Yearly Archives: 2007

Over My Dead Body

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Recently a 40 year old teacher (now former teacher) here in North Carolina married a 16 year old student who he also coached in cross country. Here’s what the story in the Winston-Salem Journal said:

Brenton Wuchae
coached Windy Hager at South Brunswick High School, where she recently
completed her sophomore year as one of the school’s top runners. He
also lives less than two miles away from the Hagers’ home on Oak Island.

Wuchae married Hager in Brunswick County on Monday, according to a marriage license.

Hager’s parents,
Dennis and Betty Hager, said they did all they could to keep the couple
apart after noticing a deeper-than-usual friendship forming between
them. The parents said they tried to intervene by talking to the coach,
going to school officials, pleading with police and sheriff’s office
detectives, even other teachers and students at South Brunswick.

But the Hagers say they reluctantly signed a consent form allowing their daughter to marry her coach.

It’s often hard to criticize parents because you just don’t know what it’s really like for them.  We’ve all seen parents completely lose it on their kids over seemingly small acts of misbehavior and thought "I wonder what the kid’s done before that caused this over reaction", or at least we hope it’s a "straw that broke the camel’s back" thing.  In this case I’m not going to necessarily criticize the parents but I am going to say that you’d have to put a pen in my cold, dead fingers and move my hand for me in order to get me to sign the consent form.  I’d rather take out a note on the house and put my daughter in a boarding school somewhere north of the arctic circle than turn her over to some middle-aged, can’t handle women his own age, bum of an ex-teacher.

And of course stories like this make it oh-so-much-easier to convince my friends back in DC that I really didn’t move to the location for Deliverance.

Yadkin Valley Times

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I came across a new blog/website called the Yadkin Valley Times which is written and hosted by Andy Mathews the former editor of The Yadkin Ripple.  What interests me the most is that I found the site via a story in the Triad Business Journal about the publishers of some small newspapers in NW North Carolina who resigned after their papers were purchased by Heartland Publications.  The  Biz Journal story used Mathews’ post about his interview with one of the publishers in its reporting, so for those keeping track you have this progression:

  1. Editor of small mainstream paper starts his own online news venture (looks like he’s using WordPress)
  2. Said editor interviews publisher of his former paper (and the Elkin Tribune) about the publisher’s resignation.
  3. In its story about the resignations a mainstream business news publisher cites material from the new online news service.

Add to this mix the fact that another mainstream paper in the area, The Winston-Salem Journal, just did a front page piece on how Yadkin County is struggling with the tension between residents who want to keep the old conservative "country" flavor of the county and those who want the county to evolve into a more cosmopolitan area.  Then the Journal’s managing editor, Ken Otterbourg, writes a post in his blog about the print piece and ties it to the story about the publishers resigning.  If you look at all of these pieces together you have a nice snapshot of the todays media lifecycle.

Now all we need is for some turkey at one of the local TV stations to decide they need a "war room" like CNN’s "Situation Room", hire a 20-something woman to stand in front of a large flat screen monitor and then do 45 second broadcasts of her surfing around local online sources and in the process have her tell us what we’re seeing.  Heck they might even have her play a Youtube video shot by a local citizen who happened to be in the right place at the right time, which of course might lead them to lay off all their camera folks (sorry Lenslinger).

In all seriousness I am interested in what Mathews is doing with the Yadkin Valley Times, if for no other reason than it might be an early sign of what could be a promising development.  That is, with lots of professional journalists hitting the streets as their former employers struggle with legacy businesses, we might begin to see more and more of them plant their own flags in the ground and start their own publishing concerns.  After all they don’t have to sell that much advertising to match their old salaries, and if enough of them do it and then create a kind of co-op that they can pitch to advertisers (the former city hall beat reporter teams up with the former sports reporter) then they might create some legitimate competition for their former bosses.  That would be kind of cool to see.

More Home Improvement Fiascos

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Celeste and I, having recovered from some of our earlier home improvement projects, have decided to start on some major projects that we hope to have completed by the end of the summer.  We began the process by ordering a dumpster (see the picture on the left) from Waste Management so we can demo a bunch of our house quickly and without dozens of trips to the dump.

Hopefully we’ll do a better job than some of the folks featured in the Home Inspection Nightmares section of the This Old House website.  I’ve written about the site before and they recently added a new gallery, of which my favorite is the alternative ambient floor heating system pictured here:
heater

Compare that to the system we inherited and I think we might have found the culprit who did both.

