Textual Interventions

Last week the Toronto Star announced it was going to sack about 100 in-house editors, and replace them with editors from somewhere else.

Today the Torontoist blog is running  an internal memo to Star staffers from the publisher. What’s interesting about it is that a Star editor took a none-too-kind red pen to the letter, showing all the big and little ways the memo falls short as a piece of writing.

I love this bit of contested narrative, especially the beginning of paragraph three, where the text says “we are today launching a Voluntary Separation Program, to provide staff with additional choices.” The editor’s comment: “additional to what? haven’t named any others. please explain.”

On the very same day, a blog called she is too fond of books (yes, the hed is written downstyle) invited its readers to write a collaborative story: “I’ll start with a sentence, and everyone who comments will grow the story by adding a sentence of their own.”

The blogger started it like this:

“Ugh, Monday again!” I thought, as I rolled over and hit, literally hit, the snooze button on the clock-radio.

(Starting a story with a character waking up is a cliché, but whatever, no one is pinning their hopes on this group of monkeys writing a masterpiece.) It continues:

Why was I feeling so aggressive this morning? Then the gut-wrenching horrors of yesterday came flooding back.

Not even wishful thinking could make the sight of my husband in the arms of my best friend a dream. Losing both of my best friends in one fell swoop was simply not a good way to start a week.

But, hey, it’s not like I didn’t know it was coming; I’ve been fooling myself for quite some time.

What interesting creatures we humans are, able to see so much, or so little, depending on our psychological needs.

I’d convinced myself the perfume I smelt on his shirts was just the cheap kind counter girls attacked shoppers with, to be fair it probably was, Sandra had a cheap streak.

(We could quibble about so much interior monologue so early in the story, but no matter. Besides, infidelity and a cheap tart named Sandra? Things are looking up!)

Forget about the snooze button – I reached out again and turned off the alarm. The last thing I wanted to do was get out of bed, but it was pretty unlikely that I’d fall asleep again now…although that was the ONLY thing I wanted to do.

Well, not the only thing, but castration was frowned upon in my small town.

Hmm. Funny line, but a little troubling if you’re a man. I figured was time for me to play along. Besides, as a guy, I thought the story needed more action, and less tiresome ruminating about how lovely it was to stay in bed. So I added something along the lines of…

My husband tottered to a stop at the side of the bed, his ankles wobbling on high heel shoes, his chest hair billowing out of the bodice of a dress — Sandra’s dress.

A new character! AND a plot point! That, I figured, would propel the story in a really interesting direction.

I figured wrong.

And then it hit me, glue was what I needed — the horrible once-it-comes-in-contact-with-the-skin kind that’s impossible to remove without surgery. I closed my eyes and smiled.

OK, well, maybe glue was an interesting direction, especially if we got into huffing, or affixing wigs to the cross-dressing husband. But no, the glue was just non sequitur foreshadowing for this:

I listened as my husband turned on the shower in our newly renovated, completely decadent bath/spa/suite, a project which had gone well beyond our original budget by far, and which we had just started to enjoy last week. This room had become an all consuming project in the last year. The shower was amazing, with multiple-positioned shower heads and a marble bench, a japanese soaking tub (which was well worth the $8000 we had spent on it), heated floors, towel racks and a sauna. This room had a majestic view of the Malibu coastline, with floor to ceiling windows which had to be installed via an enormous construction crane. Our neighbors would probably not be speaking to us any time soon. Not that we cared.

WTF? It was supposed to be one sentence, not six, and more important, we’re adding digressive back-story about a “completely decadent bath/spa/suite” that includes an $8,000 Japanese soaking tub and a snarky bit about how the couple was so selfish they had alienated their neighbors?

Ever faithful to the plot, I bent the rules and added a second post, wherein the husband returns and admonishes the wife for wasting everyone’s time and good will on her embarrassing and long-winded home-porn back-story.

… and then it fell apart.

The blogger deleted my two comments, and added an update that said, “I reserve the right to edit anything that I wouldn’t write (anything I wouldn’t want my kids to read), and to delete attempts to shanghai the storyline for a personal agenda.”

That caveat wasn’t in the original instructions. (Though the shanghai the storyline for a personal agenda phrase is rich with irony, since we all got soaked by that motherfucking $8,000 Japanese tub.)

