Full Text of Ian's Weekly Commentaries

Voting (December 11th, 2000):

In one of the more bland and bizarre moments in the bland and bizarre saga of Election 2000, George W. Bush issued this statement, "As Americans have watched on television, they have seen for themselves that manual counting, with individuals making subjective decisions about voter intent, introduces human error and politics into the vote-counting process. Each time these voting cards are handled, the potential for errors multiplies. Additional manual counts of votes that have been counted and recounted will make the process less accurate, not more so."

In other words, if I follow the Governor's logic, human beings really have no place in the voting process. And he probably had a point. If we'd only stuck to polls and computer models, we wouldn't have been in that mess in the first place. Al Gore on his part made a big show of seeming above the fray. This was just another strategy, as near as I can tell. After all, where Jesse Jackson goes, fray follows. And both sides were certainly guilty of politicizing the political process. Republicans and Democrats snarled at each other, waving placards, gathering angrily in public places to scream their support for their candidates. And I sat in my hovel and screamed back, "Why?" The election was over. There were disputes about how the votes should be counted, but the votes were all in. So who were these idiots trying to convince? What was that all about?

I studiously avoided all coverage of this flap-- after all, how much videotape of people in windowless rooms counting pieces of paper did I really need to see? Not to mention pundits commenting on people counting pieces of paper in windowless rooms-- but some of it has rubbed off on me, kind of like a punched-out bit of paper on a ballot falling to the floor. Oh right, that punched-out bit of paper is called a "chad." Everybody knows this now. The fact that everybody knows this is highly irritating.

Even more irritating: the election of our President depended upon how clingy a chad is, or rather, on how we defined the clinginess of a chad, legally. This is purely subjective on my part, of course, but I think one of the reasons Republicans were so incensed about a manual recount is that "chad" sounds like the name of a Democrat. I think if it had been called "chuck," they might have backed off, and the Democrats might have conceded. The Democrats never backed off, though. Already, spinning gave more qualifications to chad than previous generations could never in their wildest dreams have imagined: dangling chad, pregnant chad, hanging chad.... As the Republicans gnashed their teeth, whipping up briefs into the wee hours. And this was all over the kind of stuff your girlfriend picks off your sportscoat before you go out to dinner. Some call it chad. None dare call it schmutz. I gotta go.
(hear the realaudio version)

Cliches (December 18th, 2000):

Whazzup? Maybe it's time to put some cliches to bed. I think we're on the same page. Yes, I'm trying to think out of the box, to come up with some scalable b to b solutions, while I'm still on top of my game. What do I bring to the table? Well, at the end of the day, if it's on my watch, and I've got my game face on, and hang time, and a good dee, all things being equal, and the playing field is level, I hope to leverage the added value I put on the plate, stand up to the plate, and be the go-to-guy in a zero sum game with zero tolerance for those who put an "I" in teamwork.

There is no "I" in teamwork. It's a no-brainer. It's a non-starter. No question about it. You've got turn it up a notch, crank it up, turn a negative into a positive if you want bragging rights. Failure is not an option. It's an opportunity, and a challenge. Every trojan horse can become an achilles heel but he's got to make it look easy out there. Having said that, you've got to run on your record, and play to win. This is key. It's a key element. We'll see how it plays itself out. There's a bottom line in every window of opportunity. Here's the best kept secret. For all intents and purposes, if you want to fast track a new paradigm, even if it's an uphill battle, if you want to be a global player, you've got to touch base with an objective mindset if you want to e-enable benchmarks that implement transitioning, streamline synergies, and visualize cross platform solutions 24-7.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. You've got to front load the back end, folks. If you want a user-friendly killer app, you've got to be proactive. It's all about mindshare. It's all about real-time sticky eyeballs. We're not going for the niche market here, people. If you want to be next generation mission-critical you've got to have a transparent seamless architecture that supports world-class community bandwidth deliverables, out-of-the-box. You want to go ahead and position yourself in a win-win situation, you'll be good to go. Me, I'm going in a different direction. The decision to leave was not an easy one. I'm proud to have been associated with all of you, but it's time to pursue other opportunities. Good enough. Nuff said. You got it. I gotta go.
(hear the realaudio version)

Work Radio (December 25th, 2000):

Like many of you, I suspect, I have a number of radio stations preset on my car radio. One of them, selected by my daughter, is set to a station that specializes in 80's and 90's rock. Its slogan, which every radio station is obligated to have, was "Your upbeat listen to at work station." Every time I heard an announcer say this, the phrase struck me as clunky and desperate, somewhat akin to Bob Dole in the last Presidential election, haranguing soccer moms to vote for him. That is, it seemed like a pitch to a demographic that only exists in a marketing executive's dreams, and even if it did exist it wouldn't pay any attention to you anyway. Your upbeat listen to at work station. How many jobs are there, I wonder, that let you listen to the radio? Even those that do allow that sort of thing, the employees probably prefer a little Nine Inch Nails over headphones to Phil Collins.