The People in Black and White Clothes

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PhotoAbout once every couple of months some Mormon missionaries stop by the house to check in on me.  We were Mormons when I was a kid, until my folks were divorced in the mid-70s, and the church never removed me from its database.  For some reason they don’t chase down my brother, but they’ve been knocking on my door every where I’ve lived since college.  Last week they stopped by while I was out and our 11 year old son left a note on the fridge (pictured at left, click on it for a full view).  For those who can’t read his writing it says, “The people in black and white clothes stopped by and asked to see Dad — Justin.”  Luckily I figured out that there weren’t Mennonites, priests or undertakers knocking on doors in the neighborhood.

Who’s Responsible?

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I just read a great piece by Seth Godin that essentially says that marketers are responsible for the affects that the products/services they market have on society. From his piece:

If marketing works, it means that free choice isn’t quite so free.
It means that marketers get to influence and amplify desires. The
number of SUVs sold in the United States is a bazillion times bigger
than it was in 1962. Is that because people suddenly want them, or is
it because car marketers built them and marketed them?

Cigarette consumption is way down. Is that because people suddenly
don’t want them any more, or is it because advertising opportunities
are limited?

Others will tell you that if it’s legal, it’s fair game. If it’s legal for Edelman
to post a blog called Working Families for Wal-Mart (when it’s really
working Edelman employees for Wal-Mart), then they have every right to
do so. In fact, they have an obligation to their shareholders to do so. Or so they say.

I believe that every criminal, no matter how heinous the crime,
deserves an attorney. I don’t believe that every product and every
organization and every politician deserves world-class marketing or PR…

Let me be really clear, just in case. If you think that the world
would be a better place if everyone owned a handgun, then yes, market
handguns as hard as you can. If you honestly believe that kids are well
served by drinking a dozen spoonfuls of sugar every morning before
school, then I may believe you’re wrong, but you should go ahead and
market your artificially-sweetened juice product. My point is that you
have no right to market things you know are harmful or that lead to bad
outcomes, regardless of how much you need that job.

Along the way, “just doing my job,” has become a mantra for blind
marketers who are making short-term mistakes in order to avoid a
conflict with the client or the boss. As marketing becomes every more
powerful, this is just untenable. It’s unacceptable.

If you get asked to market something, you’re responsible. You’re
responsible for the impacts, the costs, the side effects and the
damage. You killed that kid. You poisoned that river. You led to that
fight. If you can’t put your name on it, I hope you’ll walk away. If
only 10% of us did that, imagine the changes. Imagine how proud you’d
be of your work.

Thankfully I’ve never had to market anything of social consequence, but I have had to market products that I looked at and thought to myself, "Who in their right mind would spend $x for this?"  In those cases it was extremely difficult to write compelling copy or to enthusiastically sell the product, and honestly I didn’t stay with those companies for long.  The flip side of the coin is that I’ve worked with services/products that I didn’t personally find valuable but it was abundantly clear that the customers did, and from that experience I learned to try and work beyond my own biases.  In other words just because I don’t like something doesn’t mean that there aren’t a million people out there who do like it.  Either way I agree with Godin that if you market it or sell it, you are responsible for it.

Cross posted on LowderEnterprises.com.

It’s Not About the Truth

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A few weeks ago I got an email from Barry Porter, Director of Marketing, Adult Publishing Group at Simon & Schuster, who is responsible for promoting "It’s Not About the Truth" a new book about the Duke lacrosse team case from last year.  The book was written by Don Yaeger with Mike Pressler, the former Duke lacrosse coach.  Mr. Porter asked me if I’d like to review the book and I told him I would.

Last weekend I got my copy of the book in the mail and I read it over the last several days.  Since I’m not a professional book reviewer I figured the best approach would be to provide some bullet points of my initial impressions.  I’ll start with a couple of negative impressions I had, but for the most part they’re positive.  Here goes:

