The redoubtable Jerry Michalski (the writer/thinker/networker, not the battleship) has started blogging and has put up a wiki. (Wiki, not Wifi. A wiki is a page that can be gang-edited, a digital act of trust.)

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Here are the Top Ten or So Signs that RageBoy Is on the Mend:

11. When he puts in a link to a bloody, angry, foul-mouthed CD, he remembers to put his Amazon affiliate code at the end

10. He’s got enough strength back to type out all of “motherfucker”

9. Remembers that if he’s a “babe magnet,” he’s got his polarity reversed

8. Uses elegant CSS definitions to put “Fuckhead” into 64pt green san serif font rather than messier inline notation

7. Drops “Big Lou Gerstner” from his blogroll

6. Winer and Lessig take out joint ad in Variety to complain about him

5. Hand writes a note to each of his EGR subscribers to apologize for not calling them fucking hosers enough recently

4. His blog entry on why the DayPop Top 40 eats motherfucking shit makes it onto the DayPop Top 40

3. When you click on his photo, it no longer takes you to a John Denver play list

2. RageBoy clips his page boy

And the number one sign that RB is on the mend …

1. No one’s safe any more

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Here’s a discussion of Chris Macrae’s “wild idea” that we should on our web sites encourage people to sign a pledge that says: Once a million people have signed up, we will avoid buying from global companies that spend more than $250M a year on advertising but won’t spend 10% of that on making the world better.

I’m suggesting that we called it “The Tenth Ad Pledge.”

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TeleTruth.org has filed a complaint alleging that Verizon (and the companies that merged to form it) have vastly inflated the amount and cost of missing equipment to the tune of $20-$80B. Why? Presumably because this “vaporware” counts as an expense that can be passed on to the consumer in the former of higher rates.

This one, if true, would scrape the field clean.

The press release is here. There’s a table of contents here. And, oddly, if you click on the link to the “Executive Summary,” (http://www.newnetworks.com/auditexecsum.html), it actually takes you to the Microsoft security home page.

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Doc blogs “In Praise of Breasts” which, in addition to raising questions about our culture’s fetishism and about the ability of art to transcend the sexual, also poses the eternal riddle: Are there other sure-fire ways to crack the DayPop Top 40?

Yes, there are. Here are some titles guaranteed to shoot you into that vaunted heaven:

See you on the Top 40!

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Dave writes in response to my blog that asked for some empirical basis for the software copyright spat:

For crying out loud David, it’s super simple. If I build a house I can live in it as long as I want. If I want to rent out rooms I can do that too, as long as I want.

I don’t know what the right answer is. I am hugely suspicious of arguments by analogy when the things being compared are different in contentious ways…like houses and software. I do think we’d get closer if we looked at some data. And I am 100% positive that the issue isn’t super-simple because if it were, smart, well-intentioned people like Winer and Lessig would agree about it.

For a brief article from three years ago about why arguments by analogy fail when applied to the Web click here and page down to the subhead “Floundering Morality.” It’s about ThirdVoice. Ah, the good old days!

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Dylan Tweney in his newsletter ups the ante on the number of bloggers:

…most published estimates put the number far lower, at half a million [9] or less [10]. But leading Weblog provider Blogger.com has more than 700,000 registered users, LiveJournal.com (which most weblog news stories overlook for some reason) boasts more than 650,000, and Radio Userland has upwards of 50,000 users. Freeware/open source blogging tools such as Movable Type and Greymatter add even more to the total, though no one seems to know how many.

I asked Steven Levy where he got the 500,000 figure when he interviewed me for his Newsweek article. He said it came from Blogdex. It seemed low to me. I’m glad to see Dylan come in with new numbers.

Also, Dylan traces weblogs back to Douglas Englebart’s Augment system, “a kind of hyperlinked, team-oriented online journal…” Interesting precursor. I’d never heard of Augment before. But because Modern Weblogs began not as team journals but as individuals publishing annotated logs of where they’d webbed that day, the historical line is at least dotted. Besides, don’t the cave paintings in Lascaux count as a type of early weblog? And the tales told by the Homeric Bards? And Psalm 22? And, when you think about it, isn’t the last warm breeze of summer, sending a chill through the sparrows even as it rocks them to sleep, a weblog? Isn’t it really?

