You’re at that awkward stage. You’re nowhere near ready to get rid of all of your comic books, and yet there’s a closet in your house that you don’t want your friends to see. Not until they know you well enough to understand that although you certainly do have an opinion on whether Batman could beat Captain America, they’ll never be subjected to it.
(Not unless they have access to your LiveJournal.)
It’s helpful to explain exactly where you are on the Comic Book Collector spectrum, so that your mom, your boss, or a potential third-base partner understands that there are those who are in far, far deeper than you are.
The Spectrum is like a pH test kit. Read the following list until you see a shade of nerdity that matches your own skin tone:
1) You continue to put every new comic you buy in a protective baggie…but you stop using backing boards.
2) You put every comic in a baggie. But you buy the cheaper, ordinary plastic kind instead of archival-quality neutral baggies.
3) You no longer care whether “Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man” is alphabetized under P, S, or A (for “Amazing Spider-Man,” which absorbed that title this year).
4) You stop entering your new comics into an inventory database.
5) You stop keeping your comics alphabetized.
6) You stop putting your comics in baggies and just put them in the longbox “naked.”
7) You keep them in cheap OfficeMax cardboard boxes, instead of industry-standard “longboxes.”
You throw out all the multiple copies of comics you bought during the “speculator boom” in the Nineties.
9) For the first time in your life, you look at a comic in your collection and you think “I’ll probably never read this again, ever.”
10) You still have boxes of comics, but you need to go drive somewhere if you want to visit them.
11) You throw out a run of comics because you have another copy of this storyline in the form of a trade paperback reprint.
12) You throw away new comics after you’ve read them.
13) You go through all of your existing comics; cull out the ones you actually want to keep, and eliminate the rest.
14) You go through all of your existing comics and throw away any that probably aren’t valuable.
After Stage Thirteen…your nephew gets an awesome birthday present and your sister or brother no longer invites you to the family barbecues.
Hmm? Oh: Stage 12. Not a statement of pride…just a statement of fact.
If you want to be a published author, well, that’s no trouble at all. Write a big check to a vanity press. They’ll take any manuscript you can cobble together and they’ll print it as an authentic, book-shaped object.
Honest: it’ll have words and pages and everything. You can even put it on your bookshelf alongside such celebrated novels as “The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy,” “A Farewell To Arms,” “Great Expectations,” and “Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas,” each of which has sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
(Golly!)
You just can’t put it on a bookshelf at Barnes & Noble. Not unless you sneak it in there when Security isn’t watching. You’ll probably have a decent shot at it; usually they’re more concerned about inventory moving in the opposite direction.
Otherwise…no. Booksellers won’t stock your vanity-press book. Period. There’s an excellent reason why: for all they know, the author him or herself is the only person who believed in this book enough for it to get published. It might look like a book, but there’s a huge and unpredictable difference between A Book-Shaped Object and a viable work that the public will actually want to support.
Booksellers trust books that come from traditional publishers. A title that appears in Wiley’s (or Random House’s or Harmony Books’) catalogue is the residue of a lonnnng chain of people who read the book and believed in it passionately enough to devote their time, energy, and their company’s money towards getting it in front of the public.
This author didn’t write a check. He wrote an email to an agent, who receives manuscripts by the dumpsterload every year. An agent liked it enough and believed in it enough to take the author on as a client, and then sent the book onward to editors at various publishers. An editor liked it enough to present it to her bosses, and (more importantly) she jumped up and down on desks and conference-room tables and defended it against other editors who had manuscripts of their own that they wanted the company to acquire.
The manuscript moved on, upwards and sideways through the process, acquiring more and more supporters who were eager to carry the thing across steeper terrain and heave the book over greater and greater hurdles. By the time a book is on the shelf at a bookstore, it’s collected a small army of fans, ending with a buyer at the bookstore chain who thought highly enough of it to order copies for every store in the national chain.
Maybe they felt so strongly about the book that they even gave it a featured position in a holiday promotion. That’s at least partly an ad paid for by the publisher, but the publisher wouldn’t have spent the money and the bookchain wouldn’t have offered the space unless both parties felt that the property in question was potentially hot stuff.
(Hmm? Oh, well, yes…I wouldn’t have brought it up myself but now that you mention it, I have had two books advertised in Barnes & Noble’s Christmas circular. Aren’t you a peach for asking!)
It’s a long, inefficient and overall frustrating process. Still, it works. It’s a Darwinian thing that weeds out the little lap dogs that need to be carried around in Hermes bags and fed via eyedroppers; ie, the Godforsaken beasties that Nature doesn’t want and which couldn’t survive without artificial support.
The ones that survive have proven their ability to thrive on their own strengths. Failures still outnumber successes, but the books that make it through this grotesque process can become monster national best-sellers that soon start to promote and sell themselves. When that happens, the book has proven a mandate from the people. Clearly, this book has plugged into something out there. It’s filled a gaping hole that nobody else managed to spot, and provided something that the American public is responding to by the hundreds of thousands.
Before I move on to my real point, I ought to say that there’s a difference between Vanity Publishing and true Self-Publishing. Self-Publishers also do an end run around the formal Process, but the signature difference is a lack of self-delusion. You can’t rule the world via self-publishing but you can become a cherished and important figure within a specific community. Incidentally, there’s another advantage to being a Self- as opposed to Vanity publisher: you can actually make money via this approach.
But the Vanity authors insist that they’re writing their own checks because the massive Publishing Machine is unfair and elitist and out of touch with American tastes and needs and damn them for denying the public their chance to see what you can do.
It’s a fab delusion. It makes the whole house smell like an apple pie is baking somewhere. That’s one of the reasons why most people go that route in the first place.
Yesterday everyone found out that Hillary Clinton wrote a $6,400,000 check to her own campaign to keep it afloat until the next round of primaries.
In my mind, Hillary Clinton has become a Vanity Candidate.
She can’t convince a crucial legion of people to like her campaign enough to keep it moving forward to the next step. Like many authors, she got through some of the hurdles, but as the obstacles got progressively higher and harder, she found fewer and fewer people willing to skin their knees and cut their hands scrambling to get over them. To the contrary, her greatest allies are now reaching for the Bactine and the Band-Aids and muttering about needing to get home to paint the children or vacuum a sick relative.
And whereas writers like Wil Wheaton are self-publishers by virtue of the fact that they have actual, hard-earned audiences of people in place who are pleased to buy his books, Senator Clinton apparently can’t even inspire her own fans to keep the checks coming.
Vanity Candidacy. For six million dollars, she’s bought herself a comforting, reassuring, Presidential Campaign-shaped object. But it’s not a viable product. It’s an engine for self-delusion.
Today I happened to hear a recent “Fresh Air” interview with Al Gore…a politician whose reputation has only grown since he left public politics. I respect the hell out of him. Before his Nobel Prize and before the slide show and before his diplomatic work, there was his absolutely gutsy decision to concede the 2000 election.
Gore had every logical reason to continue the fight, and plenty of legal justification. History may never decide whether or not it was correct for the Supreme Court to hand down a decision that in so many words chose the next President.
But Gore conceded. He conceded an election that he had probably won, fair and square.
Why? Because he had the makings of a great President: he put the needs of his country ahead of his own needs or those of his Party.
Fighting the Supreme Court decision would have dragged on the process for months…and there had to be an inauguration on January 21, 2001. An orderly transfer of executive power on that date was more important than any other issue or factor. It sure as hell was more important than Al Gore’s ego. It was a close approximation of the classic King Solomon decision. Q: To whom did the Presidency rightly belong? A: The petitioner who would rather give it up than see the baby harmed.
