Country spam

Ah, my Nigerian scammer friends are back again. And, having been unsuccessful using the USPS as their platform, they’ve now moved on to FedEx:

They haven’t quite mastered the vocabulary yet, bless their hearts—like any FedEx communiqué would involve the word “postal”. But at least they’ve moved up to “package” instead of “parcel”.

(I’ll let the missing apostrophe from “isn’t” in the header pass. So many Fortune 500 corporations can’t seem to be bothered with such niceties that it’s not really a warning sign anymore.)

But I don’t think they grasp the ludicrousness of instructing me to “collect the package at our office”. Uh—just which one of the 16,424 offices in Santa Clara County would they be thinking of?

Olympic protection

You’ll recall that there have been stories about the IOC and LOCOG getting all sniffy about enforcing the exclusivity clauses regarding their sponsoring corporations’ products. LOCOG’s Supreme Sport Lord even announced that you could be refused admission to an event if you, a paying ticket-holder, showed up in apparel advertising a sponsor’s competitor.

(Hey—maybe that’s why there have been so many empty seats at the various venues: those no-shows were banned for wearing Nike instead of Adidas; or a jacket touting Jaguar instead of BMW.)

But apparently there’s an official London 2012 prophylactic; and some wag has, er, salted the Olympic Village with a competitor’s party hats. Which naturally got tweeted and set the LOCOG brand Gestapo into overdrive trying to gather in all the contraband condoms.

Yes, there are to be no rubbers except those supplied by Durex, and I suppose a brand called Kangaroo Condoms (tagline: “For the gland downunder”) just really doesn’t speak to the Olympic Spirit.

What I find interesting is that, as a measure of its corporate largesse, Durex has already supplied 150,000 condoms to the 10,000 athletes, and they still have a few days to go. If they’ve already run out of prophylactics, then we really have to salute their energy and endurance. If past Olympics are any guide, 150,000 was kind of a lowball. US target shooter Josh Lakatos commented on the 2000 Games at Sydney: “I’ve never witnessed so much debauchery in my entire life.”

(Condoms have been supplied to Olympians ever since 1992. At the Beijing Games, they were printed with the Olympic motto, “Faster, Higher, Stronger”.)

Let me also say that, as a UCLA alumna, I’m relieved that at least the interlopers weren’t Trojans.

Dress code

A while back I was wandering around Nordstrom and came upon a rack of clothes with this tag, which must still be attached if someone wants to return it to the store for a refund:

Here's the thing: the tag is on the exterior of the dresses.

There is a class of women who think nothing of purchasing an article of (usually high-end) clothing (and by "purchasing" I mean handing over some form of money to a shop clerk), wearing it on one or more occasions and then returning it for a refund. Typically, in order to get the refund, the price tag must still be attached. With most tags either inside the collar or at the sleeve/cuff, these women just endure the annoyance of the tag rubbing against them for the length of the special occasion in order to get the "free" schmattes.

And Nordstrom with its essentially no-questions-asked returns policy is a particular target. A few years ago I read a story in the Seattle Times about people's strategies for dealing with a tight economy. One woman flat-out stated that this was her way to save money (and still look sharp). She at least had enough shame to insist on anonymity.

So I found it interesting that the manufacturer has built in a mechanism that should foil this kind of gaming the system.

About those shootings...

Okay, this time I do have words.

In the wake of Sunday’s mass killing at a Sikh temple outside Milwaukee, there’s been quite an international outcry about American racism and violence; a lot of uproar about our weapon-packing whackjobs targeting particular religious/ethnic groups. But may I remind you that we the people have a rich and varied history of non-discrimination when it comes to mass shootings.

In support of my contention, let me present a sampling from just the past few years:

July 2012: gunman kills 12, wounds 58 at a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado.

January 2011: gunman kills six, wounds 18 (including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords) at a mall in Tucson, Arizona.

November 2009: gunman kills 13, wounds 29 at Fort Hood, Texas.

March 2009: gunman kills ten (including his mother and four other relatives) across two counties in Alabama.

April 2009: gunman kills 13, wounds four, commits suicide at an immigrant community center in Binghamton, New York.

February 2008: gunman kills five, wounds 18, commits suicide at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois.

December 2007: gunman kills eight, commits suicide at a mall in Omaha, Nebraska.

April 2007: gunman kills 32, wounds 17, commits suicide at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia.

February 2007: gunman kills five, wounds four at a mall in Salt Lake City, Utah.

October 2006: gunman kills five Amish girls at a school in Pennsylvania.

July 2006: gunman kills one, wounds five at the Jewish Federation in Seattle, Washington.

March 2005: gunman kills nine, wounds seven at Red Lake, Minnesota.

March 2005: gunman kills seven, wounds four, commits suicide at a worship service held at the Brookfield Sheraton, Brookfield, Wisconsin

They slaughter in churches, hotels, schools, shopping malls, military bases, temples, universities, offices, fast-food restaurants, homes, movie theatres. They target immigrants, tourists, students, politicians, shoppers, grandmothers, babies, close relatives, complete strangers, soldiers, co-workers, Christians, Jews, Muslims, who-knows-what. Their victims are every color of the rainbow.

