DON'T DRINK THE DASANI
Do you swear by bottled water? Do you blanche at the thought of drinking iffy tap water, like Liz and others do? Then wake up, because Coca-Cola has been exposed in the UK of filling its Dasani bottles with nothing but common Thames River water, that's full of toxins despite the processing they apply.

It's what I've pretty much always suspected: Bottled water is a rip-off. I remember years ago, in an office I worked in, some chump water delivery guy (I forgot the company) bragging about how good his outfit was, because he'd worked for a couple of others, and they both used to routinely fill their water-cooler bottles at the tap, sans any treatment. Of course, his current company did nothing of the sort. Right.

Technically, Dasani isn't billed as "pure" additive-free water. Coca-Cola touts that, in addition to the reverse osmosis they do to it, they pump in additional vitamins and minerals. That's not the case with their main competition, PepsiCo's Aquafina--that's sold as filtered, unadulterated H2O. I guess I believe them, because I use three bottles of it every week to change out the water in the tank of my office pet, Phil the betta. Hey, I've been using it for a couple of years, and he's not dead yet--quite the opposite, unusually frisky for such a little fish.

GOODBYE, WARREN

Well, it's happened. A little over a week after turning up the heat in his search for a contract, Warren Sapp leaves the Bucs for Oakland's $36.6-million, 7-year deal. Thus does Tampa Bay lose one of the most entertaining and impactful athletes to ever come through town.

The move to the Raiders was a surprise, with most observers as late as yesterday morning figuring Sapp would go to Cincinnati. Despite the two clubs' histories, I think the Bengals would have been a better team to join, as they appear to be in more of an upward trend than the discombobulated Raiders. But you never can tell with NFL teams these days; Oakland might end up being the better club next year, or the year after.

John Romano's column pretty well matches my feelings about Sapp's departure. I think it was a good move for the Bucs in the longer term, but for the immediate future, going with Ellis Wyms as a replacement doesn't exactly instill me with confidence.

In looking back over Sapp's career (check out the photo of Sapp in a Devil Rays uniform!), I'm surprised it hasn't been pointed out how improbable the circumstances were that allowed Tampa Bay to draft him in the first place. When he skipped his senior year at Miami to enter the 1995 Draft, he was projected as one of the top five picks that year, even a possible No. 1 overall to the first-year Carolina Panthers. Then a few days before Draft Day, his positive test for marijuana came out, and speculation went wild: Was he a junkie? Did he demonstrate poor judgement in getting caught, which would reflect on his ability to play in the NFL? The upshot is that Carolina traded the No. 1 pick to Cincinnati, who took Ki-Jana Carter there. Expansion Jacksonville took Tony Boselli at No. 2, and the next nine teams in order also passed on Sapp, scared off solely by the positive pot results. When Tampa Bay got on the clock with the twelfth pick, they snapped him up, incredulous that he was still available. The rest, of course, is history. Sapp is rightly credited with being a major component of the Bucs' rise to respectability, yet his arrival was largely the result of dumb luck.

MORE CHEESE PLEASE, BABY

Is it possible to not like the post-modern lounge-lizard experience that is Richard Cheese & Lounge Against the Machine? Well, yes, I suppose it is. But I sure wouldn't want to swing with that scene, babe.

I discovered them about a year and a half ago, and enjoy their rendition of the Dead Kennedys' "Holiday In Cambodia" every time it cues up on my iPod. If you want even more Cheese, check out a generous sampling of these swingalicious covers. I highly recommend "Star Wars Cantina", sung to the rhythm of Barry Manilow's timeless "Copacabana". While supplies last.

POPE: KEEP IT TUBULAR
Pope John Paul II declares that disconnecting feeding tubes from vegetative patients is immoral, amounting to "euthanasia by omission".

No big shocker. The way he's going, he's gonna be hooked up to a feeding tube pretty soon. I call this preemptive survival technique on his part.

SATURDAY NIGHTS AND HYDE PARK: NO GO
For future reference: Think twice before heading out to Hyde Park on a Saturday night. Total Deadsville.

It was surprising. I was counting on some fun out there, because I figured Ybor would be overflowing with 18-to-20 year-old Spring Breakers, which wouldn't be worth the trouble. Maybe Fridays are just generally a better night for Hyde Park.

PARIS IN TAMPA

It's true: Paris Hilton busted her ass falling off a horse in the rural regions north of Tampa, and was tracked down at a Tampa hospital hours later.

As long as she's in town, she might as well take a well-deserved break from filming the second season of "The Simple Life" and spend tonight partying in Ybor City, where I'll be (changed my mind, I'm heading out to Hyde Park instead). I typically avoid blondes, but given her other a$$et$, I'll make an exception.

As the news crews packed up and rushed from the scene to prepare for broadcast, a man and woman walking out of the hospital looked at the scene, perplexed. What is going on, the man asked, what is all the commotion?

"It's Paris Hilton," shouted a cameraman.

"Who is that?" the man asked.

The cameraman shook his head.

"Who is that?" the cameraman said. "He needs to watch more TV."

No he doesn't, cameradude. He needs to hit the Internet, where Paris' best work can be found.

FUNDRACE 2004
Yup, you can indeed find out which of your friends and neighbors made political campaign contributions, and to which candidate, through Fundrace 2004. Here's what's shaking in my neighborhood (actually, it's more like my city--even searching by ZIP code, it's not particularly specific). Lots of familiar names in there, actually.

This may smack of unauthorized access, but by law, it's not:

Federal election law makes the snooping possible. Presidential candidates are required to disclose contributions of $200 or more, and the Federal Election Commission makes databases available for download.

The thing is, would the knowledge that such information is easily attainable dissuade some people from giving in the future? The big-time contributors won't be bothered, but is it worth the exposure to give a couple of hundred bucks?

GET THE LEAD OUT!

Are you a fan of Mexico's world famous Chaca Chaca candy bar? Going by this damning review, I can't imagine why anyone would be. Now, there's even less reason to enjoy it: The state of California has issued a health warning on it, saying it contains dangerously high levels of lead.

The Chaca Chaca is made from apple pulp and chili powder, along with tamarind. Where does the lead come in? I guess it's from the manufacturing process.

ACCIDENTAL VIDEOGAME PORN

We all know videogames are tools of the devil. They make you twitchy, nervous, violent and disrespectful toward your parents. Of late, they've even been accused of killing TV ratings. Evil, I tells ya.

The pixelated violence has been a given. But sexually explicit images? Yup, those game designers are one filthy lot, and they've been demonstrating that ever since the days of the infamous "Custer's Revenge" on the Atari 2600. Some people, particularly those at Berkeley, choose to believe that all those examples of joystick porn is accidental; but I say, a wink is as good as a nod to a blind man. Whatever that means.

The image above, by the way, is from 1989's "Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode", for the NES. Secret-agent-man Golgo has come a long way since then; these days, he's fighting against international currency fluctuation plots.

THE CARSON DALY CURSE

This just occurred to me, after an evening of watching images of Carson Daly, Tara Reid, and Jennifer Love Hewitt flash across the TV screen:

Dating Carson Daly is a career-killing move.

Consider: Hewitt's career has tanked hard ever since she dated and broke up with him. Same with Reid. Can it be coincidence? I think not.

So, the next girl who hooks up with Carson better not count on having a showbiz career after the fact. The man's toxic.

REAL PHONE MISDIAL SCAMS
I must have had my psychic mojo working this past Tuesday. My seemingly crackpot suggestion that shady companies were buying up spare toll-free numbers in the hopes of snaring unsuspecting misdialers appears to be validated as fact by this FTC crackdown:

According to the Federal Trade Commission, three Utah-based companies bought dozens of phone numbers very similar to the toll-free numbers that "American Idol" fans call to place their votes. Viewers who misdialed and got one of the numbers were directed to dial a 900-number to place their vote. A message on the 900-number then gave the correct toll-free number to call.

The FTC said about 25,000 consumers were charged up to $3 per call during the 2002 and 2003 seasons.

I wonder if there's any connection to the offending companies being in Utah, with that state's (801) area code being so close to the usual (800) toll-free code. I can't believe anyone would misdial the 1-800 part of a toll-free number, but I guess when you're talking about thousands, even millions, of callers, the odds are there. Said odds being markedly increased when you're talking about idiot "American Idol" fans.

This game has been played on the Web for years. Typos of popular website URLs used to be cornered regularly by the same sort of sleazy operators. Some still are--for instance, mistyping "excite.com" as "exxcite.com" will give you a bunch of popups and a redirect to some fly-by-night website. More commonly, the intended websites will buy up the typo URLs to ensure they don't get hijacked; Yahoo!, for instance, has got "yaho.com", "yahooo.com", and "yahooh.com" all redirecting to the proper homepage.

MOTIVATIONAL READING

Just a couple of days ago, I spouted off:

What are the odds of a hacker buying and reading an actual book?

Today, The Boondocks' Aaron McGruder runs with that concept, in his usual funny way.

BEWARE THE HERBAL PREPARATIONS
I was regaled with a funny story from my officemate this morning about her doctor's visit yesterday. When she opened her comments with, "If you've been looking for the worst doctor in Clearwater, call off your search, because I found him," I knew it would be a good one.

She's had this persisent coughing and sinus problem all week long, and after realizing that it wasn't attributable to allergies, she bit the bullet and set up a doctor's appointment. This was a first-time visit, so the first thing the doctor did was give her a once-over physical. She said she was fine with that, although I have the feeling that she wasn't completely comfortable, considering that she knew the problem was a throat/respiratory thing. But doctor's orders and all that.

So the doctor did his thing, and when he was done, asked her the following:

"Are you taking any herbal preparations?"

My friend was thrown by this. "What do you mean by 'herbal preparations'?"

"You know," the doctor said. "Herbal preparations."

"I don't know what that is. What sort of things are you talking about? Can you give me an example?"

A nurse who was in the room with them chimed in, "What we mean is, you know, herbal preparations."

Already peeved by having to undergo what she felt was an iffy physical exam, my friend was getting testy with this rather dense line of questioning. She made another attempt at clarity: "Are you talking about vitamins, something like that?"

Nurse: "No no, we mean more like--Herbal. Preparations."

They might have been alluding to some modern-day snake-oil remedy like St. John's Wort or something, and simply didn't have the communicative skills to get their point across. Or they might have been probing about more illicit substances like marijuana, and were desperately trying not to say so. Whatever the case, my friend was fed up by now, and just said, "I don't think so. Why?"

The doc delivered the kicker: "Well, it's just that a lot of women have been using herbal preparations lately when they're trying to get pregnant."

Getting pregnant is a sore point with my friend. She's pretty much dead set against having any kids, ever; but as a married woman in her late 20s, she's getting pressure from several directions to breed, already. To get this assumption from a schmuck doctor who seemed less than on-the-ball, and who she was seeing solely for a respiratory problem, was too much to take. Adding to the awkwardness was that a fellow officemate around the same age officially announced yesterday morning that she was a few weeks pregnant; I think the juxtaposition felt like yet another societal full-court press on her to have a child.

Despite telling the doctor that she was definitely not taking anything to get pregnant, herbal or otherwise, he kept insisting otherwise. At that point, my friend got her prescription and got the hell out of there.

Kind of harrowing, kind of funny. It made for a good morning story, anyway.

UPDATE: I checked with her later in the day on one point: The doctor did ask her directly regarding pot and other illicit drug use, so that wasn't what he was hinting at.

It also occurred to us that "herbal preparations" connotes Preparation H. Good for hemorrhoids, bad for babies?

TURKISH SONG OF THE DAMNED
Back from a St. Patrick's Day party at Bennigan's. Not too adventurous, but very close to home, so it fit the bill. It was okay, but given that I'm blogging in the aftermath, it obviously wasn't that good.

Anyway, to close out this St. Patty's Day, I feel like conjuring up a Pogues song: "Turkish Song of the Damned". The song itself is not that Irish, but the instrumentation is definitely Celtic, and the Poguers themselves are definitely Irish.

I come old friend from Hell tonight
Across the rotting sea
Nor the nails of the cross
Nor the blood of Christ
Can bring you help this eve
The dead have come to claim a debt from thee
They stand outside your door
Four score and three
Did you keep a watch for the dead man's wind
Did you see the woman with the comb in her hand
Wailing away on the wall on the strand
As you danced to the Turkish song of the damned

You remember when the ship went down
You left me on the deck
The captain's corpse jumped up
And threw his arms around my neck
For all these years I've had him on my back
This debt cannot be paid with all your jack

And as I sit and talk to you I see your face go white
This shadow hanging over me
Is no trick of the light
The spectre on my back will soon be free
The dead have come to claim a debt from thee

BROADBAND INTERNET: DSL CATCHING UP?
A few days ago, I mentioned in passing that DSL Internet providers had made a little headway against their cable competitors. Now, new findings from Leichtman Research Group back this up, along with showing the broader expansion of home broadband access for both cable and DSL.

As of now, there are some 24.6 million broadband customers in the U.S. That's big, but it's important to remember that it's still far less than the number of dialup customers.

Leichtman isn't prepared to declare a trend in DSL's stronger numbers, but it seems that, at least temporarily, the revitalized marketing efforts by the phone companies are paying dividends. The next step is seeing how the cable providers hit back, and if DSL can keep up these gains. The boost in download capacity from 1.5 to 3 mbps by most cable providers is one move, although I'm not sure it'll resonate with customers.

LIQUID PIZZA
Also spied by my eye during lunch today: Packages of Campell's Soup At Hand in pizza flavor. Pizza soup. Yuck.

I guess if you insist on being an inefficient multitasking showoff, you deserve the likes of liquified pizza.

LAUGHING MYSELF AWAKE
I rarely ever remember my dreams. That may sound odd to some people, particularly those who regularly have vivid recollections of their dream states. I've actually been accused of lying about this, and using that as a false excuse for not wanting to open up and share, out of fear for revealing something about myself.

But it's the fer-real truth. For whatever reason, I can't seem to retain very much from my dreams, and I believe this has been the case for most of my life. I think I dream as much as the average sleeping person, and I usually get the faint impression that I have dreamed most nights. It seems that if I wake up in the middle of a dream, or if I'm dreaming pretty close to the time I normally wake up, I will retain at least some partial recollection; but even then, half the time that memory fades to nothing within minutes of waking up. It's exceedingly rare that I'll ever recall a complete dream, from start to finish.

Why is this? I've never had it analyzed, but I suspect the prognosis would be something along the lines of avoiding whatever underlying meaning the dreams may have--by wiping them clean from my brain right away, I don't have to examine them, as I'd be wont to do. I'm sure the relative lack of sleep I get regularly is part of it: I tend to remember my dreaming from the occasions where I sleep longer than my usual 6-7 hours (which might suggest I actually dream more with more hours of slumber). I don't know that that's the whole story, though, because even as a kid who got more than enough sleep, I had the same trouble remembering them.

