I entered Texas A&M in the fall of 1996 as a big basketball fan. I left in the spring of 2000 and, miraculously, I was still a big basketball fan.
I came to A&M from a pretty good basketball town in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The hometown Razorbacks played in a big, modern arena that was always filled with screaming fans. I arrived in Texas to find a culture that either ignored basketball completely or tried to squish it into a football-shaped hole. Advertisements for a game my freshman year said, "We want to have the 12th Man in basketball, too!" And that thing that every college football crowd does at kickoff, with their voices rising to a crescendo that culminates in the kick, we used to do that in basketball, with the tipoff, and what's worse, we even did it to "kick off" the second half, when all that happens is an in-bounds pass. But by far the worst was the band. Now, the Fightin' Texas Aggie Band is stodgy even by college football standards, but a marching military band works well in a football environment. What doesn't work is plopping the Aggie band in the middle of a basketball arena, where the sounds of a giant bass drum clash with the pace of a basketball game.
Oh yeah, the arena. G. Rollie White Coliseum, in its day, was a pretty decent place to watch a ballgame. But by 1996, it was pretty run down, and the thing I noticed about it was that on the court you could see the lane lines for the side basketball goals, a callback to YMCA gyms but not anything befitting a basketball arena.
Nobody deserves to have to watch a basketball game in G. Rollie White with a military band and a team whose standout is a Spanish import named Dario Quesada, but the Aggie basketball fans came close. At every game were a hundred or so interested fans, but at most games the rest of the crowd just sat on their hands, occasionally hissing a call that may or may not have been incorrect. In what may be a first, then-coach Tony Barone threw the A&M fans under the bus after a home loss to Kansas (that occurred before students had returned from winter break), wondering aloud to a television reporter how his team can win when there's nobody there to support him. He was 100% correct, but he was understandably let go not too long after. Whenever I told people I was going to a basketball game, the most common response was "Why?"
Fast forward to today. The Aggies lost in Austin, 83-70. What's most impressive is the way in which they lost and the following they now enjoy. Early in the second half, the Ags were down by 18 points to a team that's probably one of the top five in the nation. They fought back to pull within 6, making a real game of it until Brad "Sweep the Leg Johnny" Buckman drew a questionable charge that represented Joseph Jones's fifth foul. Since Billy Gillispie has taken over, this team has shown a remarkable amount of heart, and it seems to be increasing with every game. But what has really amazed me is the change in the fans. At today's game I sat by a section of A&M students who were more spirited than any entire crowd I was a part of during my time as a student. They did yells, they stayed behind the team, and, especially in the second half, they got really loud. They had such a presence at the game that at times I thought I was in a neutral arena.
I hope that the recent gains the basketball program has made are a sign of things to come. After the first NIT appearance in a decade, the Aggies have responded well to the departure of Antoine Wright and, though they're currently 3-6 in conference, could still make a legitimate run at the tournament given the schedule they have remaining. Whatever happens, I hope they hang onto an environment that is not nearly as inhospitable toward basketball as it was just a few years ago. In fact, Reed Arena is now a really good place to watch a ballgame.
Saturday, February 4, 2006
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
The Top 22 Songs from 1 to 21 of All Time
1. One Tin Soldier (Coven)
2. Two of Us (The Beatles)
3. Three Hopeful Thoughts (Rilo Kiley)
4. Four of Two (They Might Be Giants)
5. Five O'Clock World (The Vogues)
6. Six O'Clock News (Kathleen Edwards)
7. Seven Nation Army (The White Stripes)
8. Eight Miles High (The Byrds)
9. (tie) 96 Tears (? and the Mysterians)
9. (tie) 98.6 (Keith)
10. Ten Days (Missy Higgins)
11. 11 Easy Steps (Troutfishing in America)
12. 12 Bellevue (Kathleen Edwards)
13. 13 Steps Lead Down (Elvis Costello)
14. 14th Street (Laura Cantrell)
15. Fifteen Again (The Luxury Liners)
16. 16 Military Wives (The Decemberists)
17. Seventeen Dirty Magazines (Modern Skirts)
18. Eighteen (Alice Cooper)
19. 1921 (The Who)
20. 20 Questions (Amy Rigby)
21. 21st Century Man (Electric Light Orchestra)
2. Two of Us (The Beatles)
3. Three Hopeful Thoughts (Rilo Kiley)
4. Four of Two (They Might Be Giants)
5. Five O'Clock World (The Vogues)
6. Six O'Clock News (Kathleen Edwards)
7. Seven Nation Army (The White Stripes)
8. Eight Miles High (The Byrds)
9. (tie) 96 Tears (? and the Mysterians)
9. (tie) 98.6 (Keith)
10. Ten Days (Missy Higgins)
11. 11 Easy Steps (Troutfishing in America)
12. 12 Bellevue (Kathleen Edwards)
13. 13 Steps Lead Down (Elvis Costello)
14. 14th Street (Laura Cantrell)
15. Fifteen Again (The Luxury Liners)
16. 16 Military Wives (The Decemberists)
17. Seventeen Dirty Magazines (Modern Skirts)
18. Eighteen (Alice Cooper)
19. 1921 (The Who)
20. 20 Questions (Amy Rigby)
21. 21st Century Man (Electric Light Orchestra)
Sunday, January 8, 2006
An Evolution of Communication and Information Systems in the Astrodome
I have no idea why, but I've occasionally wondered what would happen if we had to start over. Like, if we somehow lost all the technology we have developed over thousands of years, leaving only the knowledge we have gained, how long would it take us to get back to where we are today, and how would we do it? If we were armed with nothing but minerals, animals, and vegetables but knew about the possibility of things like the automobile and the internet, how would we create them? With foreknowledge of things like pollution, how might we do things differently?