Plus, the castration comment made it in, so what was wrong with a cross-dressing husband who bickers with his wife for spending obscene amounts of money on soaking tubs, multiple-positioned shower heads and marble benches, and then blathering on about them ad nauseam?

I mean … cross-dressing? Come on. A UK psychotherapist and general practicioner wrote this in an article about it:

Men who cross-dress are not mentally ill. Indeed, psychologists in the USA have decided that cross-dressing comes within the normal range of male sexuality unless it becomes a compulsive obsession.

The husband is a benefit! He’s colorful! He’s out of bed and dressed before his deadbeat wife! He even speeds up the action in an otherwise sluggish story! In my humble opinion, he’s a much more compelling character than his irritating, bourgeois wife.

Plus, would you want to implicitly condone the behavior of a wife who is selfish and narcissistic, and probably a gold-digger to boot? No, I’d keep my kids miles away from that nasty piece of work, and her construction crane to boot.

Anyhow. Someone wrapped up the story with “I sat up and realized it had been a dream,” and then a little stage business, which the blogger cleaned up a bit for the end of the story.

It was all a dream. Another cliché. How fitting.

So the lesson to learn today, kids, is that you can be as grotesque as you want to your bathroom or your neighbors, but don’t ever ever ever cross-dress. Because in this family-friendly culture, that kind of shit just doesn’t fly.

That’s Me in McSweeney’s

Look, I’m the confection of the day:

Read the rest at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

Random Video Happy

While I gear up for a heavier dutier post about cars and power (horsepower, not political power), two lovely vids have tweeted across my purview.

First, “You are being shagged by a rare parrot.” The title pretty much says it all. And if it weren’t splendid enough as it is, Stephen Fry is in it!

Second, Leslie Feist sings an inspired mash-up of her song, “1, 2, 3, 4″ — on Sesame Street. Dude!

(But … where’s The Count? No matter. it’s 2:27 of good.)

The Glass Is Half-Full, But Only if You’re Wearing Underwear

Part of my day job involves updating our company’s intranet home page, and I had a short announcement to post. I had a headline in mind, and thought the perfect thing to accompany the announcement would be a photo of a glass of water that was exactly half-full (you know, to allude to the old pessimist/optimist routine).

I had all the tools I needed to do my own: glass, water, digital camera, Photoshop. But it takes time and a place to shoot and all that. Besides, our company does a fair bit of design work for brochures and other publications, and we have a subscription to a stock photo collection for just such a purpose.

So I logged in, and there were photos of glasses of water:

Not quite what I was looking for, so I kept searching.

These are close, but a little too generous with the water. (And why do the ice cubes look like creatures from the X-Files?)

You’ll find many a model in a state of Zolofted good cheer, and some exuding faux-sensuality, but I drilled, baby, drilled, and I couldn’t find a photo of a half-full glass of water.

In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a single pessimistic image in a stock photo gallery, which is to say there are no half-full glasses. There are empty glasses, and there are full glasses, but there are no half-empty or mostly empty glasses (I suppose because that would be, like, a bummer).

I did find this weird little dude, waiting patiently for the designer searching for a photo of a child executive with kidney problems and conjunctivitis.

Then I saw this next image:

Not sure what I’m supposed to think about this one. “Nothing says refreshment like a pubescent boy in tighty whities”? Yeesh! I immediately logged off and went to go shoot my own photo.

Come Fly with Me

“Alain de Botton, author of popular books including ‘How Proust Can Change Your Life’ and ‘The Art of Travel”’… in what apparently is both a literary and aeronautic first … is serving a one-week appointment as Heathrow’s ‘writer in residence.’” – New York Times

Dear Mr. de Botton:

Congratulations on your appointment as Heathrow/Terminal 5’s first writer in residence. Even though Heathrow’s owner, BAA, has granted you complete editorial freedom, as public relations professionals we would like to emphasize a few talking points to ensure a successful enterprise for everyone involved.

First, Terminal 5 is not actually underwater, despite the animation on the British Airways web page. The tropical fish, eagle rays and sea turtles gliding through an aquatic concourse are merely messaging, to emphasize the gliding ease with which passengers can get on their way “quickly and hassle-free.”

Reminding people that the terminal isn’t filled with water would prevent real public relations problems: the fear in the minds of non-swimming passengers, the anger and self-esteem issues if women think we’re comparing them to sea turtles … that sort of thing.