Gore conceded the most powerful office in the world and emerged as a giant, independent of any two-term limit. Any Republican considering a future campaign for the Presidence is sent into a mild panic with one simple question: What if Gore decided to run again? If a race were ever decided on the issue of character, Al Gore would be undefeatable. Absolutely. Karl Rove has left the business and the Bush family wasted its last remaining Cursed Monkey Paw wish on the Supreme Court decision.
Hillary had that same opportunity for a display of greatness, a chance to plant an arrow in the ground that marked the moment when she truly came into her own as a national politician. Withdrawing from the race and committing her supporters and resources to Obama wouldn’t have been as conceding an election that she had already actually won by popular vote, but it still would have been hot stuff. She could have come back in eight years, even stronger than before.
But nope, she let the opportunity slide right on past her. She wrote the check and increased the rhetoric. She’s proven that in its current form, her campaign is a vanity production. A campaign based not on service but on ego, and a bad sports cliche: I can win, no matter the odds or the cost; I just have to prove that I want it a little more than the other guy.
She can’t change the numbers, so she’ll try to change the math. If she can’t change the math, she’ll try to change the process. And if she can’t change the process…well, God help any Obama supporter if she runs some numbers on how she’d fare against a Republican incumbent in 2012 and likes what she sees.
Which is a pretty big damned shame. Obama’s candidacy has the national authority and support of a new Neil Gaiman novel. Obama isn’t just in Barnes & Noble…he’s on the end-cap, with a special display including a life-sized cutout of the man with a button in his nose you press to hear one of eleven sayings.
At this point, Hillary 2008 is a 50-page George Jetson/Captain Kirk slashfic available only through Lulu.com.
She can’t win the nomination. If she keeps this up, she can’t even win re-election as a Senator.
She’s planted her arrow in the ground and marked a transformative moment in her political career, all right. It’s the same sort of transformation that happened when Dukakis tooled around in a tank during a campaign appearance. Except you felt sorry for him later on.
Praise God, my new iMac has just been delivered. Not a loaner from Apple, but my own hardware. It shall be covered with Wacky Packs stickers by day’s end; this, I vow.
I do have a fine relationship with my FedEx driver (thanks to the fact that loaner hardware flows into my house like nicotine into a supermodel) and his twice or thrice-weekly deliveries are nice, if necessarily brief, interactions.
Today, he handed over the 30-pound package, collected my signature, and then said, without any preamble, “You know, they’re saying gas will be six bucks a gallon by the end of summer? Can you believe that?”
“When gas gets that high, Society starts to break down,” I replied, shaking my head. “Even if it’s just a little bit.”
“It means nobody goes out to dinner any more, so restaurants close,” he continued. “People stay home instead of shopping. They don’t go out to visit friends as often. Dealerships can’t sell cars. The cost of everything goes up. People lose their jobs. People file for bankruptcy. The economy takes a giant hit…”
I nodded. There are scenarios that sound merely alarmist until they actually happen…cf the levees in New Orleans being overrun and floodwaters damned-near wiping out the entire city.
“At six bucks a gallon, civilization starts to break down,” I repeated. “The Government will step in if it breaks $4.50.”
(Just like they stepped in when Katrina became a Cat 5 and curved in towards the city with the inevitability of a bowling ball finding the pocket. Yeah, good point.)
My driver continued to talk about the cost of gas, predicting a trend towards European-style gas consumption: people stop buying trucks and even sedans, and start buying minicars and scooters and other vehicles that look as though they belong on top of a child’s birthday cake instead of an American road. In some circles, this development would be discussed approvingly. My FedEx guy couldn’t believe what was happening to his country.
It’s natural that a truck driver would be among the first to become so alarmed about the rising price of gas. He’s among the first trades to feel the heat.
But this was a significant event. Lyndon Johnson had more information about the status of the Vietnam War and the American public than any other man in the world. Even so, he didn’t truly believe that the cause had been completely lost until he turned on the CBS news on night and saw that Walter Cronkite had turned against him. Numbers are numbers and can be interpreted any which way. But when something happens to clearly demonstrate how deeply an event or crisis has penetrated, it’s tangible and resists your attempts to flip it over and look at the cleaner side of the issue.
Today, a FedEx guy who has other houses to deliver to took the time to talk to me for five minutes about how desperate the cost of fuel was becoming. Today was the day I officially started to worry.
Glimpsing one’s own intellect is like seeing the bride before the service on your wedding day. It’s bad luck. It just puts a pall over the whole thing.
Case in point: I spent Thursday afternoon in the company of a top-tier Double Diamond Platinum Rewards Plus cardmember in the Close Personal Friends of Andy Ihnatko organization. We had a fantastic lunch followed by a long walk through the Public Garden.
I mentioned how unseasonably bare most of the trees were.
“They really should have budded out by now,” I observed. And as I said this, I checked my watch.
I checked my watch.
This sort of thing makes me think about all the people who have gone out and bought a $1000 whatever-it-is, just because I told them that they should.
Apart from this itchy demonstration of my nincompoopery, it really was a spectacularly good day. First of all, there was the company I was keeping. If I were free-falling 12,000 feet above the earth and I had to choose between having either a single parachute or a phone call from this particular friend at that moment…
…Well, okay: of course I’d take the parachute.
Still, let’s be fair: I’d enjoy the trip down a lot more if I had the phone call instead. I’d be guaranteed a pleasant…(processing, processing) 1 minute 5.376 seconds of conversation. With the single parachute, I’d spend my time worrying about whether the chute is going to deploy properly, are my lines going to get tangled, I don’t want to land in a crocodile put like the poor bastard in that “Faces Of Death” video…things like that.
But I digress.
Maybe it was the company, maybe it was just dumb luck, but it was just one of those days when everything clicks together supernaturally well.
We were sitting on a park bench when the subject of squirrel ankles naturally found its way into the conversation.
(Here you see why I was forced to create a separate superclass of service for friends like this one. Competition for companions like this can be fierce, and if singling them out for exclusive services makes the economy-class conversationalists feel slighted, well, blame the economy. You might also blame the intensity and frequency with which the latter group chronicles their progress in “World Of Warcraft,” but I don’t like to judge.)
“You know how squirrels can turn their claws around so that they face in either direction?” she asked.
No, I didn’t. I imagined that she was talking about opposably-retractible claws or something.
“I’ve never really looked at a squirrel hand,” I admitted. “I guess I should look it up sometime.”
And at that moment, a squirrel loped down from a tree, as if cued by another squirrel wearing a headset and scrutinizing a clipboard. It patiently hopped up onto the bench, and put its front paws on my leg.
“Oh, okay,” I said, examining the creature. “You mean how they can stand on their haunches like most mammals, but can also flip their whole feet around so that their ‘palms’ and ’soles’ are both facing towards the bark of the tree as they hang on.”
For the purposes of this blog, I’ll tell you that the squirrel then snapped me a smart little salute, doffed his miniature green wooly Irish fishing cap at the lady, and bid an adieu that was unintelligibly squeaky but which was clearly an attempt to articulate “Have a good one, Ace.”
Time for an update, sensation-seekers. The biggest CWOB-related news is that I’ll be moving the site to a new host soon. Page load times degenerated to such a point where I practically dreaded doing anything that would encourage people to, you know, actually visit Ihnatko.com. Every time I’d go on Twitter and post a link to a new article, I could count on a flurry of replies in which the word “borked” featured prominently.
That said…I couldn’t be happier about my current webhost.