When I asked myself these questions, I was mainly thinking about many of the inefficiencies that pop up as we try to move ahead as a civilization. I once read that the fax machine will be viewed by history as a pretty much unnecessary invention whose only purpose was to move us from snail mail to email. When you think about it, it makes sense: if we had it to do all over again, we would probably just go straight to email, bypassing the fax machine altogether. Our history is probably full of places where we took a serpentine route toward a more "ideal" technology, but the question of how we could have done things differently is largely academic. Or is it?
When Hurricane Katrina displaced hundreds of thousands of people, families were torn completely apart and, in many cases, sent to shelters at opposite ends of the country. Without warning, the communities housing those who were evacuated were forced to create some way to document these individuals and get them in touch with their loved ones. Since these evacuees arrived with little or no documentation and carried cell phones that no longer worked, the struggle of these shelters to reinsert these people back into society reads like a condensed history of communication. In many cases, we have served these displaced Americans well by adapting our high-tech capabilities to their low-tech circumstances. But in other cases, we have acted as though we haven't been there before.
When I arrived at the Reliant complex (which includes the Astrodome, the Reliant Center, and Reliant Arena) on Monday, September 5, at 6:00 a.m., about 25,000 former residents of the New Orleans area had been living there for between two and four days. I arrived with my laptop because I had learned that people with wireless-enabled laptops were needed, and I was assigned to something called Operation Get In Touch, which I learned was a website set up by Pinnacle Wireless specifically for Katrina victims.
When I entered the Reliant Center, I sat down at a long row of tables, plugged in, and was immediately struck by the wall in front of me. A big banner high on the wall said, "Sign In Here," and below that, stretched across about 100 feet, were the letters A to Z. Below that were thousands of index cards and hundreds of sheets of paper and posterboards. On each card, or paper, or poster, was basic information about an evacuee (often no more than first and last name) and the names of people he was looking for. The cards served two functions: they were the first forms of official registration for residents (though it's unclear how many residents actually signed in), and they allowed residents to see who else had arrived, giving them an opportunity to find lost loved ones.
To anyone who's been alive in the past fifty years, the idea of cards taped to a wall as a means of tracking 25,000 people may seem inadequate, and it is. But keep in mind that when these people arrived documentation was close to the last thing on anyone's mind, never mind the fact that the computer power to enter these people in some kind of database was not available (I was told that as late as Sunday the Reliant Center still had only one computer for getting people registered).
I was quickly informed that I would be entering registration information for residents of the Reliant Center into an online database as well as using existing online tools to help residents find lost friends and family. The written information we were to enter had, I think, been taken down by volunteers who had talked to evacuees. It was asked whether we would be entering the information contained in the cards on the wall. At that time, nobody in our area knew.
Entering evacuees' information into the database was simple enough, but it was clear that the information we were getting from people was not always sufficient. Information that would allow us to distinguish duplicate names, things like middle names and birth dates, were not always supplied. Still, having the information in a searchable database was a huge step up from keeping information on paper only.