Worse, passengers could easily mistake Terminal 5’s wave-form roof or its aquatic-themed web page for the unlikely event of a water landing, and we definitely want to avoid any panic about whether or not their seat cushions will work as flotation devices.

Second, anything you could do to bolster the public’s image of the Terminal 5’s state-of-the-art baggage system would be a huge benefit. Entre nous, it seems like picking scabs to bring back those uncomfortable memories of 5,000 stranded and furious passengers, losing 28,000 pieces of luggage, canceling 500 flights, etc. etc.

We hired a writer instead of a historian because we want to go forward, not back—and we are going forward, the future inspiring winged prose and all that. (That phrase isn’t half bad, is it? Feel free to use it, giving credit where it’s due, of course.)

Speaking of phrasing, while extolling the Heathrow experience, please exercise restraint in your artistic impressions. You’re no doubt above Douglas Adams-type japes about how no language on Earth has ever produced the phrase “as pretty as an airport.” But it’s all too easy to craft a simile comparing passengers’ Waiting for Godot experience to the hot dogs eternally spinning on those metal rollers. Also, take it from us that it’s best to avoid attempting any description of luggage finally emerging from dark orifices and plopping onto conveyors.

Third, musings about Baudelaire and Nietzsche are all very comforting for when reading by the fire, but is there anything in the writings of those dead Euros that counter aviation’s current perception problem? Not just the passengers broiling on tarmacs in aluminum gulags, or the bovine indignity of being whisked like so much solid matter through the airstream. But also environmentalists’ gloomy reminders that a single jet jaunt to Hong Kong has a bigger carbon footprint than several African nations.

Perhaps you could wordsmith an astute philosophical observation to address this? Something like “There is no greater happiness than a ruddy-cheeked Englishwoman fresh from holidays in Mallorca who enjoyed one of BAA’s customary on-time arrivals” ought to do the trick.

Fourth, you will visit our unique mall experience and its added cachet of international travel, not to mention the great, wide tapestry of humanity who will come to relish it. We are particularly interested in the part of the tapestry eligible for our exclusive Concorde Room, with its bespoke furnishings, ensuite bathrooms and private cabanas. Is there any way you could sing the room’s praises without fomenting class hatred? That would be a real bonus.

Finally, remember that as an employee, after using the lavatory you must wash before returning to work.

Sincerely,
The BAA communications team

Walter Kirn’s “Up in the Air”

Walter Kirn begins his clever, caustic novel Up in the Air with a little monologue:

“To know me you have to fly with me.” That’s Ryan Bingham, protagonist and veteran air traveler. “Sit down. I’m the aisle, you’re the window — trapped. You crack your paperback, last spring’s big legal thriller, convinced that what you want is solitude, though I know otherwise: you need to talk.”

Bingham is 35, a career-transition counselor for some vague Denver management company (his job is to travel around and fire people, and make them feel OK about it).

The plot, such it were, centers around Ryan’s monumentally trivial quest to reach the Holy Grail of one million frequent-flier miles. His obstacles: his disintegrating career, his ragged family (especially his sister’s impending marriage), the nagging paranoia that someone might be angling for his miles.

At times I found the plot a little confusing, and some of the dialogue — while awfully snappy — a tad bit too terse.

But the plot isn’t nearly as much fun as Kirn’s pitch-perfect anthropology:

I call it Airworld; the scene, the place, the style. My hometown papers are USA Today and The Wall Street Journal. The big-screen Panasonics in the club rooms broadcast all the news I need, with an emphasis on the markets and the weather. My literature — yours, too, I see — is the best seller or the near-best seller, heavy on themes of espionage, high finance and the goodness of common people in small towns. In Airworld, I’ve found, the passions and enthusiasms of the outlying society are concentrated and whisked to a stiff froth. When a new celebrity is minted in the movie theaters or ballparks, this is where the story breaks — on the vast magazine racks that form a sort of trading floor for public reputations and pretty faces. I find it possible here, as nowhere else, to think of myself as part of the collective that prices the long bond and governs necktie widths. Airworld is a nation within a nation, with its own language, architecture, mood and even its own currency — the token economy of airline bonus miles that I’ve come to value more than dollars. Inflation doesn’t degrade them. They’re not taxed. They’re private property in its purest form.

Despite his status as a damaged bit of luggage (divorced, accused of running from his family’s problems, lying to his mom about his location), Ryan is somehow engaging, despite being marinated in cynicism.

