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Daily Blah for... Saturday, January 31, 2004
Real Funny
P and I went to see two comedians last week, and their styles could not have been more different. One was David Sedaris, the author, New Yorker contributor, NPR commentator and all-around neurotic wit. I’d picked up Sedaris’ Naked a year or two ago and found it laugh-out-loud funny, except when he strayed off the topic of his crazy family. But seeing him read live, in an unusually packed Unitarian church hall, gave me a whole new appreciation of his work. Sedaris writes like the bastard son of James Thurber and Woody Allen, and his reedy, dour voice sounds just like that of the cartoon dog Droopy. The evening had a wonderful rhythm to it; Sedaris would read two or three exquisitely-crafted sentences and then pause as the room shook with laughter. He didn’t smile at such moments, he didn’t try to ingratiate himself; he just sat there glumly waiting to speak again like our response was so much tolerable noise. Naturally, we loved him all the more for it.
Sedaris has no qualms about inviting you to laugh at his family and its foibles – his nighttime fear of flesh-eating zombies, his mother’s new-found love for her paper shredder – but he also has a wonderfully unhurried ear for language. Calling home one night to complain about his boyfriend, he learns his mother is doing jury duty and has been sequestered. To most of us, this would not be a rich source of comedy, but Sedaris takes a moment to marvel at the unusual combination of “mother” and “sequestered” in the same sentence. “It was like hearing the dentist had been canonized,” he said. The room shook again, and the sentence took up lodgings in my brain. I was surprised to discover, at the end, that most of the stories he had just read had not yet been published and were still in draft form. He was constantly writing, room-testing and rewriting throughout his reading tour.
No such love of craft was evident in the comedian we saw a few nights later: Kevin Nealon, formerly of Saturday Night Live, who was appearing at Cobb’s Comedy Club. Where, to my everlasting shame, I took P to on one of our semi-regular mystery dates. Cobb's is slap-bang in the middle of the most touristy part of town, but some years ago I saw the excellent Greg Proops perform there. How bad could Nealon be?
The answer was unbelievably bad. Brain-numbingly bad. So bad he had to rely on tired, desperate retreads of SNL routines; a back pocket full of weak Weekend Update news bits written on index cards; a pathetic attempt at a chat show using reticent audience members as guests; and yes, even a racist joke or two. “I used to have an Asian girlfriend. I didn’t know. I thought she was just tired,” she said. Safe in my San Francisco haven, I didn’t know anyone told jokes like that any more. I felt the sharp snap of it, like a punch in the gut.
Nealon knew how much he sucked. “I got nothing,” he admitted, sotto voce, more than once. But like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, the worst part of it for him must have been getting away with it. Because the crowd of tourists and frat boys was stinking drunk – Cobb’s has a two-drink minimum, and this was Friday night – they brayed and whooped at anything he said. He could have been up there reading the phone book as long as he threw in the occasional Hans and Franz “pump you up!” catchphrase. P observed him standing outside afterwards while I went to get the car. He was clutching a notebook and a novel, looking sad, trying to get through to his wife on a cellphone while fending off a gaggle of drunk 22-year-olds. The club owner introduced herself, said they’d met before, and Nealon feigned the memory. “And I realized, ‘this is his life now,’” P said as we drove home. Recycling jokes across America, fending off drunk tourists, clinging to the last few threads of an ill-deserved TV fame – and wishing, perhaps, that he had a tenth of the talent of a really glum comic writer.
Political Aphorism of the Week
Dan: "But what about Kerry being a war hero?"
Me: "Hey, just because he looks better in a tank than Dukakis doesn't mean he won't tank like Dukakis."
Daily Blah for... Thursday, January 29, 2004
Mixed Metaphor of the Week
“We’re not trying to solve the whole ball of wax with one silver bullet. It’s a row of dominoes.”