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Gary Unblinking Stock points us to coverage of the obvious irony of the sumptuousness of the dining at the Earth Summit that’s addressing world hunger.

Don’t these folks have a freaking PR agent who could have whispered to them beforehand: Ix-nay on the aviar-cay!

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I particularly enjoyed this week’s missive from Hank Blakely. He turns from his weekly W bashing to the news from Pat Robertston:

Pat (actually his real name is “Marion,” but that’s just a bit gender ambiguous, so he substituted “Pat”) and his American Center for Law and Justice (they do both!), have come up with this simply nifty idea they call the Houses of Worship Political Speech Protection Act*. Wow! Huh? We mean, wow! How many loaded words can you get into one title? Do these guys know their business, or do these guys know their business?

More from Blakely here. And more about Robertson’s initiative here.

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Word Ways, the oddest journal on the planet, and available only in print, has at last put up a website at www.WordWays.com. WordWays is a small-circulation journal for people who treat words as objects. They set themselves challenges and then create enormous word lists of, for example, all the words that can be broken into pallindromic sets. And that’s one of the simplest examples.

The site is scandalously out of date, though! It runs Jeff Grant’s 10-word word-square that relies on people’s proper names but does not yet run the 10-word word-square in the current issue, the first such square with all authenticated sources. It’s from Rex Gooch in Letchworth, England. Here it is, with the source of each word to the right:

A B A P T I S T U M     Pulliam

B A H R A M T A P A     in Azerbaijan

A H L E R B R U C H     in Germany

P R E P A R A T O R     Oxford Eng. Dict.

T A R A D A N O V A     in Russia

I M B R A N G L E S     OED

S T R A N G F O R D     in England

T A U T O L O G I A     qv in OED

U P C O V E R I N G     OED

M A H R A S D A G I     in Turkey

Congratulations to Mr. Gooch and all the little Letchworth Gooches!

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Jonathan blogs about a Declan interview “with a lawyer from Verizon that has some very hopeful bits. … The short story is that The sleeping giant of the telcos, has political clout that puts Hollywood to shame, but let’s not forget that they may be out allies for now, but they ain’t us, and their agenda isn’t ours.”

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I wrote a brief reply to Dave’s “It’s simple” reply to the following blog entry…
Dave Sifry thinks carefully about the arguments being advanced by Dave Winer and Larry Lessig about software copyrights. As Doc says, Sifry is moving the discussion forward, a good thing.

In a nutshell (i.e., annoyingly inaccurately), Lessig proposes a 10-year copyright for software, after which the source code would be released into the public domain. Winer thinks this would unduly damage small software houses: “If we have to publish our source code the users won’t pay for it. Ten years isn’t enough time to create a new market.” And that would mean the end of the major incentive for innovation.

Sifry disagrees with Winer on this: “I can’t think of a single example of software that generated revenue 10 years after it was written, unless you’re talking about software for the Space Shuttle or some other old piece of hardware…”

That’s the swerving point in this debate, the point at which the conversation starts to head into the weeds. All contending parties agree, I believe, that (1) the goal is to build a marketplace that encourages innovation and (2) that the way to do that is to let the market reward innovation. Unfortunately, to spread the value of innovation, two things have to happen that are contradictory from the market point of view: First, someone has to have a great idea for which she is rewarded. Second, you want that idea to spread and be built upon as raidly as possible and requiring that the creator be rewarded slows down the spread. Much butting of heads ensues.

So, the reasonable compromise (as I think all the disputants agree) is to set some number of years during which a copyright holds. The question is: What’s the right number of years? More important, how do we decide the right number of years?

We can’t merely be guided by individual instances where a copyright of n years would have been clearly too long or too short, for the essence of the compromise is that we’ll tolerate some inequity in service of a larger growth in equitable innovation.

Further, n is going to be different for different industries, applications and hardware platforms: Some areas have the metabolism of hippopotami and others of hummingbirds. There is no n that is optimal for each body type.