Be that as it may, the other day my daughter punched in that station to find that it had changed its name from K 101 to Star, and its slogan had become "Eighties rock-- and more." The playlist was still pretty much the same, as near as I can tell, Phil Collins, Phil Collins, and Phil Collins. I couldn't hear the "and more" part, but we were only in the car for ten minutes or so-- we might have heard a little 10CC, Journey, and even some Prince if we'd stuck with it... but it brought my attention to a new phenomenon-- the personalizing of radio stations. I don't know if it's the Internet influence, but I've noticed that more and more stations-- generally those that specialize in what we call oldies now-- that is, 70's 80's and 90's pop-- no longer identify themselves by their call letters, but by some noun-- The River, Star, Mountain. What this has to do with Phil Collins is anybody's guess, but then again, Yahoo! near as I can tell, is just a portal to the Internet.

If you answer yes to the question, "Do you, uh, yahoo," what you are actually doing is scrolling and clicking. Sure, you can pretend that you're doe-see-doe ing at a hoedown, but you're really sitting at a terminal in an ergonomic chair and you're only fooling yourself. Still, if you're a radio station, and you want to call yourself Ocean, Rain Forest 95, Skyscraper, Doorknob 104.3, Dave, Suzie, Window, Pillow, or SUV 100, it's all the same to me. If it makes you happy, and it keeps Phil Collins off the streets, you can call yourself whatever you want. I gotta go.
(hear the realaudio version)

What Is Death? (January 1st, 2001):

Scientists recently unearthed a dormant 250 million-year-old dormant bacterium, from a cave in New Mexico. Then they took it back to the lab, and brought it back to life, using a combination, I believe, of a sub-atomic Heimlich maneuver and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. This discovery and resurrection could mean that, by any real measure, bacteria could be as immortal as Dick Clark. And the possibility looms that bacteria have come here from other worlds, hitchhiking to earth on comets, meteors, or attached to the hulls of space ships of little gray aliens.

This is all heady stuff, and probably amazing. Still, the bacterium's extreme age aside, what distinguishes it from the stuff underneath the shower mat? The gunk we scrape off cheese? Or pond scum? The substance we tackle with an old toothbrush to remove from grout? How long does it take for bacteria to stop being a nuisance, and become a miracle? What if they'd found this bacterium on a 250 million-year-an ancient wedge of Gouda? Would they have scrapped the mold, and tried to save the cheese? What has more value, the stuff in the attic, or the dust collected on it? It's hard to get perspective sometimes.

About six months ago, for instance, I requested DSL so that Everything Internet would be that much faster. What I wasn't told is that it takes over six months to get DSL. Not only that, while you're gathering cobwebs and mold waiting for the scientists to bring it back from the cave, it shows up at your door in a state of dormancy. It just sits there. So when you're put on hold as you wade your way through the maze of voicemail, and that friendly pre-recorded female voice tells you, "Your call is important to us," what are you supposed to think? I know the call is important to ME or I wouldn't be hanging on for the forty minutes and counting, but how, exactly, is it important to a pre-recorded female voice? And again, how long would I have to be on hold before the call achieved cosmic significance?

If they find my skeletonized remains in my fossilized hovel 250 million years from now, receiver still clutched in bony hand, and the woman's reassuring voice still emanating from the tiny speaker, will the scientists try to revive me? I hope not, unless there's a tech support clone being revived as well. If I can't get those lame website graphics to load in less than ten seconds-- well, what's the point of going on? I gotta go.
(hear the realaudio version)

Claudia's Palm (January 8th, 2001):

I haven't really followed up on this story as I should have, but I learned last August from the online market watcher Pervasive Weekly that supermodel Claudia Schiffer was going to offer the new Palm Pilot on her website, www.claudiaschiffer.com. This makes her, of course, in addition to being a supermodel, an entrepreneur, a title that, these days, might get you a cup of coffee, if you can find a place that sells a plain cup of coffee, and not just lattes and flavored mochas, but even there you'll probably have to pay for it yourself, assuming that, as a supermodel, you even go near caffeinated beverages, sugar, or dairy products.

Where was I? Oh yeah. Ms. Schiffer said in a statement, "I am excited to be working with Palm to bring fashion to technology and extend its reach to the wider population." Uh huh. By wider population, if she means, women, in particular, wide women who live in double-wides and spend their days watching Jerry Springer, I don't hold much hope for her venture into entrepreneurship, even though the PDA she is holding up for the wide people is apparently elegant, with a brushed metallic-aqua sheen.