Besides, the real fun is in Airworld, where airport chapels are ”restful and perfect for catching up on paperwork,” and where interesting people share planes with him.

When General Norman Schwarzkopf goes to the lavatory, we get this: ”I feel a shift as all of us stop thinking about ourselves and wonder why that closed door is staying so closed. A hand-washer? Normal travelers’ diarrhea? It’s painful to picture the Big Guy so confined.”

I wanted to read this when it came out in mid-2001 … then had a thought that 9/11 must have been an odd thing to happen to this recently released book.

Then I forgot about the book for years and years, until I stumbled across Lost in the Meritocracy, a remarkable short memoir he published in the Atlantic (which is now a book).

That steered me back to Up in the Air. Good thing, too. As a satire of an odd little segment of Americana (airports and business travel), this book hits a bulls-eye.

Links to What Distracted Me from Working This Week

This week, I read someone talking about legal threats to bloggers linking to the New York Times. The writer made the comment that the Web is basically a giant copying machine. How true, how true.

In that spirit, links to some of the stuff I happily distracted myself with this week:

On the highbrow end, not one but two interesting pieces about online reviews. First, from the Economist, this discovery:

a handful of bad reviews, it seems, are worth having. “No one trusts all positive reviews,” he says. So a small proportion of negative comments—“just enough to acknowledge that the product couldn’t be perfect”—can actually make an item more attractive to prospective buyers.

And this one: A company that researches this “shows that visitors are more reluctant to buy until a product attracts a reasonable number of reviews and picks up momentum.”

Know who does this really well? Amazon.com. One company estimates that one little feature of reviewing on the Amazon site is worth $2.7 billion of new revenue. Wow.

On the middlebrow end, I wrote my sustainability tip this week about how green cigarettes are, based on an excellent article by Nina Shen Rastogi, a.k.a. The Green Lantern, a columnist on Slate.com.

Long story short, cigs are a disaster. 27 million pounds of pesticides every year in the U.S., nearly a half-million acres of forest and woodland cleared every year for tobacco farming, 84,878 tons of fine particulate matter (bad stuff!), 1.7 billion tons of cigarette butts … yuck.

Also, British project is showing the effects of traffic pollution. Using a network of wireless sensors near major roads, they collect data on carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, other pollutant levels, temperature, humidity and noise levels, as well as a count of vehicle passages. The result is a real-time “pollution map” of London, to help people choose travel routes, and government officials figure out solutions.

In lower brow fun, The New York Times has a great article about kooks who do like Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, right down to the costume, and building replica chairs. The photos are priceless. I’d run one, but the New York Times is pretty ornery about that nowadays.

The UK’s Telegraph has a list of 20 the most ridiculous complaints made by travelers to their travel agent.

One of my favorites:

A tourist at a top African game lodge overlooking a waterhole, who spotted a visibly aroused elephant, complained that the sight of this rampant beast ruined his honeymoon by making him feel “inadequate”.

On that note, courtesy of the Boston Globe’s Braniac blog, I also had to laugh at one of the funniest faux-self-help books I’ve ever seen. (Which is not for the more prudish of your friends and relations.)

And last but not least, some clever Brits did their take on what the publisher’s meeting might have been like for the Harry Potter books. Which is funny as hell if you’ve every tried to pitch a book.

The Social Media Value of Idiot Columnists

It used to astound me how many idiots (morons, blockheads, nitwits, pinheads, etc.) still write for major media outlets.

John Tierney, columnist for the New York Times, is a case in point. It’s really too bad I’m far from the only one who thinks this.

Looks smarter than he is

And occasionally Daniel Hamermesh writes inane things on the Freakonomics blog (such as classic about the environmental dangers of exercise bicycles, or his piteous bemoaning of the hardships of tenured faculty in a depression)  … though he was right about raising taxes recently.

But today I was reading the Toronto Star, which had this headline: “This mother to try potty training at 3 months.” First person by a mom to be … one of the paper’s  living reporters, who is

planning to start practising elimination communication: a method that teaches parents how to read their wee one’s signals so the infant can go in a potty (with assistance, of course) rather than a diaper.

I found myself laughing (communication? they can barely even roll over at 3 months!) and then skimming … and then skipping straight to the comments, which included these:

• Good luck with that, I wonder if you’ll post if you fail?

