Just looking at the menu … or ordering the rump??? (Obama and Mayara Tavares)

Published July 10, 2009 Trivial , Universal Leave a Comment
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So the media is all abuzz of this picture of Barack and French President Nicolas Sarkozy apparently checking out the rear end of a 17-year-old girl from Rio de Janeiro.

Gotta love the New York Post writers, headlining this important, hard-hitting story – ‘Tail to the Chief’ and leading the story with ‘Baby got Barack!’ Damn, they’re good.

Now we know Sarkozy is a total horndog (and the legal age in France is 15, I believe) so no surprise or problem there, but I kind of expected better from Obama.

Oh, who am I kidding?? Men were born to look, and it’s not like this girl had her age tattooed on her forehead (or her backside for that matter). Oh sure, it’s juvenile-looking, kind of fratboyish and probably unbefitting of a President, but I just can’t throw stones here.

Checking out women is one of the things I do best, and I’m not secretive about it – I usually point out the hotter ones to my Beyonce. My dad always said you can still look at the menu even if you can no longer order. I don’t see it as disrespect – I just admire beauty in all its forms. I would love it if girls checked me and my fabulous tushy out on a regular basis.

And maybe Barack was just comparing this girl’s rear to his own wife’s impressive backside. Clearly, the guy favors a healthy rump.

EDIT:  Video shows Barack may not have been checking out the goods at all. Sarkozy, on the other hand, not so innocent.

Obama’s Too Big to Fail Rules Too Late to Matter

Published July 7, 2009 Deep , Universal Leave a Comment
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The AP has posted an article detailing Obama’s new regulatory plan that would if enacted impose serious penalties on financial institutions when they get too large.

Although there aren’t many specifics in the article about what those disincentives would be or exactly how the government would define ‘too big’, this is a much-needed step back on the road to financial sobriety. We should never as an economy or a country be held hostage to the failings of one single entity.

As deeply as I hated all of the bailouts we’ve been throwing around to woefully (borderline criminally, in my opinion) mismanaged institutions like Citigroup and AIG, I do believe their balance sheets may have been so enormous, their footprints and obligations so intertwined in the world economy, that their failure could have crippled the entire foundation of our credit-based system and brought it to its knees.

Yet don’t be fooled – our problems didn’t lie with any one or two entities, but with the entire system. What we had instead was a complete failure by the market as a whole – and even more damning, by the regulators in charge of watching those markets – to recognize the emerging credit/debt/mortgage bubbles whose eventual bursting forced this country to its day of reckoning.

A law breaking up large financial institutions or disincentivizing them from forming in the first place will help make future problems easier to spot and solve, perhaps, but it won’t by itself save us from our own worst behavior.

And it will do very little if anything to impact our current situation and economic crisis.

In fact, the most ironic thing about the Obama plan is that the entity which may now be most accurately considered ‘too big to fail’ is our own U.S. government, which through actions taken by the Fed and the Treasury has taken on much of the bad debt and obligations (and added a bunch of new ones) that will be stifling our economy for years to come.

We can only hope that the Chinese and other foreign governments continue to agree that the U.S. government is indeed too big to fail and allow us the time to work through our issues and restore some amount of fiscal and monetary discipline without cutting off their support in one fell swoop.

Questions: The Concert Edition (Encore!! Encore!!)

Published July 3, 2009 Personal , Trivial Leave a Comment
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A couple of weeks ago, I went to see Regina Spektor perform at the Beacon Theater in NYC’s Upper West Side. courtesy of a gift from the soon-to-be-Mrs. Deadman.

What a disappointment.

I really like Ms. Spektor, could listen to her breakthrough album ‘Begin to Hope’ over and over again. But her live performance was uninspired and pretty boring, to be frank. Spektor just wasn’t connecting to the audience and it really put a damper on the evening.

My Beyonce and I were trying to figure out why the performance seemed so blah. Regina can’t be blamed entirely – I think her music and her modest (perhaps-too-humble) personality would just fit much better in a more intimate setting than the 2,600 seat Beacon. And I’m sure the fact I didn’t know most of the new songs which dominated her setlist certainly had something to do with my lackluster response.

I don’t think the quality of her musicianship was at fault. But while her voice was in fine form, and the newer music decent if forgettable, she did have her stumbles, most notably during a rap she performed near the end of the concert where she forgot the words. I felt like I wanted to be Simon Cowell, and tell her in my British accent that she should have just pushed through, as few people probably would have noticed the mistake if she hadn’t sat there awkwardly for more than a minute trying to recall the forgotten lyrics.

Regina got sufficient applause at the end of the show I guess to justify the requisite encores (another concert tradition that has totally lost meaning now that its become automatic), but it all felt empty and hollow to me, or maybe that was just my own letdown feeling showing through.

In any case, I’ve decided to post a concert questions column. Looking forward to your answers.

1) What was the first concert you’ve seen? How old were you?

2) What was the best concert you’ve seen? What do you remember most about it?

3) What was the worst concert you’ve seen? What do you remember most about it?

4) Who haven’t you seen perform at a concert but wish you could have?

5) What’s the best opening band you’ve seen? Do you usually arrive at a concert in time to see the opening bands?

