Photoshoppery

This is great. So is this. And this.

16:25 EST | permalink | /media

Did all the fact-checkers quit or something?

I’m reading “Buzzmarketing,” an overly glib 2005 business book by Mark Hughes. To its credit, the anecdotes are plentiful and entertaining, which is why I pulled it off the new-book shelf at Baker Library.

The trouble is that they don’t always ring true: on page 216, Hughes tells a Steve Jobs story. In February 1983, the Apple founder was inspecting a Macintosh factory and demanded that all of the computers be reboxed. The cardboard boxes they’d been using simply weren’t white enough to appeal to retailers. Moral: attention to detail pays (or something like that.)

I have no way of verifying this story. But there’s one thing I can verify:

Before any were shipped, Steve Jobs went to the plant to inspect the computers. Hard drives worked fine, cases looked fine, everything looked fine, except one thing.

Hard drives? Hard drives?! The original Macintosh, as any Apple geek will tell you, didn’t have a hard drive. No Macintosh shipped with an internal hard drive until 1987 – four years after Hughes’s anecdote. The industry was up in arms about the omission – writing in 1996, Intel CEO Andy Grove reminisced about his first impression of the Mac: “a ridiculous toy” which “didn’t have a hard disk (at the time, all PCs already had one).” (Only the Paranoid Survive, p.112)

Jobs personally killed plans to include a hard disk in the original Mac, spurring infighting and memo-scribbling at Apple. (see p. 191 of Steven Levy’s Insanely Great).

Yes, I realize that Hughes included that line because it was a nice transition. Yes, I realize that it’s a detail irrelevant to his anecdote. But it’s much harder take a book seriously if the author makes obvious screw-ups like this – and the editors miss them. I know no similar trivia about Rit dye, Mustang cars, Britney Spears, or Pepsi – but I can’t say I find those accounts terribly believable after seeing this.

As a special point of irony, I’m posting this just after reading Hughes’s cautionary chapter on irritating your customers, in which he describes the online revenge of two businessmen shafted by a DoubleTree hotel.

A bit of free advice to the Penguin P.R. machine, should they, by some chance, see this: hire more fact-checkers.

14:19 EST | permalink | /media

That’s not the most obvious revenue model that the name would suggest

Quoting capmag.com:

Capitalism Magazine survives on donations.

(By contrast, Communist Voice is $2 per issue.)

00:36 EST | permalink | /media

Wonderful juxtaposition

Gare de l’Est, Paris, 8 June 2005

13:51 EST | permalink | /media/advertising

Econoart

Forget the writing. The real reason I read The Economist is for the op-art:

12:47 EST | permalink | /media

Who says that blogs don’t provide original reporting?

Ha! Below, barillari.org provides 100% original coverage of the infamous capital duck:

(I should also note that these people were apparently unmoved by the cherry-blossom festival going on at the same time.)

20:08 EST | permalink | /media

Kristof’s peanut gallery

Nick Kristof is one of the two NYT columnists who are still worth a read. (The other one should be obvious. ) China Wakes and Thunder from the East aren’t bad, either. But the most entertaining Kristof content comes from his blog at the Times, where he posts selections from readers’ letters. If you want truly to see truly bad political prognostication, look no further than here:

I’m rushing around, getting ready for a trip to Africa, but here’s a sampling of email about my Hillary column. Ted from Minneapolis writes:

Energy conservation, energy self-sufficiency and global environmental crisis management will be the overriding issues of the next 20 years, not abortion. Hillary Clinton is not well-positioned to get elected or to deal with the real problems. If she were, I’d back her.

Emphasis mine. A real Karl Rove, this one.

19:26 EST | permalink | /media

The Washington Pest

A vending machine in Bethesda, MD:

See also the graffiti category in the photos section. Don’t miss this comment (on a Pepsi machine in the Harvard Red Line station) on the killing of Victoria Snelgrove, or this comment on larceny (in a mens’ room by the Athena cluster in Building 56 at MIT).

22:46 EST | permalink | /media

Metroliner and the decline of morality

Client thought ad was “…too risque, and implies that Amtrak promotes casual sex.”

Ad here. Complete series starts here. Via boingboing, which is great when it avoids George-W-Bush-related-conspiracy theories.

22:47 EST | permalink | /media

License Raj

Under my proposals, any given person might be granted a license to raise children, or a license to write newspaper editorials. Never, ever, would anyone be granted both – the reasons why are obvious.