• I think pulling the “better for the envrironment” platitude is disingenous. We want kids to be kids but not if it inconveniences us.Then we’ll accelerate them. I’ve never seen a 10 year old who cannot go to the bathroom by himself/herself. Let nature take its course.

• This article is hilarious…how can anyone take toilet-training at 3 months seriously? Next they will want to have babies dressing themselves by 6 months, or taking their own baths at 1 year! C’mon people, let babies be babies!!! If you’re worried about the environment, use cotton diapers like we do!

So now I’m entertaining a pet theory that either the Toronto Star and the New York Times have a bunch of nitwits on staff and has to fill up the space with something, or …

This is the dawning of a new era of clever journalism, where the journalist “plays the fool” (for Tierney I fear it isn’t an act), and their ludicrous rantings are really just a placeholder, and the real action is taking place in the comments section.

I’m really hoping it’s the latter.

The next John Tierney

Exclusive Non-Naming Rights Still Available

The Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has received an unprecedented gift totaling $85 million from a small group of alumni …. This innovative partnership provides a naming gift that will preserve the Wisconsin name for at least 20 years. During that time, the school will not be named for a single donor or entity. – University of Wisconsin press release

“John Ochwat” – $10,000,000

This is the ne plus ultra of personal identities. It’s not just a name, it’s a unique opportunity in the personal brandosphere. The Ochwat brand is so uncommon, its spelling remains unequalled in every major language—making intellectual property enforcement a breeze. Yet the name’s phonetic properties are remarkably fungible, allowing a dizzying variety of pronunciation and spelling opportunities!

Note: Bidding for this is expected to be keen, since the Associated Kumquat Growers and the Society for Sanity in Spelling and Pronunciation both view “Ochwat” as crucial to the success of their strategic plans.

Ochwat family residence – $1,000,000

Be the envy of corporate marketers everywhere by owning 20-year exclusive rights to a blank plaque in front of the tastefully appointed Ochwat family home in the Portland suburbs. Imagine your brand’s return on investment among influential taste-makers such as public interest research groups, children selling magazine subscriptions and Girl Scout Cookies, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Make sure to lock in the $100,000 upgrade, which includes one-of-a-kind non-naming rights to the home’s roof, visible on Google Earth, Microsoft Terraserver, and numerous government satellites.

1997 Honda Accord – $50,000

The Honda Accord is such a coveted asset, it frequently appears on top-10 lists of most stolen automobiles. And despite the car’s Honda logos, and the license plate frames from Wisniewski Auto Body, nothing says anonymity like an 11-year-old four-door sedan with slight rear-bumper damage. Imagine your pride when saying to one of your competitors, “See that car you failed to notice? We own the non-naming rights to it.”

1987 Fuji Suncrest bicycle – $10,000

Green is the new black, and nothing says green like a 21-year-old champagne-and rust-colored mountain bike. Those of you promoting your corporate social responsibility message should also consider the Brand Removal and Photograph Package. For only $2,000, you’ll receive high-resolution commemorative photos of this semi-derelict bicycle with its stickers removed, and the rights to let these images grace your next annual report. Not only will you score major sustainability points by not buying plaques or signage, such an authentic, forward-thinking green image is sure to make stockholders and environmentalists swoon with delight.

First-born child – $500,000

Though “John Ochwat” and the Ochwat family home, car and bicycle are undoubtedly prime non-naming opportunities, the bottom line is that all are depreciating assets. Yet after your first two-decade sponsorship of the Ochwats’ first-born child, your asset will only be in his late 20s—and just entering his prime branding years.

Consider your corporation’s proud legacy if you secure the rights to the Ochwat first-born now: With guaranteed preemptive bidding rights when the contract comes up for renewal, you could own the rights for the next 60, 80—or who knows, even 100 years.

Miscellaneous Opportunities – Negotiable

Many of these tempting opportunities will only be available for a short time, and the prices they’ll likely fetch will preclude all but the most aggressive Fortune 500 corporations. But to entice small businesses to partake of this great opportunity, we’re also entertaining a la carte bids on individual Ochwat assets (lawn statuary, bowling trophies, urinals). Make us an offer: the possibilities for corporate non-expression are practically limitless!

He Shoots, He Scores (Soccer Version)

I’m tired today, so my attention span is non-existent. Thus, I’m drooling and reading soccer blogs. Which steered me to this:

Props to Hardcourt Bike Polo and Prolly is not Probably, by way of No More Onion Bags.