6) Putting aside the quality of the actual music for a second, what’s the most important thing a singer or band can do to make the difference between a great concert and an OK concert or an OK concert and a bad concert?

7) Even during great concerts, I often find myself looking at my watch near the end. Do you think concerts are not long enough or too long?

8) What’s the most annoying audience habit at a concert: a) Yelling out ‘I love you’ or some other term of endearment to the performer b) Yelling out the name of a song they want to hear when the performer has not asked for such input c) Singing loudly the contents of a song when no one else is doing so to the point where surrounding concertgoers can hardly hear the real performer or d) Something else that annoys the shit out of you.

9) Why do you think audience members yell out to a performer during a concert: a) because they are swept up by the passion of the music and the moment b) because they hold out hope that the performer will hear them, notice them, and then invite them backstage c) because they like to hear the sound of their own voices and wish they had the talent to be a performer?

10) The encore: a) Like it as is b) Should be revised (How?) c) Should be eliminated.

11) OK, OK, stop your clapping. I’ll give you one more question. I give you $100 to spend on music-related items from your favorite performer – would you rather use that money to buy two tickets to a live concert or to buy a rare bootleg album from that performer that you don’t already have and why?

Questions: The Michael Jackson Edition

Published June 25, 2009 Deep , Personal , Universal Leave a Comment
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Michael Jackson dead?? That’s what the LA Times and AP are reporting, anyway (CNN hasn’t yet confirmed). Unbelievable.

Earlier today, my brother was bemoaning Farrah Fawcett’s death, trying to come to grips with the loss of his most common inspiration for those special, intimate teenage moments. (I kind of remember Farrah as being a sexy icon, but she was a bit before my prime mastubatory years).

Michael Jackson, however, was kind of like my Beatles. So I’m in shock, and surprisingly sad to learn of his premature death.

Thriller may be the album (and I do mean ‘album’) I remember playing the most as a child. I remember ordering and breathlessly awaiting a Michael Jackson biography from one of those Scholastic book forms we used to get as kids (I think it was called Thriller).

And despite all his successes, to me he seemed like such a tragic figure.

To honor of the loss of the undisputed King of Pop, I present the Michael Jackson edition of Questions.

1) What’s the first word you think of when I say Michael Jackson?

2) What Michael Jackson songs/albums do you have on your IPod?

3) Which Michael Jackson song is your favorite? (Jackson 5 Tunes included)

4) What about your favorite Michael Jackson video?

5) Which non-musical Michael Jackson moment/situation do you think is most memorable (eg moonwalk dance, neverneverland, plastic surgery, pepsi ads, his kiss/marriage with Lisa Marie, his pedophile trials, his fatherhood (baby holding), etc.)

6) Did you think Michael Jackson was guilty of pedophilia? If you think he was, as I do, do you also think, as I do, that he in some ways was as much of a victim as perpetrator given his unusual upbringing? Or do you think there can be no excuses for that kind of crime (pointing out that none of his siblings have ever been accused of similar behavior)

7) In the entertainment world, whose death do you think would generate more international attention and sadness than Michael Jackson?

8) Give me the over/under on how long it takes for a book publisher to take advantage of his death by coming out with a new Michael Jackson title? Will the book come out before the first posthumous record album? Will it be written by a Jackson family member, and if so, which one?

9) Why do you think Michael Jackson got all those plastic surgeries? Do you really believe it was medically necessary as he asserted once on Oprah (I think)? Couldn’t he tell the damage he was doing?

10) Some dude on CNN just compared Michael Jackson to John Lennon? Whose death was the bigger shock? Which one was the better performer? More influential musician?

The Audacity – and Righteousness – of Citigroup

Published June 24, 2009 Trivial , Universal Leave a Comment
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Citigroup executives have decided in their infinite wisdom to increase base salaries for many of their employees by as much as 50 percent.

The bank says the raises – which will be partially offset by a reduction in bonuses, though overall compensation packages could be higher or lower – are necessary to remain competitive … in an environment where the official unemployment rate will soon be in the double digits no less.

It’s easy and probably fair to accuse Citigroup management of being at a minimum extremely audacious and tone-deaf to the current environment. This is, after all, a financial institution that did everything in its power to run itself into the ground – egregious compensation, dubious loan-making, wanting risk management, overambitious acquisitions, questionable business line expansion.

As a result of its shoddy strategy and the crumbling economy, the company lost a whopping $27 billion in 2008.

The only reason Citigroup even exists today is because the government decided in its infinite wisdom that the company was ‘too big to fail’ and stepped in with capital several times – $40 billion in direct investment and another $300 billion in loan guarantees – to save it from bankruptcy.

Now the government owns a huge chunk of the company, which still apparently doesn’t give it the right to have a say in determining compensation for the rank and file.

The funny thing is, Citigroup executives may be doing the right thing, although they certainly could have done a better job explaining/defending their action.

One of the reasons – though certainly not the primary one – this country and its financial institutions got into the mess it did was because compensation policies were so heavily tilted to short-term performance, encouraging all employees, even those in areas like compliance, to woefully undervalue risk.