So, how do we move forward? Some numbers would help:

What is the average/typical revenue curve (dollars vs. time) for software?

What’s the curve in various industries, hw platforms application areas?

Do we have reason to think that the curve is about to change its shape or that it could change its shape in desirable ways?

What is the curve for software that we (subjectively) consider to be innovative?

I’m a humanities major and thus won’t understand the numbers even if someone has them, but otherwise it’s hard to see how the discussion can go much further.

Lessig’s reply to Charles Cooper is a superb piece of rhetoric in the best sense: clear, persuasive, entertaining. He even uses one of Winer’s proudest software creations as his example of why we want to limit the term of software’s indentured servitude.

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Ernie the Attorney has some nonsensible suggestions for Congress. Hell, they’re no more absurd than the actual proposed legislation…

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Distributed expertise

The current issue of Vanity Fair has an article (by David Rose) on the crash of AA Flight 587 a few months after 9/11. The point of the article is that the FAA’s explanation (pilot error in reaction to turbulence from the aircraft in fron of it) is very likely wrong. And the FAA is being suspiciously protective of the data it holds. In fact, suggests the article, there are structural problems with the aircraft. (I could swear I read this same article a year ago, maybe in the NYer.)

Anyway, the article supplements the data the FAA has released with information from a site where “a network of aviation experts, former crash investigators, pilots and engineers” analyze information from multiple sources, trying to piece together what actually happened.

Networked markets are smarter than the companies they’re talking about and networked experts know more than the government wants them to know.

Conversation is In

Because I am a Cluetrain guy, I am unnaturally alert to the discovery of convesation, for the central idea of that decentralized book builds on Doc’s insight that “markets are conversations.” So are businesses (as Fernando Flores said, although in a different way) and so is the Internet itself. This idea struck us four authors as especially worthwhile given business’ insistence on understanding the Net as a type of ultra-cheap broadcast medium.

So, it is almost certainly only a coincdence that in the current issue of The New Yorker (a double issue for Aug. 19 and 26), Adam Gopnick’s excellent-as-usual article on cooking ends with this insight:

Searching for an occult connection between cooking and writing, I had missed the most obvious one. They are both dependencies of conversation. What unites cooks and writers is that their work flows from the river of human talk around a table…I enjoy the company of cooks, I realized, because I love the occasions they create for conversation.

Not all that sensible, perhaps, because Gopnick should then equally enjoy the company of furniture makers and farmers. But, I like the reveling in conversation.

Then, putting that magazine down, I picked up the NY Times Week in Review and read an article called “The Selling of America, Bush Style” by Victoria de Grazia about the Bush administration’s attempt to “rebrand” the US. She points to two obstacles. First, “there are now so many competing mesages…” Second,

…advertising messages in themselves have so little bite. They are like one-way streets. Effective cultural exchange, by contrast, depends on engaging others in dialogue.

Jeez, maybe Cluetrain was right! Is the Internet spreading the cult of conversation, which is, after all the second most basic form of human sociality.

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There are some amusing plays on the Google logo at SomethingAwful.

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According to a study by Address Guardian (and reported in MediaPost), 17 million US households receive direct mail and telemarketing addressed to a dead person. Four million get “a lot” and 53% of the mail is going to people who have been dead for a year or more. 6% goes to people who have been dead for 10 or more years.

In my will, I’ve specified that my heirs should keep my email address active and that all incoming mail should be automatically answered with a personalized response expressing my great interest in their products, services, offers of stolen government funds, webcam views of their hot coed selves and, of course, penis extenders.

Count it as my own web-based perpetual flame.

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Note: I screwed up. Someone told me that NPR’s “All Things Considered” ran a commentary of mine last night and I assumed it was on copyright. But I just found out that it was in fact one on the sociality of the Web. But, enough people have linked to the NPR commentary that didn’t run yet that I’m posting it here as an unofficial draft. The transcript below is of the one that did run last night. You can listen to it here.

I’m not a tremendously sociable fellow. Like a surprising number of people in my age and socioeconomic group, I don’t have a lot of friends I hang out with. I think — I hope — it’s just the nature of modern life.