For people who came to us wanting to look for lost relatives, we were given two main websites to search through: the one we had been entering information into (Get In Touch), and the Red Cross self registry that they had been encouraging people to use in shelters spread across the country. I added a couple sites I already knew about, put together by CNN and MSNBC to my go-to list of databases. In the beginning of this process of connecting people, I'd have to describe the system that evolved as a marketplace, in the sense that each website had its own market or demographic that it appealed to and, in the absence of a clear standard, the strengths and weaknesses of each website helped determine how well it was going to compete. For instance, the Get In Touch website initially had the best search capability of any website. The problem was that it was just getting off the ground in terms of number of entries, and the entries it had were sometimes incomplete. The Red Cross website had a ton of information right off the bat, but the way it searched its entries could be confusing. When a woman approached me and asked me to look for her son (who had a common first name but a unique last name) I simply typed in the last name, which turned up no matches. Then, out of curiosity, I tried entering both the first name and the last name, and I got a match. The Red Cross website simply has a list of entries, and conducting a search takes you to a place on the list based on the first letters you entered. So searching for "John Smith" will take you to the middle of the J's and "Smith John" will take you to the middle of the S's. Websites for news organizations, as well as the Family Messages site, included many people who had left on their own in addition to those who were evacuated, but initially these sites were very limited, probably to people who had independent access to television or the internet.
Lack of a standard is something networks deal with all the time. Think of Monday morning's family connection network as kind of like VHS and Beta back in the 1980s. Just like Betamax owners ran the risk of missing out on entertainment options through their choice of an unpopular platform, searchers who looked through an unpopular database also risked missing out. Except instead of being unable to view a VHS copy of Wargames, they were ignorant of the fact that a loved one they were searching for was sitting on a different website.
Enter Yahoo. Seeing the need for a single destination for searchers, Yahoo created a site that indexed every existing Katrina search out there. I learned about it early Monday afternoon, and it was a godsend. Now I would no longer search twelve sites and worry that the thirteenth site might have held useful information. Well, sort of. Initially, the Yahoo site didn't index a lot of the information on the Red Cross and Get In Touch websites, so I used the three together.
Eventually, Yahoo was able to index every major database successfully, and as our search capability became more refined we concentrated on including more people in the database. We dismantled the wall of index cards and started entering all the information into our computers. After Labor Day, though, the volunteers who showed up with laptops were few and far between, and data entry progressed slowly.
Throughout the week, more shelters came online, and connecting families switched from a nearly hopeless endeavor to a fairly reliable process. As it did, my job evolved from finding people to helping people get back on their feet: searching for job resources, lending out my cell phone, and helping people navigate the maze of services at the Reliant complex.
And it was a maze of services. Between the post office, insurance services, job assistance, travel assistance, FEMA assistance, and many others, residents easily got confused preparing to leave the complex. There was an order of operations that had to be followed, which, because it was neither obvious nor well communicated, had people stopping by the same place three and four times. Also, because they had been put up in a haphazard fashion, many of these services would switch places every couple days, which meant that maps often had people going to the wrong place. Oh yeah, and there were redundant services in the three buildings that were often unaware of each other. On Friday I made my first trip to the Astrodome to put up some advertisements for Operation Get in Touch. At one point I ran into the people from Continental Airlines, who were giving people free airfare and were happy to know where my group was located because they had received many questions. On the other end of the stadium, along the dark concourse, were a group of people at computers who were helping evacuees search for lost relatives and were quite upset that I was advertising the same service in another building.
The communication between buildings was never great, but it did the job. Except for the PA system, which was unique to each building and had about a 1% success rate of paging people, everyone found what they were looking for sooner or later. By the following Monday (September 12), the residents of the shelters were able to access one of about fifty desktop computers that had been set up for them. The volunteers at the laptops still conducted searches and entered information, but once residents could independently look for relatives and send email, communication became much easier. As the Yahoo page was working well for everyone who came to see us, we turned our attention to the people who could not make it over to us. The Reliant Center housed many elderly evacuees who had neither entered their names into the database nor searched for others. We brought our laptops to their cots and sat and searched with them, so that by the middle of my second week at the shelters everyone theoretically had access to the evacuee information on the internet.