The decreased reliance on bonuses as an assumed form of regular compensation should help mitigate that carefree behavior in the future (though it will also likely stifle innovation as employees focus more on keeping their jobs as opposed to generating outsized profits – well, you can’t have everything and if i had my druthers, I’d rather our banking system be more preoccupied with stability than unnatural growth).

And while I want to scoff at Citigroup’s explanation that the salary increases are necessary to “ensure its employee compensation practices are competitive,” as a company spokesman put it in a Bloomberg article, it’s not entirely untrue. The irony is that because the government stepped in to save Citigroup as well as dozens of other troubled banks, the market for financial services employees is not nearly as bad as it would have been. Many of Citi’s competitors have already paid back the TARP money or plan to do so soon and will likely be offering better compensation packages to top employees.

You may think this is all a good thing, because the economic fallout of a collapse in our banking institutions could have been disastrous, certainly much more damaging than the destruction caused by the dislocations in the automotive industry.

I unfortunately believe for all the hundreds of billions of dollars we’ve spent, we’ve changed very little structurally, and only put off our economic day of reckoning a little while longer.

I also think this focus on compensation is mostly noise and beside the point. What the government really needs to do is start breaking up some of these institutions which we deemed necessary to save because they were ‘too big to fail’ and crafting regulation to limit this kind of concentration of power within the financial services industry.

Alas, if anything, mostly I’ve been seeing it go the other way, as stronger players in the industry snap up the weaker ones and get even bigger. Combined with the moral hazard we’ve perpetuated with our reliance on bailouts, that consolidation is likely a recipe for disaster.

But Kate Edmonds Donner, an event planner in New York, said the best plan is to leave children at home or send them home after the ceremony.

“If it’s a formal wedding, children should go home after the cocktail hour,” she said. Practicing what she preaches, Ms. Edmonds Donner and her husband, Alex Donner, the society band leader, did not invite children to their wedding last year in Garrison, N.Y.

Apple’s First Law of Inertia

Published June 22, 2009 Personal , Trivial Leave a Comment

I’ve always sucked at making decisions. Leave where we’re having lunch up to me and we’ll likely be having dinner there.

If there’s one thing about modern life I cannot stand, it’s the plethora of options we have. Sure the freedoms we now enjoy are terrific, the new opportunities exciting, the potential adventures limitless, but instead I like to focus on all the bad choices we can now make.

Lately, my indecisiveness is getting worse. And if I had to place blame on a particular culprit (and I must as implicating my own neuroses is not an option), I think Apple has had a lot to do with it.

It’s just the way they relentlessly make great products and then have no problem making those products obsolete – and dramatically cheaper – in a matter of months.

This weekend, the new IPhone – the 3GS – launched and is doing quite well, thank you very much (apparently, others have so far resisted Apple-induced indecisiveness). It certainly sounds like a great device – it’s got video, a faster processor (the S in 3GS stands for ‘Speed’ and who wouldn’t want that), more memory, such revolutionary new technologies as Cut & Paste and MMS (note the very subtle sarcasm) – and all of it, for the same $199 price as the original IPhone 3G (which was slashed in price by $100).

But that’s what Apple always does. Faster, better, cheaper. You may call it progress. Innovation. I just call it infuriating. How can they possibly expect me to take the plunge and buy a device – enslaving myself to AT&T Wireless’ piss-poor customer service track record for 2 years, no less – when I know something better is right around the corner.

Do you remember when Apple launched the first IPhone in 2007 and less than three months later cut the price of the device from $600 to $400 in order to spur sales. I remember joyfully snickering at all those Apple fanatics who rushed out to buy the original Iphone at launch and were given a lousy store credit voucher to reward them for their loyalty … “Suckers!”

Now as I sit here holding a cracked, crappy Motorola RAZR, listening to a Nano that’s several generations old and doesn’t even play video, typing on a single-core Dell computer that runs like molasses, I can see the truth: The joke’s on me.

I’m paralyzed from the gadget down.

MOLFT: Episode 1 (Priceline sucks)

Published June 18, 2009 Personal , Trivial 2 Comments
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I’m usually an easy customer. It doesn’t take much to please me. Just treat me fair and show me respect. Work with me if you’ve made a mistake. Just basic, simple stuff.

Do this and I’m yours forever. Because I’m loyal, too. I’ll return over and over again to your business and I’ll sing your praises to everyone I know. Amazon.com is a company that fits this bill. If I can find it on Amazon, I’m buying it there, even though they include sales tax now in New York and their prices are rarely the best available. In years and years of buying stuff on Amazon, they have rarely done me wrong, and when they have, they quickly made it right.

But if you do something stupid, even if it’s something little, and treat me like you don’t care about having me as a customer, then it’s bad news. As Bruce Banner often warned potential transgressors, ‘Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.” No matter how much I may like your product or service, if you cross me and don’t make amends, I will never spend another dollar with you again.

A couple of years ago, I started using a JetBlue AmEx credit card almost exclusively, spending thousands and thousands of dollars on it so that I could earn free tickets on an airline I absolutely loved (the new planes, the leg room, the fair pricing, the friendly employees, the TVs – just awesome).

