A podcast about books & life — not necessarily in that order
Don’t even pretend that you’re interested in reading my long tirade about the service department at Mahwah Honda, my local Honda dealership, which managed turned a flat tire into an epic.
But if you do wanna get a peek into how balled-up and pissy I can get, feel free to check out the letter I wrote to the managers at the service department, under the title of “Worst car service I have ever received”.
Continue reading “Customer Disservice”
I can’t begin to explain the genius and craft of this post from Free Darko.
My friend Cec writes to tell me that Micawber Books in Princeton is closing. I write to tell you that Logan Fox is one of the coolest names around.
Sorry for the paucity of posts this week, dear readers. I’ve been pretty burned out from work. Plus, we spent last night picking up my wife’s new Mini Cooper S, which has her pretty excited. Pix to follow this weekend.
Your Unrequred Reading is carefully hidden away under that “more” link!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Dec. 8, 2006”
Amy & I were clicking around this evening and came across Battlefield: Earth. We marveled over its badness, then checked out the Netflix page for it. Two great things occurred:
a) “Members who enjoyed this movie also enjoyed: Wild Wild West, Batman & Robin, Van Helsing, Planet of the Apes, and The Chronicles of Riddick”, and
b) This review: “I watched this movie for free one winter, working for a local cable company. Part of my job was to monitor the various cable channels to make sure there were no problems. And even though I was indirectly paid to watch, I still felt ripped off.”
The big year-end issue of my magazine is split between a directory of contract service providers (2nd half) and a series of profile pages of advertisers. Some of them by a profile/ad spread, others just buy a profile. My associate editor and I get the text and images in, lay them out, send low-res PDFs over to each client, and put in whatever revisions they request and send out more PDFs.
Since there are around 120 profile advertisers, you can imagine that there’s lot of project management involved. We also need a certain amount of perspective on which profiles are going to be smooth and which are going to “take some work.” Every morning, I open up a spreadsheet that contains the status of every “unapproved” company (their info gets moved to a worksheet called “Yay! Done!” when they’re approved). It reminds me which companies I need to harass and which ones I’ve yet to get started with because I know their profiles are going to be a major hassle.
When it’s a new advertiser, we have to engage in some handholding. When that new advertiser is overseas, this process can get a little more taxing. When the new overseas advertiser sends files from a program that you haven’t seen since 1998, it can make you throw your hands in the air. And when two of them send files from that same program. . .?
Today, I received e-mails from two separate accounts in India, and they both sent me files from Corel Draw. I looked at these attachments and their “.cdr” extensions and I thought, “Are they using Windows98? Did they send these e-mails over Prodigy? Are they just discovering Celine Dion and Titanic? Should I ask them to resend everything on a ZipDisk?”
It felt like the time I found my old collection of mix tapes up in the attic and realized that I don’t even own a machine that can play them.
“The things we crave are either near us or far, whereas time is about process. I have lived many years and I have learned not to trust process. Creation, destruction: these are not the real story. When we dwell on such things, we inevitably lapse into cliché. The true drama is in these relationships of space.”
–Emil Kopen
I’ve bought a lot of comic books over the years, but I’m not what you’d call a collector. When a store clerk asks if I want a bag-and-board for a new purchase, I answer, “No, thanks. I just read ’em.” I used to have some “valuable” comics, but I sold most of them off during college. I don’t remember what I needed the money for. A few years ago, I gave away a ton of “worthless” ones to some friends of mine. They treasure them.
You could say I own a couple of expensive comics, but that depends on your definition of “expensive”. Is $100 too much to spend on a hardcover collection of Little Nemo in Slumberland comic strips, reprinted at their original size (21″ x 16″)? Is $95 too much to spend on a three-volume slipcased edition of the complete Calvin & Hobbes, the best comic strip post-Peanuts? Is $125 too much to spend on the trade paperbacks of the final 100 issues of Cerebus? (Okay, don’t answer that one.)
And is $3,000 too much to spend on Hicksville?
There’s certainly nothing on its cover to indicate that Hicksville carries such an extravagant price. In fact, my edition reads, “$19.95 US / $24.95 CANADA”. It’s no rare, pulled-from-circulation issue, has no first appearance of Wolverine nor the death of a well-loved character (“Not a dream! Not a hoax!”).
But Hicksville brought me to the other side of the world, to small towns and jade factories, to wineries and bungee-platforms, to glaciers and Bunny Hell, to myself and beyond. It brought me to New Zealand.
Hicksville collects a story from the early-to-mid-1990s comics of Dylan Horrocks, about a comics journalist who travels to a small town to research the childhood of a famous cartoonist. The journalist discovers that everyone in this town is a comics aficionado. It’s a dream that I think all comics readers had at some point in their lives, that there’s a place in which we’re home.
But it wasn’t this vision that stayed with me over the years and led me to call my travel-industry friends to set up a two-week tour of the North & South Islands. I wasn’t naïve enough to think there was a comics Shangri-La waiting there. (That’s in Angouleme!)