As we improved our ability to keep track of people, there were fewer people there to keep track of. Starting at about 25,000 on September 4, the population of the Reliant Complex dwindled to 4500 on September 11, then less than 1500 on September 18. By September 20, plans were in place to move the remaining 1000 evacuees to Fort Smith, Arkansas, in preparation for Hurricane Rita. The facility they left behind displayed signs of the progress the Reliant complex had undergone. On my last day at the facility (which was actually a couple days before the last evacuees had left), there were computers doing pretty much all of the work, while posters still covered the vast hallways and seating sections of the Astrodome. The process that connected index cards to computers was a disjointed one, and it’s unfortunate that some residents were required to reregister a few times before they would be located. But the result was actually a very interesting lesson about the dynamics of an impromptu organization.
When I asked myself these questions, I was mainly thinking about many of the inefficiencies that pop up as we try to move ahead as a civilization. I once read that the fax machine will be viewed by history as a pretty much unnecessary invention whose only purpose was to move us from snail mail to email. When you think about it, it makes sense: if we had it to do all over again, we would probably just go straight to email, bypassing the fax machine altogether. Our history is probably full of places where we took a serpentine route toward a more "ideal" technology, but the question of how we could have done things differently is largely academic. Or is it?
When Hurricane Katrina displaced hundreds of thousands of people, families were torn completely apart and, in many cases, sent to shelters at opposite ends of the country. Without warning, the communities housing those who were evacuated were forced to create some way to document these individuals and get them in touch with their loved ones. Since these evacuees arrived with little or no documentation and carried cell phones that no longer worked, the struggle of these shelters to reinsert these people back into society reads like a condensed history of communication. In many cases, we have served these displaced Americans well by adapting our high-tech capabilities to their low-tech circumstances. But in other cases, we have acted as though we haven't been there before.
When I arrived at the Reliant complex (which includes the Astrodome, the Reliant Center, and Reliant Arena) on Monday, September 5, at 6:00 a.m., about 25,000 former residents of the New Orleans area had been living there for between two and four days. I arrived with my laptop because I had learned that people with wireless-enabled laptops were needed, and I was assigned to something called Operation Get In Touch, which I learned was a website set up by Pinnacle Wireless specifically for Katrina victims.
When I entered the Reliant Center, I sat down at a long row of tables, plugged in, and was immediately struck by the wall in front of me. A big banner high on the wall said, "Sign In Here," and below that, stretched across about 100 feet, were the letters A to Z. Below that were thousands of index cards and hundreds of sheets of paper and posterboards. On each card, or paper, or poster, was basic information about an evacuee (often no more than first and last name) and the names of people he was looking for. The cards served two functions: they were the first forms of official registration for residents (though it's unclear how many residents actually signed in), and they allowed residents to see who else had arrived, giving them an opportunity to find lost loved ones.
To anyone who's been alive in the past fifty years, the idea of cards taped to a wall as a means of tracking 25,000 people may seem inadequate, and it is. But keep in mind that when these people arrived documentation was close to the last thing on anyone's mind, never mind the fact that the computer power to enter these people in some kind of database was not available (I was told that as late as Sunday the Reliant Center still had only one computer for getting people registered).
I was quickly informed that I would be entering registration information for residents of the Reliant Center into an online database as well as using existing online tools to help residents find lost friends and family. The written information we were to enter had, I think, been taken down by volunteers who had talked to evacuees. It was asked whether we would be entering the information contained in the cards on the wall. At that time, nobody in our area knew.
Entering evacuees' information into the database was simple enough, but it was clear that the information we were getting from people was not always sufficient. Information that would allow us to distinguish duplicate names, things like middle names and birth dates, were not always supplied. Still, having the information in a searchable database was a huge step up from keeping information on paper only.
For people who came to us wanting to look for lost relatives, we were given two main websites to search through: the one we had been entering information into (Get In Touch), and the Red Cross self registry that they had been encouraging people to use in shelters spread across the country. I added a couple sites I already knew about, put together by CNN and MSNBC to my go-to list of databases. In the beginning of this process of connecting people, I'd have to describe the system that evolved as a marketplace, in the sense that each website had its own market or demographic that it appealed to and, in the absence of a clear standard, the strengths and weaknesses of each website helped determine how well it was going to compete. For instance, the Get In Touch website initially had the best search capability of any website. The problem was that it was just getting off the ground in terms of number of entries, and the entries it had were sometimes incomplete. The Red Cross website had a ton of information right off the bat, but the way it searched its entries could be confusing. When a woman approached me and asked me to look for her son (who had a common first name but a unique last name) I simply typed in the last name, which turned up no matches. Then, out of curiosity, I tried entering both the first name and the last name, and I got a match. The Red Cross website simply has a list of entries, and conducting a search takes you to a place on the list based on the first letters you entered. So searching for "John Smith" will take you to the middle of the J's and "Smith John" will take you to the middle of the S's. Websites for news organizations, as well as the Family Messages site, included many people who had left on their own in addition to those who were evacuated, but initially these sites were very limited, probably to people who had independent access to television or the internet.