A Yahoo executive, whom I won’t name to spare his blushes, telling me about the company’s new antispam solution
Little Mouse
One more thing about Look Around You. There’s this horrible 70’s pop song that one of the scientists “writes” by feeding the title into a retro futuristic synthesizer hooked up to the Petri dish-bound DNA of Gilbert and Sullivan. It’s called Little Mouse, and luckily I don’t have to try to impart how maddeningly memorable it is – because you can download it here on the fabulous Look Around You website. Go on, just click on the link, and you too will be unable to extract the following refrain from your brain:
Hey now, little mouse
I hope we understand one another
Hey, now little mouse
Show me what to do
[repeat ad nauseam]
Heh heh heh. My work here is done.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, January 28, 2004
Look Around You
I’ve just been belly-laughing my way through a DVD containing probably one of the funniest, certainly the most bizarre British comedy I’ve seen in the last year. (And yes, that includes The Office. By the way, I’m not sure how many Office fans in the U.S. are aware that the BBC broadcast two new and final episodes over Christmas; all I will say is that if you thought David Brent had reached his nadir at the end of series two, you are sadly mistaken.) Anyway, the comedy in question is called Look Around You, and it’s a pitch-perfect pastiche of every educational program the Beeb used to put on in the 1970’s. Full disclosure: I was avidly watching such shows before I was old enough to understand them, simply because there tended to be nothing on TV at 6am in 1977 other than the Open University.
The opening sets the tone wonderfully. To the sounds of a chirpy Moog synthesizer, on grainy color film, we see someone typing out the world’s cheapest computer-generated special effect on an antique PC:
>10 PRINT ‘LOOK AROUND YOU’
>20 GOTO 10
>RUN
Then we’re off to the races, as the exquisitely patronizing voice-over serves up endless tidbits of cod-knowledge (“the world’s largest number is 45,000,000,000, but scientists believe larger numbers may exist”) while crappy captions flash up on the screen (“45,000,000,001?”). There are plenty of faded pictures of scientists in sideburns conducting ethically unsound experiments and constant instructions to “note that down in your copybook.” The retro novelty of which would fade pretty quickly if it were not married to some of the finest surrealism since Monty Python. Thus we are shown ants building igloos, a free-floating brain being forced to count nuts in a jar and a pile of sulphur that inexplicably gives test subjects laser-like heat vision. All narrated, of course, in the most delightfully boring deadpan.
Will the Beeb ever have the balls to screen this show in the States? I hope so. Many of its more subtle references (the countdown clock!) may be inaccessible to 70’s kids on this side of the pond, but true comedy travels well. After all, who would have ever thought a mock documentary about paper merchants in Slough would sweep the Golden Globes?
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, January 27, 2004
Unwanted Gifts
The best explanation I've seen yet of what went on in Iowa and New Hampshire: Gail Collins in Monday's New York Times, who likened the early Democratic primaries to people trying to buy a present for relatives they've never seen before. A bunch of elderly frozen Northerners are trying to give the rest us something we'll still like come November. They've fussed and fretted over what to get, but they just don't know us. And so as often happens in such Christmas crunch situations, the choice is a lousy one. I just hope they give us the receipt so we can sneak back into the store and exchange Kerry for Edwards or Clark (who, by the look of his range of sweaters, got a few unwanted Christmas gifts of his own).
Daily Blah for... Monday, January 26, 2004
The Seven Year-old Test
It has become regrettably normal to pick up the paper and discover the world at large has once again gone mad. But now it seems one’s fellow lefties have gone round the twist, too. I mean, Dean was bad enough. But John Kerry? Please. It’s interesting how nearly all the reports from New Hampshire have included some variation on the following sentence: Democratic voters have eschewed policy debates and are simply looking for the most electable candidate. Electable? Kerry? If I were more conspiratorial, I would sense a Republican plot. First off, the Massachussetts thing. The US hasn’t tapped anyone from that hyperliberal state since JFK – and JK, you are no JFK. Did we learn nothing from Dukakis? Secondly, try naming one notable action he’s taken during his years in the Senate. Time’s up. Thought of anything? No, me neither. Kerry is a blank slate on which Republicans can paint anything they choose.