Then I found out that their much-advertised promise that your miles will never expire as long as you use the credit card wasn’t quite accurate – the miles may technically not expire, but once you fly or spend enough so that those miles turn into a free ticket award, that ticket does expire. It’s a joke of a system, and while I should have read the fine print more closely, I thought the company was being deliberately misleading. And I didn’t realize this until it was too late and a couple tickets expired.

When I continued to get canned negative responses to my elaborate, detailed requests to have an expired free ticket reinstated, I told JetBlue I was tearing up the card and using the airline only out of necessity or convenience. It wasn’t an easy decision, but as a customer, sending your dollars elsewhere is the only recourse you really have. Dell (a classic story of corporate arrogance and ineptitude) and AT&T Wireless are two other companies to which I have vowed not to send any more of my money.

(I may relax the AT&T ban since their offense of atrocious customer service was many years ago, and I can at least rationalize to myself that it’s a new company now that they’ve merged with Cingular – but mostly I just really want an Iphone. I hear AT&T’s service still sucks, however, and I really like my current provider T-Mobile, a company that knows how to treat its customers)

Unfortunately, Priceline has become the first My One Least Favorite Thing of the week award recipient, and may soon become the next blacklisted company on my shopping shit list.

Until yesterday, I’ve always loved using Priceline, so when I wanted to find a reasonably priced four-star or better hotel on the Las Vegas Strip for a trip I’m planning there this Labor Day, it was one of the first sites I checked out. Unfortunately, my ‘Name Your Own Price’ bid was accepted by a hotel – the Westin Casuarina – which markets itself as an ‘off-strip’ venue. Granted its only a block and a half off the strip – but these are Vegas blocks we’re talking about here, and in any case, it’s more a matter of principle.

Now Priceline says that the area I checked was ‘Strip Vicinity’ and that the Casuarina is located within that region. But as I told them in my letter, I’m no cartographer; how am I supposed to know which hotels are within the poorly defined shaded circles on the map – the site gives you no way of checking in advance, a sorely lacking feature. All I know is when I clink on a box saying I want a ‘Strip’ hotel I should get a Strip hotel.

Priceline has a policy where they cannot cancel or change a reservation made using their ‘Name Your Own Price’ system. I understand that policy as a general rule, given that the whole reason hotels agree to offer their rooms to users at much lower rates is because they believe they are dealing with brand-indifferent consumers. But there are times when exceptions must be made, or at the very least something should be offered as a way to compensate an aggrieved consumer, perhaps a significant discount on a future purchase.

Again, maybe I should have been a more diligent researcher. But I wasn’t trying to game the system, and the bottom line is I didn’t get what I expected or wanted. Why can’t the company make a relatively small gesture to keep me happy and a returning customer?

What truly pissed me off the most about the experience was the hour-long call to the customer service hotline, where two different agents did nothing more than repeat the line – over and over again, like it was some sort of holy mantra – ‘I’m sorry. Our contract with the hotels does not allow us to refund or cancel your reservation.’

I stayed as calm as I could, begged them to go off script for a second, to just really listen to me for a moment, and at least pretend to understand where I’m coming from. But they were no better than robots.

Afterward, I sent an email to management, which I think was pretty clever (attached below). Alas, I don’t expect a response, at least not one of the non-canned variety.

And if I don’t get one, it’s goodbye Mr. Shatner and Priceline, and hello Hotwire. My business may not mean much to them and they may not give a damn, but it will sure make me feel better.

Kinda like this blog post.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————–

My Letter to Priceline Management:

Hello there. First of all, I want to say I appreciate Priceline offering customers this ability to contact management in order to address issues and problems. Not all companies do that, so it’s very nice to see, and I sincerely hope someone high up enough to make a difference reads the entirety of this email (it’s a long one!) and follows up in a reasonable time.

I just got off the phone with customer service regarding a problem I had with Request Number: 628-999-***-**.

I was looking to book a hotel and name my own price for a Vegas trip I am taking this Labor Day with my fiancee. After a couple of failed offers trying to bid for 4- and 5-star hotels on the North Strip, I checked the South Strip box and tried again.

This time, my $85 offer was accepted by the Westin Casuarina. Even though I had never heard of the hotel or remember seeing it, at first I was happy about it because the price was decent and I am a regular Westin customer.

But then I went on the Westin website and noticed that the hotel itself markets it as being ‘off-strip’. And taking a look at the map showed clearly it was a block and a half off the strip, which posed a problem because my traveling companion sometimes has trouble moving around and as you know if you’ve been to Vegas a block and a half there is not your normal block and a half and pretty much means you’re looking at a 20-30 minute walk to get to any hotel on the strip.

I frankly felt duped by Priceline. I have used Priceline in the past many times, have sung its praises to friends and colleagues over and over again. I consider it a great, unique service and have never had a bad experience before, but this was just uncool.

My assumption is that the Westin is in fact within the circle on the area I selected in the name the bid process, and that Priceline wasn’t outright lying by including it. And perhaps I should have been more careful but I am not a cartographer, and can’t be expected to know every hotel that is offered within a poorly defined circle on a Website map (especially because Priceline does not have any way – that I could find – to show customers which hotels are in fact in that shaded circle area. That is a feature that should be added tout de suite). What I do know is that the Westin Casuarina is NOT a Strip hotel, which is clearly what I was after.

