Well, this trumps my attempt at parking Amy’s Mini in the garage:
I’m going with “In dog years, I’m old enough to drive, right?”, but feel free to add your own caption to this one.
Unrequired Reading: June 13, 2008
Pigeon house . . . of the dead!
Sorry for the lack of posts today, dear reader. I spent most of the day transcribing my Pfizer interview from Tuesday: 65 minutes on the digital recorder added up to 4,000 words, and that’s after I elided some sections that I know I can’t run in the magazine.
Anyway, I’m settling in to read, and just came across a word I’d never encountered before, which I figure I’ll share with you:
columbarium
n. (pl. -baria) a room or building with niches for funeral urns to be stored. a niche to hold a funeral urn. a stone wall or walk within a garden for burial of funeral urns, esp. attached to a church. Origin: mid 18th cent.: from Latin, literally ‘pigeon house’.
If you meet the Booda on the road . . .
Mobil Eyes
I didn’t take any pix yesterday when I went to NYC to interview an exec at Pfizer, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t see any neat stuff. In this case, I discovered the Mobil Building, a block or so southwest of Pfizer’s HQ. A gent named wallyg posted a neat pix of the building (and the nearby Chrysler building) over at flickr:
Photo by wallyg, who appears to have some other really wonderful shots up at flickr, too!
Full circle!
I’ve long goofed that the Wall Street Journal’s standard headshot drawings look like they’ve been put through The Drew Friedmanizer. Today, the WSJ has a headshot by none other than. . . Drew Friedman!
That sad part of my “Drew Friedmanizer” reference is that Mr. Friedman hasn’t used his pointillist drawing style for more than a decade. But far be it from me to develop new material!
Anyway, the article is an interview with AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega about his view of the future of wireless (centered on the iPhone, of course).
Taleb and Taliban
I enjoyed this profile of Nassim Nicholas Taleb by Bryan Appleyard. I haven’t read his books yet, but I’m sympathetic to his notion that the radically unpredictable will trump your bitch-ass plans no matter how farsighted you think you are:
Last May, Taleb published The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
. It said, among many other things, that most economists, and almost all bankers, are subhuman and very, very dangerous. They live in a fantasy world in which the future can be controlled by sophisticated mathematical models and elaborate risk-management systems. Bankers and economists scorned and raged at Taleb. He didn’t understand, they said. A few months later, the full global implications of the sub-prime-driven credit crunch became clear. The world banking system still teeters on the edge of meltdown. Taleb had been vindicated. “It was my greatest vindication. But to me that wasn’t a black swan; it was a white swan. I knew it would happen and I said so. It was a black swan to Ben Bernanke [the chairman of the Federal Reserve]. I wouldn’t use him to drive my car. These guys are dangerous. They’re not qualified in their own field.â€
Reading the profile reminded me of a post I wrote about Ahmed Rashid’s book Taliban
The book is also a product of its time, of course. One of the “problems†with Taliban is that oil was priced around $13/barrel in the years leading up to its publication. That fact was a key to his understanding of Russian and Iranian policy, and it’s completely understandable; who would even entertain the notion that oil would someday trade for 5x that price?
Of course, the black swan that I missed was that oil would soon trade for TEN TIMES that price. The profile is filled with some pretty neat anecdotes about the way our sophisticated models — especially the financial ones — can’t stand up to reality. Or, as Mr. Appleyard puts it:
He doesn’t make predictions, he insults people paid to do so by telling them to get another job. All forecasts about the oil price, for example, are always wrong, though people keep doing it.
Condescend much?
A few days ago, Sam Zell’s Tribune Group announced cutback plans at its newspapers. The announcement sparked an uproar because it mentioned the number of pages produced annually by reporters at different papers. The idea was to contrast how writers at some papers — the Baltimore Sun and the Hartford Courant — each averaged 300+ pages a year, while those at the LA Times produced an average of only 51 pages a year. The Tribune’s goal is to reach the magical 50-50 advertising/editorial ratio (which I always manage to miss in my own magazine, coming closer to a 43/57 split. Seriously. I keep track of this stuff).
The rationale as I understand it is that most newspapers are wasting their time and money on national and international news, given that most readers get that sort of news from the internet. Instead, the Trib plans to focus on local news. According to that NYTimes’ writeup:
In his note to employees, Mr. Zell wrote that Tribune papers would be redesigned, beginning with The Orlando Sentinel, on June 22. Surveys show readers want “maps, graphics, lists, ranking and stats,†he wrote. “We’re in the business of satisfying customers, and we will respond to what they say they want.â€
I guess I get where they’re coming from, but I’ve never been a fan of the “shrink to grow” mentality. Cuts may lead to profitability, but they don’t usually create opportunities for growth.
Today, the Times followed up with analysis of the strategy, interviewing publishers and editors. Rather than quote from that, I’d like to share this passage from the NYObserver’s analysis of the Times’ analysis:
“Most readers of newspapers really only consume a small fraction of what the newspaper produces,” [Neuharth] said. “Can you give them the stuff they want, even though there’s less of it over all? I think you can.”
But then again, Neuharth is the founder of USA Today, so we can’t really take advice from that.
Vanity (press), thy name is Observer. Please keep in mind that this newspaper was losing $2 million annually before its purchase by Jared Kushner. No word on how much money it’s losing now.
Kushner’s dad recently served time in federal prison for tax evasion and campaign finance violations, as well as hiring a prostitute to seduce his sister’s husband, videotaping the hookup, and sending his sis a copy of the tape, in retaliation for her cooperation in an investigation of the aforementioned tax evasion and campaign finance violations.
USA Today isn’t hip or NYC-relevant like the Observer, but its ad revenue was up 2% in 1Q08, despite a drop in overall ad pages.
(Update! Here’s a big-ass interview with Jared Kushner, in which he says that the Observer’s revenues were up 61% in 1Q08. It’s privately held, so he could just be lying, or he could be inadvertently showing how truly disastrous the paper’s numbers were before. Anyway, here’s an excerpt —
People are hysterical about the death of newspapers and I would say they’re not dying, they’re just kind of reinventing themselves. What the ultimate body count is in reinvention is still to be determined, but the difference between a weekly and a daily is that my product is a country home, whereas a daily is your primary residence. You need a primary residence so people may choose one primary residence over the other, and internet and the newsprint to some degree are interchangeable for certain people. You’re only going to buy a country house if you know you’re going to use it. You’re only going to buy a country house if you want to go to it. You are only going to subscribe to the New York Observer if you’re going to make time to read it and if it adds something to your life that’s kind of special. The way I look at it is, there’s obviously a lot competing for readers’ attention these days, but the goal of the Observer is to be something very unique. It’s a hyper-unique product. I’d like to think that our editorial mission is to give our readers every week one or two things that they just can’t get anywhere else that would make them smile, or a little bit smarter. We have the smartest readership probably in the world of any publication.
— in which he ignores the definition of the word “unique”.)
What It Is: 6/9/08
What I’m reading: Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill. Bought via Kindle
What I’m listening to: Some of my Mad Mix playlists, but I haven’t listened to a lot of music this week.
What I’m watching: Still the third season of The Wire
What I’m drinking: Coors Light, sadly enough. It was the drink of choice at the birthday party we attended in Louisiana this weekend.
Where I’m going: NYC on Tuesday to interview some people from Pfizer for a feature in my mag.
What I’m happy about: Rufus and his dogsitters got along just fine this weekend. (But one of them dropped his iPhone and cracked the screen.)
What I’m sad about: I got my ass handed to me by 3 women at Wii
What I’m pondering: How one of the partygoers this weekend managed to get tanked on Coors Light.