Evan has a great “where are they now?” entry on all the dot-coms that bought Superbowl 2000 ads. Surprise: many, if not most, are still operating and some are profitable.
From the Washington Post, Chirac Urges French School Ban on Muslim Headscarves:
French President Jacques Chirac asked parliament on Wednesday for a law banning Islamic head scarves and other religious insignia in public schools. . . “Secularism is one of the great successes of the Republic,” Chirac said in an address to the nation. “It is a crucial element of social peace and national cohesion. We cannot let it weaken.”
Chirac said he would push for a law to be enacted in time for the school year that begins next autumn. Islamic head scarves, Jewish skullcaps and large crucifixes would fall under the ban.
Sigh. Just when I thought we might be able to refer to “freedom fries” as “french fries” again, Chirac has to go make an ass of himself.
For the record, I’m a bleeding-heart liberal secular agnostic. Effective separation of church and state requires the government to stamp out government-mandated or -sponsored religious symbology (the Ten Commandments do not belong in courthouses, for example).
However, governments shouldn’t require individuals to stamp out their own personal expressions of faith in public settings.
Global Attention Profiles maps the attention paid to each country on the planet by different US media outlets on a daily basis.
So back in the late 80’s, when I was an undergraduate with aspirations of being the Great American Novelist and cable television was 40 channels instead of 500, I was greatly amused by the fact that CNN had launched a second 24-hour news channel called Headline News. Why in the world would we need two 24-hour news channels, I thought. Certainly just the one is already overkill.
Ahem.
Anyway, so amused was I, that I began a draft of a satirical novel about the absurd fragmentation of the television industry into narrow niche channels. Said novel (which I never got more than about 40 or so pages into) was to track the lives of two characters at CCN, the Cable Cooking Network. Har har har, I chuckled to myself, pleased with my satirical genius. Sports? News? Sure. But certainly there would never be an entire network devoted to cooking shows!
Ahem.
Fast forward to the turn of the century. Survivor debuts and I am briefly fascinated with the absurdity of the so-called reality television trend. Again, I toyed with the idea of writing a satirical take on this, something so ridiculous that it would never be done, like, say, a reality show that has its contestants running for President of the United States. I even seriously considered timing said satirical story for the 2004 elections to maximize marketability.
Oh ferchrissakes. Friggin’ ahem, already!
So what are the lessons I should take away from this?
For the record, I also came up with the idea of Magnetic Poetry about four years before that other English major. Bastard.
Yesterday, I departed my parent’s house at 3pm to drive back to my home in Capitol Hill in the District. Six and a half hours later I arrived there. That might not have been phenomenal if my parent’s lived in Wilmington, NC, or Providence, RI. But my parents still live in the same house I grew up in on the southside of Richmond, VA, a scant 114 miles, door-to-door, from my current abode. At almost exactly 6.5 hours that gives me an average speed of about 17.5 miles an hour through the eastern seaboard parking lot formerly known as Interstate 95 North.
In all likelihood, it could have been much worse than that. I took almost two hours and fifteen minutes to get from Richmond to Doswell, VA, barely 30 miles. At that point, I got off of I-95 and hopped on US Route 1 North which moved at a pretty normal pace until Fredericksburg, where Route 1 North turned into a parking lot as well. After it took me more than an hour to get about eight miles through Fredericksburg, I turned back south (the southbound lanes being virtually traffic free) and caught Route 3 east to 301 North, crossed the Potomac on 301 (the only bridge across the Potomac east of DC) and came into DC through southern Maryland.
The detour tacked an extra 40-45 miles onto the trip and may not have saved me any time in the long run (Fredricksburg to DC via 3 and 301 is just under 90 miles . . . and it still took two and a half hours, thanks to having to merge to single lane for the bridge and passing through the shopping center hell of Waldorf, MD). However, it did at least allow me to actually drive at over 20 MPH for a good portion of that leg, which did wonders for my sanity.
The emergent properties of traffic are kind of interesting: small perturbations at one point (merging, single accidents, even rubbernecking) can result in jams at that or even other areas on the road.
On the other hand, when you’ve been stop-start inching along the interstate for four hours, never getting above 15 miles an hour for more than 30 yards, it’s really very uninteresting.
After some analysis of California supermarket strikes and a not-too-far-off-topic (but-still-kinda-self-indulgent) digression into Where I Shop And Why, Evan finally drifts into my favorite topic of the week and makes a few excellent points:
Wal-Mart is simply on the leading edge of a very large price signal, and the ultimate end of this process isn’t Wal-Mart’s current $9 per hour with no benefits, but zero dollars per hour: ten years from now, no matter where you shop or whether the management is good or evil or indifferent, there will be no such thing as a human bagger or checkout clerk in any discount store….one trivial application of universal radio-frequency tags in products will be taking a cartful of goods and rolling it through a radio scanner with a credit-card slot on the side. Human baggers are going to vanish much faster than human telephone operators did.
and
[T]he very notion of a “supermarket” rests on the destruction of a long list of what once were lifelong professions: all those small bakeries now replaced by machine-made loaves of bread trucked out from a central factory in the dead of night; all those butcher shops, delis, pasta-makers, crafters of sauces and pickles, photo-development booths, and all the other specialties now rolled into one building with fewer people in it. I’m guessing that each job of “supermarket bagger” is built on the grave of a dozen or more former jobs.
I can’t help but think that this is a great premise for a very wonky horror movie. The Wal-mart is built on the economic graveyard of long-dead professions . . . that now rise from the dead as zombie butchers, zombie bakers, and zombie checkout clerks with a taste for brains!!
Okay, is it just me waking up to the phenomena, or is Wal-mart getting a lot of fairly negative press from multiple directions all of a sudden.?
The Los Angeles Times started a three-part series on Wal-Mart today: An Empire Built on Bargains Remakes the Working World (no-cost registration required).
What was the tipping point that triggered all this examination of Wal-mart’s impact?
Can it be that big honkin’ warehouse-size stores full of gallon jars of pickles and cheap jeans aren’t as sexy as operating system monopolies?
Want something to be afraid of? Try Wal-Mart. This article, “The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know,” from Fast Company, sent chills along my spine.
Addendum: Interesting comments on the article from Dave Pollard of the ever-so-humbly-titled How to Save the World blog.
For my Canadian and Canadia ex-pat friends who sometimes read this weblog (Darren? Ev? Deb? Celine?) but may not read the Washington Post, I give you this story: Whoa! Canada!
“Just when you had all but forgotten that carbon-based life exists above the 49th parallel, those sly Canadians have redefined their entire nation as Berkeley North.”
Beck has a weblog [link via Anil's sidebar].
It’s full of incomprehensible but beautiful statements like this one about their show at Wolftrap, right outside DC:
“the show was our best so far. the audience was throwing down, much more raucous than the tour with the lips. we even had people throwing up their hands and representing acid wash daisy dukes. tomorrow I plan to see who will represent some lavender cucumber exfoliating scrub. shizz…if we come any harder somebody might have to bust some apricot hazelnut foot gel.” []
Apparently in Beck’s world “young grungites” are frequently “throwing down” or are “on the punkmetal tip” and “representing” various objects. Lingo that my thirtysomething ass don’t understand aside, there are, as you might expect, some beautiful lyrical gems in his writing, especially when he talks (all to infrequently, though) about songs, songwriting, and performing.
P.S. If you want to get all tricked out with the lingo, try Snoop Dog’s Shizzolator