed into law the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 (AJCA), which creates a temporary incentive for U.S. corporations to repatriate undistributed income earned abroad by providing an 85% dividends received deduction for certain dividends from controlled foreign corporations. Although the deduction is subject to a number of limitations and uncertainty remains as to how to interpret certain provisions of the AJCA, we believe we have the information necessary to make an informed decision on the impact of the AJCA on our repatriation plans. Based on that decision, we plan to repatriate [bazillions of dollars] . . .

The upshot of the AJCA was that foreign revenues, which were previously taxed at 38%, were now to be taxed at 5.25% for a single year, if repatriated for the purpose of “creating jobs”. Turns out that a lot of companies have been stowing away a lot of money in foreign revenues, rather than bringing it back to the U.S., where it would have been taxed to bejeesus. Pfizer has decided to bring nearly $37 billion in foreign money into the U.S. under the AJCA. I thought the numbers were pretty astounding, but I had no idea (and no time to research) how much money other major companies were repatriating.

According to this article from BusinessWeek, it turns out my industry is way out in front. In comparison with Pfizer’s enormous stash, Dell’s bringing back just $4.1 billion. Problem is, there’s no way to show that the money’s being used to create jobs. After all, if Pfizer’s R&D budget is $8 billion for 2005, according to the AJCA, they could use the repatriated money for that same R&D budget, and spend the originally budgeted money on buying solid gold rocket cars for all the top executives.

It’s a pretty ineptly named bill since, erversely enough, a bunch of companies benefiting from the American Jobs Creation Act (like Pfizer and Merck) are in the process of dismantling some of their operations and laying off a bunch of employees. Read more about it.

Congrats to Lance Armstrong for winning his 7th Tour De France! This morning, I realized that we’re the same age, which makes me feel pretty bad about my own accomplishments, or lack thereof.

I’ve never been much of a Sheryl Crow fan, so that helps balance us out a little.