  • It’s no surprise that the book is pro-Pressler and pro-Duke lacrosse players.  What did surprise me were some of the one-liners that Yaeger used that I felt were an unnecessary distraction from his narrative.  For instance at the beginning of the 10th chapter Yaeger writes, "Nifong jumped on his media opportunity like a fat kid on a cake."  Chapter 16 has this nugget: "Nifong may have been a political virgin, but he did know something about being a whore."
  • Yaeger seems to be a political conservative and he tends to use "liberal" as an epithet.  Part of his thesis is that Pressler and the players were undermined by a group of liberal professors, the "Group of 88", who used the case as a way to promote their radical-left theories, but in the process he seems to lump all "liberals" with those who penned their names to a controversial ad that appeared in the Duke Chronicle student newspaper.  The first sentence of Chapter 12 reads, "It is one of America’s worst-kept secrets: College campuses are a breeding ground for radical left-leaning faculty."  Um, I think the faculty at Grove City College, Brigham Young University or Liberty University would take exception to being classified as "radical left-leaning."  Not that the faculty in question at Duke aren’t radical or left-leaning, but making such sweeping, blanket statements detracts from the writer’s credibility.
  • Yaeger discusses the influence of blogs on the developing story, and even uses some blogs in his research and background materials.  One such blog is Durham-in-Wonderland, which is run by KC Johnson who is a professor of history at Brooklyn College. I can’t think of another book I’ve read that references blogs as a resource.
  • Putting aside the author’s biases, and at least he doesn’t hide them, he does offer a lot of background information on the case and in particular there is a lot from the perspective of the coach.  While most of us, especially here in North Carolina, have read about the prosecutor’s (Mike Nifong’s) alleged misconduct and have read about the alleged rape victim’s changing stories, I think many people will be surprised by the information contained in the book.  There’s a lot of information about police behavior that’s downright creepy, some of Nifong’s unbelievable decisions and some decisions by Duke administrators that I’d call ill-conceived at best (chicken-shit would be another description).
  • Yaeger writes over and over that as the "true" story came out lots of people could see themselves in the players’ shoes if they hadn’t been lucky.  In other words the poor decision the players made in hiring strippers to come to their house to perform is not dissimilar from decisions made by many of us, but we never had the misfortune of having that decision turn our lives inside out.  That is definitely true for many folks, including myself.  Put bluntly I can remember at least two bachelor parties that featured private dancers (and their requisite 300 lb. escort) and it’s not hard to imagine a situation like that spinning out of control.
  • I don’t think this book will change anyone’s world view.  For those who are offended that young men would hire a stripper to come to their home they’ll probably see this case as "justification for all those other men who get away with subjugating women to such humiliation".  For those who think that all cops/DAs are crooked they’ll see this as further evidence of that "fact", and for those who think that "all liberals care about is political correctness and not the truth" this book will really stoke their fires.  Still, I think the book provides value in that it offers a detailed timeline and overview of the events that make it easier to understand how it all happened.  The author did a lot of interviews with the principals involved; the players, the coach, the attorneys and school representatives and as such the book offers lots of good information for those interested in the case.
  • Unless the author totally botched his research, and I seriously doubt he did, Nifong is toast as soon as his disbarment hearings are complete.
  • Finally, it’s not a bad read. I’m not a particularly fast reader and I was able to finish it in a few hours.  Sure I didn’t like some of the adjectives and adverbs that Yaeger used, but on the other hand the narrative flowed well.  If you have any interest at all in the case then it’s definitely worth the time.

Foxx in the Glass House

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Ed Cone has a nice little post about my US Rep., Virginia Foxx, and points out that those who live in glass houses should be very careful of the rocks they throw.  Below is the video of Rep. Foxx deriding some of the bills she sees as a waste of Congress’ time and here’s the link to some of the resolutions that Rep. Foxx has sponsored, including a resolution to recognize the Christmas tree industry and my favorite, H.CON.RES.205: Recognizing the spirit of Jacob Mock Doub and his contribution to
encouraging youth to be physically active and fit and expressing the
sense of Congress that "National Take a Kid Mountain Biking Day" should
be established in Jacob Mock Doub’s honor.

In all fairness I should point out that I’m not a fan of Rep. Foxx and have made that clear.  I also think that she’s sponsored some good bills (Example: H.R.1499 :
To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to allow members of the
Armed
Forces serving in a combat zone to make contributions to their
individual retirement plans even if the compensation on which such
contribution is based is excluded from gross income.)  That said, I also think Ed’s right that she’s being a little hypocritical in this case.

BTW, Rep. Foxx and another junior NC Rep., Patrick McHenry, are part of a Republican effort to get the Democrats to air the earmarks on the pending Homeland Security bill now, before it goes to conference with the Senate, and not after it goes to conference.  Basically they’re calling the Democrats out on campaign promises to make the legislative process more transparent.  Of course when their party was in power they were calling for no such thing, but I guess that’s neither here nor there.

Into the Belly of the Beast

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I had a cup of coffee this morning with Kim Underwood at Chelsee’s.  Kim is the Winston-Salem Journal’s online guy and we had a great conversation.  After coffee we walked over the the Journal’s building he gave me a tour of the newsroom and introduced me to a few folks.  Someone asked me if I was going to write about the layoffs last week at the News & Record and when I said I wasn’t sure she said something to the effect of "you should, especially since you haven’t been shy about writing about us." 

