Author: Gil

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“Also, it bumps into stuff and has a hard time shaving.”

There’s an article in the NYTimes today about how the police in Providence, RI have to deal with antiterrorism guidelines instead of, y’know, crime. The chief of police has one of the more bizarre quotes I’ve read this week:

“Our nation, that I love, is like a great giant that can deal with a problem when it focuses on it,” said Colonel Esserman, who has been chief since 2003, when he was hired by Mayor David N. Cicilline. “But it seems like that giant of a nation is like a Cyclops, with but one eye, that can focus only on one problem at a time.”

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A Chip off the Old Karadzic

Last weekend, I wrote about my Sunday sidewalk brunch with Samuel Delany. I should have known something was wrong, the way Chip kept looking down the sidewalk and back into the restaurant, the way he kept nervously fingering his beard, the way he patted me down and confiscated my phone before we sat at the table.

But I didn’t understand why he kept trying to explain how the biggest influence on Dhalgren was actually the poetry of Dragan Dabic, in between complaints about how Marko Jaric was disastrously underused by the Timberwolves last season.

Now it all becomes clear: I wasn’t having lunch with Chip Delany! I was having lunch with Radovan Karadzic!

We’ve gone through the looking-glass, people.

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F*** You, You Whining F***: 7/21/08

In today’s Wall Street Journal, there’s an article about how customers are asking Starbucks not to close their favorite locations, following the chain’s disclosure of the 600 stores is plans to close. The two complainants in the article come from different worlds, Bloomfield, NM and Manhattan. The person from NM contends that her townspeople won’t miss the store itself, but that its absence may keep other businesses from seeing the town as a good place to set up shop. Since I live in a town that has no Starbucks but does have a Chinese restaurants where, in the words of my wife, “it doesn’t even taste like food,” I can understand that business stigma.

However, the other person they interviewed was priceless:

Ms. Walker is in charge of consolidating 525 people from seven of her company’s New York offices into a new building in January. The Starbucks inside that building, at Madison Avenue and 44th Street, “was something that we were using to psych people up” about the move, she said.

Her hopes were dashed last week when Starbucks released the list of the stores it plans to close. She jumped on the Internet to find a phone number for the company’s main office so she can ask officials to reconsider. “Knowing Starbucks, there’s probably [another] one within a few blocks,” she said. “But that’s probably two blocks too far.”

Two things for Ms. Walker:

  1. go to the Starbucks Store Locator and you’ll see that there’s a Starbucks across the street from your building as well as another one down the block on your side of the street, and
  2. f*** you, you whining f***.

I’m hoping to make this the first installment in a series of smackdowns. If you can think of a better title for this, please send it over.

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It’s always the end of the world for somebody

Courtesy of Hit & Run, here’s a neat article from World Affairs on how the current crop of “America-in-decline” books & articles is nothing new:

As with the pessimistic intellectual troughs that followed the Depression, Vietnam, and the stagflation of the late 1970s and early 1980s, there is a tendency among declinists to over-extrapolate from a momentous but singular event—in this case, the Iraq War, whose wake propels many of their gloomy forecasts.

It’s always easier to

  1. call for the end of the world, and
  2. pretend that now is how things are always going to be.

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What It Is: 7/21/08

What I’m reading: Against the Gods, and Bottomless Belly Button

What I’m listening to: Court and Spark, by Joni Mitchell, and Hearts and Bones, by Paul Simon

What I’m watching: Dazed and Confused, and Sunshine (not the 87-hour Ralph Fiennes movie of the same title)

What I’m drinking: Rogue Dead Guy Ale

Where I’m going: A mini-class reunion in Philadelphia next Thursday night, allegedly. I write, “allegedly,” because it’s taking place a hipster bowling alley, and I know of only one other attendee. I thought about using my frequent-flyer miles to take a 30-hour Fri-Sat round trip to San Diego for the Comic-Con, but decided against it, in favor of hitting my company picnic on Friday and trying to have another quiet weekend like this past one.

What I’m happy about: A new Paul Weller album comes out tomorrow, and so does the DVD of Spaced!

What I’m sad about: My dad almost destroyed his car by getting gas from one of those discount stations. On the plus side, he saved 8 cents per gallon, which would add up to a whole dollar in savings, based on the fuel tank in my car.

What I’m pondering: Why Roche had to go and bid for the remaining shares of Genentech about a day or so before my Top Companies issue comes out, in which I praise Roche for leaving Genentech independent. (I realize the integration is more about back-office functions, while letting the R&D functions stand on their own, but that trick never works.)

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The Week that Was

Sorry I didn’t write more last week, dear readers. Last Sunday evening, I had to pick up my dad at Newark Airport, but his flight was delayed an hour or so, and my ensuing late arrival at home led to a short night of sleep heading into Monday (we get up at 5am to start the day). That sequence left me off-kilter for the rest of the week. Since most of my work-days were spent working on my conference and trying to write code for the web-edition of our Top Companies ish, I never got settled enough to start a-writin’.

If you’re interested in the highlights — brunch with a semi-famous author, a shoot-from-the-hip panel discussion at a media relations class, and a fancy dinner that led to the final-straw decision to buy a GPS unit — then click “More”!

Continue reading “The Week that Was”

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Fall of the Mall

Yesterday’s WSJ had a neat article about the bankruptcy of cheap-chic clothing retailer Steve & Barry’s. It explores the practice of malls essentially paying S&B’s to open up shop in large, unoccupied spaces. This subsidy tied into the company’s business of “nothing above $9.98”. Sez the Journal:

For mall owners, large anchor spaces, which were once occupied almost exclusively by department stores, are especially important. Their role is to draw lots of shoppers into malls, enabling owners to rent their smaller spaces to specialty stores. When anchor spaces go dark, clauses in the leases of smaller tenants often permit them to pay lower rents.

This led the company to go from 31 stores in 2004 to 276 stores by this year. It looks like the company came to rely on the upfront payouts from mall owners, which fueled a rapid expansion in new stores, which fueled a greater need for more upfront payouts (esp. as the economy slowed and sales dropped), which fueled rapider expansion, which. . .

Well, you can guess what happened; the company went bankrupt a few weeks ago. The story’s a little more complicated, and also touches on the company’s celebrity-branding strategy, including its Sarah Jessica Parker line, “Bitten.”

I found the article pretty compelling, despite the fact that I’d never bought anything in one these stores. Still, I like to try to gain an understanding of how retail works, and sometimes fails to, while also trying to grok what the ebb and flow of different types of stores and product mixes says about us as consumers. For the moment, access to the article is free, so check it out.