Lack of a standard is something networks deal with all the time. Think of Monday morning's family connection network as kind of like VHS and Beta back in the 1980s. Just like Betamax owners ran the risk of missing out on entertainment options through their choice of an unpopular platform, searchers who looked through an unpopular database also risked missing out. Except instead of being unable to view a VHS copy of Wargames, they were ignorant of the fact that a loved one they were searching for was sitting on a different website.
Enter Yahoo. Seeing the need for a single destination for searchers, Yahoo created a site that indexed every existing Katrina search out there. I learned about it early Monday afternoon, and it was a godsend. Now I would no longer search twelve sites and worry that the thirteenth site might have held useful information. Well, sort of. Initially, the Yahoo site didn't index a lot of the information on the Red Cross and Get In Touch websites, so I used the three together.
Eventually, Yahoo was able to index every major database successfully, and as our search capability became more refined we concentrated on including more people in the database. We dismantled the wall of index cards and started entering all the information into our computers. After Labor Day, though, the volunteers who showed up with laptops were few and far between, and data entry progressed slowly.
Throughout the week, more shelters came online, and connecting families switched from a nearly hopeless endeavor to a fairly reliable process. As it did, my job evolved from finding people to helping people get back on their feet: searching for job resources, lending out my cell phone, and helping people navigate the maze of services at the Reliant complex.
And it was a maze of services. Between the post office, insurance services, job assistance, travel assistance, FEMA assistance, and many others, residents easily got confused preparing to leave the complex. There was an order of operations that had to be followed, which, because it was neither obvious nor well communicated, had people stopping by the same place three and four times. Also, because they had been put up in a haphazard fashion, many of these services would switch places every couple days, which meant that maps often had people going to the wrong place. Oh yeah, and there were redundant services in the three buildings that were often unaware of each other. On Friday I made my first trip to the Astrodome to put up some advertisements for Operation Get in Touch. At one point I ran into the people from Continental Airlines, who were giving people free airfare and were happy to know where my group was located because they had received many questions. On the other end of the stadium, along the dark concourse, were a group of people at computers who were helping evacuees search for lost relatives and were quite upset that I was advertising the same service in another building.
The communication between buildings was never great, but it did the job. Except for the PA system, which was unique to each building and had about a 1% success rate of paging people, everyone found what they were looking for sooner or later. By the following Monday (September 12), the residents of the shelters were able to access one of about fifty desktop computers that had been set up for them. The volunteers at the laptops still conducted searches and entered information, but once residents could independently look for relatives and send email, communication became much easier. As the Yahoo page was working well for everyone who came to see us, we turned our attention to the people who could not make it over to us. The Reliant Center housed many elderly evacuees who had neither entered their names into the database nor searched for others. We brought our laptops to their cots and sat and searched with them, so that by the middle of my second week at the shelters everyone theoretically had access to the evacuee information on the internet.
As we improved our ability to keep track of people, there were fewer people there to keep track of. Starting at about 25,000 on September 4, the population of the Reliant Complex dwindled to 4500 on September 11, then less than 1500 on September 18. By September 20, plans were in place to move the remaining 1000 evacuees to Fort Smith, Arkansas, in preparation for Hurricane Rita. The facility they left behind displayed signs of the progress the Reliant complex had undergone. On my last day at the facility (which was actually a couple days before the last evacuees had left), there were computers doing pretty much all of the work, while posters still covered the vast hallways and seating sections of the Astrodome. The process that connected index cards to computers was a disjointed one, and it’s unfortunate that some residents were required to reregister a few times before they would be located. But the result was actually a very interesting lesson about the dynamics of an impromptu organization.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
The Greatest Commercial I’ve Ever Seen
Okay, so there's this hierarchy of commercials. The laws of marketing dictate that even between the most useful product in the world and the most willing consumer in the world, commercials provide a vehicle for, often artificially, regulating the distance between consumer and consumable. And whether a commercial is something that you look forward to or an annoyance that poisions the time it takes you to reach for the TiVo remote, the truth is that the hierarchy of commercials plays a big role in how jazzed you are about stuff you may or may not even like. So here goes:
Level 1: Commercials that inspire mass product returns, boycotts, and even protests. Crosses: good. Fire: good. Madonna: ehh... but put the three together, and you get something that didn't make a lot of people very fond of Pepsi.
