FunctionalAmbivalent

Plying Possum

Here's the fashion tip of the day:

Possum wool looks great and you can wear it anywhere.

Go here for possum wool sweaters, socks, scarves, and caps.

As for wearing possum fur anywhere: I give you nipple warmers.  You heard me: Nipple warmers.  Just in case you prefer furry to erect nipples.

Imagine You're an Adguy and You Need a Tagline for a New Product

Something that says it all, that is enticing and memorable.  Something that speaks to what marketers like to call "an unserved need category."

"The New Bathroom Experience."

Apparently, after focus groups and mall tests, it was determined that there were people for whom a "new bathroom experience" is an attractive proposition, especially if it involves pulsating jets and warm-air dry.

This is a fine example of why I'm not in the advertising business anymore.  To get to "The New Bathroom Experience," smart people had to have creative meetings, exchange ideas, brainstorm, throw a bunch of stuff against the wall and see what sticks...well, maybe that's not an appropriate metaphor.  But in the end (another bad metaphor) someone had to write this stuff.  I'm glad every single day that it's not me.

Creative Destruction

For those of us old enough to remember when there was just one phone company, the impending death of AT&T can not help but be something of a...well...something of...well, I don't know.  Something, anyway.

There was a time when Bell Telephone, which was what we all called AT&T back then, pretty much ruled the world.  You want proof? There's a great story about the early days of the Internet that shows AT&T's power.  The story is featured in the book Where Wizards Stayed Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner.

The Internet was, remember, developed as an alternative, highly survivable communications system for the Department of Defense.  The whole idea was to have lots of different routes through which signals could travel so that if, say, Kansas City suddenly went up in smoke, important government messages could still get through.

So the the guys at DARPA -- a wacky bunch of computer scientists working in the Dr. Strangelove Pentagon -- came up with this idea of computer networking over a web, rather than by the straight-line method of standard telephones. 

To test their idea, they build a couple of routers that were about the size of semi trucks.  They hauled one out west somewhere so they could plug it into the phone lines and see if the two computers could talk to eacho other. 

Great idea, except that AT&T had a rule against anyone else's equipment being attached to their phone lines.  AT&T told the computer scientists to go pound sand.

Well, you've gotta figure: National security, the Cold War...a couple of pretty pleases from the Pentagon and AT&T would climb on board. 

Except that AT&T was a huge monopoly and wouldn't budge, even if it meant nuclear vulnerability.  The whole American Cold War infrastruture had to find a different way to test the Internet.

Now AT&T is being bought by what was, back when, a local phone subsidiary of AT&T.  AT&T will survive as a brand, but as a company it's going to cease to exist.

Wow.

Business Fun: Why I Have Two FedEx Accounts and Won't Use Either of Them Ever Again

One of my clients is a biotech start up.  Customers send DNA samples in from all over the world.  We have a distributor who does a lot of business in the U.S.  The distributor needed labels pre-addressed to our lab to include in shipping kits they provide for their customers in the U.S. 

Fed Ex, being the service-oriented firm that it is, refused to ship U.S. labels to Canada, even though the labels were then going to be sent back to the U.S. for use.

So my client's customer called to see if we could get the labels printed and sent to our location in the U.S., so we could forward them to Canada.  I volunteered.

"That's easy," I said.  "I'll get it taken care of right away."

And it seemed like it would be easy, too.  We already have a FedEx account, and I imagined a three minute phone call.  I called FedEx and explained what I needed.

"Got it," said the FedEx rep, and two days later incorrectly addressed labels arrived in my office.

OK, anyone can make a mistake.  The labels had our address and FedEx number on them, instead of our distributor's FedEx number. 

I called again, explained carefully, and the rep said, sure, OK, sorry about the mix-up.

Four days later, another set of labels arrived, the same as the last batch of labels.  Our address, our FedEx number.

By this time our customer is getting kind of edgy. 

"We need those labels," they said, "if we're going to send you more samples."

So back on the phone I went where I discovered that FedEx could do any two of the three things that we needed: Labels pre-addressed to us, send the labels to us, or put a Canadian account number on the labels.  They could not manage all three.

So, after another hour on the phone, I discovered a loophole: If I opened a new account with a slightly different adddress than our existing account, I could get the new adddress pre-printed on the labels, get the Canadian account number printed in the third-party shipper space, and get the labels sent to the adddress of the existing account.

Arriving at this inelegant solution took a total of two weeks and about two hours on the phone, resulting in pre-printed U.S. labels being, in effect, smuggled into Canada.

When my personal FedEx account executive for the new account called to say hello, welcome to the FedEx family, he wanted to know if I had any questions.  I explained what I had just gone through, and asked him why Fed Ex couldn't get the right address and the right number on the labels. 

"Oh, well, it's really quite easy," he said.  "Our computers won't do that."

Well, now it makes sense.

So That Would Make Vice President Cheney Colonel Cathcart, And President Bush General Dreedle, Right?