I know the ‘no-changes, no-refund’ policy of Priceline associated with the name your own bid process. And as a general rule, I understand it. But clearly there are times when exceptions should be made and I thought this was one of them.

So I called Priceline customer service expecting to get some customer service. Instead I ended up spending nearly an hour on the phone with two agents who had to be about as unhelpful as customer service people could possibly be.

As I tried in a very calm, respectful manner to explain my situation as fully as I could, the ONLY thing they’d say, and they kept repeating it like it was a holy mantra, was ‘I’m sorry. Our contract with the hotels does not allow us to refund or cancel your reservation.’

The second agent – who was I guess supposed to be higher along the customer service food chain – was as unhelpful as the first guy but even worse, in that he didn’t even seem sympathetic to my issue. His name was Matt, and his ID # was *********.

In any case, I’ve gone on long enough. But needless to say, if no one can help me out, then I suppose my much-anticipated trip to Vegas will be dampened unnecessarily. And given that it’s the only recourse as a consumer I have, I will have no choice but to not use Priceline ever again and try to convince others in my circle to not do so either and use Hotwire or some other service instead. I may not be as good at convincing people not to use Priceline as William Shatner is at convincing them to use it, but I will try my best.

Given that I really like Priceline, and love Shatner (heck, I feel just by writing this letter I’m being The Negotiator he is constantly imploring us to be), I’d much rather feel like someone at your company cared enough to go the extra mile to make me happy so I can continue to use your services and sing your praises. While for therapeutic reasons I was going to write this letter regardless (nothing is perhaps more frustrating that being stonewalled by two customer service agents who clearly enjoy not helping customers), I’m hopeful that it will get a non-canned response and a satisfactory resolution.

Thanks very much. Yours truly,

Ring the bell. School’s back in …

Published June 9, 2009 Deep , Personal Leave a Comment
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In my recent questions column, our own dagblogger Nebton says the biggest risk he ever took was to go to graduate school after 30.

With official unemployment nearing double digits (and the unofficial number much higher), a lot of people looking for something to do are following Nebton’s example and going back to school.

Now financially, going back to school to get another, or more advanced degree, doesn’t often pay off since the cost can be so high and the potential benefits often rather low. There are probably more productive ways to spend your time in a recession than going back to school. But still, who can blame these people?

I know I for one miss school a good deal. The friends and the camaraderie, the laid-back environment and the relative lack of responsibilities, the eclectic subject matter and the extracurricular activities. I miss it all (except for homework, of course, which still ranks up there as one of life’s more torturous inventions)

But perhaps what I miss most about school is the constant sense of accomplishment. School is designed in such a way that you always feel like you’re progressing toward something. To the next level of math, to a more complicated version of French, to the next grade, to the next placement test, to the next degree. It’s all neatly structured, with few opportunities for shortcuts and side paths. And all along the way, you’re being judged and graded. You know where you stand in school and the measurements for success are rather simple. And being smart was enough.

In the real life, it isn’t quite like that. It’s easy to feel adrift. Am I doing the right things? Am I progressing? Am I building a life that will matter? Do I know where I want to go and how to get there?

Now I happen to have a job – stock picking – where I actually do get graded constantly (the market declares its verdict every day and investors have little patience for poor performance that extends much beyond a year).

But even still, it’s not quite the same because there are so many things that feel out of my control. I know there’s been times where I’ve never worked harder and the stocks I picked stank up the joint, and other times where I decided to take it easier and couldn’t miss.

Some of that discrepancy is probably due to the fact that investing is more of an art than a science, and if you do enough research you can always find a reason not to buy a stock (ie mistaking the trees for the forest), but there are times when I question whether anyone can beat the market consistently enough to make a difference. There’s a whole pretty well-accepted theory out there in my line of business – the Random Walk – that says it’s darn near impossible to beat the market consistently.

In school there were certainly times when I got very good grades despite doing as little work as possible (that describes much of my tenure in fact), but I rarely felt I got a grade I didn’t deserve, in that if I knew the material I did well. In the ‘real world’ I feel like I get ‘grades’ I don’t deserve all the time, and the standards for success are so much more complicated – is it personal happiness, intellectual fulfillment, money, job title, goodwill, friends, lovers???

I want to know, please just tell me how to get on the Honor Roll.

Yeah, I’m still in love with our president … (Obama’s Speech to Muslims)

Published June 4, 2009 Deep , Universal 1 Comment
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What can you add when one man says everything you’re thinking and says it with such clarity and such poetry??

All of us share this world for but a brief moment in time. The question is whether we spend that time focused on what pushes us apart or whether we commit ourselves to an effort, a sustained effort to find common ground, to focus on the future we seek for our children and to respect the dignity of all human beings.

It’s easier to start wars than to end them. It’s easier to blame others than to look inward. It’s easier to see what is different about someone than to find the things we share. But we should choose the right path, not just the easy path. There is one rule that lies at the heart of every religion, that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

MOFT: Episode 16 (PokerStars)

Published June 1, 2009 Personal , Trivial Leave a Comment
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You’ve seen a lot less of me on dagblog lately, and while I’d love to put all of the blame for my absence on my Beyonce and the wedding plans which have been set in hot and heavy motion (It’s mostly painful, stressful stuff, but registering at Target was hella fun – come to Papa, Wii!!), but there is a much bigger badder beast than Mrs. All-Consuming Wedding at work here – and its name is PokerStars.