Good point, but my reply to her was that I didn’t feel as comfortable writing about internal goings-on as "public facing" events.  For instance I have no problem critiquing the newspaper’s web re-design because I’m the audience and my opinion matters as much as anyone elses.  On the other hand, I don’t work at the newspaper, don’t know the financial situation, don’t know the personnel situation and so I don’t feel qualified in evaluating the specifics of the layoffs. (For what its worth, I took a similar tack last November when the Journal had their own layoffs.)  On the other-other hand, if some of the stories coming out of the layoff action are true then I can say that in those specific instances the individuals who were laid off got a pretty rough deal.  Here are two specific cases that I know of:

  1. One N&R library staffer was laid off and he is getting ready to enter cancer treatments and is apparently going to need a bone-marrow transplant in the future.  I’d originally heard this as a rumor, but now Ed Cone has posted an appeal to help Marcus Green pay for the COBRA expenses for the procedure so I guess it’s true.
  2. One reporter was hired, started last Monday and was laid off at the end of last week. Four days on the job!  How the management at the N&R let that happen is beyond me. At best it’s poor management and at worst it’s callousness of the grossest kind.

As for the rest of the layoffs I don’t really have much to say.  It’s obviously a business call that the folks at Landmark felt they had to make, but it doesn’t make the situation any easier for the folks now looking for employment. 

In general terms one thing I’d like to see, just once, is a case where a senior exec takes a personal hit in order to save the folks working for him or her.  I’m not talking about the N&R here, I’m talking about all the companies out there who are downsizing in an effort to improve their financials.  Is there one CEO out there willing to say, "You know what, the buck stops here.  Before I lay off 30 people making $50,000 each I’m going to give up my $1.5 million bonus, and together we’re going to fix this business"?  Somehow I think we’re more likely to hear, "It’s unfortunate that we have to let go 30 fine people but rest assured that as your all-star CEO I’ve created a contingency plan to have those same functions fulfilled by 60 people in Bangalore for 1/6 the cost, which is why my $1.5 million incentive is returning a tremendous ROI."

Oh, and by-the-by, the folks at the Journal were really nice to me, especially when you consider that I’ve not always been so nice to them.  Either they take a more charitable view of we bloggers than many of their brethren, or they know exactly what I am: an opinionated person with enough ego to think that people might want to read his opinions, or seen another way, a guy who’s a few slices short of a full loaf and knows how to type.  Either way, they treated me well and I had a good time checking out their digs.

Constituent Relations by State Rep. Larry Brown

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North Carolina State Rep. Larry Brown from Kernersville sent a cute little email to Anglico of Blue NC.  Blue NC is a site for NC Democrats and Rep. Brown is decidedly Republican so you it isn’t surprising that they don’t see eye to eye, but the Representative’s tone is a tad harsh.  For those of you who don’t like to follow links here’s what Anglico wrote, followed by the Rep.’s reply:

Anglico: Dear Hard-Working Representative,

Following the recent convention of the North Carolina GOP in Charlotte, a number of Republican Representatives wrote to me, complaining that the Democrats in North Carolina really aren’t the majority party in the House because their candidates actually received more votes in 2006 than Democrats received. One of my colleagues recently completed an analysis of that talking point, which I am sure you’ll find interesting. Her report is posted here for your easy review.

Rep. Brown:  I cannot tell you in a kind way what you liberals can do with all your waste that would make the hog lagoon issue look like a diaper. Enjoy while you can. Post that on your web page and come visit me anytime. Larry Brown

Ed Cone linked to this piece and in the comments of that post Anglico wrote this:

Two comments:

1. Nothing I sent to Larry Brown was disrespectful or rude in any way. I challenged the Republican talking point that they "really won" in 2006 and should be in the majority in the NC House. Mr. Brown apparently has trouble reading, or else he simply objects to anyone taking issue with his point of view.

2. Most offensive of all is Mr. Brown’s blatant and gleeful disregard for anyone in his district who has liberal political leanings. He wrote the following to me:

I cannot tell you in a kind way what you liberals can do with all your waste that would make the hog lagoon issue look like a diaper. Enjoy while you can. Post that on your web page and come visit me anytime. Larry Brown

And this to one of his own constituents:

When you liberals try to send me a bunch of trash I respond. I did not initiate the exchange, but I will not yield one inch. I did not bully anyone or use foul language. You people can wallow in all your " votes for sale " attitude all you want, but I am not a part of your conspiracy to rob the citizens of North Carolina honest service.

All your buddies have not been sentenced yet. If Republicans take money for votes I want them to go to jail too. Get a real life. I am not coddling to a bunch liberal ideas either like lifestyles or sexual orientation. If you do not like it that is too bad. I am sure I will lose a lot of sleep over it.

BlueNC sent me an email and I answered just like I did with yours. If I never hear from you again, you will never hear from me. Have a nice life.

For Mr. Brown, a serious analysis of the facts on the 2006 election apparently qualifies as a "bunch of trash."

Gives new meaning to the term public servant, don’t you think?

In a way it’s kind of refreshing to see a politician not engaging in double talk and fence sitting, but on the other hand I’d kind of hope that a person who can vote on billions of dollars in state spending would be more thoughtful.