Category: Thoughts

The WSJ has listed industry-specific must-read blogs. Included are ones I know about, like Bookslut for the publishing world and Defamer for Hollywood, as well as ones I didn’t know about, like Taxanalysts.com and Pharma Marketing Blog. Neat!

Ask Philosophers, at Amherst: it’s basically an advice column by the philosophy department. Most of the questions are a little more serious than this one, about the ethics of switching allegiance from one sports team to another, but they’re still pretty neat. It’s almost as amusing, and perhaps more useful, than The Non-Expert, whose slogan is “Experts answer what they know; the Non-Expert answers everything.”

The latest issue of Ad Report Card from Slate covers the most recent Miller High life ad campaign, involving no humor or irony. The critic notes: “It’s always a dangerous game to guess at how ironic (or not) the kids are being these days: Are they drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon to be funny? Do they actually just like it? Are they not even sure anymore?”

And you know, I have no idea. PBR is good for the money, which is to say, it sucks but it’s cheap. I fully expected Miller High Life to battle Schlitz for supremacy as hipster swill, but if it’s going to move upmarket as this article predicts, I’m guessing that means Miller has decided to leave Schlitz and PBR to have the alterna-swill category and want to fight for the mainstream-swill category with Bud.

Side note on market share: Budweiser seems to be stuck in a plight similar to that of Harley-Davidson: they are losing market share at the very high end (custom bikes or microbrews) and at the low end (Hyosung, Kawasaki, Schlitz, Miller). What will they do about the squeeze?

Harley Davidson seems to be expanding into new markets: They’re advertising the Sportster in women’s magazines (women now buy 10% of new bikes, and rising), they bought a sport-bike company (Buell), and they’ve built a line of bikes that don’t look much like their past efforts (V-Rod, etc). Bud is focusing on more niches: they’re the official beer of every sporting event you could possibly imagine (Gay Ultimate Frisbee of Northwest Minnesota? Check.) and are constantly developing more niche products (B-to-the-E, Bud Select… ).

Will it be, as they say in the biz, “impactful”? Hell if I know.

We make jokes about things because they are horrible, and laughing about them somehow makes them seem less horrible. For example, these horrible tattoos, which I found courtesy of the rather wonderful Modblog (as in body-modification blog. Not for the squeamish).

Or our president, as in the joke that my brother sent me today:

Donald Rumsfeld is giving the president his daily briefing. He concludes by saying: “Yesterday, three Brazilian soldiers were killed.” OH NO!” Bush exclaims. “That’s terrible!” Bush’s staff is stunned at this display of emotion, nervously watching as the president sits with head in hands. Finally, the president looks up and asks, “How many is a brazillion?”

Growing… bulge found in Oregon… the unnamed bulge was created because of a big cavity… that is filling with fluid.

Maybe content is king, and maybe it is merely a courtier. But whatever it is, everyone will tell you it should be done right, which means doing it their way.

One of the people giving advice is Gerry McGovern, who will tell you that the key metric of content quality is sales generation per page. That’s how we know that J. K. Rowling is a good writer: the books sell, therefore they are good! To maximize the quality of your website, according to Gerry, you need to focus on the pages that have the broadest audience, and delete the unpopular filler pages surrounding them.

His Harry Potter example is really an odd choice given that those books tend to be about 20-50% too long, populated largely by rehash and filler. You could tell “The Half-Blood Prince” in half the pagecount, save years of writing and pounds of shipping, and still charge thirty bucks for the hardcover. In contrast, the article can’t be made much shorter. Don’t get me wrong: it’s 600 words, 590 of which are unnecessary, but if you cut it below 500, you don’t get paid for it, so you need to keep that filler in there. Even in Harry Potter, the filler serves a crucial function: it keeps the kids quiet for several additional hours. Each page is another few minutes of silence that parents will pay dearly for.

In other words, you may not like filler, but the good bits depend on it like a jewel needs a setting.

Some days I have trouble deciding. How many pairs of shoes should a man have? Is it OK to spend all my money on dangerous toys? Is it worth the airfare and registration fees to go to Euro OSCON? Should I get an incredibly creepy tattoo? Is it cloudy enough to warrant bringing the umbrella? How often should I go to the Waltham office instead of the Cambridge office?

Sadly, nobody can answer these questions but me.

Today I feel ill and my head feels tingly and dizzy. On the other hand, it is restaurant week in this fair city, so I am obligated to go out and have a nice dinner no matter how ill I feel. Such are the travails of living in the northeastern US in late August.

I have found an amusing article on the internet. It is titled Evolution, Intelligent Design fail to explain Bush.

That is all.

Yesterday I had a day of low self-esteem. I felt that every message I sent, every action I took, betrayed my lack of worth and my hatred of myself and others.

Then, on the way home, I saw a man in a very large SUV with a very large cigar and a cowboy hat, and I said to myself, at least I’m not him, broadcasting his lack of penis and his hatred of himself and others every day. At least I’m not one of the people profiled on Dirty Jobs, squeezing baby chickens.

Then, I went and got my Parker Farm farm-share, and chatted with neighbors and acquaintances about how to cook Swiss Chard and what to do with turnips. When I got home, Bookdwarf and Rony and Toshok and I grilled steaks and corn and zucchini and eggplant and green peppers, and drank wine, and sat behind the house. And then we played UNO. And I went to bed a happy man.

(Note: You squeeze a baby chicken to make it poop, so you can look at its cloaca and determine its sex. Someone once told me it was all done by scent, but that’s not true. Some varieties of chicken can be sexed by looking at their wing-tips, but for the others you have to look at what they call the vent. Chickens are sorted by sex because pullets (girls) are worth more than cockerels (boys), and are therefore sold separately.)

Brilliant post over at Kung Fu Monkey on Intelligent Design and another about how the Republican party has gone from being the party of practical, no-nonsense killjoys to the party of nutjobs.