The murderers are soldiers, ex-soldiers, students, unemployed, immigrants, farmers, city folk, Christians, Muslims, who-knows-what. They shoot and run, shoot it out with the cops, shoot themselves. They give us multiple reasons or single reasons or no reasons at all for their sprees.

Let me just say that a whackjob with a gun doesn’t really need a cause to espouse or a specific group to hate; all he (and the examples above were all men) needs is the weapon(s), the ammo, the access and maybe the ability to go to full-auto.

So, back off, world. We are completely equal-opportunity when it comes to this kind of mayhem. You don’t like who got shot this time? Wait ten minutes; someone will go after somebody else.

God help us.

Mr. Johnson's London

I suppose it’s in the spirit of the London Olympic Games that the Sunnyvale Public Library set out Johnson’s Life of London prominently on the new books shelf. Whatever—I’m glad I picked it up because it turns out that London mayor Boris Johnson is an entertaining writer and eloquent advocate for his hometown.

Johnson’s love for “the world’s greatest city” is palpable; he embraces it with all its flaws. He describes it as “like a vast multinational reactor where Mr. Quark and Miss Neutrino are moving the fastest and bumping into each other with the most exciting results. This is not just a question of romance or reproduction. It is about ideas. It is about the cross-pollination that is more likely to take place with a whole superswarm of bees rather than a few isolated ideas.”

And then he goes on to trace the civic supercollider, starting with “the pushy Italian immigrants who founded” it. He uses the construct of profiling famous Londoners to trace the city’s development. Boudicca’s rampage spurred the Roman occupiers to invest in infrastructure in their far-off colony. Shakespeare represents the flowering of English theatre, which filtered out through the empire to spark entertainment on a global scale.

J.M.W. Turner—well, he refracted light onto canvas as no one had done before. Lionel Rothschild basically wrote the £4M check that allowed Disraeli to buy the Suez Canal from the French-led consortium that dug it but couldn’t make it pay. W.T. Stead gave us tabloid journalism (becoming the spiritual ancestor of Matt Drudge and TMZ.com). Keith Richards—seriously? Do I have to explain him to you?

He doesn’t skirt the city’s problems; he just takes the bad with the good and decides that, on balance, the latter outweighs the former. But it’s not just the people, it’s their interaction in that serendipitous setting of London—and Johnson’s style in tying it all together—that makes this a wonderful read. Want examples?

Establishing the Norman court at Westminster:

“So it was that London acquired its bicephalous identity, with the centre of political power at one remove from the centre of wealth.

“Sometimes the moneymen have infuriated the politicians, and sometimes the politicians have egged on the mob against the moneymen. But for a thousand years London’s commercial district has had easy access to government—and yet been apart from it; and that semi-independence has surely contributed to the City’s commercial dynamism.”

19^th Century hygiene:

“By 1858 the smell from the river was so mind-bending that MPs could take it no more, and Joseph Bazalgette was commissioned to produce the immense system of sewers on which the city relies to this day.

“The penny had finally dropped with London’s rulers. If you let poor people live in conditions of squalor and penury, then their diseases could be transmitted to the rich.

The Blitz:

“Looking back at the Second World War, it is pretty clear that it was a disaster for Britain and for British Standing in the world. For my generation of postwar softies, brought up to fear nothing more than the sporadic campaigns of the IRA or al-Qaeda, the Blitz seems an unimaginable horror. It was more terrifying and vastly more lethal than the Great Fire of London (which killed how many? That’s right—eight people); and it went on so long—night after night, month after month, from the autumn of 1940 to the spring of 1941, and then with a resumption in 1944 and a series of deafening false climaxes like a hideous parody of a Beethoven symphony.”

Well, I’ve used up my “fair use” portion of quotes.

Johnson’s liberal arts education shines through every paragraph, as does his relish at being able to apply it to so rich a subject. You should pick it up and share in the love.

#BroadcastFail

Wednesday I wanted to watch the live stream of the men’s gymnastics, so I gritted my teeth and went to NBC’s Olympics site. What I saw was spectacular; but it was also infested with commercials.

Yes—“live” feed; car commercial every two to three minutes. I gave up after watching one American and two Japanese on the high bar and parallels.

Then yesterday afternoon I thought I’d take a look at the floor routine that won Gabby Douglas the women’s all-around gold.

Here’s what I found:

They obviously want to make it as hard as possible for you to watch anything but their prime-time commercial-riddled broadcast. #NBCFail

So I used my VPN connection to find it on the BBC. Imagine my surprise to discover that the Brits couldn’t be bothered to show much of anything not involving TeamGB.

BBC—meet NBC. Both utterly useless.

Retail Olympics

Okay, you understand that the Olympics aren’t just about athletic achievement, right? Aside from badminton teams competing to throw their early matches by playing with all the skill of 11-year-olds, there’s merchandise. Lots of it.

