Author: Aaron Weber

Media Bias, Horrible Situations

Or, What’s the matter with Kansas? In which some guy runs a dingy women’s health clinic in the inner city (a.k.a. abortion clinic, since too few people go for actual preventive medicine or birth control), and gets accused of all sorts of horrible things by his employees, and loses his license.

Right wing media reports: HE EATS BABIES

The local free weekly provides a nuanced (a.k.a. “unread”) take: A bad doctor in a bad clinic becomes a straw man for the anti-choice crowd to push way too much regulation onto one particular procedure. The mainstream media mostly ignores it. What I want to know is, when is my health-care provider going to start offering discount prices on Wednesdays?

Anger, revised

This article is the culmination of many years of astrotuf lobbying by captains of destructive and corrupt industries. It highlights as the work of a man whose job it has been to assemble fake public-interest groups that make tobacco look good, to undermine the public welfare, to make powerful titans appear to be sympathetic grandmothers, to paint as corrupt the defenders of the defenseless.

The article is very well written, but it fails to actively point out corruption and unethical behavior. I expect the paper of record to point out lies and deceptions, not merely to note that certain people disagree with the Creation Science Group’s assertion that the earth is flat, the Citizens for Wonderful Things position paper on the idea that tobacco is a healthful tonic for nerves, or the Mountebanks and Patent Medicine Manufacturers of America press release on the subject of laudanum as a remedy for neurasthenia.

Again with the recurring themes

Gay romance novels are starting to take off. I wonder if Mary Cheney’s Memoir will be as taut as the abs and pecs of gay gay gay bla bla bla. Market data: “According to Romance Writers of America, the Houston-based professional association, which has 9,400 members, romance novels are read by 51 million people each year and account for 49 percent of paperback sales. In 2003, the most recent year for which figures are available, sales of romance novels totaled $1.41 billion.”

If you’re willing to pay for the Albuquerque Journal you can read an article here about how rents keep dropping as Californian investors are flooding the area’s investment-property market. (I remember bumper stickers in Colorado complaining about folks coming over from the coast and yuppifying everything. They said “Don’t Californicate Colorado.”)

See also NYT on the global housing bubble amd on increasing price resistance and a slowdown in the NYC market.

Thx to Fleck for the tip on the real estate, and to the inestimable Bookdwarf for the romance novel article.

Reviews

Quick summaries of the novel Bangkok 8 make it sound like a trashy mystery but it’s so much more. I mean, yeah, there’s prostitution, drugs, gem smuggling, and of course murder. But there’s also buddhism, the conflict between east and west, and pretty balanced explorations of the society in which the prostitution, drugs, gem smuggling, murder, and international intrigue take place. Highly recommended.

My Musical Education

So, I’m driving back from the land of Vomitola (A.K.A. Lowell, A.K.A. “Factory town turned loft-condo-ville”) and I heard Something for the Weekend by the Super Furry Animals playing on WMBR (one of two good music stations in Boston– the other being WERS). I’m pretty sure I’d heard the song before, but I hadn’t known the title or the name of the band– I thought Super Furry Animals were some kind of jam band or something, but no. So, I found a song I like by listening to the radio. How long has it been since that happened to you?

So anyway I go to look up the name of the song to check the lyrics and come across violent slash fiction apparently related to a BBC TV show of the same name. EW EW EW EW.

And then the next day, at the gym, the Alien Ant Farm cover of Smooth Criminal came on the sports-club Muzak. It’s a good cover and a brilliant video and hey that’s fun. Nice work, boys.

Deeply Cynical Exercise

Scandal! A publisher has been paying a media outlet for consideration in a soft-news segment about their product category!

I mean, sure, it’s profoundly unethical, especially given that the “punters” aren’t told about the fees. This all began with co-op ads, where a retailer and a manufacturer split advertising costs– say, a music publisher giving out posters to a record store, or a beer distributor giving out neon signs– and moved into things like book publishers paying Borders a million dollars to put a particular item at the front of the store. Or, say, Unwrapped, on the Food Network, where the food manufacturers actually provide the vast majority of the show’s footage, (and likely the entire production budget).

Yay ethics! Bring on the B-Roll! Bring out the payola! I want me some kickbacks!

CONSUME!

Yes, I’m back. I can’t keep the domain and not use it. I can’t sit around and not make notes, hey I could be blogging this.

I can’t say hey, here’s how long it takes the average worker to earn a Big Mac, and wonder how long does it take me to earn a linen blazer, and what if I get the cheap knockoff instead? And what if I buy the surprisingly well-made car that saves money by recycling the discarded styles of other manufacturers? Anyone with the guts to acknowledge a poor rep (“Hyundai. Yes, Hyundai”) wins in my book. Especially if they acknowledge and address the concerns– by improving quality and backing it with a big fat warranty.

My company has always had pretty good quality, but the reputation as a dinosaur persists. I keep saying, we need to license the line “Don’t call it a comeback, I been here for years” from LL Cool J. But I doubt it’ll happen. For starters it’s a song, and we don’t do TV or radio advertising.