Finally, on the most superficial level of existence – which is the one most Americans inhabit – Kerry looks a fright. Just get a load of that giant, craggy brow (overwhelming his face “as fearfully as doth a galled rock”), the dour mouth, and a complete lack of eyes. The nameless Bushie who told the Times last year that Kerry “looks French” was onto something, but it was not the worst barb that could be leveled at his appearance. In fact, Kerry looks like an utter nonentity; a gray-faced, shuffling commuter in a shabby suit contemplating the complete failure of his existence. The kind of guy you might see hunched over in a corner on the train, or standing at the end of a social security line. I remember some network producer about a year ago saying that Kerry was the one candidate he’d ever met who had failed to excite the producer’s seven year-old son. It seemed as good a test as any. If only seven year-olds could vote in New Hampshire tomorrow, the Democrats might regain a modicum of common sense – and concentrate on candidates who are truly electable.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, January 22, 2004
Scream for Dean
It was the scream heard around the world. But in case you haven’t caught it, Howard Dean gave a virtuoso performance in the role of “angry weird yelling guy” after his dismal third-place showing in Iowa a couple of nights ago. Not only has this made him the butt of jokes along the Leno-Letterman-Stewart axis of comedy, but now the quintessential Internet candidate has had his outburst remixed online not once but three times – set to the sounds of Aphex Twin and Ozzy Osbourne. Not to be undone, the folks at songsfordean.com have fought back with a dubiously-scanned rap called Howard Dean Yell. (Sample lyrics: “If you can’t take one exuberant yell/Then elect someone who will make you feel swell.”) Is it just me, or is it a little weird to have this WASP-y New England candidate with an almost entirely white following celebrated in rap? Anyway, even Dean fans have to smile at this sly Pee-Wee reference on The English-Bush Lexicon: “’Howard Dean’ is today's Secret Word, so, remember, everyone, when you hear the words ‘Howard Dean,’ scream real loud!”
Is this all unfair to the candidate? Yes, of course it is. Life is unfair. Politics is very unfair. Just ask Neil Kinnock, former leader of the British Labor Party. When he was polling ahead by a whisker in the UK’s 1992 General Election, he held a rally in Sheffield. Nobody remembers anything about the rally today except for the fact that Kinnock started pumping his fist and screaming something weird, which was later translated as “you’re alright.” But for that moment, he could well have become Prime Minister. From all the noise coming out of New Hampshire, Dean might as well start reflecting on his own screaming point of no return.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, January 20, 2004
Too Much Stuff
A hefty piece here about a company called AuctionDrop, which I put together late last year for Fortune Small Business, and which has finally hit newsstands. I can't wait for AuctionDrop's San Francisco office to open. I've got way too much stuff myself. My attic, rather than my garage, is heaving.
E-COMMERCE
eBay for Dummies
Auction Drop, a fast-growing Bay Area startup, will list, sell, and ship your surplus stuff—for a price.
By Chris Taylor
Randy Adams had a common American affliction: an outbreak of junk overpopulating his garage. There were so many unloved gadgets residing there that his wife couldn't get the car in anymore. Why not sell them on eBay, she asked? Adams, 51, demurred. He'd never sold on eBay, but as a retired entrepreneur who'd started six technology companies, he had no illusions about what would be involved. He'd have to take digital photos of everything. Then he'd fret about getting a good feedback rating, without which he was unlikely to empty his garage. "It's hard to start out on eBay," he noted. "It's hard to be a casual seller." Well, then, said his wife, her exasperation growing, why not found another company to do it for you?
Which is exactly what Adams did. The firstAuction Drop store opened its doors in San Carlos, Calif., last March; it was so popular that Adams opened another four stores by the end of 2003 and plans at least 15 to 20 more this year. And Auction Drop is only the most visible of a number of new companies that piggyback on eBay's massive success. The premise is simple. A vast, global marketplace is opening up. You have possessions that could be selling in it, but you don't have the time, the equipment, or the inclination to do it yourself. For a percentage of the proceeds, Auction Drop and its ilk will do the job for you. All you have to do is sit back and wait for the check.