The truth of matter is, if we’re going to point fingers at anyone, Genghis is really the one to blame because it was partly due to his move to Philadelphia that our weekly NYC poker game, which has been going on regularly for more than eight years, has become very hit-and-miss, and I can’t have that. I need my cards fix.

So I decided to take the plunge and join Pokerstars, which easily earns the award for this week’s My One Favorite Thing. This isn’t the first time I played poker online – A few years ago I was on PartyPoker before that company decided to give up the U.S. market when Congress passed a law banning banks and other financial institutions from funding customer deposits.

The whole issue of the legality of online poker remains in flux, which is a complete joke considering the haphazard nature of this country’s gambling laws (yeah, state lottos and ‘riverboat’ casinos that aren’t even on the water, I’m talking to you) and considering that poker is a skill game enjoyed by millions and millions of Americans.

Indeed, poker is as American an institution as apple pie, and I’m pretty convinced now that the Democrats and card-loving Barney Frank are in charge that it’s only a matter of time before online poker becomes a fully regulated, fully taxed, fully legal activity. In the meantime, I had no qualms about rekindling my little addiction by joining Pokerstars, which along with a couple of other companies decided to take the risk and continue operating in the US.

As far as the site goes, it’s pretty good, very reminiscent of the PartyPoker look and feel. While Texas Hold ‘Em is far and away the most active game on the site, PokerStars offers up enough variety for a non-specialist like me to keep entertained, and I probably most enjoy playing Omaha Hi-Lo and 8-Game (which is eight different games that switch every 5 minutes or so).

And also like PartyPoker, I am convinced that the card distribution on PokerStars isn’t totally random – there are just way too many runner-runner flush suck outs that I see the bigger stacks hit. (This won’t make sense to you unless you know poker, but it basically means that the site’s algorithm seemingly has a mysterious way of moving games along – which if true makes the site a lot more money – by enticing people with few chips to call, only to nail them later in the hand. However, it’s possible it only seems that this happens a lot because you see so many hands playing online – I generally have three games going on at any one time).

I’m trying to keep my cardplaying to at least a reasonable minimum, but I have to admit it’s definitely eating into my blogging time, and sleeping time, and eating time. I’m just thankful we have such solid new contributors to keep the site active. I promise eventually I’ll start caring again about the real world – aside from poker and weddings that is. But right now, I have a game to get to.

Why Facebook will be a HUGE business…

Published May 5, 2009 Personal , Trivial , Universal Leave a Comment
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Late last year one of my predictions for 2009 was that Facebook would go public, sparking a mini-rally in the markets. Yet a lot of what I read about in the press lately is all about the company’s struggles – having trouble raising money at the valuation they want, having trouble hiring the workers they want, having trouble generating significant ad revenue.

To which I say, bullshit.

Seriously, you’d think the company was on the brink of failure, as opposed to being within 12-18 months, tops, of scoring the biggest Internet IPO since Google (And hell, I like my job just fine, but if you want to toss me a bunch of those pre-IPO options, Mr. Zuckerberg, I’m ready to chat)

I could go into all sorts of detailed analysis why I remain a committed bull on Facebook’s prospects, but all I need to do is show off a very simple demonstration.

Here are the sidebar ads I recently received on Facebook:



Damn, Facebook. Are you reading my diary, or what? The next thing you know they’ll be sending me an ad for McDonald’s Filet-o-Fish!

Now my assumption is the wedding ads are due to my recently updated ‘engaged’ status, and as for the hair restoration one, maybe it’s just the thirtysomething-year-old male demo.

But however they’re doing it, there’s no question Facebook has a friggin’ treasure trove of data on what their users like, what they need, what they do, who they hang out with etc. etc., and marketers should be able to use that information to their advantage.

People in the online marketing space have for years been talking about using the power of the Internet to effectively target specific users with relevant ads, but while there’s been some progress made on that front (search advertising is, after all, the holy grail of targeted advertising), no one company has been able to assemble the kind of information on its users like Facebook has.

The only real question is how much Facebook can get away with using. Personally, I think it’s great being served up relevant ads and as long as they don’t pass on personally identifiable information, I’m fine with it, but I know a lot of others find it all creepy and scream about invasion of piracy whenever Facebook tries to do something innovative with their data to make some money

But the privacy worrywarts should at least be comforted by the fact they certainly don’t always get it right. I pressed refresh and this was one of the ads that came up:

Not very relevant, unless, of course, Facebook has somehow figured out how to see into the future!! Perhaps they’ve scanned all my data and decided through some sort of complex scientific/actuarial data mining analysis that I’m a ripe target for breast cancer (men can get it you know!) Is it time for a mammogram????

Newspaper bailout? Please no … but we do need The Watchmen

Published May 5, 2009 Deep , Universal Leave a Comment
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What a shock. A reporter (fearing for his own job, perhaps?) asked White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs if the potential imminent closure of the venerable Boston Globe calls for yet another government bailout, this time to save the flailing newspaper industry.