Evidently people are lining up seven across at the main official tschotschke store to buy everything from tea towels to track suits at Olympic-sized prices.

However, I like the competition that’s arisen between non-official tote bag manufacturers. First there was the bag sporting the statement, “I’m Renting My Flat to a Fat American Family”. Back snapped a bag with “Proud American family renting an overpriced London flat from snooty Brits with bad teeth!”

It’ll be interesting to see how this progresses through the various rounds.

Another #NBCFail

Definitely getting a kick out of the reaction of—well, pretty much everyone on the Internet—to how NBC is covering the Olympics.

Because it’s a lot more engaging and immediate than the network’s actual, you know, coverage. If you want a sample, just Google #NBCFail. That hashtag took over from the #ShutUpMattLauer one. Or maybe it subsumed the latter.

It’s not just that they’re not broadcasting anything in real time. Or that they’re spattering commercials throughout like they think this is their last chance to appease advertisers because ad companies are going to shut down in 18 minutes. It’s that they can’t even fully present what they’re showing without inserting spoilers.

The biggest example (so far) is the break before showing the women’s 100-meter backstroke final. NBC ran a promo for yesterday’s Today show interview with the 17-year-old, shrieking, “When you’re 17 years old and win your first gold medal, there’s nobody you’d rather share it with.” And they included a photo of her holding up her gold medal.

I like Andy Borowitz’s take in The New Yorker. Sad thing is—if someone did offer a “NBC-free” stream for $29.95, people would sign up.

As it is, many tech-literate (and even not so literate) folks have hooked into VPNs to be able to watch coverage from other broadcasters. I never thought I’d say this, but I’m really enjoying seeing the BBC’s offerings. Not only are they minus the NBC fatuous commentary, they’re showing sports I’d never have seen courtesy of the broadcaster that’s supposed to be serving the American viewing public.

Olympic mania

I was reading a commentary in The Economist about the opening ceremony at the Olympic games, which was mildly interesting.

But, wherever I can, I also read readers’ comments. And in this instance, here’s where I went straight to hell.

One DeweyV asked, “What? No Benny Hill…?” To which speedface6 replied, “Apparently they’re playing the Benny Hill theme song during the breaks at the beach volleyball.”

And, you know what? Even though I’ve not seen a Benny Hill episode in decades, that manic sax just immediately leapt to my mind and has been dashing madly about between my ears ever since.

Let me share the love:

Opening class (high & low)

Okay, Danny Boyle did a bang-up job with the opening ceremony of the London Olympic games on Friday. It wasn’t what you’d call universal or inclusive in terms of the brotherhood of man, but it told a heck of a tale about the United Kingdom.

He didn’t go as far back as James A. Michener usually did with his novels—no primordial ooze. But we got a history-lesson-in-a-stadium starting with bucolic Britain, through the dark days of the Industrial Revolution, the wars of the 20^th century, NHS nightmares and the digital age. And it was massively entertaining.

Frankly, even though it didn’t seem to be part of the narrative, Boyle had me at the schtick with James Bond and HM the Queen. No, no—not the two of them going on a mission and parachuting into the stadium; the part with the corgis. That was all class.

I also enjoyed the percussion exercise, led by Evelyn Glennie. They could box that and I’d buy it.

The bit with Mr. Bean channeling Chariots of Fire was so British. I wonder if I was the only person remembering the incident involving Zola Bud and Mary Decker at the 1984 Olympic games?

The big downer of the whole evening was NBC’s “coverage”. Meredith Veiera and Matt Lauer expanded the concept of cringeworthiness exponentially. Their ignorance was embarrassing, and they just could not stop bashing on about it. They could have gone down onto the stadium floor during the rural sequence and stood in for the village idiots.

I joined thousands of tweeters in yelling, “Shut up, you two! For the love of God, just shut up!” They got their own hashtag: #ShutUpMattLauer. Actually, there's another, #NBCfail, but that wouldn't be Olympics-specific.

And, since NBC (to which we used to refer as the Nothing But Crap network when I freelanced there) delayed their broadcast hours and hours, they had plenty of time to clean up their hosts’ blather, I do not get why they didn’t do some basic editing. Were none of their execs listening to the show? Or, God help us, did they think it was witty?

For the first couple of hours the network was cutting to commercials about every nine to ten minutes. But when the parade of athletes started, commercials came on at three minute intervals. Not even basic cable channels have the chutzpah to pull that. (Thank God for DVR.)

And, in another demonstration of NBC’s crass jingoism (which has marked their coverage ever since they got the contract years ago), the network swapped a taped interview with Michael Phelps for a sequence at the ceremony honoring victims of the 07/07 London terror attack. (If you want to see it, go here.) Seriously? What were you thinking, NBC? So you could edit, but just not for the better?

(Well, if they had shown the tribute, Veiera and Lauer would just have yammered right through it.)

Another question—why, in this Digital Age, can I not find some coverage online that’s not bleeding NBC?