Marketing at home

I’m about to put my house on the market, which is a pain in the neck in any case. But these days, you have to Stage it.

This is an experience I’d wish only on the most disagreeable of human beings. It’s the most gobsmacking, insulting and humiliating thing outside of a frat house.

The whole object seems to be to make your house look like you moved some things in, but never actually, you know, lived there.

First, my realtor told me to clear everything off horizontal surfaces. Well, fair enough. Then she made me remove a photo of the Children of Lir statue in the Garden of Remembrance (Dublin) because “it looks prehistoric”.

Whatever.

But then The Stager got involved. My agent and The Stager were here for two hours on Friday and I’ve been clenching my jaw ever since.

She really wanted me to pack pretty much all my books, but when I told her there’d still be the bookcases around, she backed off. Instead, I’ve had to remove about half of the ones in the living room, “arrange [the remainder] by size” and lay a bunch of them on their sides. That way you can add “objects” to the shelves. Evidently so it won’t look like you actually have the books for the purpose of reading them.

(Same with my night stand: have to remove the night-time reading stack. Although they’re creating a “nook” by the window, with a chair and table, and there’ll be a couple of “colorful” books on the table.)

I’m allowed to have my coffeemaker on the kitchen counter, but that’s it. As for the kitchen island—that has to have stools and two “place settings” set up, regardless of the fact that the dining table is four feet away. Oh, and the place settings have to be “colorful”.

I now have plastic plants in my house. This is a first, and I can’t imagine what it would be about fake shrubbery that would make prospects proclaim, “Hey, honey—plastic! This is definitely the place for us!”

Turns out that “colorful” means “gaudy”. They’ve brought in orange towels and some sort of puce knobby bath mat. The dishes are to come on Monday when they reconvene. Evidently buyers have the color sense of teenagers and I have to pander to that.

(The Stager declared that there must be A Picture over my bed. I shudder to think what that’s going to look like, but I’m sure they’ll be borrowing whatever it is from a down market motel chain.)

I believe they considered having me ship out the two cats for the duration: there was some discussion that ended with a reluctant mutual assurance that “well, people have pets—they’ll understand…”

But I suppose the low-class coup de grâce is a fat plaster chef-like creature in an anatomically-improbable position. I’m guessing it’s meant to hold a bottle of (cheap-ass) wine. Whatever, it’s going to scream “cheesiness” from my kitchen counter to all who enter the house.

The realtor and staging artiste are returning to finish up their transformation of my house to something Al and Peggy Bundy would snap up. I hope to God the place sells quickly because I’m not sure how long I can live in a chiropractor’s waiting room.

Oil & water

It seems that BP’s stock price has taken a drubbing in the past couple of days, as even investors realize that the oil leak off the Louisiana coast is going to cost more than 11 human & untold animal lives.

Oh, boo-hoo.

Feeling Lost?

The US this week marked the death of a couple of TV programs. I’ve already written about NBC cancelling Law & Order. The final episode aired Monday & I’m trying to work out what the appropriate period of mourning would be. A month in black? & then three more in dark purple? Veil or no veil? It’s hard to know.

Also this week, “Lost” broadcast for the last time. In case you missed any of the chapters, here’s a summary of the series’ six years.

It probably helps to follow if you ever actually watched a single episode, which removes me from the enlightenment. But I put this forward as a public service.

Anti-social media

One of my colleagues…No, not really.

A person who works in the same business unit as I do has sent me a connection request on LinkedIn.

I’ve never worked with this guy, never exchanged emails—shoot, he couldn’t even pick me out of a line-up.

So what is it with people who just go through lists and start indiscriminately trying to “link” with you on these sites? He doesn’t have a clue who I am; what could he possibly hope to gain from such a connection?

Except another “connection” in his profile.

On a related note, I have thankfully found a way to block all those damned game updates from my Facebook friends. No more Farmville, Fishville, Mafiaville or other villainous “news” for me to wade through. I’m really appalled at the amount of time these games must suck out of people’s lives, & I sure as hell don’t want them sucking me into that stuff, not even by having to move my eyeballs beyond the colorful announcements on the page.

For both the LinkedIn and Facebook offenders, three words come to mind. Get. A. Life.

Economics du jour

The Euro is at a four-year low against the US dollar, at one point today clocking in at a skosh below $1.23.

I am so tempted to find a flight going somewhere in the Eurozone & just ad libbing once I get there.

L&O: RIP

Damn! NBC has cancelled Law & Order (the progenitor of Criminal Intent & SVU). It’s going to finish out sweeps month & then I guess TNT gets it for good.

I suppose in the age of fake reality that’s cheap to produce L&O was marked for life support at best. & the Nothing But Crap network (also known when I was associated with it 20 years ago, as Nice But Cheap) needs to keep ahead of the bailiffs when it comes to finding any programming that will appeal to people who are texting or playing video games while the TV is on anyhow.

& I have to confess: the TV is pretty much a talking lamp for me. Just background noise most of the time. & yet every once in a while I want to actually, you know, have to think about the characters & plot. It's very hard indeed to find any of that floating around the networks. So I'm gutted.