Last year, a friend of mine was kind enough to offer me a directory on his own server so that I could install a bunch of different content systems, pick a winner, and learn the system. It was a very generous offer and allowed me to really take my time choosing a winning horse (which is what I have here with Wordpress).
Obviously, he’s not set up as a webhost and so when bottlenecks and other various problems cropped up, my banging on doors for a fix was simply not the best way to show my gratitude for his kindness. Instead, I kept pulling Scrabble tiles out of a bag at random, hoping that a solution would present itself. Lo and behold, the letters spelled out “Pay for real hosting, you cheap, pathetic bastard.”
(No, there aren’t any punctuation tiles in Scrabble. But I pulled out blank pieces after the G and the D and I; the Fates may be fickle, but don’t claim they don’t know the rules of Scrabble.)
One of the (many) benefits of my job is that minor annoyances can become fodder for good columns, and the problem of choosing a webhost is no different. And I have an awesome resource helping me out: the 7,000 people following my Tweets. I’d already surveyed the landscape of webhosts by the time I put out a query on Twitter, but over the next couple of days the opinions, details, and character assassinations that were put before me were invaluable.
At this point, I think I’ve homed in on three candidates: Pair, Media Temple, and A2Hosting. I’ve come to casually think of them as “Rock-solid hosting maintained by steely-eyed missile men,” “Lots of online hosting tools that I can actually understand, even as static screenshots” and “The folks who have been responding to my emails quickly and in great detail.”
These are all good things. Negotiations are still underway and I don’t really know which way I’ll go. At this stage, one of the most compelling arguments for any of these hosts is “Well, Merlin Mann uses A2 for 43 Folders…I mean, if it’s good enough for him…“
I’m in sort of a funny niche as a consumer. Ihnatko.com was just building up when the server melted down, but even so, it was getting way too many hits to entrust it to a basic, consumer-level webhost. And while I’ve no (concrete) plans to create the next HotButteredNurses.com, I could be quite happy with a couple hundred thousand unique visitors per month…and I’m optimistic enough to be choosing a host that can support that kind of traffic.
So at some point in the next couple of weeks, Ihnatko.com will be at a new host and we can put any previous ugliness behind us.
Welcome to sunny Boulder, Colorado. In the Rockies, they have 31 words for snow; “Sunny” means “a light, steady sifting of rice-sized little puffs that make the deal much more picturesque without inconveniencing pedestrians.”
Enjoying a bit of a lie-in. Yesterday I celebrated the beloved tradition of leaving at 5:30 AM for a 9:10 AM flight on no sleep, you see. The Bob McKenzie Algorithm has gotten me to many an early-morning appointment and by now, I trust it without question.
Window seats on both legs of my flight to Denver allowed me to sleep and took some of the edge off of my fatigue, though I was mightily thwarted on the second flight. I didn’t have access to Twitter while I was in the air, of course, but over the course of those two or three hours, I instinctively reached for my iPhone to post 140-character bagatelles such as
Montana Tweeters: if you have a spare mattress or two, could you set them out in the yard? Because this kid in the seat next to me is the reason why the word “defenestration” exists.
and
If I had thought to tuck a Ziploc baggie the size of an 18-month-old into my carry-on, this flight would be SO much more pleasant right now.
Whenever the kid wasn’t crying, he was trying out a new bit of the Annoying Child Passenger act that I’d never encountered before: he kept tapping me on the arm and on the leg and kept trying to pull the pens and papers out of my shirt pocket. I made the usual non-confrontational comments to the kid’s mom — you know, observing the sort of limits that are in place when you’re spending two hours literally belted down next to the person you’re in conflict with — and got the least-encouraging response possible:
“Oh, Justin is so curious, isn’t he? He loves to explore his environment!”
The kid’s name wasn’t Justin but you know what I mean. He is the universal Justin, the spot on our nation’s CAT scan that causes your doctor to immediately order some more tests. If Justin had grabbed an air marshal’s gun and shot a flight attendant, her mom would have proudly beamed that Justin was murdering way above his grade level.
So I hadmy silicone earbuds in (the kind that shut out all cabin noise) and slept fitfully. I was able to ignore Justin’s tapping nearly until the end of the flight, when intense thumping really required that I have a word with Mrs. Justin.
I prepared my most intense Glare of Danger but quickly re-holstered it when I opened my eyes and turned my head and discovered that it was the flight attendant, urging me to turn my iPod (the hell) off and put up my (damned) tray table already because we were about to land.
(Stupid Justin.)
I’m here for the Conference on World Affairs, naturally. There’s only one thing on the Conference agenda on Sunday, and it’s a reception for the speakers. I was dead-tired but it’s a good chance to meet a lot of people whom you’re probably not going to get much chance to mix with during the week (oddly, they tend not to put me on the panels about the impact of the religious right).
Was picked up at the airport by student volunteers and taken to a very nice house where I’ll be staying for the week. Unpacked just enough to verify that I hadn’t left anything at home and then fiddled with the MacBook Air long enough to verify that nope, I didn’t configure “Back To My Mac” properly on my desktop iMac.
Damn and blast. It’s one of Leopard’s greatest features but it’s not quite done yet. Getting it to work on a local network is a piece of cake (barely more difficult than enabling file sharing) but when you try to make it work over the Internet, you need to do lots of fine-tuning. The trouble is that Back To My Mac does precisely the sort of thing that your home firewall is meant to prevent.
These aren’t simple problems. But one thing that Apple could do is provide a simple utility for checking the WAN connection. It worked fine at home, and that’s as far as I could test it.
The bummer here is that I was counting on Screen Sharing to give me a secure tunnel for blog posting while on the U of Colorado campus. Oh, well. Back to stopgaps. Right now I’m using copper socked into the house router.
Got in a good nap and showed up at the reception when it was in full swing. There are folks here whom I’ve been hanging out with for years and years and it’s v.swell to see ‘em all again.
Among these: a rocket man who’s working at Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space program. Certainly favorite of the many Crazy Billionaire Human Spaceflight initiatives, and that’s probably because Bezos is keeping his big yap shut about what they’re up to, for the most part.
Richard Branson just loooooves to talk about Virgin Galactic. He talks about the seats and talks about the cupholders and talks about the commemorative wristbands and the special little uniforms and that makes me think “Wonderful, Rich…but what about the $480 valve somewhere in the system that will kill everyone on board if it sticks at the wrong moment?”
Blue Origin doesn’t feel like a PR push for Amazon. It feels like an actual space program.
The infuriating bit, of course, is that Tim can’t talk about anything he’s doing. They take security so seriously that I can’t really even joke with him about it without making him feel uncomfortable.
“So that means you don’t press him for info?”
“Right. Well…not very hard, anyway.”
No, no. Last night I was actually just curious to know that the work was still interesting and that he was still having fun, and received enthusiastic affirmatives on both points.
There are a few new people that I’d like to meet this week. Mike Farrell? Yes. It would come down to a dumb, fanboyish “I watched M*A*S*H, like, every week!” thing but I bet he’s the sort of classy guy who deals with TV fans by punching them in the torso instead of leaving a mark on the face. Jello Biafra? DEF-initely. He was pointed to me at a table but I froze on the basic “Mister Biafra? Jello?” question. I’ll get to him.
I did indeed get to meet James Randi, who was damned charming and put me at ease right away. I wished him a happy Not Houdini’s Actual Birthday But The One He Had On His Passport (April 6, surely you’ve seen the displays at your local Hallmark Gold Crown Store?) and we had a nice little chat. Cool. I’m on a panel with him tomorrow and I accomplished my main goal, which was: not to say or do anything to cause him to climb onto the stage on Tuesday, eye me cautiously, and then move his chair farther away from mine.