Level 2: Commercials that make you not want to buy something. Some people liked them, but for many people, the Quiznos "spongemonkeys" had a certain "eewww" factor, and those people, when they were hungry for a sub sandwich and came upon a Quiznos, would keep on driving until they got to a Subway.
Level 3: Commercials that keep you indifferent. "Taco Bell has a new product? It's got carne asada and some kind of tangy mayo concoction? Great...when's the ballgame on?"
Level 4: Commercials that make you interested. The teaser trailer for that movie you may or may not see in six months didn't get you making plans to go see it, but it got the seed planted in your brain. That's level 4.
Level 5: Commercials that inspire purchase intention. I don't have enough money to get every DVD that comes out on the market. But when I can, I'm totally getting the Seinfeld Seasons 5 & 6 that comes with the handwritten script and all the special features.
Level 6: Commercials that make you go out and get something. If you like music, and if you have a particular fondness for U2, and you weren't in the Apple store ten minutes after seeing the U2 iPod commercial, then you don't have a pulse.
And for a long time, at least for me, that was the list. But a couple weeks ago a commercial came along that changed everything.
Back in October of 2000, things were pretty good. I was experiencing the dizzying heights of the mania known as eBay Addiction. I had purchased numerous LPs, a couple Willie McGee jerseys, and some out-of-print books, and, not to brag, my feedback score was skyrocketing. There's been a certain ebb and flow to my eBay usage since, but I've never stayed away for long.
When the "Daydream Believer" commercials came out, I absolutely loved them. The commercials called to mind a feeling that lots of people have toward eBay, and the song, plus the imagery of getting "it," whatever "it" is, caused me to do something I didn't think was possible. I love the commercial so much I've had to invent Level 7.
Level 7: Commercials that make you want to give your money directly to the company. Go ahead, eBay. You can have it. Take whatever you want. Seriously. I don't even want anything in return. Not the Traveling Wilburys CD, the Simpsons cel with certificate of authenticity, the life-size Han Solo in carbonite, or the Beatles' Yesterday and Today LP with the butcher cover. Not even the powder blue Lance Alworth jersey. The perfect marriage of product and message has shot you straight to the top of the advertising hierarchy, and as a result I just want to give you my money. That's how much I love your latest commercial.
Level 1: Commercials that inspire mass product returns, boycotts, and even protests. Crosses: good. Fire: good. Madonna: ehh... but put the three together, and you get something that didn't make a lot of people very fond of Pepsi.
Level 2: Commercials that make you not want to buy something. Some people liked them, but for many people, the Quiznos "spongemonkeys" had a certain "eewww" factor, and those people, when they were hungry for a sub sandwich and came upon a Quiznos, would keep on driving until they got to a Subway.
Level 3: Commercials that keep you indifferent. "Taco Bell has a new product? It's got carne asada and some kind of tangy mayo concoction? Great...when's the ballgame on?"
Level 4: Commercials that make you interested. The teaser trailer for that movie you may or may not see in six months didn't get you making plans to go see it, but it got the seed planted in your brain. That's level 4.
Level 5: Commercials that inspire purchase intention. I don't have enough money to get every DVD that comes out on the market. But when I can, I'm totally getting the Seinfeld Seasons 5 & 6 that comes with the handwritten script and all the special features.
Level 6: Commercials that make you go out and get something. If you like music, and if you have a particular fondness for U2, and you weren't in the Apple store ten minutes after seeing the U2 iPod commercial, then you don't have a pulse.
And for a long time, at least for me, that was the list. But a couple weeks ago a commercial came along that changed everything.
Back in October of 2000, things were pretty good. I was experiencing the dizzying heights of the mania known as eBay Addiction. I had purchased numerous LPs, a couple Willie McGee jerseys, and some out-of-print books, and, not to brag, my feedback score was skyrocketing. There's been a certain ebb and flow to my eBay usage since, but I've never stayed away for long.
When the "Daydream Believer" commercials came out, I absolutely loved them. The commercials called to mind a feeling that lots of people have toward eBay, and the song, plus the imagery of getting "it," whatever "it" is, caused me to do something I didn't think was possible. I love the commercial so much I've had to invent Level 7.