Adams has a track record of getting a jump on good ideas. He founded one of the web's first e-tailers, the Internet Shopping Network, in 1994 (and later sold it to the Home Shopping Network). Selling secondhand, he believes, could be just as big a business. "Think about how much consumer equipment is bought every year," he says. "Even if just 25% of electronic and sporting goods are candidates for resale, that's a $25 billion market." Call it the re-retail model.
Since last March, Auction Drop, which isn't yet profitable, has sold at least 10,000 items and has generated more than $1 million in revenue. It charges a commission of between 20% and 38% of the selling price. The more expensive the item, the lower the commission. (eBay's seller fees, roughly 5%, are included in the commission.) Auction Drop won't sell anything it appraises at less than $50 (although you can give it a whole box of books, say, as a single item) or more than $1 million, or anything that weighs more than 150 pounds. To make money, what it is looking for is what Adams calls a "good value density"—something that is heavy in value relative to its weight, like watches, cameras, and laptop computers. Or like the pair of lifetime season tickets to the San Francisco 49ers the company sold for $30,000—its most value-dense item yet.
Chances are you won't see your stuff again—Auction Drop sells 92% of everything it puts up on the website, a phenomenal rate compared with eBay's 50%. But if by chance your item isn't sold, Auction Drop will either ship it back to you or donate it to charity, in which case it will send you a tax receipt.
Naturally there were teething troubles. "At the start they needed a lot more handholding," says Carol Shaffer, 47, a software training director and a regular customer of Auction Drop who lives in San Carlos. "You had to wait with your stuff at reception while they typed in a description for each item. It could take hours." With hundreds of customers flooding in every day, the company had to speed up processing. Experts in appraising items like jewelry and accessories were brought onboard, as were trained copywriters and photographers. Staff workshops on subjects such as pricing a designer purse were hastily arranged.
Adams—who had originally envisioned each Auction Drop store as a self-contained unit, receiving, selling, and mailing each item—switched to a spoke-and-hub model. The spokes were stores throughout the Bay Area in Los Altos, Menlo Park, San Leandro, and San Rafael, which would concentrate on getting the goods out of the customer's hands fast; the hub was the warehouse store in San Carlos, where every item would be processed on a conveyor belt.
The overhaul worked. "They've gotten a lot better about using their own judgment," says Shaffer—who has been selling items on eBay since 1995 and has now switched entirely to using Auction Drop (which sold 150 of the 170 items she left with the company). Take a stroll along that conveyor belt now, and you get the impression of a well-oiled (if somewhat minimalist) machine in rapid motion. Items travel in crates, each with a unique bar code. Open one and you might find a Lladro collectible dog figurine, or a Brighton Caroline tote bag, or a stereo autographed by the singer Thomas Dolby. Photographers have ten minutes to shoot each item from a variety of angles; the copywriting team aims to list 300 items on eBay every shift. Knowing that the description sells an item as much as its photo, they try to invest the writing with a certain sizzle. One listing for a Batman pogo stick begins "Holy rare collectibles, Batman!"
For eBay the timing couldn't be better. The San Jose-based website faces a couple of big challenges if it wants to maintain the startling expansion rate that made it No. 8 on FORTUNE's list of America's Fastest-Growing Companies. First, it has far more buyers than sellers. Second, new sellers are harder and harder to come by; most of those who have the knowledge and patience to sell on eBay are already doing so. Adams's company has become adept at bringing in eBay virgins: 18% of its users don't even have a computer. "We're thrilled about the success of Auction Drop," said Walt Duflock, eBay's senior manager for user programs. Indeed, Adams got eBay's equivalent of the royal seal of approval last summer when CEO Meg Whitman dropped by and sold off a few used goods of her own, including a genuine bristle dartboard and a Coach belt.