Since I've lived like this all my life, I've been used to it, and don't really feel like I've missed much. But sometimes, the lack of remembrance in this area is nagging, at least for the day or so after it happens.

Like last night, for instance. I was having some sort of dream, but if I had a gun to my head, I couldn't tell you any details. The only thing I know for sure was that there was something intensely funny about it. So intense, in fact, that I felt myself laughing really, really hard in the dream. The next thing I knew, I was awake, having woken myself up with my own hard, sustained, out-of-my-mouth laughter. I had dreamt something so funny that it managed to wake me up in the middle of the night!

And of course, as soon as I woke up, I didn't remember a damned thing about it.

TECHNO-DELI
Sign of the digital times: While at the Publix deli today getting my lunch (6-inch turkey sub on grain bread, if you must know), I noticed a 17-inch computer monitor sitting in plain view directly behind the counter, with a Publix screensaver flashing on and off every few seconds.

A computer terminal hookup in the deli department. No doubt a useful, even necessary, work tool for the supermarket employees. But it still seems a little odd. I'm sure it seemed odd when they first started installing phones in places like the deli and stockrooms about 30 years ago, too.

I THOUGHT EVERYONE WAS IRISH TODAY??
Usually, I'm the one who forgets to don some color-appropriate apparel on a holiday that falls on a workday. It'll slip my mind that it's 4th of July, for instance, and I'll wind up being the only schmuck in the office who doesn't wear a red-white-and-blue shirt/pant/tie combo (and in fact, probably will wear something starkly different, like all black--and rouse suspicion that I'm a closet anarchist or something).

This morning, I was proud of the fact that my waking mind actually remembered that today is St. Patrick's Day, and accordingly, I put on a green shirt to signify the holiday. For once, I remembered!

But so far today, it seems the joke is yet again on me. I've been around and about in downtown St. Pete today, walking from my office to the nearby Publix for lunch, getting a good eyeful of all the other downtown work denizens. Guess what? It's been a struggle to find many other people who are wearing a spot of green today. Even olive or khaki green would be acceptable, but no: I'd estimate at least every other person I saw walking around was totally green-less.

What's the deal? Is this a bad year for celebrating St. Patty's? Is it that it fell on a Wednesday, the traditionally blah humpday? Were there not enough Guinness "St. Patrick's Day Christmas" ads running over the past couple of weeks (which my assistant absolutely loves, by the way)?

As you can see, it's kinda bummed me out, not the least because green is also my favorite color. I guess I'll drown my sorrows in alcohol later tonight. Maybe something green, probably not beer.

UPDATE: It looks like my guesstimate of every other person in downtown St. Pete wearing green was fairly accurate, as this informal St. Pete Times poll indicates.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF BUSCH... GARDENS
Here's one way to get your Fun Card: Tampa's own Busch Gardens mailed out a marketing flyers with a mistyped phone number that happened to lead to a sex-talk line.

But was it truly mistyped? Take note of my observations on this phenomenon when it happened to Verizon, back in August:

Why does it seems that every time there's a wrong number in a case like this, the misdialed number always leads to a porn line? I realize it seems this way because that's the only time it gets reported in the media, but still. The crackpot conspiracy theorist in me would say that the porn outfits have cornered the market on every other toll-free number in existence, and their strategy is that they will hook unsuspecting customers every time they misdial a number. But no, that would make too much sense.

HOW-TO HACKING
"The Shellcoder's Handbook: Discovering and Exploiting Security Holes" is a new book coming out next week. It's raising some eyebrows among computer security types, who think it's a how-to guide that'll give a whole new wave of wanna-be hackers the blueprint for busting into Windows machines.

I'm not sure the concern is warranted. What are the odds of a hacker buying and reading an actual book?

REALITY CHECK: SUGAR RAY JOINS THE CONTENDER
When the upcoming reality-boxing show The Contender was announced last month, mastermind producer Mark Burnett lamented:

"We're looking to reclaim a part of America that's been missing," ["Survivor" creator Mark] Burnett tells Variety. "Where are the 'Thrilla in Manilas?' The Sugar Ray Leonards?

Sugar Ray listened, and has agreed to join the show as one of its stars, serving as a trainer and business advisor. So it'll be him, a real fighter, and Sylvester Stallone, who played one on the silver screen.

(By the way, the accompanying photo on the Zap2It.com article is obviously not a headshot of Sugar Ray--unless he's changed a lot recently; it's of Burnett. Here's a nice photo of Sugar Ray.)

I just hope Sugar isn't thinking about using this gig as an opportunity to make yet another comeback. Then again, that would certainly spice things up: Sugar looking over the palookas, shaking his head, and declaring, "I can whip all your asses, I'm in it to win it now!" (I know, I know, in my dreams...)

SEE YOU AT THE CROSSROADS
Gobs of information was set loose today in The State of the News Media 2004 report (which includes a great chart-generating section). Not that all of it is good news: The news business is at a crossroads where media outlets are splintering along several lines, while general trust in the traditional industry is eroding. This is reflected in job cutbacks at traditional media outlets, just at the time when more journalists are probably necessary to verify and follow up on news data:

Much of the new investment in journalism goes toward distributing the news, not gathering it, the study said. Newspapers have about 2,200 fewer newsroom employees today than in 1990, and network TV news has cuts its correspondents by a third since the 1980s.

As a journalist, what can I say? The same skills that go into professional journalism can be applied to a number of other fields that are way more lucrative: Public relations, advertising, corporate communications, financial analysis, etc. I know several people who've gone into those fields after becoming disenchanted with news, for a variety of reasons. And the resulting vacuum has to be filled by the people who are left, who are then stretched thin and can't do as thorough a job as otherwise possible. This isn't a new trend; it's been that way for the past couple of decades, at least.

The fact remains that you have to be a little crazy, and a lot dedicated, to make a go at journalism as a profession. There are certainly easier ways to earn a paycheck, and generally a bigger one (although you're never going to get rich working for someone else; that's the case in just about any industry).

More on this from me later, probably.

WHY BEAR WHEN YOU CAN ROLL?
More Ybor fun:

The obnoxious sidewalk preachers are a common sight in Tampa's party district. With Spring Break starting up, some churches figure that the Lord's message might have a better chance of sinking in with the kids if it's coming from their peers. So this past Saturday, there was probably a dozen or so youth ministry kids trolling up and down 7th Avenue, all smiles and wearing brilliant white t-shirts with the name of their church group (I don't remember the name; I was stone sober, honest).

Instead of following the usual preachers' example of reading loudly from the Bible to no one in particular, these kids had a special gimmick: a group of three or four of them would group together, with one tugging a large cross on his shoulder Jesus-style (thus literally having a cross to bear), while the rest would ask passerbys if they wanted to take a "The Passion of the Christ" quiz. It was clever, although I don't think I saw one person take the bait (then again, I wasn't keeping track of them all night, but I did see them several times while they did their back-and-forth).

When I was getting set to leave, I caught one last look at one of these cross-bearing troupes, heading in the opposite direction. They had this 40ish drunk guy tailing them, laughing with them and excitedly shouting. As I got closer, I could see the drunk was pointing wildly down at the foot of the prop cross. I looked down to where he was pointing...

And saw that there was a wheelie roller screwed to the bottom of the cross.

So it turned out that these intrepid youths were actually rolling their crosses up and down the street. Understandable, in that there's no sense in putting their cross (and themselves) through needless wear-and-tear, as they probably use it every week. Comical, as it sort of lessens the overall impact. Jesus still wept, I'm sure.

I can't believe I didn't notice that little detail before; but as is often the case in life, a drunk showed us the way. I have a feeling the other crosses had some sort of covering over the base to hide the little wheel.

CLUB CZAR
I spent a small part of Saturday night at Club Czar in Ybor City. It's an attempt at a Soviet-theme bar, with the main attempt coming from having club employees stroll around in Red Army/Poliburo-style costumes (with an occasional guy-in-a-nun-habit thrown in for variety).

Although I've never met them, I have a hunch that this would be the kind of bar that the people at Grammarporn would totally dig.

In any case, it was pretty dead, despite the recent completion of a St. Patrick's Day night parade and the midnight-ish hour. The music was okay, basically a selection of '80s New Wave B-sides, which I guess is standard fare for a Saturday night (and probably every night, with a little variation). I find it funny that Czar likes to brag about all the different kinds of vodka it has--again, part of the Soviet decor--yet they didn't have the Smirnoff I ordered (I settled for Stoli instead).

MCDONALD'S WI-FI: DEAD ON ARRIVAL?

There's an interestingly-crafted article at CNET, by Richard Shim, on the current status of McDonald's proposed wi-fi hotspot offerings in its restaurants. It starts out with a field test:

Signs at a McDonald's in downtown San Francisco cordially beckon customers to surf the Web using its wireless Internet service, but no one is biting during a recent Wednesday lunch hour.

In fact, none of the 20-odd patrons scattered about the restaurant's two dining areas appears to have a laptop computer or wireless PDA on hand. A few peer over newspapers, while others talk quietly or stare out the window over trays of french fries and hamburgers.

The scene is typical, says supervisor Margie deGroot, whose restaurant near Market and Second streets became, last year, one of the first McDonald's in the country to offer wireless Net access to customers: "Why would these customers use this service when they can go back to their offices to use their computers?" she says.

So based on this opening, you'd think the rest of the story would continue to underline how iffy the prospects are for McDonald's wi-fi offering.

But inexplicably, the rest of the article goes on to tout the rosy promise of charge-per-session hotspots, hinting at established setups at other restaurants like Starbucks. It feels like a clumsy grafting; I almost suspect that the editor decided to stick the San Francisco episode at the top so that it could then be quickly dismissed. It's a clumsy attempt at spinning this into a positive, despite very little to base that on (other than the usual analyst remarks). The 6 percent figure for Schlotzky's customers who find the hotspot a compelling reason to visit is more disheartening than encouraging; 6 percent is nothing, hardly worth considering.

I still maintain, as I did a year ago, that it's a weak idea for a place like McDonald's. No one wants to hang out in a McDonald's, Web access or not. The store manager in San Fran summed it up perfectly: Why would somebody on their lunch break want to pay for wireless access when they could more comfortably do it for free at work (assuming that the risk for getting chewed out, or even fired, for goofing off on the Web in the office is "free")? It's a good idea to target road-warrior types who would actually have need to utilize this kind of access point; but those types would more readily opt for a Starbucks instead. I see this effort dying within two years.

DRIZZMAL

So dreary was this day, with its perpetually overcast sky and lazy rainfall, that I've coined a new phrase to describe the environment: Drizzmal. Dismal and drizzly. Drizzmal.

Hey, I admit it's no nuculer, but what can you expect on such a downer day?

"NUCULER" REACTION

The President's been a pretty reliable source for comic fodder with his commonly-acknowledged mispronounciation of the word "nuclear". But is he really flubbing it? Maybe not, since both "noo-clee-ar" and "new-cew-lar" are so frequently used that both versions are gaining currency.

What can I say but, "That's My Bush!"

Language is evolutionary, of course. And nothing accelerates that evolution more than what comes out of the mouths of prominent personages, Presidential or otherwise. So Bush is probably helping the much-disparaged pronounciation become more acceptable.

I have to admit that I sometimes slip up and use the "nuculer" version. I think the real reason for it is the frequent use of the shorthand "nuke", most often used as slang for cooking something in a microwave. The "noo" sound in "nuke" seems to lend itself more to being followed by another "oo" syllable. I'm just going by my own instincts on that; I don't know if there's any real linguistic basis to it.

GEORGE MICHAEL "RETIRES"
George Michael has decided to wake us up before he go-goes by declaring that he's likely retiring from the music business--which is not to say that he's retiring from music:

He revealed: "I think (‘Patience’) is going to be my last commercially promoted release. I’ve been very well remunerated as they say for my talents over the years so I really don’t need the public’s money. I’d really like to have something on the Internet with charitable donation optional, where anyone can download my music for free. I’ll have my favourite charities up there and people will hopefully contribute to that."

I'm sure this will make Michael an instant hero to the legion of dedicated fileswapping mavens, who'll tout him as a model for how music should be created and distributed in the Internet age. Of course, considering that Michael wouldn't be doing this if he hadn't already made a comfortable pile of money over the years, it's a bit of a hollow example. Plus, he had other, more personal reasons for doing this:

He explained the move would also help him reduce his profile, and so media intrusion. "I’m not pretending I won’t be famous any more, but believe me, in the modern world, if you take yourself out of the financial aspect of things, i.e. you’re not making anybody any money or you’re not losing anybody any money, believe me I’ll be of very little interest to the press in a certain number of years."

I could make a crack about most of the world, the press and beyond, considering Michael to already be, effectively retired for a few years now. But I won't.

CHURCH BLOGGIN'
BuzzMachine's Jeff Jarvis blogs while he's attending church services. And he sees nothing wrong with that.

Shine on, you crazy diamond.

(Via Steve Outing at Poynter)

DUCK FIGHT 3000!!!

I love Sunday afternoons, particularly at this time of the year. Nothing to do all day but decompress, and drink life in.

Case in point: I just walked over to my patio window and caught about five full minutes of a couple of the local ducks engaged in a death match on water! It was hilarious. They were facing each other bill-to-bill, alternately rising up with wings fully spread and then on top of one another, biting and writhing. Lots of splashing around and angry honking. I felt like cueing up the classic Captain Kirk vs. Mr. Spock hand-to-hand combat music; it was just that gripping.

These ducks are pretty amusing in general. They're Muscovites, meaning they're some of the ugliest fowls you'd ever want to see. Plus, these local duckies are ridiculously inbred, meaning they're that much uglier and that much stupider. They waddle around the grounds like they own the joint. And they're fat, no doubt from all the handouts they get (I suppose I'd give them something too, but I live on the second floor, so it's not easy to toss food to them).

I'm kind of hoping they have some repeat performances, ideally on a predictable schedule. I can get a cockfighting-style gambling ring going, make me some extra scritchy-scratchy.

SHOCK THERAPY THROUGH DOGWALKING
The perils of life in the big city: City construction crews are leaving underground live-wire cables exposed, leading to electrified pedestrian walkways. This negligence has led to several canine electrocutions and at least one human death, in New York City.

Interestingly, thanks to rubber-soled footwear, humans tend to be safeguarded against these deadly shocks. But dogs, being barefoot, usually are the bigger risk; and when a pooch in distress gets shocked, his owner will tend to reach down to hold him, and the rest is history.