Okay. Enough lollygagging. I can enjoy a nice mile and a half walk to campus, followed by lunch (featuring my favorite style of cuisine: complimentary), taking in a panel…and then speaking on the subject of “Things We Wish We’d Learned In College.” I don’t have my complete list yet but I can predict that “the notion of compound interest” fill have a prominent spot.
News out of the Boston media scene this week: WBZ is buying both sportscaster Bob Lobel and entertainment reporter Joyce Kulhawick out of their contracts and sending them home.
I have two reactions to this. For logistical reasons, I have decided to present them in this order:
1) “Damn, what a shame.” If you grew up with WBZ on your dial, you probably muttered something similar when you heard…particularly if at any stage of your childhood there was, you know, a dial on your TV.
Every year, there was Bob Lobel, sitting on a scaffold at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. There was Joyce Kulhawick, interviewing the New Kids On The Block when they came home to visit.
Every time the Red Sox blew a three-game lead to ultimately break our hearts and lose the ALCS or the Series, Lobel represented all New England sports fans in delivering the “I’m not angry, son…I guess I’m just disappointed” speech to the Red Sox. “We put a lot of faith and trust in you, and I suppose we shouldn’t have done that.”
It never failed to result in the Sox biting its lower lip, staring glumly at its shoes and feeling real bad about what it had done, and wishing that Lobel was one of those sportscasters who’d just haul off and hit them and make it easy.
And there were times when celebrities blew through town and SOME-body had to go out to the Four Seasons and talk to them. When a covert nest of Nazi spies is headed to the water-purification plant with a tanker truck of rat poison, you send in Captain America. When Jackée Harry refuses to leave town until she has a chance to tell somebody what it’s like to work with Marla Gibbs, you send in Joyce.
Overall, though, as a New Englander you just really liked seeing those familiar faces. Other on-air personalities came in and either moved up to the network or moved down into real estate, but a rare few managed to become a welcome addition to the New England landscape.
This is another item in the list of Things That The Kids Today Are Missing Out On. True, their video games are just flat-out stupidly better than what I had to deal with. But you know what, junior? You’ll never know the momentary, but still genuine, thrill of realizing that the man buying a pack of Carltons ahead of you at the Store 24 in Kenmore Square is the weekend sports guy on Channel 5. I can testify that it’s a jolt of pleasure that can’t even compare with scoring a 100% playing “Through The Fire And Flames” on “Expert.”
(This video game reference is brought to you by Google. Google: helping the ignorant fake their way through things since 1998.)
Alas, Bob and Joyce are just the latest casualties in the media industry’s ongoing and necessary change of underwear. Once again, the “Broadcast News” vision of the future proved spot-on. The logic isn’t immediately obvious, but it’s tough to keep your job when you’ve become a beloved local institution. Career-wise you want to aim for a butter zone where you’re popular enough that the station will fight to keep you but not so important that your salary shoots up to the level where they have to choose between renewing your contract or having two-ply toilet paper in the washrooms.
Or maybe the key to success, oddly enough, is to have a terrible agent. “They offered you a $50,000-a-year bump,” Swifty reports, “but I managed to talk them into moving your parking space closer to the entrance instead.”
If you want to be able to keep making the payments on that lovely home in Belmont…take the parking space. You don’t want to be selling Ferraris in a Toyota economy.
The second reaction:
2) “Gee, it’s been ages since I actually watched the local news.”
Which spells out the problem, and the reason why the era of the Ron Burgundy is over. I still get my news from professional journalists, but I don’t get my news in a way that involves sitting down for thirty minutes at a specific time of day and watching ads for snow tires.
But that doesn’t mean I’m not sorry to see Bob and Joyce go. It’s sort of like when your old grammar school gets torn town. You haven’t even driven past it in ages, but you always enjoyed knowing that it was still there.
I keep forgetting to post this, so I thought what the heck: this time I’d remember. The panel schedule for the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder has been up for a couple of weeks. Here’s a list of all of the panels I’ll be participating in.
A few immediate reactions are inevitable. In no particular order:
1) I’ve got kind of a light schedule this year. I think during my busiest year, I wound up speaking on 12 of these panels. Usually, I’m on eight or nine. This year…six.
I’d be happy to pitch in on more panels if they ask me, but I ain’t complaining. All to often, there’s a marvelous panel going on and I’d love to attend just as a spectator…but dagnabbit, I’ve been counter-programmed and I’ll be spending those 90 minutes speaking instead of listening. This year, I ought to be able to enjoy more of the Conference from the back of the room.
2) I’ve got a nice little lineup, methinks. I’m pleased that the conference organizers have chosen not to call my bluff about what I insisted that I would do if I ever had to speak on another panel about Blogging. I would have needed to obtain a box of signal flares and I have absolutely no idea where I’d find a marine-supply store in mountainous area like Boulder/Denver.
It’s a mix of topics that I’m very comfortable with, topics that encourage me to take a couple of big risks, and at least one panel in which I expect that any surplus ego I might have picked up from a week of people at Macworld Expo telling me I’m fabulous ought to be filed down and countersunk quite cleanly.
I’m thinking specifically of the panel in which
3) I will be speaking on the subject of digital actors, alongside a four-time Emmy Award-winning executive producer of “The Simpsons” and a visual effects and dynamics programmer for Digital Domain who’s won an Academy Award. Twice.
I predict that this is the panel in which I will be introduced solely as a guy who converts old Macs into aquariums. I also predict that I will choose to speak last, and that I’ll spend my ten minutes teaching the crowd how to fold a single sheet of paper into a cube without making any cuts or using any glue. “Play to your strengths, kids,” is the message here.
4) As usual, I sent the Conference about a dozen ideas for panels (as requested). They actually put two or three of ‘em on the schedule…but I’m not on them. No sweat. The field-goal kicker tells the coach “You know what we should do? We should have someone take the ball and just run straight through the defensive line; maybe we’d even score a touchdown or something that way” and that might inded be a fab idea, but the 164-pound ex-soccer player might not be the best man for the job.
5) I came up with a topic that would have bamboozled the Conference into putting me on a panel with James Randi, Jello Biafra, and Mike Farrell, but they were too sharp for me. Damn and blast.
6) The radioactive power of my little Photoshopped portrait endures. I sent them (as requested) my bio and a couple of standard headshots for the conference program. But look at what they’re using:
Yup, someone visited Ihnatko.com and they vastly preferred the low-res bit of fun in the masthead to the “real” photos I’d provided.
I think this helps to explain why they never put me on panels about serious stuff, like the increasingly itchy connection between the ATA Alliance and the proliferation of compound-derived weapons in the Congo.
Hell, no, I’m not miffed. I’ve still yet to take a formal portrait that I’m truly happy with…so y’might as well have a little fun. My only concern is that it’s cropped so closely — and the quality of the printing in the program is usually so iffy — that I wonder if the gag will “read” properly. When they see me in person, will they think that I’ve dyed my naturally-gray hair with that Just For Men crap?
This is actually going to be an unusual Conference for me. This must be my tenth or eleventh appearance and it’s the first one in memory in which I will not have to work on some sort of massive project during the week. Usually, CoWA week directly precedes some sort of ungodly book deadline or a massive feature article comes due on Wednesday or something that forces me to run myself ragged…at altitude, no less.