Certainly it will help professional women organize their busy busy lives and at the same time lend a stylishly metallic aqua sheen to their ensemble, but it's been my experience that most professional women, unlike professional men, prefer not to have tiny electronic gadgets dangling from their person. Guys, if left to their own devices, would have calculators, Game Boys, PDAS, and cell phones bristling from their belts like a brace of pistols from the Wild West. Women carry a cell phone and lip gloss and that's about it. Where they hide these things is anybody's guess.

Women don't need pocket organizers. Women ARE organizers, and most of them don't have pockets. Men, however, who desperately need to organize, instead spend their time buying organizers, then upgrading them. What men really need is somebody to organize their organizers so they can get organized. Claudia Schiffer could do that for us, I suppose, but it's been my experience that any relationship with a supermodel leads inevitably to chaos, whether she has an organizer or not. James Gleick, I suspect, would agree with me. I gotta go.
(hear the realaudio version)

Speed Dating (January 15th, 2001):

It is truly the dawn of a new age, and our zest for leisure is fast becoming another excuse for work. For instance, take the hot new game, Speed Dating. Very popular in Jewish circles, according to the San Francisco Examiner, Speed Dating consists of gathering young singles in a coffee house, setting an egg timer for seven or eight minutes, and allowing one single to ask questions of another single, "What makes you happy, what do you like to do," and so forth, until the timer goes off, and you move on to the next single.

Rabbi Yaaco Deyo, who invented this game, says, "It's a quickening of the process... There is none of that inefficiency, that sloppiness and insensitivity." Supposedly, Hollywood has sent out feelers, but the Rabbi insists that putting this shorthand musical chairs game on television would commercialize what was meant to elevate dating. To which I can only say, "okay, whatever."

If you're a single whose hobbies include compulsive gambling and exercise, however, you may want to check out the Tropicana Casino, which has recently installed what are called Pedal N' Play quarter slots machines that have been welded to stationary bicycles. Handlebar buttons control the amount of the bet and the spin of the wheel, and there's even a monitor to measure how many calories you've burned. Yes, you can lose money, even as you're losing weight. To my nose, the faint whiff of desperation hangs over these two enterprises.

But what about the dotcom edition of Monopoly? There are no "bricks-and-mortar railroads, utilities, or real estate in the dotcom edition. Instead, you land on Lycos, Ebay, and Nokia. Chance and Community Chest have been replaced by Download and Email just in. You still roll the dice, alas, instead of wearing out shoe leather and vocal chords pitching your company to increasingly indifferent venture capitalists. And the new prices reflect the new economy. Where Boardwalk went for 400 bucks, now you land on Yahoo, which goes for 400 million.

I haven't seen the game itself, so I don't know what's replaced Mediterranean and Baltic Avenues-- if it's Petopia and emusic, well you might want to reconsider your purchase-- or better yet, combine all of these ideas-- play dotcom monopoly on a timer, so when you lose your shirt on that dotcom investment, you'll at least have the pleasure of knowing it didn't take very long to do it. And play it while riding a stationary bicycle. And play it, not with someone you love, but someone you MIGHT love if he or she answers the questions correctly, and if Yahoo and Amazon don't go out of business before you get around the board. I love America. I gotta go.
(hear the realaudio version)

Hillary (January 22nd, 2001):

I've been brooding about Hillary Clinton's gazillion dollar book deal, for which she will allegedly tell all, even though you know she won't, because she's Hillary, and will only tell you as much as you think you need to hear, now sit down, children, shut up, and pay attention to the bullet points I've outlined on the blackboard. I don't begrudge her the money, well, who am I kidding, of course I begrudge her the money, same as I begrudged Newt Gingrich the money for his book deal, or any of these weasels, right or left, who parlay the coin of their fame into gazillion dollar book deals that result in hardcover books that show up like clockwork on the shelves of Goodwill stores roughly six months after they were published.

What's the point? Nobody reads these books. People only buy them to have them, or to say that they have them, does anybody actually read these ghost-written mealy-mouthed pieces of crap? Well sure, reviewers and critics. But they're paid to do it, aren't they? I could be wrong, Hillary could surprise us all and reveal her husband and herself as the opportunistic bizarrely co-dependent cut rate Macbeths the Republicans believe them to be, but I suspect that Hillary's book will be more about what we need to do to help the children than how she wanted to blow hubby's head off after that whole Monica Lewinsky deal.

Now, I'm a liberal, I suppose, and don't hate the Clintons as much as I should, but full disclosure-- I must say the two of them really gave me the creeps, and don't have much interest in what either of them have to say about anything, no matter what. If President George Jr. writes his memoirs, or has them written, I can assure you I will feel the same about him. At least Al Gore wrote his boring book, EARTH IN THE BALANCE, by himself.