One way to protect your doggie is to invest in a set of doggie booties. Just be prepared to provide moral support when the other dogs start laughing.

THERE'S ALWAYS PEANUTS AND CRACKERJACK

Has there ever been a more arduous time to be a Boston Red Sox fan? First the team gets bounced out of the playoffs by the hated Yankees, then it loses out on the Alex Rodriguez chase to that same AL East rival (and winds up sounding like a bunch of crybabies over it). Now, Catholic Sox fans are upset about Opening Day at Fenway falling on Good Friday this year, meaning they can't indulge in their traditional ballpark goodies like hotdogs and meat-topped pizza.

In typically soft American religious fashion, several fans are asking for special dispensation to eat meat at the game without the risk of going to hell; the Boston Archdiocese ain't going for it. It seems that in 2004, being religiously faithful and Red Sox-faithful are mutually exclusive things.

"I would hope it was just an oversight when they were doing the schedule," [Archdiocese spokesperson Rev. Christopher J.] Coyne told the Boston Herald. "I think it's very insensitive to the huge number of people who are Christians and fans."

Oh, I agree. It's very insensitive to keep a religious fan from stuffing his fat face with a footlong for three whole hours. What a crisis of faith! I've got news for you: If you can't go to a ballgame and resist the temptation of meat-flavored munchies, even with Godly devotion on your side, then you should seriously question your value system. Not to mention your waistline.

FLYING ELVI AND INDIAN CASINOS

The Seminole Indian Tribe here in eastern Tampa is holding the grand opening of its Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino this weekend. So naturally, the tribe had The Flying Elvi skydiving team dive-bomb tribal grounds to celebrate.

What a weird time to have them jump, Thursday morning. If they had done it over the weekend, I would've gone out there to see it. It's not every day you see something so kitschy. Plus, with any luck, there might be an Elvis splattering.

As for the new gambling mecca, I can't say I'll be blowing my quarters there on a regular basis. I'm not too big on gambling. It might be something to check out once in a while, although I have a feeling it's going to be teeming with eighty-year-olds 24/7, a real turn-off. But maybe a good place to check out the sleazy scene.

CHAMPPS: LAND OF AUDIOVISUAL TECHNIQUES
I'm going out to dinner tonight with a group of friends, including a couple I haven't seen in a long while. We're converging on Champps (that's "Champps" with two "p"s--more stupid-looking than distinctive, and probably created just to secure a unique trademark), a self-described upscale sports bar. I'm sure the only difference between their greasy-fried mozarella sticks and the mom-and-pop place across town's is an extra five bucks. But whatever; the main purpose is to get together and mingle, not eat.

Would you like to read a description of the Champps at International Plaza in Tampa, the location I'll be hitting? Sure you would:

Champps is an upscale casual dining restaurant that offers a broad menu consisting of freshly prepared food coupled with exceptional service. In addition, Champps creates a visually exciting environment through audiovisual techniques and several large screen televisions.

Gripping, isn't it? Especially the "audiovisual techniques", which, just in case they don't do the whole job of creating the "visually exciting environment", are backed up by a mess of big-screen TVs. I'm not sure it can be more obvious that that little scrap of text was ineptly written by some sub-literate mall marketing assistant. (Hell, who am I kidding--it's probably the work of the sub-literate mall marketing manager.)

It's little, everyday incompetencies like the above that give me enough smiles to make it through the day.

M-M-M-MAX HEADR-R-R-ROOM-M-M!

Ah, '80s nostalgia. MediaPost's Real Media Riff reminisces about the late, great "Max Headroom":

For those of you who're too young to remember and too old to recall, the show's storyline was set in a not-too-distant future that is eerily like the one we are living in now. Can you guess what year it took place? Yep, it was 2004, when the show's protagonist Edison Carter (an intrepid reporter, not unlike the Riff) uncovers a plot by corporate America to begin airing "blipverts," compressed TV commercials that would be played so fast, that viewers wouldn't be able to react quickly enough to zap them.

While we are sure this is a concept that may have actually been tested somewhere, sometime - and for all we know, may be going on right now - the "Max Headroom" version of blipverts had at least one nettlesome drawback: they caused TV viewers to spontaneously explode. Obviously, this would be bad for the business of most major marketers, and would also wreak havoc on Nielsen's sample, (we can only imagine the weighting scheme associated with this one), but at least it would be an ingenious solution to digital video recorders: "If you zap our ads, we'll blow you to smithereens."

Thank goodness, our 2004 isn't exactly like "Max Headroom's" 2004. In the TV version, books were illegal, because they kept people from watching TV. TV sets were provided to the poor to keep them occupied and docile. And it was even illegal for manufacturers to install "off switches" on TV sets. No, that's nothing like our society today, much to the chagrin of Madison Avenue. If anything, it seems there are forces afoot that would like to make it illegal to install "on switches" on TV sets.

As far-fetched as blipverts might seem, the notion of short, fractionalized TV spots apparently is not. The ANA panel kicked around scenarios that would bust the :30's hold on advertising formats, with a range of longer and shorter form options.

Definitely a show that was ahead of it's time, and yet firmly a part of it. In my mind, anyway, Max Headroom is an iconic '80s symbol, probably as much for the Pepsi and MTV ads he did as for the TV series.

Pegging the show's setting in the future year of 2004 involves a little bit of conjecture. Officially, the show's storyline never explicitly revealed the exact year; indeed, the show's subtitle was "Twenty Minutes Into The Future", a purposefully vague and quirky premise, intended to convey the mood that the future depicted, while absurdist, was not so very far off. However, piecing together some plot elements from the original UK pilot, mainly the age of one of the protaganists, yields the year 2004.

I had a Max Headroom t-shirt back in the day. I even brought it with me to college here in St. Pete. I managed to lose it my freshman year.

MOBILE PHONE AS THE ONLY PHONE
In-Stat/MDR has a new report out on U.S. mobile phone usage, specifically on how mobiles are displacing landline phones. The meat of the findings:

- 14.4 percent of consumers use their wireless phones as their main (only?) home phone.

- Said consumers tend to be young (ages 18 to 24), single, urbanites, and mobile data (text messaging, Internet) users.

- Nearly a third of mobile phone users will not have a landline by 2008.

Personally, I'd have no problem giving up my landline; I use my mobile phone almost exclusively right now. Had I opted for cable broadband Internet instead of DSL, I'd have definitely dropped the landline phone. As it is, I find having an alternate phone number does come in handy just often enough to warrant keeping it. It's a bare-bones service, though: No long-distance nor any other extras like call waiting and such.

The trend is definitely moving toward the abandonment of landline phones. I have friends who, only a couple of years ago, considered the prospect of going exclusively wireless to be just too far out to consider. Now, with pricing plans fairly reasonable, they're looking seriously at it and even taking the plunge.

SEEN ON ST. PETE'S ROADS
In order to cope with traffic, you have to extract little pieces of visual comedy as you look over your steering wheel. Here's what I extracted around noon, driving up 4th Street North, on the way to lunch:

- The license plate of the car directly in front of me: D GENER8. (It actually took me a few seconds to get that one--must've been low blood sugar.)

- A huge industrial-style dump truck, I think for a tree-cutting service, painted bright red, with the company's name in professionally-airbrushed lettering: YUTZY'S. Yutzy's? It sounds like a character from "Happy Days". Plus, I believe "yutz" is a variant of the Yiddish "putz", meaning clown or idiot. I'd have gone with another name.

- Finally, my friend, driving around even further north on 4th Street, called me to report on a homeless guy planted on the median in an intersection, begging for change. The cardboard sign he was holding up read: "Why Lie? I Need A Beer." Apparently, it was working well for him. (A coworker informs me that you see that sign a lot up in Gainesville, around the University of Florida area; and come to think of it, I'm pretty sure I've seen it before around here too.)

VIRGIN TRUMPING APPLE? NO

The news that Richard Branson's Virgin Group is entering the digital music market has BusinessWeek all excited, and proposing that Virgin is the one company that could usurp Apple and its iPod/iTunes dominance.

Virgin could certainly make things interesting, but I don't see why BusinessWeek is predicting instant success for Branson. They're pointing to Branson's other, diverse business dabblings as a solid track record; I guess I'm seeing something different there:

Branson, chairman of the British conglomerate, is a master marketer. He has brought hip and fun to stodgy fields such as airlines (preflight massage, anyone?) and mobile-phone service (who else offers personalized daily predictions from cartoon character Sponge Bob Squarepants?). True, he flopped with the introduction of a soft drink, Virgin Cola. But overall, Branson and his irreverent marketers have had a golden touch, particularly when it comes to reaching younger demographics.

I'm not denying the ability of Virgin to make some noise in the markets and industries it's entered. But that noise hasn't translated into success.

Mobile phones? Virgin isn't even a blip in the U.S. mobile phone market; it's targeting teens because that's the only market it can dominate, and it doesn't appear that they're establishing any sort of long-term foundation there. Virgin Air Lines? Again, an extremely minor player in the U.S., behind even the cut-rate carriers like Frontier and JetBlue.

The mobile phone service is relatively new, so you could argue that it's got time to grow; but the airline has been trying to make a dent in the American market for years, with absolutely nothing to show for it. This isn't an indication that Virgin will do anything more in the digital music biz.

Upshot here is that, with the desirable young demographics that Virgin caters to, it makes sense that it should hit it big in digital music through sheer synergy. That doesn't mean that it will, though, and Branson's track record more suggests that he'll flop, and not even come close to displacing Apple. I get the feeling that BusinessWeek got pepped up by Virgin's press release and didn't bother to look at Virgin's spotty record to date.

THE GOOGLE OF EMAIL
This looks promising. Bloomba is a new email program that uses a web browser/search engine-like interface, instead of the traditional hierarchical filing system, to manage archived email. Basically, instead of putting your messages into certain files, you leave them as they are, and find them later by entering a search query.

This appeals to me, because I already often use the search funtion on my email clients to find information in my saved email messages. I still use file folders in order to filter the searches; I'll usually remember is what I'm looking for is in a message I sent or in one I received. So I'd really like to take this puppy for a spin.

The potential downside: Depending on how many messages you archive--and I tend to save a ton, going back a year or more--the search method could be frustrating. Depending on what you're looking for, you have to have certain keywords lodged in your mind in order to target your search as specifically as possible, or else you'll spend way too much time digging through messages.

Alison Overholt's review of Bloomba's 1.0 release reveals that the only things it lacks--the integrated calendar scheduling and the like--are the things that I never use anyway. The email components of such a program are all I need. The lack of IMAP compatibility would prevent me from using this at work, but since I can't choose my own email program there anyway, it's a moot point.

THE HARD LIME

St. Patrick's Day is but a week away. If you puked up more than your fair share of green beer last year, perhaps you'll consider switching to Mike's Hard Lime this year. You'll probably still puke, but at least you'll have that delightful citrus aftertaste to re-enjoy.

SAPPED OUT

Elsewhere in Bucland, Warren Sapp's agent announced that, in the face of Tampa Bay's other free-agent signings, his client is no longer going to wait around for the team to make an offer, and will begin entertaining offers from other teams.

Allow me to provide translation here: Sapp hasn't gotten any worthwhile offers a week into his first foray into free agency, so he's having his agent send out a reminder that he's still available.

It's a surprisingly necessary move for Sapp, who only a couple of years ago was one of the most effective pass-rushing ends in the league. It's conventional wisdom that a defensive lineman hits the downside of his career at age 30, so perhaps the market for Sapp's services has been set based on that, and he simply hasn't come down in his asking price. Based on the deals that have been handed out so far for other defensive ends, it would appear that his options are becoming increasingly limited.

Still, I can't believe that Sapp's best days are behind him. While his sack total has gone down, he still commands double teams on practically every play. He's enough of a difference-maker that plenty of defenses in the NFL could use him, badly. He'll be playing somewhere next season, and I'm hoping it's still here in Tampa Bay.

RETURN OF THE GOOCH

In a move that was foretold 24 years ago in an episode of "Diff'rent Strokes", linebacker Jeff Gooch signed with the Tampa Bay Bucs today, thus returning to the team with which he's spent most of his career.

I would post a nice headshot photo of him here, but as you know, The Gooch was such a fearsome bully in the "Diff'rent Strokes" universe that they never dared show him on-camera. We were left to imagine what the bad-ass who terrorized Arnold Drummond looked like, which no doubt amplified his legend. Since I always try to pattern this blog my life after "Diff'rent Strokes", I follow the established protocol here.

(Years ago, a friend and I got into a running (but playful) argument over whether or not The Gooch had ever made an actual appearance on the show. I insisted that he never did; my friend insisted that not only did he make one single appearance, but that he was played by none other than a young Forest Whitaker! I thought my friend was nuts. Unfortunately, this was--imagine this!--in the pre-Internet days, so we never could settle it. Since then, I've found out that Whitaker did, indeed, make a guest appearance late in the run of "Diff'rent Strokes", in an episode titled "Bully For Arnold"; but although he was playing a bully, it was not The Gooch, but rather a one-shot character named Herman. By the time that episode aired, in the show's final season, The Gooch had long since been written out of the storyline.)

THE PULSE OF THE AMERICAN FAMILY ASSOCIATION
Back in January, when the American Family Association got egg on its face over its botched gay-marriage poll, I offered the following friendly advice:

[T]here was no need for the AFA to even embark upon their own survey, and thus wasting their time and resources (although judging from the way this was carried out, I doubt they devoted much of either toward this); they would be better off just citing all the existing evidence to back up their case. In the event that they feel 55 percent assent somehow isn't convincing enough, they could always do a polling among just their own membership; that should get them something like 90 percent, minimum.

Obviously, they did not get the memo. Today in my email inbox, I got a missive from the AFA with an invitation to participate in their latest online poll, on preferences in the upcoming Presidential election. And judging from all the blogging activity as of this writing, it appears those dolts sent out this invitation to pretty much the same polling population that sabotaged their gay marriage poll.

This new poll is certainly not as charged a topic as gay marriage, but no doubt, the AFA had the same preconceived notions for the results on this as they did for their last poll--namely, a majority of pro-Bush respondents. That ain't gonna happen, judging from the poll results as of my participation less than an hour ago:

Poll Results
Whom do you favor for the next President of the United States?
John Kerry 90.33 % 16,520 vote(s)
George Bush 3.48 % 637 vote(s)
Ralph Nader 6.18 % 1,131 vote(s)
Total: 18,288 vote(s)

So, I'm guessing the AFA is going to toss out these results too. Probably blame that nasty homosexual underground conspiracy for foiling them again.

WINDOWS 78
I've never heard, or heard of, the band Windows 78 (adjust volume accordingly). I know that they look like this and this, and probably sound like this. Hell, maybe Bill Gates jams with them sometimes, I dunno.