But not this time. I might have a column or two to finish, but that’s no big deal. I’m really looking forward to just kicking back and enjoying a week off (more or less) in a beautiful part of the country surrounded by interesting new people.
All of these panels are open to the public, so feel free to come on by. I shall be blogging, I shall be Twittering, and I shall also be recording and posting my bits of the panels.
Now that the 1 has flipped over to 2 on my novelty “Numbers In Strict Numerical Sequence-A-Day Calendar” I can call your attention to a couple of goofs I had going. It was an unusually active April Fool’s Day for me…so much so that my Hand-Blackening Soap (”Indistinguishable from the genuine article…guaranteed ice-breaker”) remained in its original packaging and will be stored away for another year.
First, my pal Jason iChatted me with a preview of what he had planned for his TV site, TeeVee.net. On April 1, TeeVee would become Radeeo, the blog that would have existed in its place if television had never been invented and radio had remained the single dominant form of entertainment and information throughout the 20th century.
I thought it was a fabulous wheeze, and it immediately inspired a brilliantly funny idea. And when I completely and spectacularly failed to figure out how to make that idea work, I went with my second idea.
This Radeeo piece really was going to be it for April Fool’s Day. But at a little after midnight on April 1, I impulsively typed something into my Twitter window and clicked “Update”:
A few seconds later, I saw that message in my Twitter feed. I immediately thought “Oh. Oh, dear…I seem to have started an April Fool’s prank that might inconvenience me for most of the whole rest of the day.”
Well, Twitter seemed to be a neat medium for perpetrating an ongoing April Fool’s gag. Fortunately, the timing worked out so that by the time I had to “leave for the airport,” it was time for me to go to bed, and my flight wouldn’t “touch down” until after I’d woken up.
So I spent the day publishing a nice, tidy little serial adventure, in about four dozen 140-character chapters. The first post starts right about here. Twitter posts appear in stack order, so start at the bottom of the page and click the “Newer” button to get to the next installments.
I prolly ought to archive them here in proper order…but it’s late and I still need to finish a Sun-Times column.
A heartening array of responses to the first draft of my business cards, sensation-seekers…many thanks. There were a wide variety of reactions and I can confidently acknowledge that all of them are spot-on. Particularly:
“Awesome…this is totally you.” Cool. This is a major design goal. Speaking about “the Ihnatko brand” without adding implicit air-quotes gives me diaper rash, honest to God. But the fact remains that I do have a brand. My business is based on being the only person in the world who can deliver an Andy Ihnatko-ey sort of style and perspective on a topic, as opposed to one of a thousand who could list all of the ways you can boldface a word on a webpage…so it’s important that my business card duly represents my peculiar form of fabulosity.
“Are you sure that this is a professional-looking business card?” Which is a good point. You can get so creative that your business card looks like an arts-and-crafts project. You don’t want your overall design statement to be “Wow! Look what happens when I click on this button…Golly!”
I do have some extra freedom thanks to the circumstances under which someone gets my business card. It’s almost never “Why don’t you call me on Monday? I think I can convince you that IhnatCorp is Mullet County’s most competitive and comprehensive solution for roadkill removal and disposal.” By the time cards are swapped, the transaction’s more or less locked. Either the company has agreed to mail me some hardware for review, or an editor/producer/conference organizer and I have decided that we want to work together. It’s just a matter of making sure they know how to reach me.
“That’s totally not going to get lost in a pocketful of business cards.” Another design goal. At the end of a four-day conference, I have this huge stack of other people’s cards. Sometimes, the reason why LambadaWare’s software gets reviewed a month before DiscoSoft’s is because Lambada’s card had a bright orange back and a punch-out of a little dancing guy. As I riffled through my cards on the plane ride home, my eye was drawn to that design. I instantly remembered “Oh, right; they have that really cool new presentation tool” and thought about that open slot on my editorial calendar coming up in a week’s time.
“My eyes didn’t know where to go.” Yup, that’s no good. Graphic design is all about user interface. You can exert a form of mind control over the observer by choosing a layout and color scheme that more or less forces someone to look here, then here, and then make sure that they take in this.
“The background is way too busy.” Right, and that’s just a first go of this. The photo is one of my “standard” portraits, available to folks who need a shot for a conference program or whatever.
I’m sort of waffling on putting my mug on the card. Pluses: I have sort of a unique “look” and so seeing me again on the business card ought to help you remember who I am and what we talked about three days earlier at the trade show; also, we come back to that subject of “branding.” Negative: putting your photo on your business card is the sort of d-baggy, loserish thing that Jerry Lundgaard would do.
If I do it, it’ll be more of a design thing than a photo thing. Which is why I homed in on that particular photo. It’s not a “Hey, look at me!” sort of shot…it’s just sort of an interesting image.
But I agree that it’s sort of a busy background. I softened it a bit by desaturating everything but the eyes in the sculpture, but it’s probably a bit too noisy…even for the back side of the card.
“There’s no space on the back for the recipient to jot down notes.” Very true, but I don’t know how to process that problem. If a business card is going to have two sides, then it has to have a clear Front and Back. If you put too much white on the back, it looks like the front.
This is an open problem and the answer begins with my deciding whether or not I care.
Well, this is why I enjoy graphic design. You don’t slap down your first design and write a check to the print shop. Nope, you keep noodling at it. You work up an idea, decide what you like about it, and carry those elements over to the next design. The stuff that doesn’t work — hell, even the stuff that you’re just not excited about — gets left behind.
I like the phonetic spelling of my name. That’s a nice little graphical element (and a useful one). That stays. Here’s the next evolution of that first design:
You immediately see the results of a few decisions: I like the phonetic thing as a design element, so it’s bigger and more prominent. Plenty of white space so someone can jot down “Remove this person from the contact lists on all future press events,” etc. And the background has been reduced to just my portrait, which in the printed version would look a shade or two lighter than it does on your screen.
If this design makes it to the next round, I’ll prolly wind up shooting a new photo specifically for the card. Same sort of shot, different expression. And wearing sunglasses in a promotional photo seems kinda…well, I don’t want to say because if I say it, someone will send me a photo of one of my favorite authors wearing sunglasses in a promotional photo.
But I’m still firmly in “screwing around with ideas” mode. Here’s something I whipped up for fun the other night:
I like it a hell of a lot. Yup, it’s a “quote” of the classic Marlboro Man design. But this wouldn’t look out of place as a sticker on a guitar case backstage at a Lansdowne Street club in 1988, either.
This is a relatively quick-and-dirty implementation. If this went forward, I’d smooth out a lot of those shapes to make it look like vector art (even though this was a fairly simple Photoshop job). The trouble with this design is that any thoughts of using a cheap “100 business cards for $30″ service goes RIGHT out the window. It’d only work as a process color job, where I hand the printer three separations (one piece for each of the three colors) and pray to God that it traps out properly. It’s v.tricky to have the grey butt up against the red without winding up with some sort of halo between the two areas. Either the two separations don’t register properly, or you “trap” it wrong and the grey and red bleed into each other a little, resulting in a maroon sort of outline.
Maybe I’ll do this as vinyl stickers. Do guitar players read my stuff? Are they willing to pay $24 per sticker, to make sure I come out even? Or $42 per, so I can maybe finally buy myself the “Calvin & Hobbes” omnibus?
Onward and upward. Admittedly I’ve tanked my original goal of placing an order for new business cards 48 hours after pulling the ripcord on Adobe Illustrator, but with any luck, by the time I settle on a design I’ll have left the business entirely and the problem will have solved itself.
Okay, no more messing around. New business cards. I mean it this time!!!
