Category Archive

So, the CEO of Whole Foods got in a little trouble today - to say the least.

Whole Foods’ CEO John Mackey acknowledged today that for seven years he used a pseudonym to bash rival Wild Oats on Yahoo’s popular stock-market forum. Mackey’s alias of “Rahodeb” came to light as part of the Federal Trade Commission’s attempt to block Whole Foods’ proposed $671 million purchase of Boulder-based Wild Oats. The commission cited one of his postings in a filing made public late Tuesday, noting in a footnote that Mackey “often posted to Internet sites pseudonymously, often using the name Rahodeb.” Among the postings, which lasted from a period of 1999 to 2006, Rahodeb wrote that Wild Oats management “clearly doesn’t know what it’s doing” and “OATS has no value and no future.”

So, watch what you say.

Quick example: playing golf in morning, want to know what time chic-fil-a opens: open iphone, click maps, type “chic fila” into browser, asks “did you mean chic-fil-a,” click yes, shows map with seven chic-fil-a’s in denver, click one I pass on way to golf course, gives phone number and address, click phone number, it calls, guy answers, ask what time they open - total time? seventeen seconds. Didn’t get map, but could have - complete with live traffic report. And, yes, the photo was taken with the camera on the phone.
Only thing I didn’t do was post from browser on phone - it’s pretty slow if you’re not connected to wireless. And, while I’d like it to be faster, it ain’t like my Nokia worked that great online, either.

Bloomberg has a great take on terrorism, and by great, I mean on I really did.

“On Monday, Bloomberg finally weighed in, but his response was not what some would have expected.“There are lots of threats to you in the world. There’s the threat of a heart attack for genetic reasons. You can’t sit there and worry about everything. Get a life,” he said.

That “What, me worry?” attitude pretty much sums up Bloomberg’s advice to New Yorkers on the terror plot. As far as he was concerned, the professionals were on it, so New Yorkers shouldn’t let it tax their brains.

“You have a much greater danger of being hit by lightning than being struck by a terrorist,” he added.”

Here’s a pretty interesting observation about the events at Virginia Tech.  It’s not an argument for or against anything, just a note, and, as such, should generate zero comments.

Among the 32 people killed were natives of Peru, India, Egypt, Vietnam, and Indonesia. And, of course, the murderer himself was a citizen of South Korea.

The events of Sept. 11 produced a similarly international list of victims, but that was no surprise: One would expect that the World Trade Center, given what it was and where it was, would be full of people from all corners of the globe. One would not expect the same of a random lecture hall in Blacksburg, Va. Yet now it turns out that Blacksburg is not merely a member of some metaphoric “global village” like everywhere else, but that Blacksburg is rather a literal global village, with concrete links of kinship and citizenship all over the world. Whatever American community you touch nowadays, for good or for ill, there are international repercussions.

This new level of internationalism is something to consider in our national debates about immigration, education, or even foreign policy—not as an argument for or against anything, but simply as an existing fact that not all of us have properly internalized. It’s also something to consider when we ponder America’s oddly lopsided relationship with the rest of the world. As you read this article, America’s gun-control laws are being debated around the world, America’s mental-health system is being analyzed in a dozen languages. America’s local news is now the world’s local news. But somehow, I don’t think that our knowledge of the rest of the world is growing at a similarly rapid pace.

The nice people at the McDonald’s really care about the environment, as this sign clearly states.

Can’t you just imagine the mother bird feeding her little chicks french fries she found on the ground underneath the second drive through window? What a perfect habitat for little birds.

Why bother?

UPDATE:  Some of you may have seen it, some of you didn’t, but the title of this post was a derogatory term for black people.  I saw it a second a go and couldn’t take it; so I changed it.

There, I said it. Is it okay? No, it’s not. And, yet, people seem to think it’s okay to use derogatory terms to describe homosexuals. I don’t understand people like Anne Coulter (or the audience from the American Conservatives Union) who think it is.

Just this past weekend, Matt and I were talking about Ned Stewart’s band, Grand Champeen.  Matt had noted he was going to go see them at South by Southwest and I said, you know, they’re still going strong.  I said something to the effect of, “They’re the next ‘Yo La Tengo’,” by which I meant they’d toiled for a long time now and they were due to break out.  Matt, full music snobbery in effect, actually agreed that might be a possibility.

And, then, I get an e-mail from Dave just this morning, linking to an article about the band on MSNBC.  Pretty damn cool, actually.  Go Ned!  And download the album at iTunes or buy it at Virgin or get from the dude who made illegal copies and works outside your building (okay, maybe not that last option).