But then I think about my email life. I spend a whole lot of time engaged in really stimulating conversations with strangers. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t get at least one email from someone I’ve never met — messages on interesting topics from people who, through the constant hand-off networking of the web, think I might be interested in what they’re interested in. I write back, the stranger responds, and this goes on for a couple of days. Then, typically, it peters out … and sometimes we bump into one another again on the Web..

The exchanges always have their own character. Some are sober and direct. Some are wordy and formal. Most are jokey, sarcastic, outright funny. In short, the messages sound like their authors, but use the near-universal web attitude of irreverence and humor to cushion the stating of beliefs that may be directly at odds with your reader. “Hey, man, it’s just a joke, it’s got a smiley face next to it.” Humor is becoming the format for intellectual content just as dry sobriety and rigor used to be.

The great thing is that this email arrives unasked for. Someone in the Netherlands, or Australia, or South Africa read some message I posted to a discussion board on the Web, the Web, or stumbled across my home page, or were referred by a friend or previous a correspondent.That’s the nature of the Web, a network that gets its value from people stumbling around.

And I start conversations all the time. I read about an interesting a couple of days ago, so I found out a little more about it on the Web, got the author’s email address, which she publishes, and I wrote to her to talk about an interset I think we share. An hour later, her reply was in my mailbox. A couple of exchanges and we’re allies whose paths may well cross again.

Today I heard from a stranger who thought I’d be interested in something called “pattern language.” He obviously cares about it a lot. So, he educated me briefly and gave me a perspective I might never have stumbled on. Two messages and it’s over. Maybe.

This morning, a guy came across my site and asked me to comment on his. I sent him a message critiquing but now I think he probably just wanted me to say “Cool site!” and share his enthusiasm. So, I think I made a mistake. I haven’t heard back from him. I have no idea whether he’s sulking, found my comments helpful, or now thinks I’m a moron. Maybe all three. That’s part of the conversation too.

What do I get out of this Clearly, stimulation. But it feels deeper than that. The world is coming unstuck in the very best of ways. We’ve lived under a rigid system for managing social contacts. The people you don’t know are strangers. You don’t speak unless spoken to. You stay formal until you get to know one another. Not any more. I sense a spiritual mandate to connect, a mandate so deep that it feels biological. We must find one another, now. We have to grip every hand that we see. This is the new evolution. We are building a world, we’re building the real web, the one that uses technology for connection the way our souls use our bodies for awareness. It’s just email. But it’s joyous.

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Joe Mahoney — whose weblog I’d missed despite the fact that Joe is an old friend, the most literate amateur I’ve ever met (as opposed to professional professors), an astounding musician, and a role model — and I ended up arguing in email about W’s twisted psychology. Joe has run the correspondence. Although he says I trumped him, his last paragraph, with its Frenchification and Lacan reference, is a thoroughly enjoyable classic of intellectual rug-pulling.

Here’s my “analysis.” It is, as always, highly scientifical.

The family is dominated by Babs. She is a classic bitch-tyrant, passive-aggressive mother. Jeb was the favorite. W was the drunk ne’er-do-well who had to be propped up by his father’s cronies; his only validation, as a “successful businessman” he knows came through his father’s largesse, which he hates because he hates his dependence on it.

Once in office, he has surrounded himself with Dad’s pals because that’s the only way he knows how to succeed, but he resents it and can’t feel like a success (or a man) so long as he does what they say. (But he is afraid not to do what they say). He has to do Poppy’s job better than Poppy did. Why? So he can beat his two rivals - Dad and Jeb - for the approval (= fucking) of his mother. So, it won’t be enough for him to beat Dad at the presidency game. He’s also going to have to do it in the face of the advice of Dad’s Greek chorus that’s been guiding him so far. The defection of elder Republicans from the Bomb Iraq cause only gives W a bigger hard on for it.