All that's beside the point. Their site's splash page is faux low-tech cool, and the name is evocative of the '70s. That's all that matters.

DEAD MAN RUNNING, PART II
Yesterday, it was a call from the Kucinich campaign. Today, on the way home from work, I spied a roadside sign from the Howard Dean people.

Honestly, what are they expecting to accomplish? Do Dean, Kucinich, Sharpton and whoever else supporters honestly believe their guy can garner enough primary votes at this point to make any difference? These guys are, realisitically, not even in the running for the VP spot anymore. It's idiot inertia. Honestly, it's stuff like this, the appearance of expending so much senseless energy into a past-dead cause, that turns so many people off of politics.

Then again, Dean did win his home state of Vermont after dropping out. I guess his supporters are hoping for a miracle win in Florida--possible only by virtue of generally low voter turnouts this primary season--will re-inspire their boy to jump back in.

Great plan. These are the same morons who'll end up voting for Nader. Again.

FURTHER THOUGHTS: Maybe Kucinich, Dean and the others are continuing their dead-man run as a sort of grand guerilla-marketing stunt, in advance of the upcoming release of Dawn of the Dead. It makes as much sense as whatever their real reasons are.

HOW TO MAKE IT AS A COMIC BOOK WRITER
Ever wanted to be a comic-book writer? I sure did as a lad. Heck, I'd still like to take a crack at it. Now I know just how simple it is to achieve this goal: Just create a hit sci-fi/fantasy TV show and/or a hip indy film first, and then sit back and watch the big-money comics offers roll in.

I wish I could think of one or two examples.

DEAD MAN RUNNING
I got home this evening to be greeted by a voicemail message on my answering machine from none other than Dennis Kucinich. Or a reasonable facsimile, anyway. He's sure-as-shootin' hoping that I'll cast my ballot for him in tomorrow's Florida Democratic Presidential Primary.

Does anyone have Dennis' phone number? He didn't leave one. I'd like to get back to him and sell him a clue.

BATTLE OF THE NETWORK BALLPARKS

It's Spring Training time, and in the local Grapefruit League action, that means not one, but two baseball stadiums festooned with television cable company naming-rights monikers. This past winter, Bright House Networks Field and Knology Park both came into being, apparently because the area's competing cable companies feel minor league hardball is ground zero for recruiting new customers.

Bright House Networks (formerly known in Florida and other areas as Time Warner Cable) slaps its name on the Spring home of the Toronto Blue Jays and rest-of-the-year home of their Florida State League affiliate Dunedin Blue Jays. Meanwhile, area upstart Knology's name graces the Philadelphia Phillies's Spring digs, home of the FSL's Clearwater Threshers (the newly-rebranded Clearwater Phillies). Got all that? Good. Play ball.

I figure a grapefruit is a lot tastier than a cactus any day.

COMMENTING FOR BLOGGER--IN BRAZIL
On a random surf yesterday, I stumbled upon a Brazilian-based blog. I don't remember which one it was, but it was more or less like this one, Blogrupal, maintained and hosted by the Brazilian version of Blogger.

If you dig through Blogrupal and click on one of the commenting links, you'll come up with a comment box that looks like this. You'll notice right away, like I did, that the commenting feature is a built-in component of the Brazilian Blogger service.

Neat, huh? So why do the Blogger users in Brazil get to have integrated commentarios, but us North American Blogger users don't?

Obviously, I've got commenting covered through HaloScan, and with the service and enhancements (mainly the addition of Trackback) they've provided lately, I have no intention of dropping them. But still, having the commenting function bundled into the blog management system, without relying on a third-party service, would be more convenient and (presumably) less prone to problems.

I recall that someone told me that when Blogger started up, they originally had a native commenting function, but it was so buggy that they quickly dropped it, and haven't replaced it since. I haven't seen any indication that they're going to revive it, although it would make sense that they would eventually. Maybe they'll consider buying HaloScan.

SENSECAM: A VISUAL MEMEX?
There was quite a buzz this past weekend at Microsoft Research's annual Techfest over SenseCam, an auto-clicking camera-necklace that can take up to 2,000 pictures over the course of a 12-hour day. The applications for such a little robo-shutterbug can be surprisingly useful:

As [Microsoft researcher] Lyndsay Williams trudged along snow-covered paths and passed by shop windows one recent day in Cambridge, England, so too did her SenseCam -- automatically snapping hundreds of photos along the way.

Later that day, Williams could have used those pictures to figure out where she'd left her car keys, or to show a friend the sweater she saw in a window.

Perhaps weeks or months later, she might have zipped through them to figure out when she last saw a particular colleague or what bottle of wine she had been drinking that night.

Once I got past the idea of the SenseCam as a novelty item--"Look guys, it's taking your picture right now!"--it occurred to me that such a device represented a visual component to the "outsourced memory" function of a Vannevar Bush-style Memex machine. That something like this would take continuous photos without any action from the wearer is key, as I believe a Memex would have to run independently of user action, practically in the background, in order for it to be effective.

Since SenseCam came out of Microsoft Research, the same department that's working on the Memex-inspired MyLifeBits project, I'm thinking Microsoft is thinking along the same lines as me.

So what will we end up doing with that brainpower/memory capacity that'll be freed from the tasks of having to remember minute everyday details? Will we get dumber or smarter from being able to let parts of our brain atrophy? I'm thinking it'll be the latter; that's my optimism showing (darn). Maybe we'll start to develop mental powers like telekinesis and telepathy. Thanks, Bill Gates!

FURTHER THOUGHTS: To describe the SenseCam as an individualized version of the "black box" log recorders found in aircraft is most apt, and has been noted elsewhere.

EL WEB SITIO DEL BUMBLE BEE MAN

A fan site dedicated to The Simpsons' favorite Mexican sitcom star. I don't think I need to add anything here. Except to say that Senor Bee's performance in A Burns For All Seasons was muy bravura.

POWER-OUTLET ISP
Power companies across the U.S. have talked about jumping into the Internet Service Provider game for a couple of years. They're well-equipped for it: They have an existing network that already runs to practically 100 percent of all commercial and residential sites, and pumping through Web access alongside electric juice would take minimal adjustments from their source.

Now Cincinnati's Cinergy Corp. has become the first electric utilty to offer Internet service, using a special broadband modem that you need only plug into an electrical outlet to start the connection.

Can they beat the cable and phone companies in providing broadband? The pricing, at $30 monthly, is definitely a good start. I don't think the enhanced upload speeds, which cable and DSL can't provide, are going to be a big deal; the average consumer doesn't know or care about that. The lack of extra wires in this setup--only a plug from the regular ol' power outlet to the modem, then an Ethernet cable from modem to computer--is appealing in my mind, in that it clears up the wire clutter at least a little.

Ultimately, the biggest challenge for power companies is overcoming the typical consumer's perceptions of what broadband Internet really is, and where it should come from. These ingrained perceptions are why cable broadband has twice the market share as DSL, and why it's hard to make headway against the cable companies. Yankee Group analyst Michael Goodman said it best back in August, and it's worth repeating:

"It's also a function of how consumers view broadband -- whether they see it for entertainment or communication."

Since many consumers seem to associate broadband with entertainment, he explained, they tend to choose cable. Those who perceive high-speed access as a business tool or a way to communicate with others are more likely to pick DSL, since the phone is viewed in a similar way.

Since then, DSL has made some small gains against the competition, chiefly through lowering prices and increasing their marketing push. Power companies will have to really push this and make their existing customers aware of the new service. That they've already got such a large base of energy customers who they can market to directly gives them a good place to start.

SOFA KING LOW

Yup, it's that kind of lazy Sunday afternoon around here. Just right for sounding out advertising slogans, repeatedly until you, too, get the joke.

Judging from the email source that delivered this to me, I think the Sofa King reigns somewhere in Canada. Maybe Kevin knows exactly where.

BLOGS FROM JUPITER
Jupiter Research, providers of so much research on new and emerging media and technology, has a blogging section for its analysts to scribble on.

Great insight from some pretty sharp minds, with especially timely notes from their road trips to various industry tradeshows and conferences. I particularly like Gary Stein's and Niki Scevak's blogs, as they both deal with advertising and marketing. Generally, all of Jupiter's focus areas hold great interest for me, as I like to hear the latest trends from tech, media and whatnot.

I wonder if these analysts took it upon themselves to start blogging, or if it was a corporate decision to toss up some employee blogs. I can see why individuals would want to keep a blog for their own professional purposes, but I could also see why a knowledge-based company would want to initiate it, in order to jump on the latest wave. Could Jupiter even offer this blogging space as an employee perk? I guess it doesn't really matter, as long as they're doing it.

Could the concept of providing company-hosted blogs be applied to other industries, even those that aren't knowledge-based in nature? Could the likes of Wal-Mart one day offer all its employees the opportunity to blog on the company's dime? Even the stockboy in Whatchacallit, Wyoming could have his own online soapbox at "blogs.walmart.com/joe_schmoe"...

Actually, that's pretty much a pipe dream. Companies big and small would be scared to death of giving every single employee the chance to spout off online. And rightly so, since the average person doesn't commit to writing unless they're pissed off about something, and in such a case it would have to be work-related. Not to mention the tremendous potential for leakage of sensitive company data; I doubt much of corporate America wants to give Fucked Company any more help than it's already getting. I'm thinking that if a big company ever (improbably) offered company-wide blogs, about two-thirds of them would never be used, and the remaining one-third would be split down the middle between chronic complainers and time-wasters. Probably only knowledge industry companies like consulting firms, media outlets, etc. would find benefit from this, and then it would have to be restricted only to certain job categories.

HEALTHY CORN DOGS?

I stopped by EVOS today for a late-late lunch/early dinner. I'm still on the Crispy Thai Trout Wrap kick, so I usually don't bother even looking at their menu. But I had to wait in line, so I occupied myself by looking over the choices, even though I already knew what I wanted.

One item stood out: Corn dogs. Corn dogs?? In a health-food joint? Corn dogs are practically the antithesis of healthful eating, for Christ's sake. Cholesterol bomb on a stick.

Turns out, this was a still a batter-dipped dog, but it's healthy because it's a batter-dipped soy dog. I would think the batter alone would make this a nutritional no-no, regardless of what it's wrapped around. Maybe they somehow bake these things instead of frying them, as they do with their air fries.

Whatever. I've never been a fan of corn dogs anyway, soy or regular, so I'm never going to touch them.

FROM GOVERNATOR TO EDITORNATOR

Apparently already bored with being Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger is taking on the executive editor roles for both Muscle & Fitness and Flex magazines.

You'd think a title like "executive editor" would refer to a pretty important job, and normally, it does. In this case, though, it appears to be little more than a figurehead position, with Arnold probably doing little more than glancing (or having an executive assistant glance) at final layouts, and maybe posing for a few photos. (Arnold's own spokesman calls this a hobby for the Governor that wouldn't take any time away from his other work.) In exchange, publisher American Media can make the claim to having two muscle magazines that are "run" by a legendary bodybuilder.

As an editor myself, I'm insulted by this. It suggests that a real executive editor doesn't do an awful lot at a magazine when someone else can approach the job as a hobby. Big publishers like American Media traditionally screw over the editorial talent, but this is a particularly grievous slap.

GAY MARRIAGE AND SURNAMES
As I was reading about the plight of Frank and John Michael, a local gay couple who got married in Canada a few months ago and now can't get most government entities to recognize it, a rather obvious but not-much-talked-about detail about gay marriage stood out to me. Observe:

Florida doesn't seem to know what to call Frank and John Michael. Voter registration officials know them as the Mavros. But the agency that issues driver's licenses refuses to call them anything but Mavro and Schuler.

While there's more to marriage than just a name change, it's usually the most apparent indicator of a change in status. My question is: In a gay marriage, which surname becomes the married name?

There's no established ettiquette here, obviously. I guess the couple decide for themselves, based on whichever name they like better. But other factors would have to enter into it. One partner may feel stronger about wanting to retain the family name. Or, as I imagine would be the case for a lot of gay people, becoming estranged/disowned by one's family would probably make it easier to take on a partner's last name. Less likely, but perhaps not that far-fetched, whoever is the more dominant one in the relationship might be a reflection of who ends up keeping his/her original surname.

Probably the easiest way is for both partners to retain their existing last names after marriage; it's normal for heterosexuals to do that, so it's not unusual. Personally, in the case of Frank and John Michael Mavro, I'd be interested in hearing how they decided on Mavro instead of Schuler.

CUERVOWOOD
When everyone knows you're broke, you get some interesting proposals tossed at you for whoring yourself out of the hole. Take Los Angeles and its $250-million budget shortfall. No doubt as a gesture of kindness, beverage king Diageo, and its Jose Cuervo tequila brand, has offered the city $1 million for what amounts to naming rights to the town. The most prominent aspect of this would be the erection of prominent Cuervo signage underneath the landmark Hollywood sign in the hills over LA. Other parts of the deal would make Cuervo-concocted margaritas the city's official over-21 drink, and make Cinco de Mayo an official city holiday.

While I'm not adamantly opposed to creative product placement, I'd have to say that this one goes a bit too far. It may not seem like such a big step beyond New York City's deal to make Snapple the official metropolitan beverage of choice, but slapping a corporate name onto a public landmark is a little hard for most people to take. In fact, I'm sure Diageo didn't expect this proposal to be accepted at all; someone at corporate just saw that the budget problem was making a lot of news, and decided it was a good opportunity to piggyback onto that coverage. Good plan.

If you can put aside the ethical objections, I also have to say that $1 million is a paltry sum for something of this magnitude. One million is chickenfeed for a global giant like Diageo, and for what they'd be getting back--millions of eyeballs looking up to the Hollywood Hills every day and seeing the Cuervo name--they'd have to be crazy to think that LA would fall for it. New York got $166 million for their Snapple deal, and that doesn't even call for very prominent signage comparable to the LA proposal (to achieve that, the Statue of Liberty's torch would have to be replaced with a bottle of Snapple!). And naming rights for sporting and event arenas, where the market for this sort of thing is set, usually sell for an average of $2-3 million per year, with that sum inching up year after year. That's another clue to me that Diageo wasn't even remotely serious about this offer. If they were, they'd have ponied up a massive amount more.

THE PRODUCT AS MEDIUM
Crispin Porter + Bogusky is an odd duck: An independent ad agency based in Miami that's scooping up bunches of major clients, in direct competition with agency heavyweights. In an industry that's seen a tremendous amount of global consolidation over the last several years, the only free-standing agencies that are broadly successful are those that are based in New York or LA, where the sheer volume of commercial enterprises leave a lot of business for all comers; or those that have longstanding relationships with a single bigtime corporate account (like what Nike and GM have with their hometown agencies).