Gibbs was sympathetic to the plight of the industry but at best non-committal with his answer. Yet Clusterstock writer Joe Wiesenthal seems to think such a bailout is coming (although not in time to save the Globe), and that the Obama administration and Congress will justify such largess by carping “about how the lack of a thriving fourth estate posed (sic) ’systemic risk’ to democracy.”

I don’t think Wiesenthal is right. The public appetite for more bailouts is basically nil, and if the auto industry is now getting the stiff arm from Congress then I can’t see how newspapers are going to be able to feed in any significant way at the public trough. The Obama administration has already rejected calls from house Speaker Nancy Pelosi asking for looser antitrust restrictions created under the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970.

However, I’ve also seen our government do some stupid and surprising things over the past year, and it did after all once create a Newspaper Preservation Act, so perhaps we will see government intervention in the newspaper industry.

And make no mistake, a widespread newspaper bailout would be a stupid thing to do. No one under the age of 50 wants to read newspapers anymore. So what? Most of these people haven’t stopped staying up to date on current events, but are finding the news – at least the news they want – through other means, such as our beloved Internet and the emerging blogosphere.

As a former journalist, trained at one of our nation’s finest J-schools, I want to be sympathetic to the cry and hue I hear everyday from folks in the industry. But media companies should have to deal with the same technological creative destruction forces that numerous other industries have been forced to confront.

The newspaper industry will have to find a way to stay relevant amid emerging technological (perhaps the new large-screen Kindle will offer one answer) and societal changes, or die the slow death it deserves. I am confident a market will always exist – or at least eventually reemerge – for people who know how to effectively create and/or edit content.

However, I have one important caveat here. There is one function that newspapers perform that I do think is vital to our democratic society: Investigative journalism. I cannot begin to enumerate all of the political and business scandals that would likely never have seen the light of day had it not been for the fine investigative work funded by the newspaper industry.

Indeed, much of that investigative work is already disappearing as the industry adjusts to the new economic realities by paring their operations to the bone. Whether newspapers survive or not, the days are already numbered when editors would allow their best investigative journalists to go off the grid for months at a time pursuing a potential scoop that could net the publication a bunch of Pulitzer prizes.

Other media – like magazines and television – have occasionally shed some light on some very dark corners of American history, and certainly some in blogland would pick up the muckraking mantle of the newspaper industry, but it is possible that the private market will no longer be interested in supporting the important investigative work the newspaper industry has historically done.

If the newspaper industry does not survive, and no other privately funded source emerges to effectively replace the investigative work it once did, then the government should step in to create and fund an investigative agency that would perform that function.

A group of Watchmen, if you will (and Watchwomen, of course).

I haven’t given much thought about the organization or mandate such an agency would have – although it would have to have an extraordinary amount of independence from government interference and electoral politics, even more than the Fed and the Supreme Court currently enjoy – and certainly we’d need to figure out who would watch the watchmen. It could be that the creation of such an agency may be too complicated or costly for the federal government.

In any case, I can live easily in a world without newspapers. But a world without a functioning investigative journalism system would be scary indeed.

MOFT: Episode 14 (The soon-to-be Mrs. Deadman)

Published May 4, 2009 Deep , Personal , Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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Sorry for my extended absence the last couple of weeks, but the excuse is a good one: I’m engaged!!

So as much as I may have wanted to make the clementine My One Favorite Thing of the Week – I mean, really, it’s got all the health-filled, sunshine-y goodness of the orange but with more sweetness, less seeds and in an adorable little easy-to-peel package to boot – it’s only fitting that I bestow that honor instead on the amazing girl who finally convinced me to give up 35 glorious years of singlehood.

The soon-to-be Mrs. Deadman is sweet, smart, sensitive, silly and sexy (yes, she too comes in an adorable little easy-to-peel package). Even though we’ve been together for just under 2 years, it is tough to imagine my life without her. She has a very caring soul, is incredibly nurturing (you should see her coddle our dog – and to think she wasn’t a dog person when I first met her) and totally trustworthy. Her smile and laugh are infectious. She keeps me entertained and challenged. She supports me in every way imaginable. She gets along beautifully with my family and friends (and as a big bonus, I love her family and friends, too). I really could go on and on about how great my fiancee is (we both hate that word and have stolen her sister’s use of the word beyonce instead), but suffice to say, she is a catch.

Now that I’ve made all the readers sick with my saccharine description, I will begrudgingly admit we’re not perfect. We have our scraps. But that’s OK. We know we love and care about each other a great deal and we start with that premise whenever one of those thankfully rare disagreements arise.

At some point, I will probably discuss my qualms over the institution of marriage in general and how I got past them. But for now I just want to keep this (mostly) romantic!

The bottom line is that I’ve found someone who makes me laugh, who makes me think, who makes me horny, who makes me dinner (on the rare occasion!), who makes me happy … who just makes me better.

And I feel like a very lucky man.

If aliens don’t exist, does God?