Level 7: Commercials that make you want to give your money directly to the company. Go ahead, eBay. You can have it. Take whatever you want. Seriously. I don't even want anything in return. Not the Traveling Wilburys CD, the Simpsons cel with certificate of authenticity, the life-size Han Solo in carbonite, or the Beatles' Yesterday and Today LP with the butcher cover. Not even the powder blue Lance Alworth jersey. The perfect marriage of product and message has shot you straight to the top of the advertising hierarchy, and as a result I just want to give you my money. That's how much I love your latest commercial.
A Way Out for Marshmallow and Yam
Before heading off to Crawford, President Bush did something very important today. Here's my entry from last year's ethics journal, on the timely topic of animal rights:
This year's turkeys aren't going to a farm; they're going to Disneyland to become grand marshals of its Thanksgiving Day Parade, which will bring us a long way toward answering the age-old question of whether animals are capable of feeling ridiculous.
Today was a somewhat exciting day in my family because it was the day that President Bush pardoned the turkey and sent it off to a farm to live out the rest of its days. This is not normally something that registers on the Lauve radar, but my father works for the turkey segment of Cargill, and this year one of his colleagues, who is serving in a rotation as president of the Turkey Federation, went to Washington with his family to present the turkey. So a family I’ve known for a long time got to schmooze with the President and take part in this cute tradition that ensures that a turkey’s life will be spared this Thanksgiving.
Except the fortunes of the turkey are not nearly as pleasant as most people believe. Since the turkey is bred for consumption, he is much too fat to be any good in a natural environment. So he goes off to a farm with a lot of other animals and dies almost immediately. When I told my mother this last night, she reacted as if I was telling her that pro wrestling was fake.
I don’t know how many people would make a stink about this, but I don’t know why they can’t just use a wild turkey (I would guess it’s tough to get one that’s docile enough) or just do away with the ceremony completely. To me it just seems like a waste to doom an eatin’ bird to a fate it’s not suited to.
This year's turkeys aren't going to a farm; they're going to Disneyland to become grand marshals of its Thanksgiving Day Parade, which will bring us a long way toward answering the age-old question of whether animals are capable of feeling ridiculous.
Thursday, November 17, 2005
The Top 50 States with the Strongest Personality
1. Texas
2. California
3. Florida
4. Hawaii
5. Alaska
6. Massachusetts
7. New York
8. Colorado
9. Louisiana
10. Virginia
11. Arizona
12. North Carolina
13. Vermont
14. Tennessee
15. Oregon
16. Utah
17. Indiana
18. Georgia
19. Connecticut
20. Kansas
21. Oklahoma
22. Missouri
23. New Jersey
24. Mississippi
25. Iowa
26. Pennsylvania
27. Montana
28. Nebraska
29. Wisconsin
30. New Mexico
31. Michigan
32. South Carolina
33. Wyoming
34. Minnesota
35. Idaho
36. Illinois
37. Alabama
38. Maryland
39. Arkansas
40. Maine
41. New Hampshire
42. Washington
43. Kentucky
44. Nevada
45. Rhode Island
46. Ohio
47. West Virginia
48. South Dakota
49. Delaware
50. North Dakota
2. California
3. Florida
4. Hawaii
5. Alaska
6. Massachusetts
7. New York
8. Colorado
9. Louisiana
10. Virginia
11. Arizona
12. North Carolina
13. Vermont
14. Tennessee
15. Oregon
16. Utah
17. Indiana
18. Georgia
19. Connecticut
20. Kansas
21. Oklahoma
22. Missouri
23. New Jersey
24. Mississippi
25. Iowa
26. Pennsylvania
27. Montana
28. Nebraska
29. Wisconsin
30. New Mexico
31. Michigan
32. South Carolina
33. Wyoming
34. Minnesota
35. Idaho
36. Illinois
37. Alabama
38. Maryland
39. Arkansas
40. Maine
41. New Hampshire
42. Washington
43. Kentucky
44. Nevada
45. Rhode Island
46. Ohio
47. West Virginia
48. South Dakota
49. Delaware
50. North Dakota
Thursday, November 10, 2005
A Well Deserved Cy
Back in late September, I had a conversation with Chris Carpenter that really told me a lot about him.
At the time, he had had a couple bad starts in a row after having basically nothing but quality starts all year. Needless to say, he was not in the best spirits. "Yeah, it's been a good year," he said, "but lately I feel like all the innings I've pitched are catching up to me. I just can't locate my pitches the way I did earlier in the season."
I tried to reassure him. "You've been the best pitcher in the league all year, and you'll get it back together."