He has had two opportunities to beat Poppy. Only two people have ever caused Poppy to fail: Clinton and Saddam. Having beaten Clinton, it’s on to Saddam. W has a love/hate deal going with Saddam because although Saddam humiliated the father who never loved him (and who still has the good graces to appear embarrassed with him), Saddam has also given W the opening he needs to win Mommy. He’s not after revenge. It’s approval he’s after. In support: his overwhelming need to be liked is all too obvious, right down to the juvenile nicknames he gives people. His infantilizing of global politics (Putin is “Pooty-poot,” the comic book rhetoric of “evil doers”) undoubtedly (hah!) goes back to his failure to win approval as an infant. He is stuck there.

The Oedipal nature of the Iraqi threat (or opportunity, as it appears to W) implies that he will penetrate Iraq violently, preferably by inseminating it with sperm sprayed from above . His operative metaphor is probably (i.e., I’m making this up) “shoving a smart bomb up Saddam’s ass” to degrade him (= Poppy) sexually so that the Mama Bush will prefer him. W’s no bush! He’s a bomber!

Your comments on his oral fixation ring true to me (which unfortunately does not mean they’re any more likely to be true) and I assume that the oral sex with Laura - and whatever other Dallas Debbies he did during the Drunk Years - was one-way, brutish and unreciprocated.

So, if we could just persuade Babs to blow him, preferably after Dad’s gone limp while trying to perform his husbandly duties, the world might yet be saved. Why don’t you write to her and suggest that?

Go to Joe’s site to read his concluding comment. Stay for the poetry and the voice and the ideas.

Based on nothing but what I saw this morning on the talk shows (when my family’s away I snap on the TV first thing so I can hear voices I can ignore) the public discussion of Sami Al-Arian isn’t asking the basic question: Is he a good teacher and scholar? If he’s doing illegal things outside of the classroom — and according to Al-Arian, a judge last year declared that the groups for which he participated in fund raising were not supporting terrorism — then the legal system should deal with it and, if convicted, he should be bounced from the university. Otherwise, he should be free to say and do what he wants outside of the classroom.

Now, the nit in the ointment is that the University of South Florida claims he’s in violation of his employment agreement and I don’t know what that agreement says. Oh wait, I just found a copy. Sure enough, right there in Paragraph 32c it says: “Tenured professors can be fired if doing so enables Jeb Bush to look tough.” Too bad, Sami. You shoulda read the fine print.

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According to the results of a new study, as reported by Jim Meskauskas at MediaPost:

…the at-work Internet user spends more time with the Internet than he does with any other media. According to the study, the share of total minutes of media consumed using the Internet is 34% among the at-work audience. That means that 34 of every 100 minutes of media consumed belong to the Internet. That is more than any other medium (television accounts for 30%).

That’s good but not unexpected news for us Net boosters. But could you please tell me at what job you get to spend 30% of your “media time” watching TV?

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1. They can’t tell the difference between a party and a market.

2. They think it’s their party.

About #1. Marketers think that we on the Web are markets. They define a market as a group of people who will respond favorably (i.e., 2% will twitch their eyebrows in reaction) to a message. For example, “urban males 18-24″ is a market if they will respond favorably to an ad with a babe touching a pen to her lips, and “people who read Parade and own a weimeraner” is a market if they respond favorably to a jingle that rhymes “wet good” with “pet food.” These markets have no existence as a group except as a statistical abstraction. They are not real groups, much less communities on conversations. The Web, on the other hand, is a set of global parties where people are talking with others only insofar as we find one another interesting on some topic. Marketers look at these parties, these real groups of real people, and see only opportunities to deliver messages.

About #2. The fundamental mistake business insists on making over and over on the Internet is to think that their Web site is theirs. Even if they have learned that the Internet is not driven primarily by business, just about every business thinks about its site as a piece of property they own. When we enter it, we are now subject to their rules and their messages. While this is legally indisputable, it’s also what makes business sites feel so alien on the Web.

[For further reading: Cluetrain, Gonzo, Doc.]

Scott Knowles, a marketer whose head is not up his ass when it comes to the Web, responds: “I think putting a “traditional” in front of “marketing” when your slamming it would make things more accurate. There really is a difference.” Yes, there is. I assume a “traditional” in front of “marketers” in the screed above, but I shouldn’t assume that all me readers assume the same assumption. (You know what they say about “Assumptions”: they make an “ass” of “u” and “mptions.”