In his 1961 novel, Catch 22, Joseph Heller created a character named Milo Minderbinder, a mess officer who sidestepped the standard army provisioning channels to bring the enlisted men a higher quality of chow.  As Milo got more and more into black market trading, he seemed to forget that the war was anything but a consumer of goods and services that he could supply and profit from.  He started trading with enemy, eventually contracting with the Germans to strafe his own airfield. 

Catch 22 was, at the time of its publication, an example of absurd satire -- a whole book full of things that would never, ever happen, but that made a larger satirical point about the ridiculousness of war.

Yeah, well...

Halliburton, which is currently under criminal investigation for violating the American embargo against charter Axis of Evil member Iran, just landed another big contract in Iran.

Akbar Torkan, managing director of the Pars Oil and Gas company, said Halliburton had won a tender to drill two phases of the South Pars gas field in the Gulf, which sits on the world’s biggest reservoir of natural gas.

“Halliburton and Oriental are final winners of the tender for drilling South Pars phases nine and 10,” he told the ISNA students’ news agency.

Halliburton doesn't think it's doing nothing illegal, since it's channeling the work through offshore subsidiaries.  I think that's a pretty fine, "depends on what your definition of 'is' is" legal point.  Don't you think the White House and Congressional Republicans should publicly condemn Halliburton for trading with the enemy, and then stop channeling billions of dollars to Halliburton for logistical services in Iraq?

Of course they should.  They just won't.

That's some catch, that Catch 22.

Simplifying Christmas

We all know them: The people who drive themselves into frenzies during the three-month Christmas holiday.  Just before Halloween, I had a woman come up to me and say, "I'm done with my Christmas shopping."  Her eyes glowed with a kind of menace, as if she were a predator of some kind smelling blood.

"I'm working on my decorating scheme," she said.  "I wasn't satisfied with last yer."

Psychology Today has an interesting article on people like her.  The article is wrapped around a java applet that enables readers to find a close-by therapist to talk them down out of their Christmas trees.  The article tells the stories about people who lose all persepctive on Christmas, and why they do it.  It's starts out with the tale of Frank Pittman, who wrapped his whole sense of self-worth around creating the perfect Beef Wellington for Christms dinner, and who went off the deep-end when the kids didn't like it.

...increasingly, we package our expectations of family love into the holidays. We want the occasions to be "perfect" and we want all our dreams--of connection, harmony, joy and bliss--to come true. We willingly go to a great deal of trouble for the season's slew of holidays--Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and, of course, Christmas--precisely because our expectations are so heavily tinseled.

In fact, we count on the holidays to compensate for the rest of the year. "I wanted to make up to the family for not having been a good enough father and uncle all year," the Atlanta-based Pittman confides. The disastrous dinner made him vow then and there to do that in different ways. He now puts a lot less energy into Christmas and much more into the rest of the year. "It's worked out a lot better," he reports.

My wife and I have always travelled for Christmas, but this year we're staying put and having a tiny portion of our large families in for a few days.  I'm cooking a Christmas goose because I like the sound of it, a culinary spectacular that has Beef Wellington possibilities if someone doesn't think it's the best thing they've ever had.

While we're trying hard not to lose our shit completely, we're having some trouble deciding what standard of elegance/civility we're going to apply.  My idea of preparing for houseguests is laying in a couple of extra bottles of Knob Creek, making sure we're stocked with firewood, and wiping the dust off the TV screen.  My wife's plan is somewhat more detailed, involving the installation of new bathroom fixtures, the loss of ten pounds, and cleaning to the point of creating a surgically sterile environment.

Despite appearances, we've been simplifying Christmas for years.  It's like paddling upstream, but by ruthlessly cutting away at literal and figurative clutter we've managed to keep from turning into those people who start their shopping at 6 AM the day after Thanksgiving. 

We started cutting back years ago when doting grandparents started showering our children with dozens of big, plastic toys that had an entertainment half-life of about twenty-minutes, after which they became jut more stuff to fight over.  As I recall, it took four of us over an hour to open presents that year, which stuck us as maybe a bit much.

Grandmothers and grandfathers were gently told to chose more carefully, we dialed-back our own buying, and we arranged with our many siblings to draw names for which sibling would give to which sibling each year, enabling quality over quantity and cutting the UPS bill by 80%. 

Every year another complexity rears its ugly head, and every year we hack mercilessly at it, trying to keep it out of our lives: Competitive wine buying, insanely complicated side dishes, computer-operated lighting.

This year, our gift of simplicity is that we're not traveling.  We've vowing, like Mr. Pitt, to do a better job of being family during the year so that Christmas's relative psychological importance shrinks. We're having people in and arranging things so that their time in our home is something other than a holiday frenzy. 

We're taking as our hosting model my sister, who lives in a woodland house that looks like a Currier & Ives Christmas card.  My sister swears she has simplified, and I believe her even as she prepares a Christmas Eve fete for 20 that includes everything but a Yule log.  As she's mulling cider and slicing ham and moving placecards around, it's apparent that she really has cut back: No more culinary experiments; the same decorations year-to-year; growing acceptance that plaster sometimes cracks, and she doesn't need to remodel the bathroom every time someone comes over.