Seriously. I haven’t had “real” business cards made in…in…I actually don’t think I’ve had any made at any time in this millennium. Good Lord. I ran out of the last of my “good” ones a while back and in a panic, had a box made overnight at OfficeMax on the weekend before a big conference. And they were so lame that I had a red ink rubber stamp made at the same time, so I could hand-print an apology for their overall shabbiness on the back of each one.
They predate my current phone number and email address. I can’t hand it over until after standing there like a mook crossing things out and scribbling in new information.
I started using Moo Cards as a stopgap. And frankly, I’d be happy to keep on using them indefinitely. They’re simple, they’re cheap, and they’re quite pretty. The only trouble with Moo cards is also their most charming attribute: their oddball, stick-of-gum size. At a Biz Card-Intense Function — such as a trade show, or one of those deals where the company rents a hotel suite for the day and sees about a dozen different pundits — those little Moos can get lost in your recipient’s pocket or card organizer…and Moos don’t fit in the little automatic business card scanners that power-carders tend to use.
So my solution is to make myself some jumbo Moos. A color photo on one side, and a few simple lines of digital and analog URLs on the back.
Here’s what I’ve come up with for the front. What do you think? After fooling around with a few different ideas, I decided to throw a phonetic spelling of my name on there as a graphical element. Natcherly, it’ll be spelled out in black-and-white the normal way on the back, so if your complaint is “But will people know how to spell your name, from this card?” then don’t sweat it.
An artifact from The Ihnatko Archives. It’s my own artwork: this appeared on the back of a tee shirt. It also represents a pretty bold case study illustrating how great organizations can crumble.
Let’s say that your Mom’s next-door neighbor has a big riding mower, and truth be told, he really enjoys driving it around. So much so that when he’s done cutting his own half-acre, he’s still got a lot of counter-horticultural bloodlust left inside him and he goes ahead and cuts your Mom’s lawn, too.
How do you react to this? Do you:
(a) Thank him kindly for being so nice, and also surprise him with a $50 gift card to the Outback Steakhouse sometime during the summer as a tangible and tasty symbol of your sincere gratitude? Or do you
(b) Stand in his mower’s path just as he’s about to enter your Mom’s property, wave him to turn off the engine, and then make him sign a liability waiver? And then ask him for proof that he’s bonded and insured? And insist that he stop and phone you before entering the sunny side of the yard, so you can drive over and verify that he’s raised the blades to prevent burnouts? And ask him if he really thinks that a tee shirt and shorts conveys the sort of polished appearance that properly represents your Mom and her household?
The first attitude is the reason why the Boston Computer Society was the largest computer user group in the world for the first fifteen years of its existence. The second one is the reason why it died a deathly death just shy of its 20th anniversary.
I was an active volunteer with the BCS’ Macintosh special-interest group for many years and I can honestly say that it was one of the happiest chapters of my life. The BCS•Mac’s Somerville office was like a clubhouse, like Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton’s Raccoon Lodge. You’d drop by just about anytime you wanted, and you’d discover cool people to hang out with, cooler hardware to play with, and some jobs that needed doing.
Example: I came in one afternoon and discovered that Apple had donated a 300 dpi (!!!) scanner. Awesome. I unboxed it, hooked it up to the lab’s Mac II, and spent the whole afternoon playing with the scanning software. I got a whole mess of experience in digitizing photos, the BCS•Mac got their new hardware installed and a whole drawer full of graphics and images scanned…it was one of those mutually-beneficial relationships.
I mean, hell…they even let me be an artist. I have the lumpy physique and the Skinner box-influenced personality that instantly communicate “Of course I can figure out why your your office WiFi base station isn’t showing up anywhere.” But you don’t really look at me and think “Yes, that’s the guy to design our organization’s tee shirts.” And yet, that’s what I did, for nearly every Macworld Expo.
This thing was different from scanning photos or setting up a network. Actual money was involved. But still, it was a completely low-key operation. When an Expo was about a month away, I’d kick a couple of ideas around with the leader of the Mac group, draw up the winning design in MacDraw or Illustrator, take it to Harvard Square to be rendered on a then-exotic 1200 dpi phototypesetter, and then go to Chinatown and drop it off at the silkscreeners’ shop. Two weeks later, boxes of Hanes Beefy-T’s littered the office. Thoughout, there was the same supportive attitude that the BCS brought to every job that needed to be done. If a volunteer was eager to jump onto a handcar and start pumping, then the leadership’s job was to grease up the rails and get out of their way.
As usual, there was never even any need to get the central office involved. The central administrative offices of the Boston Computer Society were located downtown in offices at One Center Plaza but really, the dozens and dozens of BCS Special Interest Groups more or less ran themselves. Center Plaza’s chief duty was to divvy up the annual membership fees and other sources of income into the subgroups’ operational budgets. Occasionally, they could also be counted upon to bail SIG leaders out of jail when they were off representing the BCS at a trade show and they got confused as to what level of alcohol saturation constituted a DUI in that part of the country. Overall, though, it was a hands-off relationship.
But a funny thing happened to the group in the Nineties. If you wanted to be charitable about it, you could say that Center Plaza’s salaried directors saw an opportunity to evolve the BCS from a shoeless nonprofit into a true educational institution and a valuable consumer brand, which would in turn guarantee that the Boston Computer Society could continue its important mission into the year 2000 and beyond. And therefore, for the first time in the group’s history, they insisted on running the operation like a formal, hierarchical, accountable business.
The uncharitable — but probably more accurate — way to describe the overall change would be to note a universal truth: the only thing more annoying than an organization that requires your constant attention and input is one that runs just fine without your interference, thank you very much. Wreaking untold havoc via petty, random, and incessant meddling is much, much more satisfying. At least then you can see that you’re having an impact on the operation, you know?
The Mac Group was the Boston Computer Society’s superstar performer. But technically, the BCS•Mac’s money came from Center Plaza. So if the salaried employees at HQ wanted to give themselves the pleasant, nougaty, leadership-ish sensations of being an absolutely essential part of the BCS•Mac’s success, they found an easy way to go about it: they demanded that all Mac Group expenses greater than, say, nine dollars be submitted to Center Plaza and be subjected to a formal approval process.
Every Macworld Expo, the tee shirts sold out and made money for the group. No worries there. Regardless, our silkscreeners’ invoice had to be approved by Central Plaza before the shirts could be printed. Here, my sorrows began…and my career as a tee shirt designer ended.
I thought a Batman-themed tee shirt would be a damned cool thing for the 1995 summer Expo. The first “Batman” sequel was about to be released and the posters and ads were all over the place. I designed a two-sided tee, with a parody of the Batman logo on the front. And on the back, I created one of my most satisfying pieces of artwork ever: Batman, perched confidently and menacingly over Boston’s landmark CITGO sign in Kenmore Square. Very dramatic up-angle shot, with his cape spilling and flapping over the front of the sign. I’d morphed the CITGO triangle into an approximation of the BCS•Mac’s sigil.
I had a few weeks to put the design together and I finished my Adobe Illustrator artwork well ahead of schedule. “Awesome,” the head of BCS•Mac pronounced. “We can get this to the silkscreeners just as soon as Center Plaza cuts us a check.”
Two weeks later, we still hadn’t heard back from the mothership.
Y’see…there had been Meetings.
“We can’t allow you to produce this shirt,” they finally proclaimed. “Batman is a registered trademark. Do you think you can get a signed clearance from DC Comics?”