But Auction Drop isn't the only piggyback rider eBay loves to carry around. A company called PostNet, based in Henderson, Nev., is rolling out a similar business model. PostNet has the advantage of being well established; it has 425 Kinko's-style copier stores nationwide. eBay dropoff points have been set up in 11 test stores in Arizona, California, Georgia, and Nevada. Staffers take digital photos and write descriptions of each item; everything else is taken care of at PostNet's headquarters. The commission has been tentatively set at 40%. "I'm very impressed with Auction Drop," says Steve Greenbaum, PostNet's CEO, "but we already have our overhead costs taken care of. We're very confident of our ability to compete."
Mindful of the rivalry, Auction Drop is expanding operations with all the gung-ho fearlessness of a late 1990s dot-com. Adams has bought a Los Angeles warehouse that he hopes will become the basis of a new hub-and-spoke system. By April he intends to have ten stores in the Bay Area and another ten in L.A. Next on his list: New York City and surrounding suburbs. Adams is quite willing to lease out franchise operations too. "Our goal," he says, "is clicks and mortar on every corner."
Will it work? Some longtime industry watchers are skeptical. After all, PostNet and Auction Drop are not the first players in this space. Two predecessors, TIAS.com and MyEZSale.com, had 14 and seven dropoff locations, respectively, at the height of the dot-com boom in 2000. MyEZSale had to shutter its doors for lack of funding, while TIAS now simply sells antiques and collectibles on its website. "Consignment companies don't have a lot of control over the inventory," says David Steiner, president of Auctionbytes.com, a news website for online sellers. "They're at the mercy of whatever comes through the front door."
For now, at least, Auction Drop doesn't have a problem with intake. Adams is eager to hire 140 new staffers on top of the 60 he already employs and still expects to post a profit this year. Neither TIAS nor MyEZSale had a hub-and-spoke model, let alone a well-oiled one. And Adams is no dot-com spring chicken. His years as a serial entrepreneur—one of his companies failed, the other five left him a multimillionaire—will provide invaluable experience as Auction Drop goes nationwide.
By the way, a couple of months ago Adams filled a truck with consumer electronics from his house and drove it to Auction Drop. His garage is now gadget-free, his car is sheltered, and his wife is happy. If only he could cure the rest of us of the too-much-stuff disease.
Daily Blah for... Monday, January 19, 2004
First Bite of the Apple
Here's my mostly glowing review of GarageBand. Although I loved it, this is a version 1.0 product, and I ran into some weird bugs. More news came from Apple on the one I hinted at in the story: the fact is you can drag digital music files that end with a .mp3 into the program, but it won't accept one that ends with .MP3. Yeah, you read that right; capital letters make all the difference. Apple was quite sheepish about this one. And rightly so. It's a stupid and worryingly PC-like bug. Of course, they promised to fix it in the first downloadable patch.
The Virtual Virtuoso
Apple's GarageBand puts a full-scale recording studio at your fingertips
By CHRIS TAYLOR
Monday, Jan. 26, 2004
Music, as any teen in a garage band will tell you, should be as simple to make as it is to listen to. That hasn't always been the case with musicmaking software though. Turning your computer into a recording studio with programs like Pro Tools and Cakewalk Plasma means splashing out hundreds of dollars and slogging through dense instruction manuals. There had to be an easier way. Now Apple has found it with GarageBand, part of its $49 suite of Mac-only iLife applications released last week. As the name suggests, GarageBand is aimed at amateurs. You don't need to read the manual to put together a pretty professional-sounding tune. You don't even need much talent.
At its simplest level, GarageBand lets you lay down loopsprerecorded short riffs by drums, bass, piano and so on. There are 1,000 loops to choose from on the basic software and 2,000 more on the $99 add-on, Jam Pack. Here's the clever bit: the loops are arranged not just by instrument but also under mood-based headings like "Relaxed," "Intense," "Cheerful" and so on. Click and drag your loops into the score, and they become interactive. You can stretch and splice them like lumps of Play-Doh. In just 10 minutes I found I could intuitively assemble a thumping dance ditty that would not disgrace most deejays' decks.