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MoveOn has a petition Americans can sign online urging our representatives not to allow us to go to war without solid evidence against Iraq and a reasonable hope that a war might lead to good.

Will signing a petition do any good? Well, it’s like to do marginally more good than not signing a petition.

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In response to our call for names for the invasion of Iraq, Joe Mahoney writes:

I don’t really like Operation Oedipus. Oedipus is a patricide, not an avenger. Even in Freud’s appropriation, Oedipus is all about dissolution of the patriarchal order (or something like that). I’d vote for Operation Orestes.

I’m less enamored with Operation Oedipus than I was. I’d prefer something like Operation Oedipal Blindness or maybe Operation Oedipal Apocalypse.

Norm Jensen meanwhile suggests Operation Blatant Hypocrisy.

Oliver Travers points us to Fred Langa’s column at InformationWeek about the new Microsoft EULA. Fred’s reading of the EULA is less paranoid and alarming than the Registers’ that I cited.

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AKMA says he disagrees with me. I beg to differ.

At issue are the comments from Ha Jin I ran approvingly:

Chinese is very rich in describing feelings. For sadness there are some words English doesn’t have. So too for taste. … [But] there are some abstract words that Chinese doesn’t have, such as ‘truth,’ ‘identity,’ and ’solitude.’ Obviously, English is a more speculative language, whereas Chinese is more earthly, closer to things.

AKMA’s beef (well, since we’re both vegetarians, maybe we should switch to a different metaphor, perhaps something spatial) is that he has “little patience” for

the attitude that cultural groups have intellectual or spiritual tendencies that can be read off the vocabulary or syntax of their languages.

In this there are two objections AKMA may be registering: (1) Cultural groups have tendencies; (2) These tendencies are deterministically determined by their language. The “read off” implies the second objection, as if we could look at a language out of context and “read” the intellectual and spiritual tendencies of its people.

AKMA then says that he doesn’t think Ha is so dumb as to believe in #2, a simple and “tedious” linguistic determinism. But neither is experience independent of language. Rather, says AKMA, “I agree that social life, thought, and language are closely related , and that they affect one another.” But, AKMA says, he rejects what Ha says because English speakers do manage to say earthly things and Chinese speakers manage to say speculative things.

It seems to me that this objection is to a third statement that Ha doesn’t make: (3) The intellectual and spiritual tendencies language non-deterministically influences are not tendencies but hard limits. That is, AKMA seems to be taking Ha as saying that if Chinese is a more earthly language than English, then English speakers can’t say earthly things.

I find it unlikely, based on the snippet I originally posted, that Ha is saying that English can’t be earthly and Chinese can’t be speculative. He is talking about tendencies and uses the comparative “more.” So, I think AKMA is attacking a strawperson interpretation of Ha. And I thus am able to agree with AKMA’s subtantial point while disagreeing with his critique of Ha’s statement.

Now, this doesn’t answer a question that seems to jab more squarely at the questions of language and translation: Are there things that can be said in Chinese that simply cannot be said in English, and vice versa? And the answer to this question is one that I again think AKMA and I are likely to agree on: That the question is totally screwed up is betrayed by my sloppy use of the word “things.” In fact, this question is like waving red meat, um, I mean, waving a spatial metaphor in front of a postmodernist.

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AKMA’s got some excellent comments on The Dispute and Alex Golub takes apart and then puts back together Lessig’s rhetoric in a remarkable display of insight. (AKMA has some later comments here.)

My opinion? We need to back Lessig and we need to develop 100 others who approach his passion, intelligence and stamina. His rhetoric at OScon is that of desperation, and we all want Lessig to win the struggle in which he is engaged. (Yes, I am now open to dispute from those who don’t agree 100% with Lessig’s aims. My response: “we” in the prior sentence means “those who want Lessig to win the struggle in which he is engaged.” Try getting out of that one, Mr. Smarty-Pants Communist!)

(By the way, I’ve had the opportunity to spend a litte time with Lessig, and despite Alex’s inference from Lessig’s OScon presentation, Lessig is far from humorless. He’s witty while also fully engaged with the people around him. A delightful person to be in a room with.)