I wasn’t entirely certain that I could, no. But I wasn’t the least bit worried that I’d actually need one, either. I knew enough about intellectual property laws to know that so long as you could provide a trademark/copyright holder’s attorney with enough reasons to advise against a lawsuit, you were bulletproof. A low print run, a one-off design, modifications of the source material, and a nod towards Fair Use was all it took. Any sane lawyer would look at this shirt and realize that there was no money in this prosecution…assuming that they could even win.
But this time, it wasn’t the sanity of someone else’s attorneys I needed to worry about.
“Look, it isn’t undeniably Batman,” I said, fairly. “It’s merely a Batman-ish superhero. You could just as easily make a case that it’s Moon Knight, or Spawn…or really, any other cape-and-cowl superhero.”
“We’re not really comfortable with your using the CITGO sign, either,” BCS Central replied.
As the clock ticked down and Macworld Expo loomed closer and closer, Center Plaza fired off micro-edict after micro-edict. From “Batman can’t be the dominant figure” — damn, out went the back-panel art I was so proud of — to “You have to round off the points of his ‘ears’ to make him more distinctly ‘not Batman’,” to “You need to add editorial content to the design, to give it extra legal protection” to…to…
Well, all the way to my vowing “If I live to be a THOUSAND, I will NEVER design another tee shirt for the Boston Computer Society!!!”
I think the thing that finally broke my spirit was their testy demand that the shirt also include the Boston Computer Society’s formal mission statement. My dear reader, if you’ve ever made use of the phrase “Are you f***ing SH***ING me?!?” then well, you have me to thank. I invented it right there on the phone, when no other response seemed suitable.
Over the next two or three years, One Center Plaza alienated so many of its most productive volunteers through endless bureaucracy and mindless micromanagement that all of the people who were actually keeping the subgroups running got fed up and left.
Yup, myself included. The tee shirt thing was just the first push down a long slide. I stopped doing artwork, stopped writing for the monthly magazine, stopped pitching in to help run the monthly meetings. Ultimately, I even stopped hanging around the Mac Group’s office. It wasn’t my clubhouse anymore. Spontaneity and excitement and a sense of purpose had been driven out, replaced by rules, forms, and a deadlined proposal process that provided ample time for lots and lots and lots of valuable discussion and feedback on every idea.
The functions of these active volunteers were usually taken over by people who needed to be paid, and who didn’t work half as hard. Thus, my vow to never design another shirt for the BCS was ultimately in vain. I had barely not designed the next two shirts (I was very pleased to note that they sucked, and went mostly unsold) before the Boston Computer Society died a deathly death.
The rise of the Web certainly contributed to the BCS’ collapse. All of a sudden, computer users could get advice from strangers without having to drive through the snow to a lecture hall at MIT on a specific day of the month. But I’m convinced that a scaled-back group would have endured to this very day. Because a user group doesn’t need to be run like a business. It needs to be run as though the organization sees volunteers as assets, and not liabilities.
Better, they should see them as people.
Postscript: and of course, the BCS does endure, in the form of BMAC. For all intents and purposes, this is the Boston Computer Society Macintosh User Group monthly meeting. Same place, same schedule, many of the same people, even. Except that these meetings are actually happening. Which is the best revenge of all, don’t you think?
Postscript to the Postscript: I was suddenly reminded of the true fetid cherry that topped this whole miserable experience: the silkscreening job was awful. I’d rendered those gradients to print at a specific dot-screen angle to make for smooth transitions without any loss of detail. The yellow logo on the front had been specially trapped with a holdout, to make for a nice, intense color.
I got the first shirt. The back was printed like mud. The front…well, the front was comical. To get a nice, intense yellow without the black fabric bleeding through, my artwork called for the logo to be printed in white with a thin layer of yellow on top of it. That’s a standard trick. Instead, the screener had thrown away the “white” layer and kept adding layer after layer after layer of yellow. This had two effects: (1) Indeed, the black didn’t bleed through a bit, but (2) the logo contained at least an eighth of an inch of built-up color and caused the whole front to pucker and sag.
This was way out of character for our usual silkscreener in Chinatown. If I handed them a design that they knew wasn’t going to print properly, they’d mentor me through the changes that needed to be made. If my design was “close enough,” they’d find a way to make it work. And the shirts were always perfect.
Ah. But the BCS•BAT shirt wasn’t printed by our usual guys. No, see, BCS Central had insisted that the job go out for competitive bids. You know…to make sure it was a fair and open process.
The winner of this Fair and Open Process? Some friend of a BCS boardmember.
So you’ll understand why I wasn’t exactly teary-eyed when the Boston Computer Society finally went out of business. I’d tell the story of how this new regime fired me from the monthly newsletter, but (a) it’s a long tale, and (b) it’s not possible to make the BCS central management look more like a bunch of paltroons than I already have.
(It’s like “Tora! Tora! Tora!”, see…except, you know, with pants.)
Nominations are closed on the 2008 Internet Pants Of The Year Pageant. I must say that I’m terribly pleased with the enthusiasm that this experiment has been met with, nearly from the very beginning. In fact, as I write this, satellite trucks from two different local network affiliates are parked in the street outside my house, with up-and-coming mid-market broadcast journalists are scraping their teeth with their fingernails as they prepare to throw a live IPotY update to the studio at the top of the hour.
Circumstances and overwhelming popular demand have led to my making this into a true competition, with not one, but three entrants. We have:
The pair I bought at a local sporting-goods store over the weekend. This was pretty much the perfect clothes-shopping experience for the average American male. (1) I bought them at a store not known for selling clothes — a hardware store would have been optimal, but a sporting-goods store works, too; (2) I bought them chiefly because they were dirt-cheap ($35 clearanced down to $19); and most critically (3) They were identical to the pants I was wearing at the time.
“You bought that didn’t change or expand your wardrobe in any way whatsoever,” you’re saying. “Nice going.” You know I hate to reinforce stereotypes but I’m willing to bet that the men and the women are putting different inflections on those last two words.
Next up, we have
The People’s Pants. You give your audience a hand in the proceedings and that translates to…what, people? That’s right: synergy. Allowing my readers to vote via independent nominations on what pants I should buy should allow me to leverage my brand across the Internet, print, streaming, and mobile domains.
One pair of pants stood shoulders above the rest, so to speak. It won lots of recommendations on Twitter and lots of recommendations here on the Celestial Waste of Bandwidth. Order has been duly placed.
Finally,
The Mom Pants. A couple of people recommended pants from a specific retailer with internet, catalogue, and brick-and-mortar storefronts. I suddenly remembered that my Mom had given me a gift card to this same establishment for my birthday. I’d been carrying it in my wallet for months, awaiting a day when I could hit one of this operation’s stores here in New England.
“Foul…foul!!!” you cry. “How can any pants compete against a birthday gift from your Mom?” Good point, and that doesn’t even touch on the fact that these pants cost me just $5 in shipping after I applied the gift card to the purchase.
There is indeed an argument to be made that I should not be more fond of a gift from my beloved Mother than I am from something that was just sort of chosen randomly from a pile somewhere. Those arguments are made by cold-hearted bastards, for which both the Internet and the adjustible-rate mortgage business is so rightly famous.
In fact, the Mom pants just arrived today. I have taken a series of “unboxing” photos, to give my readers that thrilling “You Are There” sensation that acts as a fine improvement over the sensation “You Are Here In Your Office, Doing The Actual Work Which You Were Hired To Perform.”
If I were to announce that identities of these three pageant finalists before the results were published, I’d have the three pants companies lobbying me with gift baskets, press junkets, offers to purchase property from me at grossly-inflated rates…that sort of stuff.