For years I’ve had this idea - the “group think.” The group think is a great thing. It’s what happens when a Georgia return man breaks through the last line of protection on a punt return, when REM plays the first note from “It’s The End of The World As We Know It,” when Steve Jobs reveals the first image of his phone, e-mail, internet communicator device. And, today, Seth Godin described it, albeit with another name. He calls it micro-hysteria and saw the effect first hand at a talent show (why was he at a talent show) and someone started channeling Fergie.

I, personally, think nothing describes the effect of group think better than this: walk stumble into Doc Holiday’s on Avenue A in New York City sometime around 1:23 am on a Saturday morning right around the time the following comes on:

Well, I was drunk the day my Mom got out of prison,
And I went to pick her up in the rain,
But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck,
She got run over by a damned old train.

Everyone sings along, and by everyone I mean everyone from the drunk homeless people to the drunk yuppies to the drunk hipsters to the drunk tourists to the drunk bartenders.

Wonkette is right, this is perhaps the best lede in the history of the modern newspaper:

A NASA astronaut was arrested in Florida early Monday and accused of attacking a woman she considered her rival for the love of another astronaut, Orlando police said.

Evidently, Lisa Marie Nowak, who has been to space, drove 1,000 miles, in diapers no less (didn’t want to stop), to kidnap the girlfriend of her ex-boyfriend. Dressed in a wig and trench coat, she followed the woman, another astronaut, to the long-term parking lot at the Orlando International Airport. Once in the lot, she pursuaded the woman to roll down the window of her car and sprayed pepper spray at her.

But she missed.

Can you imagine this? You drive 1,000 miles, leaving behind your three children, peeing yourself the whole way, in order to kidnap your ex’s girlfriend, only to miss fire a thing of pepper spray. And, you leave, in your car, all the accoutrements of a kidnapping, including, but not limited to, rubber pipes, a bb gun, a knife, love letters and some garbage bags.

All of which leads to a cover story feature in the LA Times and, almost certainly, a number of bad jokes on Jay Leno. There’s a Master Card joke in there somewhere.

The linked website has a pretty interesting premise - what if there were only 100 people in the world but the demographic ratios were the same as the actual population? For example, how many would have a secondary education? Seven. How many would be malnourished? Thirteen. How many people go without basic sanitation? Forty-three. How many can’t read? Fourteen.

The site is a little sanctimoniuos (or a lot), but it’s kind of a fun time waster and relevant. One note: turn your sound off. There’s horrible impending doom music/slow train noise that underlies the whole thing.

Shores, sometimes you’re right.  The view from here is that in the last six months the country’s environment for environmentalism has changed.  Here are a couple of significant examples: Walmart’s campaign to get everyone to change lightbulbs and the ever growing trend in homebuilding to get “off the grid.” Pretty cool.

What strikes me about these article is that the rich and the poor and the middle class, of all political stripes, are fingding ways to be more energy efficient and the market is meeting those needs.

I’ll Take Manhattan, Too.

Park Slope is notorious for its stroller traffic jams, as well as its slightly manic parents, but whenever I see all those young children on the sidewalk, I think of how many parents have opted to buck the trends of the past 50 years and raise their families in urban neighborhoods.

They know they could buy a McMansion in the suburbs for what they’re paying for a floor-through here, and they know they could have a real backyard. And yet they’ve decided to stay all the same, for the camaraderie and energy and diversity of city neighborhoods. These are virtues we were close to giving up on 30 years ago. That they are ascendant again is good news for all of us.

Note: the links in the quote are mine.  That way you can know a little bit about where Mattalie should live versus where they do live.

There are so many things about this that are funny, I just don’t know what to do with myself.

Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That’s why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today’s rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products. (Most babies are bottle-fed during some part of their infancy, and one-fourth of them are getting soy milk!) Homosexuals often argue that their homosexuality is inborn because “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t homosexual.” No, homosexuality is always deviant. But now many of them can truthfully say that they can’t remember a time when excess estrogen wasn’t influencing them.

Via: Babble, for the new urban parent.

Frank doesn’t post anymore, for obvious reasons. But, if I had some time with him, I’d love to talk about Romney’s mormonism. Slate has a great article almost begging the presidential candidate to make his “I’m a mormon and proud of it” speech.