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[NOTE: I was a humanities major and thus am not
responsible for accurate calculations. Further, I
probably will not understand the corrections you send
me. In fact, you should congratulate me for getting the numbers right up to whatever point I got them wrong.]

I have not been able to find a direct mention
of how many videotapes are rented every year. But:
According
to Blockbuster: “In 2001, an estimated average of
more than 3 million customers walked into U.S. Blockbuster
stores every day.” [source]

src="images/lilbutton.gif" border=0> Blockbuster has
38% marketshare in the US. [source a>]

” …consumers still spend more than twice as much renting
movies on videocassette ” [source
]

Irrelevantly
but interestingly: “…consumer spending on the purchase
and rental of DVDs and videocassettes is already up
13.3% to a whopping $8.79 billion in the first half
of the year.” [source]

So, assume that at 80% of the people who walked into
a Blockbusters walked out with a rented videotape
(while the other 20% were there to argue over late
fees or just to enjoy the continental ambiance). That
means 876,000,000 tapes and DVDs were rented from
Blockbuster in 1991. With a 38% share, that means
2,303,880,000 tapes and DVDs were rented that year.
Assume that DVDs and videotapes rent for the same
amount, which means that the ratio of tapes to DVDs
was 2:1. So, 1,535,920,000 tapes were rented and 767,960,000
DVDs.

The FBI warning on videotapes displays for
approximately 30 seconds. Assume that you can fast
forward over it so that it only takes ten seconds.
Since the FBI warning is unnecessary to honest citizens
and is ineffective in thwarting thieves, that means
that last year the FBI stole 4,266,444 hours from
American citizens. Assuming an average (don’t ask
which type of average) salary of $50,000 in the US,
that means the FBI stole $106,661,111.11 in lost productivity
just from videotape viewers. Since DVDs prevent you
from fast forwarding over the warnings, the total
is 6,399,666. hours, worth $159,991,650.00. And, since owners of VCRs and especially DVD players probably represent the higher income brackets, these numbers are undoubtedly low.

As
the Republicans say about taxes, “It’s your money!
” (Actually, the point about taxes is that it’s
our money, but let that slide.) I want it back!

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By holding my thumb over the first letter of my JOHO business card, I have obtained the transcript of the recent strategy meeting at Toho Corp.

CEO: Tell me, my loyal subordinates, what our greatest asset is here at Toho.

CFO: It is without doubt Godzilla.

CEO: Most assuredly. And what is Godzilla?

Jr. Mktg VP: It is a 110-foot high dinosaur imbued with the ability to breathe fire.

CEO (smiling indulgently): Foolish one. Anyone else?

CTO (hesitantly): It is an archetype called up by the Japanese in response to the deep guilt, shame and horror of having initiated the Second World War in the Pacific, which ended in holocausts that destroyed two of our cities as surely as the mighty Godzilla would have?

CEO: Not even close. Anyone else? No? I’ll tell you what Godzilla, our greatest asset, is. It started as a movie so poorly made that when the man in the dinosaur suit rampgaged through a city, we didn’t bother painting the inside of cardboard buildings he knocked over. We then ran this character into the ground in a series of movies that progressively lowered the production values and became famous for being so blatantly without originality. Because these movies were so bad, “Godzilla” became branded as standing for cheeziness. He is a monster who exists only as a laughingstock.

VP Mktg: Yes, Godzilla is a brand.

CEO: Yes, but unlike any other, he is a brand-in-itself. Toyota is a brand, but they make cars that are the object of the branding. Sony is a brand but they make electronic equipment. Godzilla is a brand but there is no Godzilla.

Jr. Mktg VP: There isn’t?

CEO: Godzilla is pure brand. And that means he exists only because people remember the movies and continue to refer to him when they need to talk about something large, lumbering and ridiculous.

All: Ah. Very true. So wise.

CEO (intensely, as if in another world): So, here is your challenge. If we are to slay this mighty monster that has ravaged our land, let us today pledge to keep anyone from referring to Godzilla. Where the army has failed, where the navy has failed, let us bring on the lawyers. Together we shall rid the world of this scourge named Godzilla. And then, Toho’s noble mission will have been accomplished.

