Category Archives: Interesting

Why RJ Reynolds Should Be the Biggest Arts Sponsor in the US

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Winston-Salem is the home to both RJ Reynolds and the North Carolina School of the Arts.  Until now this seemed just a coincidence to me, but now I think the folks at RJR may have seen the future decades ago and worked behind the scenes to make sure the NCSA came to Winston.  Here’s why: to get around smoking bans in liberal states like California and Minnesota bars are starting to have theater nights. It seems that in these states actors are allowed to light up during live performances, and so bars are staging plays and calling all the patrons actors.  Nifty!

Here’s a piece about the smoking ban work-around on Boing Boing, and the article they link to in The Star Tribune, the newspaper of record in those other Twin Cities in Minnesota.

I’m thinking that RJR’s marketing folks need to get hyper aggressive in promoting bar-plays AND their lobbyists need to get busy making sure this loophole doesn’t close any time soon.  To push bar-plays they should print and distribute free of charge every play that features multiple characters sucking on cancer sticks.  Better yet they should commission students at NCSA to write plays in which every character smokes and have multiple crowd scenes.

And while they’re at it why stop with bars?  They should see if this work-around applies to schools.  Those kids are always doing plays and I keep hearing how those commie-educators are constantly cutting back on arts programs so school plays offer a perfect opportunity for business/education synergy.

This’ll show those rubes at truth who’s in charge.

Fecal Lemons?

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Lex points to a video on Youtube that basically says that the lemons in your drink at a restaurant are probably contaminated with all kinds of nasty bacteria.  "Fecal" is part of the description which means that I’m pretty much done with the lemon thing for the next couple of weeks.  FYI, my memory sucks so I’ll forget all about this in a couple of weeks, thus no claim from me that I’ll "never have lemons in my drink again."

Rules of Thumb

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I’ve always loved rules of thumb, but if you pressed me to define what they are I’d just flubber out something obtuse.  That’s why I was very pleased to find this on Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools:

(Tom) Parker has refined his explanation of what rules of thumb are, and why they are cool tools. He writes:
"A rule of thumb is a homemade recipe for making a guess. It is an
easy-to-remember guide that falls somewhere between a mathematical
formula and a shot in the dark. Rules of thumb are a kind of tool. They
help you appraise a problem or situation. They make it easier to
consider the subtleties of the topic at hand; they give you a feel for
a subject. A rule of thumb is not a joke or a ditty. It is not a
Murphy’s Law. Murphy says that things will take longer than we think; a
rule of thumb says how much longer. While a proverb says that a stitch
in time saves nine, a rule of thumb says to allow one inch of yarn for every stitch on a knitting needle."

Kelly also links to Parker’s new website dedicated to rules of thumb which I think might be one of the most interesting sites I’ve ever come across.  What makes it REALLY cool is that he solicits rules of thumb from readers and then asks other readers to rate the rules so he’s probably going to amass an even greater treasure trove of wisdom in the near future.  Here’s a couple of my favorite rules from just a five minute perusal of the site:

  • If you can’t adequately and clearly explain a concept to a neophyte, you don’t understand it clearly enough yourself. —
    Adam, CIO, Perth     
     
  • For fatty foods, leave 40 percent of the grill exposed to avoid flareups. —
    Gerri Willis, USA     
     
  •   When you’re playing blackjack, assume that any unseen card is an 8.
  •   For marketing purposes, elderly consumers think they are 15 years younger than they actually are. —
      Tracy Lux Frances,  Bradenton,  Florida     
     
  •   Advertising costs should not drop below 10 percent of sales until a business has been around 20 years. —
      Captain Haggerty,  animal trainer, actor, author, and philosopher,  New York,  New York     
     
  •   The year you start growing dark hair on your chest is the year that the loss rate of your head hair exceeds its growth rate. (I must be the exception that proves the rule, because if this was true I’d be bald twice over by now; Jon). —
      Mark Ryan,  Dallas,  Texas     
     
  • You are middle aged when your high school and college days are featured
    as nostalgia on TV. You are at old age when your wedding presents are
    sold as antiques. —
      Margaret M. Day,  Locke,  New York     
     
  • When forced to estimate an adult woman’s age in her presence, take the
    figure you think she is, divide by two and add 15 (add 20 for a woman
    presumed over 50) —
      Jim Veihdeffer, PR pundit, Phoenix, AZ, US
  •   If you can touch the ceiling of your house with the palm of your hand, your ceiling is too low.  — Bob Horton,  consultant and writer,  Largo,  Florida
  • If friends ask you to help them move, remember that the work will begin
    an hour after you get there, you’ll finish an hour later than expected,
    the pizza will be colder than the beer, and the beer will be in lesser
    quantities than promised. —Tom Sacco,  West Des Moines,  Iowa
  •   It takes as much time to paint the trim in a room as it does to paint the walls and ceiling. — R. A. Heindl,  design engineer,  Euclid,  Ohio 
     

Understanding the Manchine

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Per my post about Media General’s reaction to bookofjoe’s habit of pasting their entire articles on his site with links and full attribution I’ve been having an interesting debate with Esbee in the comments.   One of the things that the debate highlights for me is the fact that old-media norms and rules are being challenged by new media tools and habits and the old-media owners are struggling with how to deal with it.  In particular I think many of us are having a hard time grasping the evolution of what some call the internet and what others call the web.  Just when most of us were beginning to get comfortable with how the web had changed information delivery and consumption the web was revamped and now readers have become cut-paste-sharers.  This evolution has been stamped by some as "Web 2.0" and it’s literally changing how people use information, but pity the person who tries to explain the "hows", "whats" and "whys" of Web 2.0.  That’s why I found the video below by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University so compelling (hat tip to Ed Cone for the link).  It’s the best explanation I’ve yet seen for what’s going on in new media, and I think it highlights the challenges that folks at old-media companies are facing.