"I sure hope so," he said as he dropped his head, his eyes disappearing beneath the brim of his cap. "I feel like I'm letting the team down with my performance lately. I just don't want to screw things up for them."
"Chris, that's ridiculous," I said. "The team wouldn't be anywhere without you. You've been its star all year. Sure it's been rough at times, but you've carried us through. And yeah, we're in ninth place right now, but without you we wouldn't be above 12th or 13th place. I'd say the team is pretty proud of you."
Slowly, as he thought about what I had said, he began to pick his head up, and he looked at me with a sideways glance that was at the same time frustrated and amused. He stared at me for a couple seconds, and then he said, "I'm talking about the Cardinals, skip, not the Crickets!!"
-----------------------------------------
The Crickets were born out of my friend Adam's fantasy baseball league. It was my first time playing fantasy baseball, and to say that I screwed up the draft would be a tremendous understatement. My first two picks were Edgar Renteria (ranked #39) and Joey Gathright (ranked about #800), and while a few fantasy nerds would tell you that those were not the best choices, I'd do it again in a heartbeat. But my best pick was the first pitcher I chose, Mr. Chris Carpenter. I later told Adam about the pick, and I said that I was able to get Carp because some people thought that his great 2004 year was a fluke. Adam said that, yeah, he kind of thought that it was a fluke, too.
Apparently Carpenter was listening, because he put together a remarkable year. I was lucky enough to see him pitch twice this year; in the first game he pitched eight shutout innings to defeat Andy Pettitte, and the second, also in Houston, was his 20th victory. I was honored to be able to attend that game, which at the time made a Cy Young seem almost certain. Carpenter slipped a little down the stretch, and you could make a great argument for Willis or Clemens or Pettitte (though they went a combined 0-4 against Carpenter), but it's great to see him get the Cards' first Cy Youong award since Bob Gibson. He started three of the Cardinals' five postseason victories, and he was one of two players on the team who really deserve whatever postseason accolades come their way. Way to go, Chris. There's a spot in the 2006 Crickets' starting rotation waiting for you.
At the time, he had had a couple bad starts in a row after having basically nothing but quality starts all year. Needless to say, he was not in the best spirits. "Yeah, it's been a good year," he said, "but lately I feel like all the innings I've pitched are catching up to me. I just can't locate my pitches the way I did earlier in the season."
I tried to reassure him. "You've been the best pitcher in the league all year, and you'll get it back together."
"I sure hope so," he said as he dropped his head, his eyes disappearing beneath the brim of his cap. "I feel like I'm letting the team down with my performance lately. I just don't want to screw things up for them."
"Chris, that's ridiculous," I said. "The team wouldn't be anywhere without you. You've been its star all year. Sure it's been rough at times, but you've carried us through. And yeah, we're in ninth place right now, but without you we wouldn't be above 12th or 13th place. I'd say the team is pretty proud of you."
Slowly, as he thought about what I had said, he began to pick his head up, and he looked at me with a sideways glance that was at the same time frustrated and amused. He stared at me for a couple seconds, and then he said, "I'm talking about the Cardinals, skip, not the Crickets!!"
-----------------------------------------
The Crickets were born out of my friend Adam's fantasy baseball league. It was my first time playing fantasy baseball, and to say that I screwed up the draft would be a tremendous understatement. My first two picks were Edgar Renteria (ranked #39) and Joey Gathright (ranked about #800), and while a few fantasy nerds would tell you that those were not the best choices, I'd do it again in a heartbeat. But my best pick was the first pitcher I chose, Mr. Chris Carpenter. I later told Adam about the pick, and I said that I was able to get Carp because some people thought that his great 2004 year was a fluke. Adam said that, yeah, he kind of thought that it was a fluke, too.
Apparently Carpenter was listening, because he put together a remarkable year. I was lucky enough to see him pitch twice this year; in the first game he pitched eight shutout innings to defeat Andy Pettitte, and the second, also in Houston, was his 20th victory. I was honored to be able to attend that game, which at the time made a Cy Young seem almost certain. Carpenter slipped a little down the stretch, and you could make a great argument for Willis or Clemens or Pettitte (though they went a combined 0-4 against Carpenter), but it's great to see him get the Cards' first Cy Youong award since Bob Gibson. He started three of the Cardinals' five postseason victories, and he was one of two players on the team who really deserve whatever postseason accolades come their way. Way to go, Chris. There's a spot in the 2006 Crickets' starting rotation waiting for you.
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