CP+B has gotten a lot of exposure for its unconventional, and effective, approaches, and the agency's work for Virgin Atlantic Airways and Molson are good examples of how they break through the media clutter:

The product as medium. It's one compelling answer to the advertising industry's greatest challenge today: media fragmentation. In a world of 100-plus cable channels, TiVo, and affordable broadband, it's increasingly tough to get your pitch to the person who should see it. Here's CP+B's zig-zaggy thinking: Instead of delivering different messages to disparate audiences, focus first on the one vehicle you can be sure will reach your customer--the product.

It sounds obvious, but it's a method that's been lost under mountains of gimmicky ad techniques.

It's interesting that Fast Company refers to CP+B as a boutique firm, with billings of $250 million last year. Granted, that is small compared to the billion-dollar behemoths like WPP Group and Omnicom Group, but "boutique"? It's suggestive of the lack of a middle tier in the ad industry.

A MULTITUDE OF SCREENINGS

Well, a-looky here. One of the multiplexes in town is having some midnight-ish screenings of flim classics this weekend. "Classics" in this case means notable flicks from the '80s and early '90s: Dirty Dancing, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Reservoir Dogs, and Scarface.

The lure of the movies is strong indeed for me to be considering hitting a couple of these shows.

First off: Dirty Dancing and Raiders are not options. Not my style. I wouldn't go see them if they were playing during an otherwise uneventful weeknight and within walking distance from my house; I'm sure not going to trek several miles on a party night for them.

But the other two... Despite owning a VHS copy, I haven't watched Reservoir Dogs in years. I certainly wouldn't mind catching it again on the big screen. As for Scarface, this would be the chance to experience the re-release that swept through theaters many months ago.

I'm already discounting the possibility of going with someone. No one else I know is enough of a film freak to even consider sitting in a movie theather until 2 or 3 AM on a weekend. Just as well, as I'll probably get more enjoyment out of these movies by myself. Besides, who knows who I might run into at the theater?

If I go for it, this could end up being quite the movie-tastic weekend. I've already got a date to see Starsky & Hutch on Sunday (I'm crossing my fingers on it; at least Snoop Dogg should be good in it), and I also want to catch Fog of War and The Dreamers. Plus I still have to get around to seeing The Passion of the Christ; I've had no luck recruiting anyone to go see it with me (I must know too many heathens).

Obviously, unless I want to camp out in a bunch of movie theaters all weekend, I'm going to have to wait until next week to catch most of these flicks. Otherwise, my head will probably explode.

GOVERNOR KINKY
What's not to like about Kinky Friedman running for governor of Texas in 2006? Let me count the ways that this is oh-so-fun-funny:

- He wrote a song entitled "Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed".

- He fronts a band called The Texas Jewboys.

- Quotes:

"I will not kiss babies. I'll kiss their mothers."
"There are no skeletons in my closet. They are all bleaching on a beach somewhere."
"I am not pro-life, I am not pro-choice, I am pro football."
"I got a straight perm a few months ago. It was so bad that it made me look like Hitler as a used car salesman."

By the way, Kinky also has a book coming out soon. I'm sure that's got nothing to do with anything, though.

9/11 IMAGES: BUSH'S DAISY?
So the campaign season kicks into the next gear, and President Bush is rolling out his re-election ads. Unfortunately, the ads instantly drew criticism New York firefighters and 9/11 victim survivors for appearing to exploit the tragic images from that disaster for political gain.

My first thought upon reading about the uproar was that the Bush campaign was sending out an implicit (and probably unconscious) acknowledgement that it doesn't think it can win in November without invoking the fear factor of 9/11. Since there's not much positive news at the moment to focus on, tapping into (or, perhaps more properly, reviving) the average American's insecurity over the terrorist threat is the favored approach. Persuading voters that Bush is better equipped than Kerry to deal with an unstable world, by virtue of the four years he's already put in, is the only viable alternative.

My second thought was that maybe some Democrat moles have infiltrated Bush's re-election campaign and have already made their mark with this backlash-provoking ad.

MediaPost's Riff questions the wisdom of the negative imagery, especially when it's too-closely juxtaposed with Bush himself:

It's a basic tenant that you should avoid associating your brand with implicitly negative imagery, even if the overt message is, "Hey, I'm the guy who's taking control of this situation." But that's exactly what Bush's campaign team has chosen to do by juxtaposing the President with images of the smoldering remnants of the World Trade Center following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Again, we think the footage is fair game, even if Democratic spinmeisters (hey, it's their job) and New York firefighters (hey, it's their right) are up in arms over it. We only question why Bush would want to remind the American public of their insecurities, especially when he is the guy in charge.

Tony Schwartz, long-regarded as the dean of political media ads - for that matter, ads of all kinds - wrote the book on this some time ago. If you're going to evoke something that triggers deep-rooted thoughts of insecurity, you want to associate those thoughts with your opponent, not yourself. Indeed, it was just that strategy that Schwartz used in his legendary "daisy" spot to reelect Lyndon Johnson in 1964. But in that spot, which depicted an image of an innocent child holding a daisy juxtaposed against the mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb, there was no imagery of Johnson, only an allusion to his hawkish opponent Barry Goldwater.

Lyndon Johnson's "Daisy" ad, of course, goes into the advertising hall of fame as one of the most memorable and impactful spots ever, political and non-political. The script of that ad, again from The Riff:

Image of little girl picking petals of a daisy, counting in her innocent voice:
"One, two, three, four, five, seven, six, eight, nine." [intentionally out of sequence, child-like]
As she reaches "ten," a resounding male voice suddenly reverses the count:
"Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one."
At zero comes a deafening roar, and the screen fills with the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb.
Then the voice of Lyndon Johnson:
"These are the stakes - to make a world in which all God's children can live, or to go into the darkness. We must either love each other, or we must die."
A reassuring male voice concludes:
"Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay home."

So it would seem that Bush's team could have used some pointers on how best to have used the memories of 9/11 in the campaigning context.

But was the fundamental decision to use them at all ill-advised and inappropriate? I don't think so. In fact, I think right now is the perfect time for the Republicans to conjure up memories of the al-Quaeda attacks--basically, in order to introduce them at the start of the election season, then quickly de-emphasize them.

As I said at the top of this post, there's not much else that's positive to cite right now, with domestic and foreign issues pretty shaky for the President. Additionally, the events of the past four years have to be addressed in some form anyway, and the terrorist attacks obviously loom large there (it's important to note, though, that the attacks are just one facet of what Bush is showcasing, the others being the struggling economy in the wake of the dot-com boom, social issues like gay marriage, etc.). By bringing these things up now, at the campaign's formal kick-off, the Republicans are making sure they're delilvering this message aimed for the gut. At the same time, once they've delivered it, the point is made, the mental seed has been planted, and the campaign can move on to other, more positive messages (presumably as 2004 rolls on and things get better for the country, ideally).

To me, the first wave of Bush ads are evocative of "Daisy", in terms of seeking an emotional reaction. It's on a much smaller scale, and intended to have a more subtle, lasting message, but the effectiveness could be the same.

THE JOHN KERRY-BILL CLINTON TICKET?
By way of A Small Victory, I've discovered there's some speculation going on regarding Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry tapping former President Bill Clinton as his running mate for the November election, and whether the law would allow that.

First off, any and all talk about this scenario is academic, as I doubt it has any grounding in reality. Its origin point is probably among conservatives who feel that Bush is so unbeatable that the only way for Kerry, or any Democrat, to prevail is to recruit the last Democratic inhabitant of the White House. As soon as Kerry picks his running mate--most likely to be John Edwards--this intellectual exercise is moot. In the meantime...

The Constitutional focus is on two Amendments that deal with eligibility for the office of President: The 12th and the 22nd. The pertinent parts of both:

- From Amendment XII: ...But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.

- From Amendment XXII: No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.

The key word is "elected", in the 22nd Amendment. The argument could be made that a former two-term President like Clinton could run as the veep, as in the event he has to take over the office of President, he would do so without having been elected specifically to that office. Upshot, something like this would probably be decided by the Supreme Court.

In any case, when I read this, the first thing that came to mind was Ronald Reagan's courting of former President Gerald Ford as a VP candidate in 1980. The comparison isn't perfect, since Ford was a one-term President and thus wasn't (and still isn't, for that matter) ineligible to run for the Presidency. But I imagine Reagan's campaign team back then took eligibility concerns into consideration, and were satisfied enough to come close to bringing Ford on board.

DANCE DANCE ELOCUTION

First it was Liz. Then it was Lisa.

My Spidey-Sense was tingling as I read of these bloggers getting their workouts by way of the Dance Dance Revolution groove-out.

Turns out the DDR craze is taking hold, but good, and is even being advocated by fitness experts for a good workout. Plus it's a kick-ass game in general.

I'm sorta tempted, although 60-odd bucks is a little steep for an impulse-buy Xbox game. And I feel sort of sluggish AND geekish investing in this thing for a workout, when there's a fully-equipped gym literally a few yards from my front door. I'll have to take it under advisement.

URBLOGS
Props to Tommy at Sticks of Fire, who got a little prime exposure for himself and Tampa ("sticks of fire" referring to the city's notorious lightning storms) on Civic Strategies' new list of urblogs.

That's urblogs, like urb-log, or urban blog, i.e. a blog that deals with news and happenings in the big city. As opposed to ur-blog, which would be an examination of the prototypical web log (perhaps Drudge Report fits that bill?).

Civic Strategies' list is nascent, and they're accepting nominations for additions (email them here, with "urblog" in the subject line). I would nominate a blog like the enjoyably NYC-centric Night in the Big City, but I think CS is looking for less hipster scene and more hard news. I'm sure it won't take them long to find several New York-based urblogs; maybe a search through the NYC Bloggers site would yield some worthy candidates.

I liked one observation that CS made about blogs in general:

Blogs do not tend to do any original reporting. Rather, they're a single person's interpretation of what they read in newspapers, see on TV or glean from elsewhere on the Internet.

This matches my opinion of blogging. That's why I generally scoff at the idea of most blogs as news sources; they're much better suited as outlets for punditry.

REAR-VIEW BEADS
A sure sign that Gasparilla has just come and gone in the Tampa Bay area: A definite uptick in the number of cars with one or more strands of party beads hanging from their rear-view mirrors. If you're a visitor to these parts, and you wonder why you see so many instances of this, that's why. Of course, many people leave those things hanging for months at a time.

I wonder if it's the same in New Orleans with Mardi Gras beads?

QUIZNO'S SPONGMONKEYS: I'M GETTING OLD

Quiznos Subs seems to have finally hit on a successful ad campaign with the Spongmonkeys (adjust volume accordingly).

Go figure. The first time I saw the commercial with those ugly little beasts, I thought "When the hell is Quiznos going to finally break down and hire a real ad agency?" I mean, they've lurched from one dumb ad campaign to another for the past year, from a dorky pseudo-British strained humor theme, to the "Chef Jimmy Quizno" turn, to this. It all looked like they were hiring some second-tier agency that didn't know what it was doing, and I fully expected the Spongmonkeys to die as quickly as the other failed approaches.

I first got an inkling that these things had taken off when I saw a parody of them used on a local television station's promo commercial for their movie of the week. A coworker today told me that her teenage son absolutely loves the spots with the Spongmonkeys, and runs into the room every time one of them comes on. Somehow, they've struck a chord with the coveted young demographic that scarfs up Quiznos-like fast food. So it appears the critters are here to stay, for a while.

Stuart Elliott, ad industry reporter for the New York Times, offered up a little background on this latest ad phenom in his weekly newsletter reader feedback. I'd post a link to it, but I'm not sure where it is on the Times website:

A Reader Asks: I wanted to get your feedback on the new television spots for Quiznos. I can't imagine what they were thinking when they agreed to use "rodent"-type characters as mascots. I am horrified every time I see these spots. Who in their right mind uses rodents to promote food? I think that the Quiznos product is far superior to the image the company is promoting with those spots. What is your take on this?

Stuart Elliott: The above e-mail message was one of several I recently received about the new Quiznos campaign, created by the Martin Agency in Richmond, Va., part of the Interpublic Group of Companies. The others were equally critical if not more so.

For instance, one reader says the campaign "causes my brain to lock up and freeze" because the "very ugly, rodent-looking creatures" are "unappetizing" enough that "it turns one's stomach." Another reader writes, "Every time I see these spots I cringe," and wonders whether the message of the campaign is that "furry animals like Quiznos."

Actually, the intent of the campaign is to appeal to younger consumers, ages 18 to 34, who make up a substantial portion of the market for fast-food sandwiches like those sold by Quiznos. The target audience is likely to recognize the characters not as rodents or furry animals but as Spongmonkeys, fanciful creatures found on a popular Web site, rathergood.com.

The site has become widely popular among, as Jon Fine wrote recently in Advertising Age, "inveterate Net geeks and the sort of cubicle jockeys who forward oddball Web links to each other all day" -- in other words, consumers who make up a substantial portion of the market for fast-food sandwiches like those sold by Quiznos.

The characters, created by a 29-year-old Briton named Joel Veitch, are deliberately produced to look cheesy, using a crude form of Flash animation. The song the Spongmonkeys sing in the commercials is based on "We Like the Moon," which can be heard by visitors to the rathergood.com site.

While I of course do not have demographic information about the readers who wrote to complain about the campaign, I would hazard a guess they are not in the target market. It is sort of a variation on the old joke that if you have to ask the price of a product, you cannot afford it; if you have to ask what the point is of the Quiznos campaign, it is not aimed at you.

And the debate about whether the Spongmonkeys are adorable or annoying is also beneficial to Quiznos, which spends far less on advertising than rivals like Subway. Indeed, the company reported last week that it has received more than 14,000 letters, calls and e-mail messages about the campaign.

THE KILLINGTON SECESSION ROLLS ON

Following up on January's declaration by ski resort Killington, Vermont, of the intent to secede and join the state of New Hampshire, the town's citizens formally voted today to put the idea into action. Next step is to ask New Hampshire if it'll play along, and then go to the Vermont Legislature to get approval.

None of which will happen, of course. But it'll be fun to watch how far this all goes.

CAN YOU FEEL IT?
My pimp hand has been unusually strong for the past couple of days.

That's all I'm sayin'.

OUR LADY OF THE SMASHED WINDOWS

A local holy site is no more. A former office building in Clearwater that had what was believed to be an image of the Virgin Mary on its windows had those windows smashed early this morning. Goodbye, Mary. I guess the pilgrimages will wind down.

I can attest to the existence of that Mary image, having driven by the structure a few times. I can't say I was moved by the spirit as I sped past, but the patterns were definitely there.