I can’t have that. If I keep the names a secret, there’s a good chance that every pants company will send me free stuff, just to hedge their bets. That sounds much better, doesn’t it?
Two notices, sensation-seekers. First, the site’s performance issues should be resolved shortly. Apparently, my host’s upstream provider was performing some maintenance, and a few nooks and crannies of the Empire are being hassled by uppity Skywalkers and their no-account friends. I am assured, however, that all of these issues will be behind us once there’s been a demonstration of the awesome might of this fully armed and operational battle station.
A kind link from Daring Fireball came at precisely the wrong time, o’course. Though I suppose I could turn the service slowdown to my PR advantage. In the New Media marketplace, no cachet is more desirable than “this site or service is so incredibly unbelievably popular that you practically need a reservation to get in. It is so very popular, furthermore, that this reservation will not be honored unless you happen to be a celebrity on the order of a recently-disgraced Senator or greater and paparazzi are available to photograph you as you cross over the club’s logo on the carpet.”
Yes, that’s an 80% lie, minimum. But lying about your stats is another one of those knacks that hopeful New Media moguls need to master.
•∞•
In other news, I impulsively started an important social, commercial, and sartorial experiment over there on my Twitter feed the other day and I probably ought to bring you folks in on it.
“Stick my head in a basket full of rat traps, or go shopping for a few pairs of casual pants? So hard for the average male to decide…” I Tweeted, dreading an upcoming errand. For indeed I need pants, and indeed I would probably prefer to experience five seconds of intense pain all at once than suffer the same discomfort, stretched out across three hours and five stores and innumerable snide, giggling salesclerks.
One or two people suggested that I just go clothes-shopping online, but I balked. Buying pants without the benefit of a quick road test is a risky proposition. Why do so many designers of men’s pants fail to understand that our ladyparts are different from a lady’s ladyparts? That’s the impression I get when I’m there in the fitting room with a prospective pair of pants. They seem to fit fine until I try to walk or sit in them. At that point, I realize what one of those six superfluous pockets is for. Apparently, you’re meant to detach your balls and stick them in that side pouch next to your iPhone until you take your pants off again…at which time you’re certainly going to need the things back for the upcoming action.
But I got enough specific recommendations that I saw the opportunity for a grand experiment:
THE 2008 INTERNET PANTS OF THE YEAR PAGEANT!
(Damn…if ever a line justified the banished-to-Hell “Flash” tag…)
Here it is: recommend me a pair of pants. I will purchase ONE pair from all those recommended — using the online store’s sizing tools, if any — and then carefully report on the success or failure of said item.
I am willing to let Internet consensus choose my pants, and Web 2.0 deliver them to me. But there are a few rules:
1) Pants must be available for purchase via the Internet. It’s OK if they’re also available via brick-and-mortar stores but purchase will be made online. Part of this is a test of buying pants without trying them on first.
2) Style is “casual.” Yes, there’s an awfully wide latitude. Suffice to say that boring, “good for school, or church!” pants are perfectly acceptable. But so are the kinds which are wired up to act as a WiFi repeater, and those which can be reversed to safety-orange for your Community Service days.
The basic style guideline is that if they shouldn’t be so upscale and fashionable that I won’t want to put them in the daily pants rotation. And if they’re so Alternative that I don’t think I can get away with wearing them to the wedding of a distant cousin — church service only, no reception — then that’s going too far.
3) Black/dark colors preferred but not required.
4) Price shouldn’t be so high as to provoke dumbfounded reactions from a parent who’s all-too-aware of how much a freelance journalist makes. Pants retailing at $60 and above had better arrive at my house hugging the sublime buttocks of the pre- or post-pregnancy Jessica Alba.
5) No kilts. Kilts are only pants if you were one on each leg. Even then, you’re probably going to create a bit of a stir at your next school board meeting without a strategically-swaddled towel.
So if you have a pair of Internet Pants to recommend, go ahead and recommend ‘em. Call for nominees closes at 11:59 PM EST on Tuesday evening.
How do you define “Hero”? Probably not “a man who spends a couple of hours running a series of routine, unremarkable errands.”
I mean, dammit. In a world in which buildings catch on fire and innocent citizens are routinely held at gunpoint, an average, good-hearted man just can’t catch a break.
But I’m proud to say that I ran the hell out of those errands anyway, expecting neither acknowledgement nor to serve as an example to succeeding generations. I was greatly amused by various consumer items along the way; how fortunate you are that I have both an iPhone and this blog!
Our first Product of Amusement was discovered near the checkout line at the supermarket. Examine this photo for ironic/comedic potential and see if you came to the same answer that as I did:
Right: “Most LARPers I’ve seen don’t need any special accessories like this. They manage to achieve this effect solely by stomping around a state park in the same filthy tabard and foam-rubber codpiece they’ve been wearing since bought ‘em off of eBay a couple of summers ago.”
You’ve never heard of Live-Action Role-Playing? Witness:
I freely acknowledge the following facts: (1) I am supporting a meanspirited and largely-unfounded stereotype of LARPers as smelly weirdos; (2) I have no idea what I’m talking about, as I’ve never met a LARPer to my knowledge; (3) any active hobby that encourages people to engage their creativity, meet and socialize with a diverse group, and make stuff instead of passively sitting at home observing other people going out there and living life is to be praised, not mocked…particularly not from the safe anonymity of a blog; and (4) I’m a bit of a hypocrite, because I enjoy (and often am in awe of) the works of cosplayers who really put their shoulders into it.
At the same time, I must cite Title 5 of the Freak Flag Compact: failure to acknowledge that what you do might seem weird to open-minded, good-hearted outsiders can result in revocation of your permit to operate said flag in public.
Speaking of Hobbies Of Yours That Other Folks Might Not Understand, we have the next product that caused me to giggle inappropriately:
This sort of illustrates why anyone who’s marketing a product needs to run those proposed product names through the ol’ Urban Dictionary first. Just to make sure that the word means what you think it means…and nothing else.
These first two photos just go to show you that the Internet will ruin your perceptions of the pure, innocent world that exists immediately above and to the left of your screen. So let’s just move on to the third and final study in the sequence:
I just stared at this one for a solid moment or two as I struggled to comprehend. I still have most of my original hair and I never had lice as a kid. So I’ve never had a smooth-skinned dome. But what is it about a bald head that might require that you take a proactive stance on the subject of “freshness”?
I mean…what sort of horrific odors or fluids does the scalp excrete that your hair normally holds in? It’s a creepy-enough mystery that I think I’ll be starting a daily regime of Rogaine, just so I can delay finding out for as many years as possible.
My second area of confusion: I was under the impression that completely bald men who took an active grooming interest in their baldness used a big shoeshine cloth instead of a dinky little wet-nap sort of thing.
You know, a chamois a couple of feet long that you grip with one hand each on side of your head? And then you vigorously slide it from left ear to right ear and back again and occasionally snap it, over and over again until you hear that <i>squeaky-squeaky-squeak</i> sort of noise that reassures you “my head is now so glossy and smooth to the touch that there’s no chance that Mr. Benny Hill will chafe his right hand as he slaps the top of my skull at a comically-high frequency.”
"Andy Ihnatko: Living Person. American Journalist." Yeah, man. Doesn't that have a great "Walker, Texas Ranger" standing stoically on a wind-swept prarie kind of vibe about it? I want that on my tombstone.
Oh, right...the "Living Person" bit. Well, you know what I meant.
You throw out all the multiple copies of comics you bought during the “speculator boom” in the Nineties.