What brought me to New Zealand was the sky. It’s no mean feat in a black-and-white comic book to convey such subtlety in clouds. In fact, Horrocks’ scratchy pen style would seem to dictate against it, mere outlines separating absence from absence. But there was something in his skies that stayed with me. I was captured by the romance of it, right down to the Maori name for the country: Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud.
In 2003, I decided to go there and see it for myself. My friend Liz set me up on an “adventure tour” group, which was an extensively mixed bag of people (one of whom has stayed a good friend ever since). For the first few days, all I saw were clouds. Oh, and rain. Lots of rain.
But by the time our tour headed to the South Island via the Wellington-Picton ferry, the sky cleared and I started to understand things that I can’t explain. By the end of the trip, at the peak of the Ben Lomond trail, a mile or so above Queenstown, I knew where I was.
A day later, I would spend 24 hours in planes and airports, replaying Emil Kopen’s remarks about space, not time, being the essence of storytelling, as I jetted from Queenstown to Auckland to LA to Newark. Today marks the third anniversary of my return from NZ. Time and space.
I bought my copy of Hicksville at a small press comics expo in Maryland in 1998. Dylan Horrocks was in attendance, signing copies (he’d been brought in to give a presentation on the history of comics in NZ). He made a sketch on the first page of my copy, along with the inscription, “Hey Gil! You’re always welcome in Hicksville!”
And I am.
(You really want to look through my photos from that trip.)
Yesterday, my dad picked up a new iPod. He called me to ask what sort of video files it can play. I wasn’t sure — outside of the movies and videos you can buy at the iTune store — because I haven’t bought a new iPod since July 2004. It’s true: I don’t even have a color display on the thing. Just 9,000 songs or so.
Dad went on to complain about the lack of “stuff” that accompanied the purchase. “There’s no dock, no cables, nothing! It’s just some slim little box, instead of that big one that folded out and had all the other accessories!”
I said, “Dad, tell yourself this: ‘I just bought a 30gig player with a color display, full video, and a 13-hour battery, for $249.’ Then ask yourself what $249 would’ve gotten you a few years back.”
He conceded that it was a mighty impressive amount of stuff for a lot less cash.
Just to keep things in perspective, here’s a piece from an article about Toshiba’s 100gb drive for iPod-sized players:
Toshiba first developed a 1.8-inch drive in 2000. The device, which was at the time the highest capacity such drive available, could hold up to 2GB of data and cost around $740. Today the drives have not only risen in capacity but also fallen in price to the point where an Apple iPod, which includes an 80GB drive and color screen, costs $349.
What a difference two days make. On Nov. 30, Pfizer gave an “R&D open house” event where it discussed its drug pipeline. The biggest drug in that pipeline is torcetrapib, a compound that raises “good” cholesterol. For years, Pfizer’s been developing it as a combo-drug with Lipitor (atorvastatin), which reduces “bad” cholesterol.
Prior to the meeting, Pfizer issued a press statement that included this passage about torcetrapib:
Commenting on torcetrapib/atorvastatin (T/A), Dr. LaMattina said, “We are first-in-class and we intend to remain best-in-class in a category that has the potential to change the face of cardiovascular medicine. T/A raises HDL and lowers LDL. We believe that the net benefits of the drug — characterized by significant HDL elevation and LDL lowering vs. the small elevation in blood pressure — will greatly benefit patients with CV risk.
“The development of T/A has required tremendous innovation on our part from the earliest stages of discovery through one of the most cutting-edge development programs ever carried out anywhere. At the end of this comprehensive program, we expect to have a medicine with unparalleled efficacy in raising HDL, lowering LDL and with an anti-atherosclerosis indication.
“We will learn of the top-line results of the three pivotal imaging trials during the first quarter of 2007. During this same period, we will also receive the results of some additional Phase III lipid studies. To obtain a reliable picture of the overall safety and efficacy profile of T/A, the results of all these studies will need to be analyzed and reviewed together, and this will happen in the context of the American College of Cardiology Meeting in March, 2007.”
Yesterday, Pfizer announced that its independent Drug Safety Monitoring Board discovered a significantly higher mortality rate in the torcetrapib wing of late-stage clinical trials. The results must have been overwhelming, because Pfizer said that it’s stopping the trials, canceling all development of the drug, and accelerating its restructuring plans. A few days earlier, the company announced that it would lay off 2,400 sales reps, as part of its reorganization. Torcetrapib’s failure means large numbers of people will be getting fired in the next few weeks.
If you follow the pharma industry, you already understand what a cataclysmic event this is for Pfizer. I don’t think it’s on the scale of a Vioxx, because there’s likely no legal liability issues, but the lost sales will be in the tens of billions. Beyond that, there’s the opportunity cost of the R&D that was performed on the product, as well as nearly $800 million in actual development costs.
I’m not trying to convey a “poor little Pfizer” impression here; I disagree with a bunch of the company’s practices (particularly its growth-by-acquisition model from the first half of this decade). What I’m trying to get across is that developing new drugs is a mighty risky proposition. I’m not sure that people who complain, “Drugs are too expensive; pharma companies are evil,” have much idea about the risks and the costs these companies incur.
I can’t make this stuff up: the new Microsoft operating system offers users nine different ways to turn off their computers.