Mitt Romney has said that if his Mormon faith becomes an issue in his race for the presidency, he will address it at length in a speech. Does he have space on his calendar tomorrow?

The press is writing about his religion. Pollsters are asking about it, and GOP voters inevitably bring it up in any discussion of the 2008 candidates. Will his faith affect how he governs? Will it hurt his chances at winning the nomination? A debate in the blogosphere rages over Andrew Sullivan’s posting of a picture of the undergarment worn by some Mormons, an act that some of the faithful have found offensive.

When they’re talking about your bloomers, it’s time to clear a few things up.

It’s an interesting question and a telling one, I think. Will the evangelical wing of the Republican party vote for a person who has all of their values: no abortion, no gay marriage, no publicly-funded stem-cell research, etc., but whose values are based on a theology heretical to their own?

(I know, I know, it is possible to frame the evangelicals’ values in a way that doesn’t rely on the negative . . .)

Mormonism can be a little crazy. (Or, a lot.) But so can Christianity and Judaism and Islam and science and atheism, which is why I’m thinking about going Buddhist, which always makes sense. On the other hand, it’s a very unfamiliar religion, particularly considering how popular it is.

Anyway, interesting . . . and that underwear looks very uncomfortable.

A group of homeowners in Pagosa Springs, Colorado are fining a woman $25 a day for hanging a peace shaped Christmas wreath on the side of her house. Evidently, some families have children in Iraq and assume that the peace sign is a portest against the war. The president of the homeowner association says that if they let this go, people could put up posters saying bomb people. Under Colorado law, only one form of speech is protected in an HOA controlled development - the hanging of the American flag. Interestingly, this is a bigger and bigger issue across the country. I don’t think it’s ever been tested at the Supreme Court level; what exactly can an HOA control? This one seems pretty silly to me, particularly considering that some people living in the development thought the peace sign was actually a sign of the devil.

I know, I know, Fox and the right aren’t the same thing. But, if you’ve got this sort of person carrying your water, well . . .

A spokesman for News Corp., owner of Fox Broadcasting and publisher HarperCollins, confirmed that the company had conversations with representatives of Nicole Brown Simpson’s and Ron Goldman’s families over the past week and that the families were offered all profits from the planned Simpson book and”There were no strings attached,” News Corp. spokesman Andrew Butcher said.

In other words, this guy thought it would make it okay if the victims’ families got paid. Sure, every television executive is like this, except, well, they aren’t. On the other hand, you could have this guy carrying the water.

I feel liberated, and I’m going to tell you as plainly as I can why. I no longer am going to have to carry the water for people who I don’t think deserve having their water carried. Now, you might say, “Well, why have you been doing it?” Because the stakes are high. Even though the Republican Party let us down, to me they represent a far better future for my beliefs and therefore the country’s than the Democrat Party and liberalism does.

We’ve not had a bad apostrophe or quotation post lately.

Take the time (lots of it at 12 pages) to read this story about elephants. It’s from the Times Magazine and it’s as good an editorial reporting piece as I have read in some time. Amazing story really. Two quotes worth quoting:

When an elephant dies, its family members engage in intense mourning and burial rituals, conducting weeklong vigils over the body, carefully covering it with earth and brush, revisiting the bones for years afterward, caressing the bones with their trunks, often taking turns rubbing their trunks along the teeth of a skull’s lower jaw, the way living elephants do in greeting. If harm comes to a member of an elephant group, all the other elephants are aware of it. This sense of cohesion is further enforced by the elaborate communication system that elephants use. In close proximity they employ a range of vocalizations, from low-frequency rumbles to higher-pitched screams and trumpets, along with a variety of visual signals, from the waving of their trunks to subtle anglings of the head, body, feet and tail. When communicating over long distances — in order to pass along, for example, news about imminent threats, a sudden change of plans or, of the utmost importance to elephants, the death of a community member — they use patterns of subsonic vibrations that are felt as far as several miles away by exquisitely tuned sensors in the padding of their feet.

Compared to this.

These were not isolated incidents. All across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of their natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings. In fact, these attacks have become so commonplace that a new statistical category, known as Human-Elephant Conflict, or H.E.C., was created by elephant researchers in the mid-1990’s to monitor the problem. In the Indian state of Jharkhand near the western border of Bangladesh, 300 people were killed by elephants between 2000 and 2004. In the past 12 years, elephants have killed 605 people in Assam, a state in northeastern India, 239 of them since 2001; 265 elephants have died in that same period, the majority of them as a result of retaliation by angry villagers, who have used everything from poison-tipped arrows to laced food to exact their revenge. In Africa, reports of human-elephant conflicts appear almost daily, from Zambia to Tanzania, from Uganda to Sierra Leone, where 300 villagers evacuated their homes last year because of unprovoked elephant attacks.