CFO: I thought our mission was to increase shareholder value …

CEO: Silence, mortal!

The transcript ends with the sound of a single gun shot.

We have much to learn from the post-marketing brilliance of Toho. This farsighted company has understood that the true aim of marketing is to drive all thought and discussion of your product off the face of the earth, especially if your product has no existence outside of what people think and say. Markets are conversations? Then let’s sue everyone into silence! Brilliant!

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From a mailing list comes a quote from an interview in the spring issue of “Boulevard” (not available online). The interview is with Ha Jin, “a writing professor at Boston University and the winner of an enviable list of awards — including the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Hemingway/PEN Award, and the National Book Award…” (What, no Heissman Trophy?)

Chinese is very rich in describing feelings. For sadness there are some words English doesn’t have. So too for taste. … [But] there are some abstract words that Chinese doesn’t have, such as ‘truth,’ ‘identity,’ and ’solitude.’ Obviously, English is a more speculative language, whereas Chinese is more earthly, closer to things.

This would sound like an urban myth if it didn’t come from such a durn good source. Amazing how different we can be while still being the same.

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We fought Operation Desert Storm. We’re fighting Operation Enduring Freedom. What would be an appropriate name for the upcoming war against Iraq?

My choice:

Your own suggestions are welcome.

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Doc, knowing that nothing brings me as much joy as mocking our “president,” sends us to “The People’s Republic of Seabrook,” featuring the writings of the left-wing Texan. (Doesn’t Molly Ivins count?) Doc discovered it at The Blogging Ecosystem, a useful place for browsing.

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Gary Unblinking Stock tells us that mnftiu.cc’s new Get Your War On is out. The strip is proof of the genius of telling the truth.

Brian Dear has started a blog, called Nettle, about design and marketing.

Nollind Whachell has started a blog. His initial entries are dominated by personal thoughts about the promise and peril of the Net’s openness. His professional background is in the gaming industry (Sierra, not Vegas).

Likewise, Mike Melduke has begun blogging, primarily about the financial side of life, such as a comparison of Elvis and the bull market.

Finally, Andrew Hinton has given Small Pieces Loosely Joined an excellent review (in both senses) over at Boxes and Arrows.In the first sense, it’s a long and thoughtful engagement with the ideas in the book. In the second sense, he says things such as “… if you think you’re an architect of anything vaguely Internet-related, you should read this book.” Thank you, Andrew.

And, one-past-finally, Carole Guevin at netdiver.net blogs and recommends Andrew’s review. Carole is also involved with AfterChaos, a new media collective: “Afterchaos is a new concept collaborative lab whose core vision + mission is to explore, theorize and prove new business models to apply to our new media industry.”

Two-past finally, I’ve joined BlogCritics. The site’s looking really good. Now I just have to remember to blog some criticism.

And finally finally, at blogtree I’ve listed RageBoy and Doc as my blog’s parents. Careful readers will observe that the date of my initial blog — see the bottom of this page — predates RB’s. But he has threatened me with an unspecified form of public humiliation if I don’t admit he is my daddy. And it’s certainly true that RB’s holding me up as the posterboy of Not Getting It about weblogs (unmerited though that honor was) spurred me to start blogging seriously…after having watched Doc for years showing what a blog could be. Besides, who wouldn’t be proud to admit that he’s RageBoy’s love child? So, thanks for the years of abuse, RB. I take it as an honor.

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I’m back in dial-up, low bandwidth doldrums. It is so hot here. I’m reminded of a joke from Prairie Home Companion that my children resolutely refuse to find funny:

“It was so hot that I saw a dog chasing a rabbit…and both were walking.”

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MegNut’s new book is now available at Amazon. I haven’t gotten a copy yet, but given Meg’s experience and the fact that she is universally liked and respected (if you disagree, then shut up and go to hell), I’m looking forward to it.

She and her co-authors are releasing the book incrementally at their website. I just read the chapter on “Using Blogs in Business,” an excellent overview of the hows and the whys.

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