Published April 22, 2009 Deep , Universal 4 Comments
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In the past couple of days, I’ve come across a couple of articles** about space and space exploration that got me asking the following, kinda random questions …

Why haven’t we found other forms life in space yet? More importantly, why haven’t other forms of life found us? And could the fact that we haven’t had any extraterrestrial encounters be at least somewhat supportive of the theory that humans are indeed a unique species, and that maybe there is a god or divine presence that approximates the concept as detailed by many of Earth’s practiced religions?

Now I kind of understand why we haven’t found life yet (by the way, this entire post presumes that Area 51 conspiracies and the like have no bearing in fact, that we have neither seen nor been seen by extraterrestrials, which admittedly is an awfully big presumption). Our space exploration attempts are still too immature, and we’ve barely begun to penetrate the infinite universe beyond our own galaxy, so our lack of success on the contact front shouldn’t be a surprise.

But given that the universe is infinite, wouldn’t one have to assume that there are also an infinite number of planets that DO harbor life and that at least on a few of those planets (if not an infinite number of them), that those life forms are so advanced that they’ve developed much better means of exploring the universe, including the means to contact us.

I know I’ve always thought that it seems almost incomprehensible to think that we’re alone in this universe, but doesn’t the fact that we haven’t been contacted yet by ETs mean that life may in fact not exist anywhere else? Ok, this is a bit of a stretch of an analogy, and a bit silly to boot, but this line of thought is kind of like how I have to assume that our species never develops the ability to time travel because if we ever did wouldn’t we somehow know about it (or perhaps the second we do develop it and test it out, we rip open the space-time continuum and destroy the universe just like Doc Brown always feared).

And if we are alone, what does that say if anything about the god question? I don’t think the answer to the question of whether life exists outside this planet would by itself prove or disprove god’s existence. However, I have always felt it would be very tough for most organized religions to square their beliefs and their written source materials with the existence of ETs. But isn’t the reverse also true – as long as we are unable to find life outside our little planet, doesn’t that support the mostly religious theory that Earth is a singularly unique place, and humans a special species whose purpose for being here is a divine mystery to be solved?

Or am I missing something very basic here?

** One article was actually a fascinating photo journal of some amazing pictures a NASA spacecraft recently took of Saturn. The other story talked about the fact that researchers have found a couple of planets outside our solar system that appear to be same size of Earth (but likely too hot to harbor life).

MOFT: Episode 13 (Scramble on Facebook)

Published April 20, 2009 Personal , Trivial 2 Comments
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My One Favorite Thing this week is Scramble, an anagram word game on Facebook that is basically the online equivalent of the old board game Boggle.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, the basic idea is you are given a bunch of letter tiles laid out on a square board and you must string adjacent letters together to form words of at least three letters long, racking up more points for longer words.

It’s quite the simple premise … and also dangerously addictive.

To be honest, I don’t even know if Scramble is My One Favorite Thing. It could quite possibly be My One Least Favorite Thing. All I know is I’m playing it a lot. A LOT. In fact, I can’t stop playing it. I’m playing it now, actually, even as I write this, because one of the unfortunate side effects of playing the game for extended periods is you can’t stop seeing Scramble boards floating in front of your head and trying to form words off of them.

Yes, I am apparently hallucinating from overdosing on Scramble. Now I understand the true meaning of the game’s name – it totally scrambles your brain into mushy eggs.

I don’t quite know how it got to this point. A few months ago, I was playing a few games of Scramble a week – a rather innocuous amount – with one of my friends on Facebook. Unfortunately, she’s like an anagram idiot savant and always crushed me.

While I was getting a bit better, the bad losses continued to pile up and began to really bother me. I said as much to my friend and she suggested I get more practice by trying out the ‘Play Live’ version of the game where you can compete against hundreds of other people who are playing Scramble online at the same time.

So I tried it. And then I couldn’t stop. The beauty of the game is that it is short – each match is between 1 minute and 3 minutes, depending on the version you play – and after the time stops, you can see what words you missed (and also get their definitions if you’d like but learning useful stuff really has nothing to do with Scramble). You can also see your scoring rank updated realtime, and if you are in the top 25 by the end of the game, you can see your profile picture proudly displayed to the right. Each match sends a tiny little shot of endorphins rushing through your bloodstream.

One night, I decided I was not going to go to bed until I got every 3-letter word on one of the boards, so after each game I would write down a three-letter word I missed and had never heard of before and commit it to memory. I spent the next six hours – writing down almost 100 words in the process (file attached) – trying to accomplish my goal. I never did it, getting only as close as one missed 3-letter word before I realized I was perhaps a game away from completely losing it and going on a Scramble-induced murderous rampage.

Part of me wants to go on and on about all the nuances of the game – how I wish they would get rid of the ability to use gameplay credits to get word hints because it’s F-in cheating and I know people use it all the time just so they can push me out of the top 10 at the last second, how I wish I knew how the game calculates one’s Word IQ because it seems almost totally arbitrary, how I wish people in the chat board would say something – ANYTHING – other than ‘gga’ or ‘wd’ after every friggin game, etc.

But there’s this other part of me – oh, call it every last tingling, jangling nerve in my body – that needs another Scramble hit right now, so you’ll have to excuse me while I get my next fix.

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