The things the author has to say about elephants themselves, the parallels in their society to our society, and our relationship to them, are pretty amazing without being overly sentimental or unreasonable.

This guy has a great meme about how newspapers should live online. A couple of quotes:

As Tim Rutten reports (and I pointed to yesterday), the LA Times has a monetary value of $2.5 billion and “a balance-sheet-engorging 20% margin”. So why does Wall Street hate it? Simple: Because newspapers are a rusty industry. They have tail fins. They print lists of readers every day on the obituary page. Worse, as a class they are resolutely clueless about how to adapt to a world that is increasingly networked and self-informing. And Wall Street knows that

[. . .]

I can’t find a single newspaper that doesn’t have a slow-loading, hard-to-navigate, crapped-up home page. These things are aversive, confusing and often useless beyond endurance. Simplify the damn things. Quit trying to “drive traffic” into a maze where every link leads to another route through of the same mess. You have readers trying to learn something, not cars looking for places to park.

The Denver Post drives me crazy. Unlike better.shorter, their articles don’t have permalinked pages when they are on the front page - new content. So, when an article comes out Monday and you look for it on Tuesday on google, it’s listed, but the link is dead. Until the crawlers can figure out where it’s actually located, you can’t find the story.

Furthermore, their search is dead broken. Here’s a link to a search for “Union Station.” Notice the top article. I don’t know how they are figuring this out, but the “F for Funding Article” is months old. Notice I can’t filter this AT ALL. What if I want it by date? Here’s a google news search for the same thing [adding the word Denver to make it smarter]. Notice I can sort by date AND relevance.

Notice another thing on that google link - the ads. Oh, wait, there aren’t any. That’s an amazing thing about google - they don’t always run ads. But think more about the Denver Post ads. They are always trying to sell us advertising in their paper. We only do in extrememly rare circumstances. Not because I don’t like the paper, but because advertising in that old format doesn’t work for us. But, I’d like to advertise online. The problem is, they run their online advertising just like their offline - they cram it all together. In the paper, real estate ads are all bundled together. It’s impossible to stand out. But, I’d gladly pay for contextual ads on the site (or in the paper!): our company name appears in an article? Run our ad. Downtown condos are discussed? Run our ad. A review of a restaurant in our neighborhood? Run our ad. Instead, I’ve got to advertise on this site. Animated GIFs? When was this site programmed, 1995? No way. Never. (Well, once, but I still feel dirty about it.)

And then, finally, there’s this: I wrote this post because Seth sent me to Eric who sent me to Doc. That’s four places it shows up. Newspapers can’t do that because they first have to know my fake e-mail address. For some reason, newspapers are still trying to get my e-mail address so they can sell it to some other idiot. Stop flippin’ registering me. It’s worthless information and it gets in the way.

Anyway, the modern online newspaper is dumb and sucks. Someone’s going to change it and that someone is going to make GooTube money

I’ve noticed a new phenomena on the news websites I read most: the most blogged/most read/most e-mailed list. The most read list means almost nothing to me. After all, the longer the CNN.com editors leave the story about Muslims burning the Pope’s likeness, the more people read it. Plus, the better the photo, the more likely I am to read a story.

On the other hand, it’s fascinating to watch the most-blogged list when compared to the most-e-mailed list. At the New York Times, they almost never include the same stories. I’ve even posted an image of the site, snapped right before I started writing this. There’s not one crossover story.  (And, I’m making this easy for you to see if you take the time to click on the preceding the link.)
I think it’s fair to think this way: the things people take the time to e-mail to their friends are the things that matter to them. The things people take the time to blog are the things that matter to them. Using the transitive property, I come to the conclusion that bloggers and the rest of the world don’t care about the same things.

Here are the five diggbait reasons I believe this to be the case:

1. Bloggers are political wonks; the rest of the world isn’t.
2. Bloggers spend too much time complaining about the same thing; the real world is ready to move on already.
3. Bloggers really like talking about the things their friends are talking about; the real world is tired of those cocktail parties.
4. Bloggers really to talk about controversies; the real world wants to talk about things that actually effect them.
5. Bloggers already already got into Princeton; the real world has sex and thus has to worry about getting their kids into Princeton.