She has her Christmas Eve down to a quickly executable drill, and has retained in it the parts that bring her joy.  She does what she does to impress no one but herself.  In the process, she makes for family and closest friends the kind of Christmas Eve that is worthy of Currier & Ives.  It's a Christmas Eve where people dress for dinner in ties, jackets, and nice dresses.  There is no rule; it just seems right.  Her guests sit and talk, bright, charming people carefully chosen mingle with college kids home for the holidays and youngsters not used to shined shoes.  It's calm, warm, a kind of annual touchstone for all on the guest list.

We're going to try to take that as a model this year.  We're going to invite our guests into our home, not into some Bing Crosby/Holiday Hotel of store-bought things and women's magazine ritual.  This Christmas, we're going to put our labor into creating moments of perfect quiet instead of simply creating a new kind of noise.  We're going to go slowly as the world swirls around us.  As much as we can, we're going to take Christmas off to spend time with people.

But mark my words: If those people don't like my Christmas goose, there's going to be hell to pay.

Vengeance Is Mine, Sayeth the Lawyers

Roger Ailes (not that one) links to this site featuring a Boston Red Sox-themed take-off on DaVinci's The Last Supper.  Ailes thinks it would be a great gift for Christians you'd like to piss off.

Here's the perfect Christmas gift for the right-wing Roman Catholic on your holiday gift list: Send one of these to Joseph Donahue, Kitty J. Lopez, Rudi Guiliani -- even Pumpkinhead or Chris Matthews. See if they get as upset as when John Kerry took communion.

I don't think I know any right wing Catholics, but I know a lot of Lutherans and I'm pretty sure they won't be mad.  The image isn't blasphemous; it isn't insulting to Christ or Christianity.  In the image, they're not even drinking, something we know went on at the Last Supper and just about every other meal Christ had with friends.  Our Savior was, by modern social standards, practically a booze-hound.

Ailes may think this photoshop bold satire, but at best it's a mildly distasteful cultural reference that will anger only the most ridiculously pious.  There's no particular religious statement made, and no reason for Christians to be offended.  Now, if the people in the image were doing something awful -- tearing the dress off a waitress, for example -- then there might be trouble, but there'd probably be trouble from non-Christians, too. 

I'm Christian, and I'm only bugged by the image because I'm also a Cub fan.  A bitter, self-pitying Cub fan.  2004 was supposed to be our year.

The people who are going to be offended are the licensers, and their reaction is unlikely to be entertaining in the least. 

The producer had better have a license from Major League Baseball for the use of the term "World Series."  They're going to need the Red Sox' permission to use the Boston Logo seen on several hats.  Then there's the Right of Publicity for each of the ballplayers: Posters, hats, t-shirts, and mugs are all merchandise not covered by either the First Amendment or any "fair use" standard.  Each of the ball-players would have to be approached individually, a rate negotiated, and contracts executed giving permission to use the ballplayers' likenesses on the product. 

Start-up deals of this sort are expensive, with tens-of-thousands of dollars changing hands before the first royalty is paid.  If the producers of these products don't have about $250,000 in licenses notarized and on file, this website, the product inventory and owners' bank accounts are all going to be gone soon. There's going to be hell to pay all the way down to the guy who silkscreens the image on the coffee mug.  The avenging angels will be researchers who surf the web looking for unlicensed merchandise, and the appocalypse will ride in on lawyers' backs.  If any of them are Christians, it's just a coincidence.

All of this is irrelevant, of course, if the manufacturers have all the right licenses in place.  Those contracts, however, usually require an "Official Product" logo to be prominently displayed on all merchandise and advertising.  I've searched the website and haven't found anything like that. 

My guess: Toast.  And soon.

Of course, I could be wrong.  The Vatican is already pissed about a Nativity scene featuring David Beckham and Posh Spice.  They're probably going to get huffy about the Boston thing, too.

"Uh, hi. This is Tom from Functional Ambivalent, and I'd like to talk to whoever it is who manages your mailing list?"

Today, in the mail, I got a catalogue for people who make their own banjos. 

Jewelry Shaped Like Testicles

Would I kid you?

Make your friends jealous and your enemies fearful when you swing by with your Ballsies on proud display. Ballsies are lovingly hand-crafted in solid sterling silver and hung on a stylish silver chain, leather cord, or key ring.  Pick your style and swing 'em with attitude!

Your new, decorative balls will go wonderfully with this very scary vagina pendant.  Or this winged penis.

Only 24 more shopping days 'til Christmas.

I Find This Both Repellent and Perversely Attractive, Like Cher

New, from Hardee's: The Monster Thickburger.  Two-thirds of a pound of juicy beef, four strips of bacon, three slices of processed American cheese, a quarter-pound of saturated fat and 1,420 calories.  Oh, yeah, I almost forgot: Mayonnaise

Whether this looks good to you or bad is probably a pretty good identifier of whether you're Red or Blue.

Here in Kentucky, when they sell these they should throw-in an inexpensive pair of stretch slacks.