The Shepherds of Christ Ministries, who now occupy that building, apparently include in their religious rites Web design principles from circa 1996. If you're on dial-up, don't even bother trying to load up that humungous single-page site.

UPDATE: The day-after reaction to the carnage, including before-and-after photos and a chronology of the vision.

14 SUPERFOODS
I generally don't watch what I eat. I know what I like and what I don't like, and pretty much go from there. The approach to (early) middle age comes with many unpleasant reminders that I probably need to start watching what I eat, if I want to retain at least a semblance of healthly lifestyle (not to mention dead sexiness).

I hang around a lot of people who are around my age or older, and dietary concerns seem to come up more and more. A little while ago, I was referred to this handy-dandy list of 14 must-eat foods, each of which imbue you with all kinds of health. I was pleased to see that most of these foods are ones that I like:

FOOD	DO I LIKE?
Beans	no!
Blueberries	yes!
Broccoli	yes!
Oats	yes!
Oranges	yes!
Pumpkin	no!
Salmon	yes!
Soy	neutral
Spinach	yes!
Tea	YES!
Tomatoes	no!
Turkey	yes!
Walnuts	yes!
Yogurt	no!

Yes, I like broccoli. Love it, in fact. Same with spinach. Think I'll cook up some of both right now. Maybe I'll toss in some random salmon and turkey, too.

And no, I don't like beans. At all. On toast or not.

BLOGOSPHERE STILL SMALL, STILL OVERBLOWN
In what's become one of my favorite posts, I cited results from the Pew Internet & American Life survey about how little actual penetration blogs have had among American media consumers. The latest findings from Pew reinforce just how forest-for-the-trees blogging is at present, as it turns out that only between 2 and 7 percent of all American adults engage in blogging, and only 10 percent of that small number bother to update their blogs daily.

As always, I never miss a chance to toot my own horn by noting that I'm a seven-days-a-week blog writer (with the very occasional holiday/travel break). Thank you, as always, very little.

Of course, you can look at results in different ways. Steve Yelvington sees the amount of average user content creation as pretty sizable, and admonishes newspapers for not tapping into this dynamic.

RSS VS. EMAIL SMACKDOWN, PART II
If you want to make Vin Crosbie see red, just use three little letters: R-S-S. That's what Steve Outing at Poynter.org did last week, when he talked about how some people's preferences were turning toward RSS alerts over email notifications, thus incurring Crosbie's wrath. (As you can see, I've chipped in my two cents, basically telling Vin that he needs to curb his paranoia.)

This is a continuation of Steve and Vin's original back-and-forth, back in September, over whether RSS or email would inherit digital content delivery. I don't know how far this one will go; it appears to be pretty much over at the Poynter site, and I'm not interested enough to check in at Vin's blog to see if he's following up there.

No doubt fueling Vin's consternation is the recent AP article proclaiming RSS to be the Internet's "next big thing" and cure-all for spam, virus infection and all that. Heck, if I made my living through email marketing (as Vin does), I would look askance at an opening like "E-mail is crippled", too.

Still, he certainly gives the impression that he's sticking his head in the sand when it comes to the increasing ineffectiveness of email for commercial communications. It's certainly not fair, but spam blocking is making it harder for all sorts of email to get through, and it doesn't look like it's going to get any easier any time soon (Bill Gates' anti-spam intentions notwithstanding).

The funny thing is, I'm no more of an RSS fan than Vin is, although for different reasons. I simply don't find a compelling reason for it. I know other web-heads like me love it, Lisa Williams in particular. I don't have a hundred different sites to visit every day, so I don't see much in the way of saving time. Even if I did have to surf all over the web on regular rounds, I'd still prefer to visit the sites themselves. Getting stripped-down text summaries just isn't that appealing to me; I like to look at the whole picture, the content in its original context (even if it is nothing more than an all-text blog post). My feelings on current, and likely future, RSS adoption is unchanged from what I said back in September:

- It's my impression that RSS feeds appeal mainly to active news junkies and hardcore Web users, and I'm not sure that'll ever change. Similar to Usenet newsgroups, which have loyal geekish devotees, but have been dying a slow death since the website-centric Web took root. It could be that mainstream adoption will never happen, possibly aided by the emergence of some new online publishing/delivery standard; if so, then obviously RSS won't be the way to go.

Additionally, as I also said back then, the only chance that RSS has at making the bigtime is if Microsoft include a built-in newsreader into the next flavor of Windows; even that might not cause a groundswell of mainstream use.

MEET THE SALARY CAP WIZARD

With the free agency period starting this week, NFL teams have some work to do on their payrolls. Enter the capologist, the front-office guy who has to decide who gets cut, who gets an accelerated signing bonus and who has to take a pay cut, all toward getting the team to that $80.582-million magic number.

The St. Pete Times provides this fun Flash piece to illustrate some of the finer points of capology (or, if you prefer, caprobatics). An interesting note regarding why the hometown Bucs can't do anything with their franchise-player designation:

In 1999, the Bucs made [Chidi] Ahanotu a franchise player, but because they did not sign him before the start of free agency in March, the six-year deal he signed in July made him the Bucs franchise player through 2005. Oops. Ahanotu was released after the 2000 season and has since played for St. Louis, Buffalo and San Francisco, all the while tagged as the Bucs' franchise player.

I've wondered about the finer points of the cap before, particularly about the so-called "dead money" it creates. I think today's articles clear some of this up for me; for instance, I was wrong regarding base salary being pro-rated and thus looking to me like money that's never actually paid out by a team. From what I've read here, teams eventually have to pay out the money that's proscribed under the cap limit, except for relatively small amounts that count as base salary in terminated contracts. Of course, the nature of the NFL's non-guaranteed contracts is, I think, the crucial reason why a hard cap works so well in football, and probably wouldn't work as well in other sports (pertinent as the NHL works toward a new collective bargaining agreement with its players).

LOSE THAT SUNSCREEN, GET THAT VITAMIN D
After being whipped into a fear frenzy for years over skin cancer, people have finally started to religiously use sunscreen with ridiculously-high SDF. So everything's okay now, right?

Well, no. As is the case with most health-related issues, doing one thing here results in a deficiency in another area. In this case, that's deficiency with a capital "D"--as in the vitamin by the same letter. It turns out that all that sun protection results in a lack, sometimes severe, of vitamin D, which leads to more health problems than previously believed. You can't win for losing.

I'm happy to say that I got my vitamin D production time in earlier today, in the form of an hour of tan time by the pool. No sunscreen or other additives to come between me and that sweet, sweet sunlight.

(Skin cancer? What skin cancer?)

NIKE PLAYS "WHAT IF?"

Leave it to Nike to come up with an eye-catching, buzz-worthy ad campaign. Inspired by usually inane subjects that come up during bar-bet banter, the "what if" campaign takes established sports stars and remixes them, placing them out of their chosen sports and into the uniforms of others:

The campaign, by the longtime Nike agency Wieden & Kennedy in Portland, Ore., which also created the "Bo knows" ads, carries the theme "What if?" The commercials, in lengths of 15, 60 and 90 seconds, offer these unlikely crossovers by Nike endorsers: the tennis star Andre Agassi playing baseball for the Boston Red Sox; the cyclist Lance Armstrong boxing; the pitcher Randy Johnson as a professional bowler; the runner Marion Jones as a gymnast; the football players Brian Urlacher and Michael Vick as hockey teammates; and the tennis star Serena Williams playing beach volleyball.

The commercial is all over the TV right now. It's also on the Nike site. I'd like to find a copy to have; no luck so far.

I have to say, Michael Vick has a wicked-looking wrist shot; but he shoots, he scores, so whatever works. His position on the ice isn't specified, but the fictitious play-by-play on the commercial refers to him and Urlacher as a "scoring one-two punch", which suggests they're both forwards. Don't ask me why, but I think that Vick would be more effective as a potent offensive defenseman, in the mold of Brian Leetch or Rob Blake: Breakaway speed, great passing, good checking, and a nose for the net. Plus, naturally, the go-to quarterback on the power play.

CAREER PATHS FOR BUBBA
When the news of Bubba the Love Sponge's firing came down last week, I made a brief prediction on Bubba's future prospects as a free agent:

I guess this frees Bubba to pursue the Howard Stern-like fame he believes he's due. Given that he's flopped in the couple of times he's tried to break into larger markets like Chicago and Philadelphia, though, I'd say his more likely destiny lies in strip clubs and metal-rock festivals.

I still think emceeing gigs like the Livestock Music Festival is where Bubba will be making his bread-and-butter from here on out. Bubba himself is holding out hope of getting his show revived on satellite radio.

Others feel that Bubba has some marketable skills, often on display during his show's tenure, that could open the doors to many diverse fields. Some of the opportunities available from Monster.com:

1. Knowledge of hog slaughtering.

Senior butcher - "Manage inventory, place biweekly meat orders, cut and serve raw the world's finest beef, pork, and poultry. Extensive knowledge of butchery. Chance of a life time." Location: Cape Cod, Mass.

3. Familiarity with Federal Communications Commission standards.

FCC Regulatory Affairs Counsel - "We have an immediate opening for a Federal Regulatory Affairs Attorney to join our Legal/Regulatory team. The Attorney will represent Level 3 Communications before the Federal Communication Commission and other federal agencies in formulating policy positions, drafting comments and presentations, meeting with FCC staff to articulate Level 3's positions; serve as the primary contact for the FCC." Location: Westminster, Colo.

5. His "No-panties Thursday" past, which had listeners hanging skimpy garments on their car antennas.

Lingerie buyer - "The Wet Seal, Inc., a specialty retailer of fashionable and contemporary apparel and accessory items is headquartered in Foothill Ranch, California. We are currently seeking a lingerie buyer." Location: Foothill Ranch, Calif.

LEAP DAY
Geez, it's still February? When is this freakin' month gonna end, already?? It feels so much longer this year, for some reason.

Oh, right! Today is February 29th--Leap Day! The chronological equivalent of Metamucil (to keep all things calendar-related regular--get it?).

So, we all get an extra day. And it's on a weekend, to boot. So enjoy yourself, and thank Julius Caesar for the opportunity.

WHEN DISCO DIED
I'm watching VH1's "When Disco Ruled The World". Very entertaining. It certainly feeds my wasn't-there-really '70s nostalgia urge.

I think the key quote was provided by Charlie Anzalone, a disco DJ from back in the day:

When they did a disco version of Ethel Merman singing "There's No Business Like Show Business", I knew it was over.

In most of the civilized world, anyway. In Canada, I think it took the release of the Guy Lafleur Disco Scoring Machine record to finally kill off the genre there.

APPLE STORES, BUT NO MICROSOFT STORES?
This past weekend saw the opening of San Francisco's Apple Store, to the customary wild fanfare. The company's retail outlets are a testament to the level of loyalty Apple users have (not to mention providing Apple a sure-fire, if expensive, way to ensure their products have a bricks-and-mortar sales channel).

This latest showing of Apple enthusiasm triggered idle speculation in me as to why Microsoft hasn't followed suit and opened their own chain of Microsoft Stores. I mean, Gates and Co. have stolen so many other ideas and concepts from Apple, why not this?

The answer, of course, is that there are already a bunch of Microsoft Stores in existence--they're called Best Buy, Target, CompUSA, Wal-Mart and about a thousand others. Microsoft doesn't need to open its own retail arm because it doesn't have any problem getting its product onto store shelves; that's the benefit of running a monopoly. The only reason to start up a Microsoft-branded store is out of pure ego, and if nothing else, Bill Gates isn't stupid. Online retailing is the other factor--it's a lot cheaper to set up an ecommerce site to do some selling instead of opening up a physical store.

Still, it would make for some interesting PR for the Big Redmond Machine. Bill Gates, if you're reading this, remember to give me my percentage. I might take it in the form of Xbox stuff; we'll talk.

NEW FAVORITE ARCHIVES
I don't know how much anyone but me notices this sort of thing, but I had neglected to update the "some of my favorites" Archive area of this blog's front page for... oh, several months now. I used to make a point of updating it at the top of every month, but that hasn't been the case in a looooong time.

Well, I just dug through the archives, and updated the links to point to some different past posts. Quite the stroll down memory lane...

I think I need to find a more automated way to update that sucker. Right now, it involves not only going through the blog's archived posts and deciding which posts stand out, but then I have to mess with the HTML code. It's generally a pain. A little piece of JavaScript or something would be ideal. If anyone has any ideas, I'm all ears.

RE-EXAMINING THE EXAMINER
It's hard to believe that the San Francisco Examiner, once the flagship paper of the global Hearst publishing empire, has fallen so low. It's current incarnation is as a freebie weekly, almost like an alternate but not quite, and a pale shadow of its former self.

It was predictable, though. When Hearst finally got to buy the crosstown rival San Francisco Chronicle, thus getting a more valuable newspaper property, it had to sell off the Examiner for regulatory reasons. Everyone knew they would try to sell it to an owner that couldn't possibly succeed, especially with the discontinuation of the two papers' Joint Operating Agreement. Enter the Fang family, publishers of a handful of rinky-dink news weeklies in northern California. They bought the Examiner for the token sum of $1 in 2000, thus doing Hearst a favor.

As predicted, the Examiner has been tanking ever since, and San Francisco, like many U.S. cities, is down to one hometown paper (although there are other Bay area papers, like the San Jose Mercury News, for the market).

Now, the Examiner is getting a shot at revival from billionaire Philip Anschutz, who bought it for around $20 million.

Can he resurrect the Examiner to something close to its former glory? It'll be tough. Hearst isn't going to sit back and let its Chronicle dominance wither. It also depends on how Anschutz wants to play this game: Does he want to invest a ton of capital into this venture, perhaps making it a foundation for broader media holdings? I'm thinking he'll have to take some unconventional routes to building the paper back up again.

TALK ABOUT THE PASSION

I suspect I'll be catching The Passion of the Christ sometime this weekend. The weather is supposed to be pretty foul through at least Saturday night, so it's a good movie op.

Kenneth L. Woodward presents a thoughtful look at how the controversially violent imagery of Jesus' final hours provides a chance to re-connect with the more redemptive aspects of Christianity. I especially like the point he makes regarding the overly-easygoing faith that most Americans, and others, take for granted:

H. Richard Neibuhr summarized the creed of an easygoing American Christianity that has in our time triumphantly come to pass: "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." Despite its muscular excess, Gibson's symbol-laden film is a welcome repudiation of all that...