You can add your own musical stylings by plugging in a keyboard, microphone or guitar. Apple is selling a $99 keyboard that plugs directly into the computer via a USB connection, and a $149 amp for guitar, bass, microphone and keyboards with MIDI connections. There are 50 software instruments in GarageBand and an additional 100 in Jam Pack. You can make your guitar seem as if it's coming through a vintage '60s amp, or your keyboard sound like a surprisingly realistic steel guitar. Select a sound and you're ready to hit the Record button. And if you flub the recording, even with the built-in metronome? Not to worry. Hit the Fix Timing button and your so-so keyboard solo will sound a little more like Ben Folds. Just don't let your piano teacher catch you doing it.
Like any other brand-new software, GarageBand has its bugs. For one thing, you're supposed to be able to use digital music files from iTunes, theoretically making sampling a snap, but most of mine kept getting rejected. And GarageBand hogs a lot of computer memory. Still, these are quibbles compared with how easy it is to create a song with up to 64 layers of loops and tracks. Coolest of all: you can save that work of genius to your iPod. After all, your music should be as simple to listen to as it was to make.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Space Rocks
You can tell it’s an election year; Bush has finally proposed something even I can get on board with. Yes, he’s going for the space nut vote and shooting for the moon. To which I say: about bloody time. I’ve been waiting literally my whole life. A lunar base starting in 2015? We should never have left in 1974.
As good an idea as it is, there’s one that would have been even better: digging for asteroids. Not just because of the environmental hazards they pose, but also the unimaginable wealth they contain. It’s one of my favorite facts: fetch a single rock from the heavens and you have enough mineral wealth to beat Bill Gates in the richest human stakes. There’s gold in them thar ‘roids. And what prompted our ancestors to leave home time and time again, to make dangerous voyages across uncharted reaches? Not merely the love of adventure, but the pot of cash at the end of the trail.
Handicapping the Race
One statistic sticks in my head from all this blather about Iowa. It’s this: 33% of likely voters are solidly anti-Bush, while 39% will never leave the pro-Bush camp. That surprised me. After all, in poll after poll, the President beats any Democratic opponent by a good 56% to 45% or so. You’d think his support wouldn’t be quite so soft. But there it is, that vast 28% chunk, much of it sitting nervously in the GOP anteroom, waiting to be persuaded to leave.
I’m still of a mind that pairing Wes Clark and John Edwards on a ticket, in that order, would be an irresistible way to persuade them. Two southerners, just like Clinton-Gore; the old and the young, the military and the law. And both with the right blend of patriotism and sunny optimism that seems to turn voters on. Both are gaining on Dean in their respective strongholds. I’m not one of these rabid Stop-Deaners; if he rides the left’s outrage all the way to the convention, then let him take a shot. I don’t think he’d ever win – there’s something plainly unpresidential in his DNA, it seems -- but he’d come closer than the pundits give him credit for, and go down in such glorious flames that the Dems would never be able to ignore its left flank again. They’d be transmuted into a party of idealists in time for 2008. If that’s the way it’s meant to be, damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead.
But as for Kerry, Gephardt, Lieberman, Kucinich, Sharpton and Mosely-Braun? They’re finished, and it annoys me that they can’t see it. There they are, blatantly sucking oxygen out of the race, using it to feed their egos. Every profile devoted to them, every column inch, serves to muddy the waters and confuse that all-important 28%, who no doubt still see the Democratic race as a comic battle between nine dwarves. In fact, it’s a deadly serious contest where we’re asked to spot the difference between five political pygmies and three adolescents who are just about to sprout.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, January 08, 2004
A Kennedyesque Day
To City Hall this morning for the inauguration of our 42nd Mayor, Gavin Christopher Newsom (and didn’t he keep that middle name quiet during the campaign?). It was as fun an event as these things can be, I suppose. The crowd was a good, solid ethnic mix; it looked like San Francisco rather than merely being peppered with nonwhites. Maria Shriver was in attendance. Local jazz star Paula West, whom I saw in action at the Red Room last year and adored, sang the national anthem. And Ed Asner read out an interminably long piece on city history prepared by the State Librarian that began like this:
Throughout the millennia, from that infinitely long-ago moment in geological time when it was created, the peninsula later to be called San Francisco waited, and waited, and awaited its destiny. True, it was an end unto itself – all nature is – these 46.38 square miles of rocky outcroppings, mountains, savannahs and sand dunes centered (by modern reckoning) on Latitude North 37 degrees, 45 minutes, 10 seconds and Longitute West 122 degrees, 26 minutes, 27 seconds. For thousands and thousands of years sea fog obscured the coastal regions in the early morning and burned off by midday. For thousands and thousands of years, the occasional herd of tule elk and the occasional grizzly bear roamed the peninsula, and great white sea birds – herons, egrets, pelicans – stood watch on the marshy north shore …
I kept waiting for him to say “then Gavin Newsom arrived. The end.”