I’m not sure which will be better therapy: ice cream or rum. Perhaps some sort of combination.

Arise, ye prisoners of starvation

Today being May Day makes me think about the marvelously lugubrious military parades the Soviets used to put on to remind the peoples of the USSR and the world that they really knew how to build arms.

I mean—it’s hard to choose between floats covered in flowers on 1 January and a gazillion attack tanks and truck-mounted rocket launchers four months later.

This year the Muscovite parades were apparently divided between those wanting to bring back Stalin (really) and those denouncing Vladimir Putin as Stalin.

That would be the Russian paradox.

Elsewhere, Greeks were comparing the IMF to the military junta that ruled from 1967 to 1974. The IMF being the source of the bailout to the collapsed Greek economy that seems to be taking down other Euro dominoes like Portugal and Spain along with it.

The French are protesting rumors of plans to undermine their job security system (under which a lot of companies find it’s cheaper to keep people on the payroll than to sack them) and state pension plan (I won’t even go there).

The Turks are just out in the streets celebrating the fact that there aren’t whack-job countrymen out with automatic weapons mowing them down (as happened around 30 years ago).

The US saw hundreds of thousands swarming the streets across the country to protest Arizona’s crackbrained immigration law. (“Not racial profiling”? As bloody if—are they going to stop me looking like I just got off the plane from Dublin to take an underground job as an au pair ro raise funds for Noraid? They are not. They’re going to stop anyone who looks like he might have originated south of Nogales.)

And in DC the self-proclaimed guardians of the somehow-Christian faith clogged the area around the Lincoln memorial to—well, I’m not sure what they were doing. Perhaps protecting us from the hurricanes and earthquakes that are caused not by meteorological conditions or seismic shifts, but by failure to adhere to this or that sect’s tenets. You can see the web site that was promoting this here, but it’s mostly full of solicitations for donations and tee-shirts for sale, so I can’t really determine what it’s all about.

Except the all-important anti-abortion stance, which always seems to crop up in the events of groups like this.

Me—I really miss those Soviet parades. I’m sure this Stalin/anti-Stalin schizophrenia is progress, but those suckers really were spectacular, even in the pre-Internet days. I suppose they’re too expensive to put on these days, it's hard to find the soldiers in impressive numbers, much less the mobile rocket launchers, and it’s much easier to expose their broadcasts as artfully edited propaganda pieces. (It’s not enough that you’ve got two hours of tanks going past? You have to loop the film to look like there are five hours?)

Anyhow—workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.

And your retirement plans.

Aftershock

So, the post-Boob Quake report is basically that even a day of conscious cleavage display doesn’t seem to produce earthquakes. Or, at least not in the same day.

Perhaps there’s a cumulative effect? So that in 2010 we’re paying for, say, the Mary Quant era? Or should we check for a surge in pestilence & plague?

At any rate, here’s the story from the woman who initiated the movement, Jennifer McCreight.

God bless social networking media. & pity that Iranians have their access limited.

Seismic protest

Further to my post about the Iranian cleric who’s giving Pat Robertson a run for the title of most completely crack-brained self-styled religious leader, the women of Facebook are engaging in a protest today.

They’re testing Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi’s proclamation that immodest women cause earthquakes. They’re doing this by wearing revealing clothing to see if there’s an upsurge in earthquakes.

It’s called Boobquake. (No, I am not making this up. It's in the news.)

Well, look—you knew it was coming. And you also know that it’s just going to inflame Sedighi’s impotent fury at the idea of mere women mocking his pronouncements.

So, in that respect—mission accomplished. You go, girls!

The scum among us

One of the great pains of job hunting is recruiters. Really, I’m continually driven to ask, “How do these people remain employed?”

They remind me of literary agents: they get paid when someone picks up an option (or acquires a book manuscript)—they don’t care who or what, just that something sticks long enough for them to get their cut.

I can’t tell you how often during my Hollywood years I saw scripts submitted that were utter dreck & completely NOT what a given production company was interested in. (As opposed to the utter dreck that actually got produced.)

Or how many fatuous cover letters accompanied the properties (that’s what they’re called), including the amazing-to-me disclaimer, “Dictated but not read.”

That pretty much says it all.

In a similar way recruiters are trying to toss résumés at clients, whether or not they actually are a match, because the more they’ve got in the funnel the better their likelihood (in their minds) that something will stick.

With this focus on volume they can’t be arsed to actually, you know, read anything you send them. This includes emails as well as CVs.

Sometimes they can’t even pay enough attention to get your name right when they speak with you—the one that’s on your CV & in your emails; the one you keep repeating to them.

I’m guessing they’re more attentive (= servile) to their clients, but you can’t really count on that. The instant they hear a position’s been filled or a candidate rejected, they’re off at ramming speed, trawling the job boards for new chum.

Well, as the saying goes, you can't live with them & you can't get enough C4 to eliminate them from the gene pool.