Indeed, Gibson's film leaves out most of the elements of the Jesus story that contemporary American Christianity now emphasizes. His Jesus does not demand a "born again" experience, as most evangelists do, in order to gain salvation. He does not heal the sick or exorcise demons, as Pentecostals emphasize. He doesn't promote social causes, as liberal denominations do. He certainly doesn't crusade against gender discrimination, as some feminists believe he did, nor does he teach that we all possess an inner divinity, as today's nouveau Gnostics believe. One cannot imagine this Jesus joining a New Age sunrise Easter service overlooking the Pacific...

Significantly, the Passion and death of Jesus is the chief element in the Gospel story that other religions cannot accept. In Islam, Jesus does not die on the cross because such a fate is considered unfitting for a prophet of Allah.

By Hindus and Buddhists, Jesus is often regarded as a spiritual master, but the story of his suffering and death are considered unbecoming of an enlightened sage. Like the Buddha, the truly liberated transcend suffering and death. But Jesus submits to it - willingly, Christians believe - for the sins of all.

This jibes with many accounts I've read of a general Asian (especially Chinese) opinion of Christianity; with tenets rooted in physical suffering, rapturous emotions and classic god-eating (i.e. the sacrament), classic Confucian philosophy regards Christianity as a savage religion.

A secondary reason for catching Passion is to amuse myself at how many people will get scared off by the two hours worth of subtitles.

PADDLING FOR THE BEAN
Are you a hardcore java-holic? Is a day without coffee a hellish prospect for you? If so, you too just might be crazy enough to get up at 3:30AM, paddle cold water in a kayak for an hour, and settle on an island campground for some fire-brewed Yukon blend.

I get my caffeine fix from tea (hot and iced) and soda, myself.

INTRODUCTORY MOVIE-SNOB ARAMAIC
Aside from the brouhaha generated over The Passion of the Christ, director Mel Gibson's decision to make the film mostly in Aramaic has inspired hope among the world's dwindling native Aramaic speakers that the film could revive interest in the formerly widespread language.

Let the record show that GQ magazine is doing its part to spread the word. Much in the spirit of the movie, the new March issue includes some key Aramaic* phrases you can use when discussing Mr. Gibson's opus:

HAVE YOU SEEN THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST? >> Ha-hazeita yat Mityasrei di Mashiha?

I THOUGHT IT WAS QUITE GOOD. >> Sivreit ana di sirta d'na havah sagi tav.

JESUS CHRIST, THIS MOVIE IS BAD! >> Scheiss, sirta d'na hu b'ish ve-mitmall'ei dreck!

MEL GIBSON SHOULD HAVE "CALLED IT A DAY" AFTER WHAT WOMEN WANT. >> Levay di la mafsiq Mel Gibson leme'bad sirtin aharei Ra'avata di Nashayya.

*Keep in mind that this is a very tongue-in-cheek piece, and therefore any resemblance between this and actual Aramaic may be iffy. "Scheiss", for instance, is obviously not Aramaic at all, but rather the German word for "shit". Based on my general facility for languages, I think the rest of the translation here is definitely Semetic, so it's mostly at least a good try at Aramaic (although I wouldn't be surprised to find out it's a polyglot of Hebrew, Arabic and other languages).

NO VROOM THIS YEAR

The Grand Prix of St. Petersburg, which debuted here last year, has turned out to be a one-and-done event--for now. Thanks to the collapse of CART and subsequent local legal disputes, the St. Pete race has been dropped from this year's schedule. Fingers are crossed that everything can be resolved in time for a stab at a race next year, or even in 2006.

I've still got my tickets to the inaugural opening day of the 2003 race. I wonder if they'll eventually be worth something in the collector's market.

CRAPPLE OF MY EYE
You just know it's going to be a good day when you catch a midday showing of The Apple on FLIX! If you ever come across this flick, make time to watch it, and revel in the delicious pain. In my own words:

Set in the far-flung future of 1994! When the glam-rock dialectic has taken over the world, and every New Yorker speaks with either a British or (West) German accent! You know, just like it really was ;)

I'm watching this dreckful creation right now, and only 15 minutes into it.... boy oh boy. I think I'd have to invent a new language just to properly express how terrible this is. They just started their first Xanadu-esque musical number--ack! It's like a third-rate Rocky Horror Picture Show. On third-rate crack.

And yes, it was just as good the second time around.

I wish to God I could track down a copy of the soundtrack. It's not available through the usual online sources. It's possible every copy of it is lost forever, having all been used as projectiles during the film's grand premiere.

GONE SURFIN', SURFIN' TAMPA BAY
I was recently chatting up this young lady who had just moved to the area. She asked me what the surfing scene was like in Tampa Bay. When I told her there was no real surfing scene here, she couldn't quite believe it. "All these beaches here, and nobody surfs?" she asked, incredulous.

I've run into that before. People from other parts of the country (I think she was from Ohio; somewhere in the Midwest, anyway) seem to assume that miles of beaches equals surfboards, glassy waves and hangin' ten, dude. The fact is, this isn't Oahu, and the water conditions on the Gulf of Mexico side of Florida are usually too calm for any serious wave-riding (the exception being when a tropical storm or hurricane passes close by, and then you have to be more than a little meshugah to be out on the water anyway). From what I understand, the conditions get slightly better on the Atlantic side of the state, especially on the Space Coast expanse between Palm Beach and Daytona. But even there, surfing is a similar experience to what the rest of the Eastern Seaboard has to offer: Fair at best, and hardly worth comparing to southern California and Hawaii.

Still, where there's a beach, there's a way, as this hardy little band of St. Pete Beach surfers can testify. The waves may not be much, and the thrill comes more from submerging yourself in 50-60 degree water than from actually riding, but I guess it's something.

I suppose I'll now have to revise my area surfing report, the next time I'm picking up women in a bar.

A JIFFY OF AN INSTANT OF A SECOND
On an average day, you're probably too busy to spare even a second of your time. But can you spare an attosecond? Or even less? Research scientists in Germany and Austria have managed to measure time intervals so small that they're meaningful only on a sub-atomic level.

So how long is an attosecond, anyway?

As an attosecond is a thousand million billionth of a second, the intervals recorded by the team are a ten million billionth of a second long. A gap of 100 attoseconds is to a second what one second is to about 300 million years.

So that would be the amount of time from... now-to-now! NOW! NOW! No, NOW! N--! Nnn! -N! Ah, forget it...

HOWARD STERN AND CLEAR CHANNEL'S POWER PLAY
At first glance, today's announcement by Clear Channel that it was suspending broadcasts of Howard Stern on its radio stations, coming on the heels of the firing of Bubba the Love Sponge, is an indication that the radio giant is really serious about stemming objectionable material from its airwaves.

At first glance.

Look closer, though, and you'll see some key differences between the Stern and Bubba situations:

- Stern is not an employee of Clear Channel; Bubba was. Clear Channel's relationship with Howard Stern is only as a station carrier of his syndicated show. Thus the suspension, which is really just a removal of the Stern show from Clear Channel air. Howard Stern will still be doing his show, and it will still be heard in most of the usual markets.

- Stern's show is produced in partnership with Viacom, which owns Infinity Broadcasting, which is the second-largest radio network, behind--hello!--Clear Channel.

The same reaction to the Bubba firing applies here: I find it hard to believe that Clear Channel only now determined that a show like Howard Stern's could be construed as objectionable. The motivation lies elsewhere, beyond a corporate impulse to conform to decency standards.

Clear Channel is orchestrating the current climate to put pressure on its chief rival, Viacom/Infinity. Much like the firing of Bubba was designed to appease the FCC and lead to a reduction in the levied fines, the Stern action is designed to give the appearance of "cracking down", when it's really an opportunistic power play.

I haven't written much on the radio industry in the past. Mostly it's because I don't think much of it, the dollars involved notwithstanding. Just these past two days of looking at the shifty moves of industry hegemon Clear Channel is enough to keep me away for a good long time.

UPDATE: Just to show how little this move impacts Clear Channel's bottom line and is done purely for show, the AP reports that only six stations across the country--out of over 1,200 Clear Channel owns--were running Howard Stern in the first place. Real chutzpah.

Incidentally, two of those six stations are in Florida, including Orlando's WTKS Real Radio 104.1 FM. I wouldn't be surprised if these were the only two outlets in the state that had the Stern show (although Miami probably has it, come to think of it). I've heard that you can catch WTKS on your radio dial in the extreme eastern reaches of Tampa/Hillsborough County, and that some Stern enthusiasts actually made a point to drive around that area during the show's broadcasts. I guess they're stuck with just the E! show now.

NET ACCESS OUTPACING CABLE TV?
Is the Internet really spurring a revolution in American media consumption? A new survey indicates that's so, in dramatic fashion: eMarketer reports that more U.S. households have Internet access (68 percent) than cable TV (65.8 percent). It's a slight advantage for the Web, but the fact that it's ahead at all is amazing. The fact that television--the dominant mass medium of the last half-century--is being trumped is mind-boggling.

These results raise some questions. When I first read them, I thought the idea of a household having Internet access without cable seemed strange, and almost contradictory. Then I realized: I was thinking in terms of broadband Internet access only, which is typically obtained through cable. It's hard to keep in mind that the majority of online American households are still on dialup access, which, of course, does not require a cable company hookup. (Is it even possible to get broadband Internet access from the cable company without also getting the television service? I doubt it.)

In a way, I'm not surprised that so many people are dropping cable. Higher rates are really turning customers off. However, I wonder how many households in the eMarketer survey have satellite TV service instead, rather than just antenna. Even with just over-the-air television, there's presumably some television viewing going on; I can't believe there are that many households that have completely cut themselves off from the boob tube.

WATERBOY IN THE LONGEST YARD
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh NO! Why, why do they have to screw with a classic football movie like The Longest Yard by doing an Adam Sandler-fronted remake? I don't care if Snoop Dogg is in it, it's a recipe for disaster.

While the main story will remain, several elements of the original film will be changed, [Sandler's business partner Jack] Giarraputo said in a statement.

No kidding. They'll have to change significantly, as Sandler cannot conceivably pull off a convincing Burt Reynolds character type. I can see this becoming a remake in title only.

In fact, why not dispense altogether with the notion of re-creating the half-funny, half-gritty mood of the original? Play to Sandler's goofy strengths instead. Simply call this abomination The Waterboy II: The Longest Yard, and be done with it. Manchild Bobby Boucher goes to jail--that's the ticket!

IS DISNEY SCREWING THE NBA?

During Michael Jordan's heyday as the NBA's marquee player, you never could have imagined the league getting trumped by something as provincial as stock car racing. But in the LeBron James era, the unimaginable becomes reality: This past weekend's Subway 400 NASCAR race on FOX attracted twice as many national viewers as ABC's competing Cleveland-New York NBA game that featured James' first visit to Madison Square Garden.

There are a lot of ways to spin this in the NBA's favor: There are so many regular season games on that even a weekend network game isn't that big a draw; the Cavs and Knicks aren't playing very well this year; there's not a whole lot of overlap between the NBA's and NASCAR's fanbases. You could also blame the NBA in the sense that it doesn't have a Jordan-like player to pull in the viewers no matter what.

I think, though, that it's time to start pointing the finger at a more likely culprit: Disney, who through its ABC and ESPN networks is the NBA's main television partner.

Disney won the broadcast rights to the NBA two years ago, after the league had a lucrative run on NBC and Time Warner's TNT. It seemed like a match made in heaven: The NBA appealed to the youngest and hippest viewers, and Disney owned the gold standard in sports programming in ESPN and ABC Sports.

Yet look at what the results were during last year's NBA Finals, at the end of the first year of the new partnership (in a post I cheekily entitled "ABC Feeling Screwed By The NBA"):

ABC, which is in the first year of its valued NBA contract, is so disappointed in the lousy numbers that it's hoping for a forced Game 7 in order to dump off its advertising commitments as painlessly as possible...

As an NHL fan, I feel better about my sport in light of this. Let's see, the NHL ratings have been sucking for the entire five-year run of that league's broadcasting agreement. Then, the first year the NBA gets on board the Mouse networks, their ratings slide. So it wasn't the NHL's fault for those cruddy ratings, it was Disney's!

I was joking around when I wrote this, because I, and probably most observers, figured the weak ratings were an abberation, and the NBA numbers would rebound the next season. Now? With NASCAR beating the daylights out of the once-mighty hoops? I'm not so sure I didn't hit on the truth back in June.

It would follow that Disney is dropping the ball here. They've been mishandling ABC's non-sports programming for years now, to the point where shareholders have lost patience in the company's continued ownership of the network (indeed, it's a key reason for the recent attempts to oust Michael Eisner). If this bungling has seeped into the formerly rock-solid sports operations, it really casts an ominous shadow on the House of the Mouse. While, ultimately, the product on the court has to deliver compelling-enough entertainment, it's Disney's job to sell the sizzle through its promotion and marketing. The ratings strongly suggest that they're not doing that.

Maybe they got lazy from the reliable success of their NFL broadcasts (although the venerable Monday Night Football also has seen an erosion of viewership in recent years). The NFL sells itself, though, so it's had to screw that up.

RICH? SMART? YOU'RE READING A NEWSPAPER
Some good news for newspapers, for a change: Their readers tend to be more affluent and educated, on average. All the pretty numbers below:

Mediamark Research Inc. and Interactive Market Systems Inc. recently released a report prepared by NAA Business Analysis & Research Department that reveals 99.9 million adults (18+) in the U.S. read an average issue of a daily newspaper. And, on Sunday, 116 million readers nationwide read an average issue.

Income has always played an important role in segmenting newspaper audiences. Readership increases steadily with higher earnings. Among adults with household incomes of $75,000+, readership stands at 57% on weekdays and 66% on Sundays vs the national average of 48% and 56% respectfully.

Slightly more than half of all men (51%) read an average issue of a daily newspaper, followed by 46% of women who read a daily newspaper. Higher percentages of both genders read a Sunday newspaper, with men at 56% and women at 57%.

60% of adults who graduated college or more read a weekday paper and 67% do so on Sundays. Five daily issues reach 78% of adults who graduated college or more. In general, people in occupations with more job responsibility also show stronger readership of newspapers. 56% of Executives, Managers, or Administrators read a daily newspaper, and 66% do so on Sundays.

Forty-nine percent of whites read a daily newspaper, compared to 43% of African-Americans, 37% of Asians, and 29% of adults of Spanish/Hispanic origin. On Sunday, the reach among racial/ethnic newspaper readers is 57%, 58%, 42%, and 39% respectively.

I take these results to mean that the higher up you are on the socio-economic ladder, the more likely you are to want to intake different forms of news and media, since these same numbers largely apply to the most plugged-in media consumers as well. This suggests that format, while important, isn't the only consideration when choosing news and media sources.

These specific results will help papers in their pitches to advertisers, as they can point to some pretty coveted demographics in their readership.

