Category: Uncategorized

“Hmm,” pondered the Coca-Cola executive, “we know Gil Roth is a big fan of Cherry Coke. How can we change the packaging to make him feel like a complete fairy when he buys a bottle?”

I’m a cheap ethnic stereotype, but I’ve concluded that there are things you cut corners on, and things you don’t.

When I was in Vegas and wanted to take a helicopter ride to the Grand Canyon, I decided to avoid the signs out on the strip that read, “Discount Helicopter Tours.”

As I wrote a few years ago, it’s not smart to go cheap when buying a carbon monoxide detector.

Never complain about shoes you bought at Payless.

And never trust an experimental Chinese fusion reactor built on the cheap:

Experiments with the advanced new device will start in July or August. If the experiments prove successful, China will become the first country in the world to build a full superconducting experimental Tokamak fusion device, nicknamed “artificial sun”, experts said.

The project, dubbed EAST (experimental advanced superconducting Tokamak), is being undertaken by the Hefei-based Institute of Plasma Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It will require a total investment of nearly 300 million yuan (37 million U.S. dollars), only one fifteenth to one twentieth the cost of similar devices being developed in the other parts of the world.

G.I. Joe Sigma 6: Introducing kids to zero-defect managment practices?

Last week, I was over at my dad’s, going through old photographs. There were some great ones of Dad as a child, as well as a gorgeous pic of his parents’ wedding (naturally, before he was a child), and other shots of him with his brothers, as kids and adults.

But did Amy want to see any of that stuff? NO! She was much more interested in the photo below, from when I was 18 years old and bore a mind-blowing resemblance to Napoleon Dynamite (not as good as this guy’s resemblance, but still):

Sigh. She plans on sending it to all of her friends who haven’t met me yet, to show them what a catch her future husband is.

Update: Shut up! I turned out to be all decent-looking and stuff! See? Even if I did have bad facial hair. . .

Yay! Osama Bin Laden’s offering a truce! If we give up more of the world’s oil regions to nuclear-ambitious apocalypse-obsessed mullahs, we’ll have peace! It couldn’t be more easy!

(I was really hoping he’d go with the “I just saved a bundle on my car insurance” line, but that’s what he gets for not using Jewish comedy writers)

I started reading Edward Jay Epstein‘s book The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood a few days ago. I’ve enjoyed his articles on Slate for a while now, and the book’s also pretty enjoyable. It breaks down the finances of how Hollywood works, and how the studios ultimately became tools in larger media empires. I find this stuff fascinating, but you all know I’m weird.

One issue that interests me is the fate of News Corp. See, Rupert Murdoch had the idea that satellite TV would be a distribution system that rivalled cable. As far as TV goes, he’s been proved right. While DirecTV can’t do on-demand too well, it’s got a great signal, and it has unique content that people are willing to pay for (in my case, the NFL HD package). Satellite’s been growing rapidly in the last few years.

Unfortunately, I’m also paying my cable company for internet service. I had some bad service from Verizon DSL a few years ago, and have done okay with my local cable company for that part of the package.

The thing is, the cable companies can (and do) provide TV, internet and voice services. The phone companies are trying to get to that point too, by laying down “last-mile” fiber-optic lines. Satellite, however, is pretty much a one-way technology; users receive signals and can send back short dribbles of info, but there’s no way to provide realistic internet and voice service via DirecTV.

Which gets me back to the question of what News Corp. exactly plans to do. And that gets me to BusinessWeek this morning, which asks Can Murdoch Win on the Web?

One theory in the article is that News Corp. will attempt to brand DirecTV’s internet service using WiMax wireless technology. Other wireless technologies are mentioned in the article, and that struck me as a pretty amazing way of getting around the Gordian knot.

In this case, the knot consists of all those cables and landlines that would need to be brought to every consumer’s home: fiber-optic, digital co-ax, etc. By going with a wireless system, News Corp. could avoid much of the massive capital cost associated with all of that “last-mile” work.

If a wireless solution offers comparable speed and access to cable and fiber, News Corp could be in a position to undercut its phone and cable competitors, which have to pay off those capital costs.

Like I said, “I find this stuff fascinating, but you all know I’m weird.”

Read all about it.

Microsoft: Not evil, just half-assed.

One of my favorite songs is Slit Skirts, by Pete Townshend. It begins with

I was just 34 years old and I was still wandering in a haze
I was wondering why everyone I met seemed like they were lost in a maze

I don’t know why I thought I should have some kind of divine right to the blues
It’s sympathy not tears people need when they’re the front page sad news.

I turned 35 today, so I can now look back on that song fondly, in my decrepitude.

Cartoonist and painter William Stout offers some advice for living well. (Thanks, Tom!)

Also, here’s a passage from the book I’m reading, Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities:

[I]t is understandable that men who were young in the 1920’s were captivated by the vision of the freeway Radiant City, with the specious promise that it would be appropriate to an automobile age. At least it was then a new idea; to men of the generation of New York’s Robert Moses, for example, it was radical and exciting in the days when their minds were growing and their ideas forming. Some men tend to cling to old intellectual excitements, just as some belles, when they are old ladies, still cling to the fashions and coiffures of their exciting youth. But it is harder to understand why this form of arrested mental development should be passed on intact to succeeding generations of planners and designers. It is disturbing to think that men who are young today, men who are being trained now for their careers, should accept on the grounds that they must be “modern” in their thinking, conceptions about cities and traffic which are not only unworkable, but also to which nothing new of any significance has been added since their fathers were children.

At which point Springsteen’s New York City Serenade starts playing, and I feel like I’m going to have a wonderful birthday.

Tony Blair cops to smacking his kids around. According to the article, new proposals by his party intended to restore respect “include a National Parenting Academy where frustrated parents would be given help in dealing with out-of-control offspring.”

If the Brits really have this much trouble with their kids, does it mean that Mary Poppins, Nanny 911 and Supernanny aren’t as valuable as we think?

Remember the case of Cory Maye that I linked to a few weeks ago? That dude in Mississippi who’s sitting on death row in a particularly murky case (as in, cops broke down his door possibly without announcing themselves and possibly without a legit warrant, and the first cop to barge into Maye’s place got shot)?

The Agitator’s done a great job of pursuing the case, and informing readers about the ever-stranger circumstances of the case. Now the strangeness has gone overboard.

Evidently, the public defender who was representing Maye on his appeal has been fired from his position as town public defender, almost certainly in reponse to his pursuit of Maye’s appeal. Read Balko’s latest on the case, just to get one more take on how messed up the justice system can get.

The lawyer, Bob Evans, is still representing Maye. If you want to contribute (not tax free) to a legal fund to try to get Maye off death row, this is the place to go.