Inside City Hall afterwards, they were serving nothing but water, coffee and cookies; clearly, the new administration intends to cut costs. The reception line to get into the mayor’s office was almost as long as Asner’s speech, and I ducked out after a couple of minutes. “I figure I’ll come back some day when it’s not so crowded,” I said to the guy next to me. He thought I was joking.
Outside, a pleasant surprise awaited. That obscuring sea fog of the morning had actually been burned off, revealing our first sunshine of the New Year. Stepping into it, feeling the freshness of a new start for the city, was easily the most Kennedyesque moment of the whole occasion. And not an egret in sight.
Verbalicious
Like my use of Netflix as a verb in that last entry? I Netflix, you Netflix, he, she or it Netflixes. This seems to be common practice with just about any popular website or technology (Amazoned, TiVo’d); you know you’ve arrived when you become a verb. God love the irrepressibly flexible English language. I thought P and I were ahead of the curve when we started saying “Netflixed” about movies a couple of months ago, but you know what? I just Googled it, and got eight pages of results. Dammit, we’re passé. Ah, but I wonder if anyone else has used it in a Spoonerism yet, as P did after we watched the DVD of All That Jazz: “Will you remember to Cabaret Netflix for me?”
Also, it seems I'm the first person ever to use "Googled" and "Netflixed" on the same web page. I win!
Fingerprint Nation
An update to that previous entry: it seems my status as a Brit won't save me. I will now have to be fingerprinted and photographed every time I reenter the United States, since I’m here on a long-term visa. That gives me a profound mix of emotions. There’s anger and sadness about the way American society cannot bring itself to trust anyone any more, like when a shop clerk asks to see ID when I pull out my credit card or a prospective landlord asks for my credit report. There is such automatic distrust prevalent in this land, you’ve got to wonder if the terrorists didn’t win a long time ago.
And then there’s a kind of numb acceptance of a new reality, much like that scene in the Pianist (which P and I Netflixed last week) where the family reads in the paper about the exact specifications of the Star of David armband they’ll have to wear. No, this isn’t a Star of David. But it is an equally involuntary branding, a dehumanizing procedure. Nobody likes being treated like a common criminal, especially not at the end of a long plane ride when they just want to go home.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, January 06, 2004
Your Body is a GarageBand
Just back from Macworld, and another fun one-on-one with Mr. Jobs. Before I forget, could someone send a memo to Steve’s stylist: please, please, please stop his eyebrows from teasing upwards at the edges in that Satanic fashion. It seems to be getting more pronounced the older he gets, and it’s very disconcerting during interviews. Hum. Perhaps he’s doing it deliberately.
Nearly all of the news coming out of Jobs’ keynote seems to lead with the new miniature iPod, but the thing left me pretty underwhelmed. Yes, it’s the size of a business card, and the brushed metal colors are delicious, and you’ll look pretty hip at the gym with it attached to your bicep via the optional armband. But it’s $249, for crying out loud, and for that you get less than four gigabytes of music storage. Consider that the cheapest regular iPod gives you 15 gigabytes for $299, and you have to wonder what Steve was thinking. In his defense, he says it’s hard to get the component prices any lower. Myself, I think it’s a ploy to lure customers into the store, where they’ll naturally decide to pony up the extra $50. Unless they really, really like the idea of a pink brushed-metal business card on their arm.