Ted Kaczynski also has been working on a book deal, which probably won't go through, because capitalism, though it has its faults, will no longer allow criminals to enjoy the fruits of crime, even if they donate those fruits to charity. It's a shame in a way. I imagine that Kaczynski would be candid in whatever book he wrote. After all, outside of the delusions under which he labors, what does he have to lose by candor? Hillary, on the other hand, has everything to lose by total honesty, and absolutely nothing to gain. I gotta go.
(hear the realaudio version)

Marketplace (January 29th, 2001):

You know what? I'm as profit-oriented as the next guy, but I'm a little bit tired of hearing about the wisdom of the marketplace. Turn on any talk show, public or commercial, and if the topic is the economy, the pundits will always eventually claim that we need to listen to the marketplace.

The marketplace will take care of itself. These issues have a way of getting resolved in the marketplace. All we need to do is listen to the marketplace. The marketplace is whispering, all we have to do is lower our ear. The marketplace is listening. The marketplace is shouting. Just pay attention to the marketplace! Pay attention to the marketplace or it will throw a fit. The marketplace loves us, or at least our buying power. When we no longer have buying power, well, the marketplace will lose interest in our attention.

Yes, I hate to break it to you, but the marketplace is an idiot. Okay, that's not true. The marketplace is weather. It's sort of dependable, but every once in a while typhoons occur and knock down everything. And even those things that do survive in the marketplace, are we supposed to learn anything from them? Here's a random sampler of successes in the marketplace: Microsoft, Pokemon trading cards, Jim Carrey as the Grinch, Amazon. com, and pet rocks. What do they have in common? One's being busted by the feds, one is x in a series of strange Japanese fads, one is x in a series of both episodes in the Jerry Lewis for the Millennium's career and the blanding of the creations of the late great Dr. Seuss, Amazon.com I wouldn't even begin to know how to characterize, it's kind of the pet rock of retail, as near as I can tell. But what do I know? Every penny I've ever had has fled from me pretty much as soon as I've received it.

Still, when libertarian types speak of the marketplace as the being the proper arbiter of values, morality itself being up to the individual consumer, I pretty much gag. I thought this was capitalism. I thought this was democracy. As far as I'm concerned, when the marketplace speaks, it's in the voice of Alan Greenspan. He's a ben evolent despot, sure, but he's still the king. Sure, we're prosperous. That doesn't make it right. I gotta go.
(hear the realaudio version)

Bush (February 5th, 2001):

I'm fascinated by the transition Bush Jr. as instituted on his path to the presidency. I'm a liberal, I suppose, though no fan of the Clintons, and voted for Al Gore, without much enthusiasm. I've made fun of Bush Jr. not for being an idiot, which I don't think he is for one minute, but for not trying hard enough to escape the shadow of his father. As a matter of fact, near as I can tell, he's trying to do his father one better, and not only eclipse his father's administration, but recapture the glory of the Eisenhower years.

Clinton was tofu? The new Bush administration is porterhouse steak. Clinton was golf? Well, the new Bush is golf too. Some things cannot be tainted, even by a sensuous democrat. Clinton was young? The new Bushies are old. Really old. Even the cabinet members who are relatively young are old. Bush Jr's attorney General nominee John Ashcroft actually lost a run for senator of Missouri last November to a dead man. How old is that? Liberals are lining up to block Ashcroft's nomination on ideological grounds. Hey, he lost a senate election to a dead guy. What more do you need to know? But I don't want to get into all that.

Nanny issues, and opinions on abortion, all that stuff. That doesn't matter. That's all just politics, and politics have a way of being political. What really matters these days is perception. Image. Republicans, it's obvious, have let their better selves be consumed by images. Now they want to erase those images. You know what Bush Jr. wants? He wants us to forget that Clinton was ever President. Not only that, since he doesn't want to be his father, he wants to eclipse Bush Sr. as well. And Reagan, because Bush Jr. wants to be Reagan, and Ford, of course, because well, he was Gerry Ford, and Carter because he was an ineffectual Democrat, and Nixon because he was Nixon, and Johnson because he was a too-effective Democrat, and Kennedy, because he was Kennedy, and now we're back to Eisenhower, and that's far enough back that Bush Jr. could definitely be that guy.

Golf, and barbecues, and drug-free suburban bliss, oh yes, that's definitely doable. It's gonna be steak and spuds, lard, doughnuts, and mixed drinks. All we have to do is pretend Clinton, and of course Florida, never happened. Do you think that will happen? I wonder. I gotta go.
(hear the realaudio version)

---

Back To Ian Shoales' Mocking Web Commentary Index