Eelymosynary?

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Ed Cone channeled George Will in the comments on one of his own blog posts.  The post yesterday was about John Edwards withdrawing from the Democratic presidential campaign and it attracted Ed’s usual crowd of commentors, a few of whom began questioning Edwards’ championing of the poor (i.e. he’s a rich hypocrite) and others who defended him.  Anyway, here’s an excerpt from Ed’s comment that had me running to my dictionary (okay, looking it up on Dictionary.com):

Poverty itself demands structural approaches, beyond any eelymosynary remedies applied to individuals or small groups. (Emphasis mine)

I don’t know what John Edwards gives to charity. I don’t think he
has to give most of his money away, certainly at this point in his life
and his children’s lives, to be considered charitable or to show
genuine concern.

But his message as a politician is more about addressing poverty and
its structural causes than proclaiming himself the charity champion.

I tried looking up eelymosynary but I think Ed misspelled it because Dictionary.com didn’t find it but did suggest eleemosynary, an adjective which is defined as "of or pertaining to alms, charity, or charitable donations; charitable."  I can’t hold this one against Ed though since I can’t pronounce the word, much less spell it.

Anyone who’s read George Will more than once will recognize the phenomenon of having to keep a dictionary handy in order to wade through the article/editorial.  I always felt this was a weakness of his since the point in his line of work (columnist) is to effectively argue an issue, not show off his vocabulary.  If you require your readers to consult a dictionary you aren’t really communicating are you?  In other words whenever I read the guy I feel like writing him and telling him "We all know you’re that kid who was always the smartest in the class, or at least sounded like the smartest kid in the class, so quit showing off and tell us what you think in terms that more than 2% of the population understands."

Anyway, Ed rarely whips out the Willian phrasing so he’s actually a very effective communicator.  This was a classic though.

Support Your Local Pastor’s Wife

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I was reading Mental Floss and they linked to an article in Time magazine (March, 2007) that focuses on pastor’s wives.  Here’s the most interesting part:

Eight in 10 pastors’ wives say they feel unappreciated or unaccepted by
their husbands’ congregations, according to surveys by the Global
Pastors Wives Network (GPWN); the same number wish their husbands would
choose another profession. "Wives’ issues" is the No. 1 reason pastors
leave their ministries. The divorce rate among ministers and their
wives is 50%, no better than that of the general public.

Ouch.

It would be interesting to see if female pastors’ husbands feel the same kind of pressure.  I seriously doubt it since our society tends to assume that men will/should work, so a female pastor’s husband probably doesn’t have the same set of expectations heaped upon him.  According to the article 70% of pastors wives choose to work, but the tone of the article implies that the working doesn’t relieve the expectations of them to support their husbands’ ministries.

I guess what this means is next time you’re in church you need to make sure you take a moment to shake the pastor’s wife’s hand before you shake his and head out the door.

And You Thought the Teapot Museum was a Crackpot Idea

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My Congresswoman Virginia Foxx caught a lot of heat for her support of the Teapot Museum in Sparta, NC.  Well let me tell you that there are stranger ideas out there and Mental Floss has a few of them.  They include:

I doubt anyone would have thought twice about the Teapot Museum if it hadn’t been for the fact that Rep. Foxx was trying to get federal funding for the project and it made a perfect political punching bag for thsoe folks trying to attack pork barrel spending.  There’s also no indication that any of these museums received any kind of public funding, but if they did then I’d say by comparison the Teapot idea looks great.  And lest we make fun of people who collect and marvel at things like teapots and PEZ dispensers let’s remember that eBay was started as a PEZ trading site.  Those PEZ geeks are laughing all the way to the bank.

The Disemvoweller

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Xeni Jardin is one of the co-editors of Boing Boing.  She posted a piece on Edge.org called Online Communities Rot Without Daily Tending by Human Hands that essentially fleshes out the thinking behind her very descriptive title. (Hat tip to Ed Cone for pointing to it).  Among the very smart things she wrote I found this bit to be flat out brilliant:

Finally, this year, we resurrected comments on the blog, with the one thing that did feel natural. Human hands.      

We hired a community manager, and equipped our comments system with a secret weapon: the "disemvoweller." If someone’s misbehaving, she can remove all the vowels from their screed with one click. The dialogue stays, but the misanthrope looks ridiculous, and the emotional sting is neutralized.

Now, once again, the balance mostly works. I still believe that there is no fully automated system capable of managing the complexities of online human interaction — no software fix I know of. But I’d underestimated the power of dedicated  human attention.

I suspect Ed is hunting for a Typepad version of the disemvoweller as we speak.  If I got more than my normal quota of one comment per millennium I probably would.