23:33 EST | permalink | /media

Oddities at the NRO, hypersensitive hyphenateds, and reverse curmudgeonism

I’ve been enamored of the NRO’s coverage of world affairs lately. And, naturally, its economic bent matches mine. But every so often I stumble across a reminder that while we may share positions on economics and foreign policy, they cover a good many things I find truly alien.

Exhibit A: The National Review Book Service is selling reproductions of a “Confederate Cavalry Officer’s Sword.” That’s not so off-the-wall; they also sell a Union equivalent. But the language used in the blurb for the Confederate model is a trifle odd:

The years 1861-65 saw the gallant Southern patriot wielding traditional weapons, in defense of his home and traditional way of life, in an ultimately hopeless battle against the war machine of the fully industrialized North.

There are a fair number of words for a citizen who takes up arms against the United States: there’s the traditional traitor, the less pejorative rebel, and the modern, sanitized insurgent. The Moby Thesaurus suggests dozens more, from the clinical insurrectionist to the historical Quisling. The “gallant Southern” has many names – but I can’t say that it would ever occur to me to call him a patriot.

Exhibit B: Anne Morse cheers the death of Abercrombie and Fitch’s “pornographic” catalog.

I must admit that I haven’t actually read a copy of the catalog. But Ms. Morse admits that she hadn’t, either. If an NR columnist can get away with speculative punditry, so can I.

A&F first came to my attention when I noticed a handful of classmates at my alma mater wore A&F clothes. Let me make clear that I wasn’t particularly fashion-aware — I wouldn’t have known it unless the company’s name were spelled out in two-inch-high letters across the shirts in question. (Neal Stephenson explains that clothiers do this because clothing designs can be copied with abandon, but trademarked words cannot.)

It next popped up in 2001 or so, when A&F released a line of T-Shirts that threw some Hyphenated-Americans hailing from East Asia into a tizzy (as is their wont). The bone of contention was the designs, which ranged from “Wong Brothers Laundry Service: Two Wongs can Make it White” to “Wok-N-Bowl ‘Let the Good Times Roll’ Chinese Food and Bowling.” boycottaf.com (which supplied me with the captions) screams that the shirts are “Ethnically Derogatory Clothing.”

You’re welcome to peek at the slogans – boycottaf.com has all five online. For me, they range from “mildly amusing” to “I suppose there might be a joke here.” But the website’s creators are adamant that, via one means or another, the shirts represent a crime against their ethnicness. Case in point:

Asian Americans are already stereotyped on TV, film and other media as uncultured foreigners who can’t speak English correctly.

And as such, they’re subject to stereotypes in a way that no other ethnic minority is. In no way do they resemble the largely harmless stereotypes surrounding the other ethnic groups which are fond of holding festivals to celebrate their hyphenatedness, for instance:

Irish-Americans: Poor and filthy criminals with a penchant for violence.

Italian-Americans (Hey, I’m one!): New-Jersey-Dwelling criminals with a penchant for familial organization and gratuitous violence

On a related note, I’ve got an A&F shirt idea that will give the Asian community something to complain about: how about T-Shirts with the slogan “Comfort Woman” (and for equality’s sake, “Comfort Man”)?

But I’ve digressed. Back to the catalog.

As I understand, the A&F “field guide” contained nudity and explicit sexual advice. Ms. Morse, apparently upon no more evidence than I have, variously called it “porn” and “filth,” praising the parents whose threat of a boycott drove the company to permanently suspend its publication.

I fail to see the victory. Was the aim to keep nudie pictures and sex text out of teens’ hands? In any mall worth the name, there is presumably a Borders, Barnes & Noble, Waldenbooks, or whatever media-megastore is native to the region. Find it. Weave through the remainders. Push past the bestsellers. Eschew the latest offerings from Danielle Steel, Stephen King, Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye. Somewhere in the back, you’ll find a “Health” section. It will assuredly contain a “Sexuality” section. Drop me a line if you can’t trump the A&F catalog with something you find there.

Or was the aim to fight the general sexualization of youth culture? [Whatever that means –Ed.] If that were the aim, I would advise those parents to boycott A&F regardless of the outcome of the catalog dispute. What teenager buys designer clothing if not to impress MOTAS?

Whatever the reason, that a boycott stemming from an explicit catalog should merit such praise left me wondering if the NR has a puritanical streak. Updates to follow as events warrant.

16:23 EST | permalink | /media