Far more exciting from where I was sitting was GarageBand. This is it, I thought; the music-making software I’ve been yearning for. As an amateur keyboard noodler, I’ve fiddled around in vain for years with programs like Acid and Cakewalk; none have the simplicity of GarageBand, where you can lay down tracks or loops and mould them visually, like pieces of Playdough. And when an Apple techie told me you can grab music files from iTunes and drop them right into GarageBand – making sampling a cinch – I wanted to scream with joy. Strangely, Steve hadn’t mentioned this, perhaps fearful of the copyright alarm bells it would set off in record industry boardrooms. He also hadn’t mentioned you can’t download GarageBand, or even buy it separately; you must buy the boxed copy of iLife ’04. Bummer.
During the keynote, I knew Steve was going to invite some mystery musical superstar out on stage to demo GarageBand. This made me a little nervous, as I’d already been told by the Apple PR people I would be whisked off immediately after the event to interview said superstar. Who would it be? How should I prepare myself? Would I be lost for words in the presence of Bono, or would I end the day cleaning Keith Richards’ vomit off my shoes? Worse luck was to come when the mystery guest arrived: it was John Mayer, the crowd went wild, and I sat there bemused, feeling like my parents. I’d never heard of him! The last thing I want to do in an interview is bruise some pop idol’s ego with my first question: “sorry, who are you?”
Luckily, I had my Powerbook on my lap the whole time, and was able to do a surreptitious search in my iTunes library. Ah, there he was – the guy who sang Your Body is a Wonderland, a beautiful ballad and one of P’s favorite songs. Nice guy, as it turned out. Not – how shall I say this? – not conventionally handsome, and yet every woman in the room was absolutely wilting. Proof positive (if any were needed after Lyle Lovett married Julia Roberts) that penning a few songs is by far the best way to make up for a lack of looks. Dammit, where’s my copy of GarageBand?
Daily Blah for... Monday, January 05, 2004
Land of the Brave, Home of the Thumb-Printed
Spent Christmas week on a flying visit to my family in the north of England -- and on my return, Homeland Security stormtroopers had me interrogated, strip-searched, thumb-printed and buttocks photographed. No, not really, but I shudder to think what will happen next time I reenter the Land of the Free. Assuming my plane is even allowed to touch its hallowed tarmac.
Needless to say, the thumb-printing scheme introduced yesterday at airports left a seriously bad taste in my mouth. Sure, I'm British, so I'm on the exempted list (for now). As a compliment, it slots into the same category as the fact that Nazi Germany considered us second only to the Aryan race. The exempted list, you will notice, consists of countries with majority Caucasian residents. "We want to catch the bad guys," I heard some Congresswoman -- a Democrat, for crying out loud -- tell the TV news last night. Well, if this scheme were really trying to catch the bad guys, they'd fingerprint us Brits too. Remember Richard Reid? Shoe bomber? British citizen? Hello? Terrorism is porous; it doesn't obey lines of national citizenship. There are no inherently "good" countries. The next terrorist attack could easily be perpetrated by an American citizen. So what's the one thing we could do to play into Al-Qaeda's hands? Become a police state. That, never forget, is exactly what Osama predicted we'd be forced to become after 9/11. So far, he's right on the money.
To put it bluntly, the thumb-printing scheme does nothing but accustom Americans to the idea of dark-skinned foreigners being treated like common criminals. Naturally, this does not do wonders for international diplomacy. Brazil, in a fit of pique, has already begun thumbprinting Americans who touch down at Brazilian airports. Canada, meanwhile, is hopping mad that US authorities chose to deport an innocent Canadian citizen to Syria -- where he hadn't lived for 15 years -- to face questioning, and torture, by the Syrian secret police. You can't make this stuff up.
Could Ridge, Ashcroft et al try a little harder to make America look like a police state, please? I don't think everyone in the world has got the message just yet. There are a couple of Bushmen in the Kalahari who haven't yet caught the whiff of racist fascism emanating from our borders.
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