BOARD GAME PR
Home & Garden Television came up with a novel way to promote its upcoming new show, "Designed To Sell": It made a board game out of it:

A board game resembling the Riff's favorite game growing up, "Clue." In the series, homeowners are given advice by real estate experts and interior designers on how simple, inexpensive changes can boost their home's economic value. The game is no different. Complete with game pieces and cards, the players either choose to be the host or the designer featured in the TV show. The object is to reach the end of the game first, along with making minimal repairs along the way. "Replace that '70's wallpaper with a fresh, neutral color coat of paint."

I'm not much for board games, but I admire the ingenuity.

CD SUIT MONEY: ON THE WAY!
Oh boy oh boy, that class-action suit against the music industry over CD price-fixing has finally been settled. So the checks are being mailed out right now. It looks like the delay netted an extra dollar: From the original $12.63 estimate to a whopping $13.86. Cha-ching, baby.

I could take or leave the slightly-higher-than-token amount--I will take it, thanks--but fortunately, it looks like public libraries around the country will reap millions of dollars from being a part of this suit, which they can then use to expand their freely-available collections.

UPDATE: Got the check in the mail today. It came wrapped around a nice little note from Mr. Charming himself, Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist (although suspiciously, the postmark is from Minnesota--doubtless the central location for check distribution). If I had a scanner, I'd throw an image of it up here. But I don't, so I won't. The check's going to the bank, but I'll keep the Crist letter as a memento.

TRACKBACKS FOR NEWS SITES
Amy Gahran makes an argument for having news sites provide trackback capabilities, as a way to enrich site content.

I've often wished for feedback functions on newspaper and other news sites, for adding my two cents to the article du jour. I would think that the average site would probably opt for regular comments over trackbacks, as commenting is more straightforward, and more inclusive (i.e., not everyone has a blog).

But I think the big disincentive for adding feedback features to news sites is, as usual, spam potential. Regular, run-of-the-mill blogs are getting plagued by comment and trackback spam to the point where many blog authors are shutting down those utilities. News sites, with their larger audiences, would be an especially attractive target for spammers, and would bring on unwanted headaches that would outweigh the intended advantages.

Aside from spam, I wonder how trackbacking would work with sites that require registration or subscription access. I suppose parts of the registration barrier could be dropped for something like this; again, I'm not sure it would be worthwhile to do this.

Gahran's post did alert me to the existence of Movable Type's standalone trackback tool. I guess MT wants to spread the love, hoping that it will lead to increased adoption of their full blog management software. Of course, this tool still requires the backend access to your blog's site that comes with owning your own domain, so it wouldn't have done me any good when I recently added the trackback function to this blog.

REALITY CHECK: THE MAVERICK BENEFACTOR

Wacky Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is tossing his hat into the reality TV ring this summer with "The Benefactor", an ABC show where he'll give away a cool $1 million out of his own pocket.

"You don't need special talents," Cuban said. "I'm not looking to find out who is the grossest, funniest, prettiest, smartest or able to go without food or water the longest.

"The right person is going to get on my good side at the right time, and whoever that is is going to walk away with a check from me for $1 million," he said.

Hmmm... I'm thinking the folks at ABC are going to want a little more fleshing-out on this concept. A hallmark of reality programming is (at least the appearance of) fast-and-loose, but the audience still needs some kind of structure to make it compelling viewing. Basing the series around just having Cuban act like his usual jackass self is good for one episode, but not much beyond that.

"Why has he agreed to give away such a large sum of money? Simply because he can and because he can't wait to devise the means through which applicants must prove to him that they deserve the money," ABC said in a news release to be issued Tuesday.

Applicants? More like supplicants, I'm betting. Cuban is going to get his jollies by having some poor saps get him coffee, brown-nose to him, and maybe do a little song-and-jig, all while he sits back with the camera squarely on him.

...So, where to I sign up again?

(I have a feeling this also will give fellow Dallas sports team owner Jerry Jones some ideas...)

BUBBA BOOTED?
You may recall the saga of Tampa Bay shock-jock Bubba the Love Sponge, who recently brought down a record $755,000 FCC fine over some raunchy on-air material last year. Now, late-breaking news has it that Bubba has been fired by his corporate employer, Clear Channel Communications. Details to follow tomorrow. Thanks to my friend Kirby for the heads-up on this.

I guess this frees Bubba to pursue the Howard Stern-like fame he believes he's due. Given that he's flopped in the couple of times he's tried to break into larger markets like Chicago and Philadelphia, though, I'd say his more likely destiny lies in strip clubs and metal-rock festivals.

I can make a lot of guesses on this, but without any details, it's all conjecture. I'm sure Bubba's track record, both in terms of past fines and contentious contract negotiations, helped with this decision. Obviously, Janet Jackson's Super Bowl performance has got big media players like Clear Channel nervous too, and hits in the wallet like the one Bubba brought drive the point home. I'd assumed Bubba was still the area's ratings king, which presumably insulated him from negative consequences; I wouldn't be surprised if the latest numbers may have shown a slip, thus providing a good excuse to can him. He also serves as a convenient sacrificial lamb, given the environment.

All this is somewhat negligible to me; I don't listen to any mainstream radio (only NPR at work, and I can take or leave that most days), and having Bubba off the air won't change my mind one bit. I'm sure there'll be a lot more made out of this by both sides of the debate.

UPDATE: It's now official, but Clear Channel managed to dismiss Bubba in the most hypocritical way possible:

"After conducting an internal investigation, we concluded that Bubba's show will no longer be carried on any Clear Channel Radio station," [Clear Channel President John] Hogan said in his statement. "This type of content is inappropriate and not reflective of the way we run our local stations or Clear Channel Radio."

Bubba's been on the Tampa Bay airwaves, doing pretty much the same schtick, for over ten years. Clear Channel has owned the stations where Bubba worked for just about that long. So what Hogan is trying to sell here is either one of two things: a) It's taken Clear Channel the better part of a decade to conduct this "internal investigation", or b) Corporate just now, after years of broadcasts, realized what was in the content of Bubba's shows. Both premises being complete garbage, of course.

The bottom line here: Clear Channel is trying to get out of paying the FCC fines, and is cutting Bubba loose as a good-faith move in order to get the fines quietly reduced or (less likely) eliminated altogether.

It's a cynical move, especially because it shows how slimy this company, and others like it, is. They'll put raunchy programming on the air, encourage the personalities to continually push the limits in pursuit of ratings, probably with assurances that they'll stand behind them. Then, once the heat gets too hot, they stab them in the back. That was the case with Viacom's "Opie and Andy Show" in New York, and that's exactly what happened with Bubba. It tells you just how meaningless a contract is in the radio industry.

I'll reiterate that I'm not a fan of Bubba's show, nor of any other crap, banal or extreme, that pollutes the radio airwaves. But I recognize a raw deal when I see it.

BIGGER DISK

Are all those (legally-obtained, I'm sure) mp3s, mpegs, jpegs, avis and who-knows-what-else files rapidly filling up what once seemed like a gigantic 30-gig hard drive? Then you need more disc storage, and there's no sense in staying in the double-digit-gigs range when you could really up the ante with LaCie's 1-terabyte Bigger Disk.

That's 1 big terabyte, aka 1,000 gigabytes. To illustrate that: You could fill this bad boy with enough mp3 files, each at about the average size/playing time of 4MB/4 minutes, to play continuously--without repeats--for nearly two years. Chew on that!

I'm still continually amazed at the leaps and bounds that hard drive technology is taking. It wasn't all that long ago (the late '90s) when 1-gig was the high end of digital storage for the consumer market. I once worked with a client whose business was providing outsourced digital storage in terabyte-sized chunks for organizations like NASA; I wonder what he thinks of this.

At $1,200, the Bigger Disk isn't cheap, but it's certainly a reasonable price as far as computer components go. For a multi-computer household, it probably makes sense. Of course, I'm now waiting for the day when I hear about people and their kids filling one of these up, and needing to get another one...

COUCH-A-BUNGA, DUDE
Hey man, you got a couch I can crash on? You do? Killer! Then maybe you'd like to share the wealth by joining The CouchSurfing Project.

It's kind of kooky idea: You sign up, thus putting out notice that travellers are welcome to come by and stay for a spell. Should you get the wanderlust, you can put out the call to other CouchSurfer members. The network stretches from Indiana to India, so there are plenty of options (provided you can get yourself to wherever you're going).

Naturally, the first thing that comes to mind is: What about the psychos? Apparently, like many Web-based ventures, the guys behind this are relying on a self-correcting system of "verification"; that's basically referrals from one user to another. It's a nice idea, but I really don't see how this is anything to put faith in; for instance, I notice that Leo, one of the founding members, is himself not verified as of this writing.

Still, I guess if you're adventurous (and trusting) enough, you could really have some keen experiences through this. Just watch out for Funky Couch Syndrome; better keep a good supply of Febreze on hand!

OH TO BE LIKE DARRIN STEPHENS

So I'm reading today's Business section, which includes the weekly Business Briefcase Profile. This week, it was on Bill Carlson, the newly-promoted President of locally-based public relations firm Tucker/Hall. I believe I've spoken with Bill once or twice, as Tucker/Hall is the PR firm for Florida Trend.

I got a kick out of this part of Carlson's profile:

Carlson says he was inspired to go into advertising and marketing by the 1960s TV sitcom "Bewitched". The male lead, Darrin Stevens [sic], "was in advertising. I thought that was kind of cool. It influenced me," he said. "It thought it was great people could have a job in a field that was creative."

I've often suspected that "Bewitched" played a huge role in shaping scores of young minds' perceptions on the advertising business, and even leading some people to pursue it. I'm glad to finally hear someone admit it!

Of course, you'll often come across oblique references as to how Durwood Darrin Stephens inspired a career in advertising. And we all know that Larry Tate is a better-known advertising industry icon than David Ogilvy.

Perhaps the most impressive homage to the sitcom was the real-life ad agency of McMann & Tate, which is apparently now out of business (I guess they were overly-reliant on using witchcraft as their ace-in-the-hole). I remember coming across their site years ago, and I shot them an email asking if they were, in fact, "Bewitched"-inspired. Someone shot back in the affirmative.

THE RANDOM 20
Here's a thing going around:

Step 1: Open your MP3 player.
Step 2: Put all of your music on random.
Step 3: Write down the first 20 songs it plays, no matter how embarrassing.

Well, since the random/shuffle setting is the default for my iPod, this should be pretty easy. I'm not going to add hyperlinks to these results, or even offer running commentary; if you're that interested in any song title or artist, search away.

So let's do this:

1. "Dancing Queen", ABBA
2. "Love For Sale", Talking Heads
3. "Boom! I Got Your Boyfriend", 20 Fingers
4. "What Goes On", Velvet Underground
5. "War In A Babylon", Max Romeo
6. "Above The Clouds", Amber
7. "Never Enough (Big mix)", The Cure
8. "The Emperor's New Clothes", Sinead O'Connor
9. "Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel", South Park (Kyle Broflofski)
10. "What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 1 - Blue Sky Revisit) - Transmission 3", DJ Shadow
11. "I Saw Three Ships", South Park (Shelly Marsh)
12. "Torture", KMFDM
13. "Aishiteru", Starecase
14. "Caught, Can We Get A Witness", Public Enemy
15. "All Apologies", Nirvana
16. "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding", Elvis Costello
17. "Running On Empty", Jackson Browne
18. "Mr. Jones", Talking Heads
19. "Surrender", Cheap Trick
20. "Time To Get Ill", Beastie Boys

I'm glad the Beasties finally got in there, at No. 20. It's a fairly representative list out of the 690 songs loaded on the iPod, except maybe the lack of real techno. I'll also note that I used my iPod instead of my computer, because I always listen to that and never listen to music on my computer anymore.

(Via Dustbury.com)

REALITY CHECK: REAL-LIFE ROCKY
In a weird convergence between reality television, movies and boxing, Sylvester Stallone has been attached to the development of "The Contender", a reality series about boxing. It's scheduled for debut on NBC in 2005, timed to come alive along with a new, apparently for-real boxing federation.

"We're looking to reclaim a part of America that's been missing," ["Survivor" creator Mark] Burnett tells Variety. "Where are the 'Thrilla in Manilas?' The Sugar Ray Leonards? We all agree no one can tell who owns what belt.

"We're all businessmen, and there's a serious business around boxing," he says. "It's the highest paying sport, yet no one believes in it anymore. What happens when we make it transparent and clean? Once clean, the upside is astronomical."

Boxing, clean?? I'm not sure that's even possible anymore. The sport's been crooked for a lot longer than most people like to think--even the golden age of the 1930s and 40s were shady times. It's just more obvious now.

Aside from Stallone's presence as the on-air personality, this show won't have an official connection with Rocky, because MGM owns the rights to that. That might change, though, depending on the prospects of "The Contender" and how the next Rocky sequel goes.

HARRY POTTER AND THE GREEK TRANSLATION
You'd figure a book series as massive as Harry Potter would be available in several languages. Heck, it's even available in Greek, my primary second language.

But it hasn't been available in ancient Athenian Greek--until now. Classics teacher Andrew Wilson has just completed a translation of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" into ancient Greek. (Note that this is the original, UK title of the book/movie known in the States as "Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone"; I guess philosophy turns off American audiences...)

"I suspect very few people will read it all the way through," he said. "You will need a degree in Ancient Greek to get a great deal out of it."

But Wilson hopes students studying the ancient language will enjoy reading extracts of the book as a "relaxation."

I've tried reading ancient Greek before. It ain't easy, although I was struck more by the number of similarities with modern Greek than with the differences, considerable as they are. The Greek alphabet hasn't changed a whole lot over the centuries, which helps a little. Learning Cypriot Greek might help some too, as it's my understanding that it's the closest existing dialect to ancient Greek that's left.

I'll never forget one time, at a museum exhibit, looking at an ancient stone tablet, filled with Greek writing from around 200 BC. It was all bunched together (spacing was a concept that didn't come along until later) and worn away and hard to make out. But as my eyes passed along it, I finally made out a name: "Orestes". Clear as day. It was a slightly exhilerating feeling to have been able to personally decipher even such a small sliver of information, come to me from across the centuries.

Quidditch becomes Ikarosfairike or "Ikarus ball" -- in a reference to the mythological boy who few too high -- while Hogwarts is Huogoetou, deriving from words meaning "hog" and "wizard."
Harry Potter is Hareios Poter. Hareios means "belonging to Ares," the war god, or "warrior" and Poter, a "cup" or "goblet."

Lord Voldemort, Potter's nemesis, becomes Folidomortos, which literally means "scaly death."

"Ancient Greek has a massive vocabulary," said Wilson. "Now it's got a slightly bigger one."