smays.com

I do love my movies

And I thought you had to watch them in a theater or TV. But I was wrong. A few weeks ago I kept seeing a movie trailer for a film called Hostage. "We gotta see this movie," I told Barb. Then I noticed it was showing at BMWfilms.com. Oh, shit. It's a commercial. Never mind. No...mind. Go to BMWfilms.com and watch this eight minute... (movie? film? cinema? commercial?). I don't what you call it but I watched three of these (about 8 minutes each) and I don't remember when I've seen anything more entertaining. I won't try to review these. Or categorize them. Just watch them. If these are commercials, they're not like any commercial I ever saw. They did make me think about owning a BMW and that's probably what it's all about. My, my, but these were good. Directors like John Woo and Tony Scott (Spy Game, Crimson Tide, True Romance, Top Gun)...actors like Gary Oldman and James Brown. And I'm sitting here in front of my little Thinkpad watching these stream on a DSL connection thinking, "I could watch 90 minutes of this, easy." So. Is this the advertising of the future? I don't know now. But I'm thinking I would have paid to watch this BMW commercial and I'm already paying to not watch lots of other commercials. The winds of change are blowing.

Staaaayyy

Barb completed her annual holiday card photo shoot this week, featuring Ripley and Andie. While I couldn't bear to help (or watch) I think this year's card will be another winner. We're embargoed here until the analog cards are mailed.

Sports Dad

A Canadian father is suing the New Brunswick Amateur Hockey Association after his 16-year-old son failed to win the league's most valuable player award.

My lips move when I read.

I find that's true when I'm reading almost anything by Elmore Leonard, Lawrence Block or Robert B. Parker. I just love these guys and find myselt reading their dialogue aloud (but quietly). Just finished Elmore Leonard's When the Women Come Out to Dance and working my way through Block's Enough Rope. While I've never been all that found of short stories, I loved these collections. Alex Cross fans will have to read James Patterson's Four Blind Mice but I thought it was disappointing. Robert B. Parker's Spencer series suffers from the same formula-rot but Parker has given us Sunny Randall and she's a nice change but just barely.

You might be from Kennett if...

A friend of mine, who happens to live in Kennett, Missouri, received a call from a woman this week but couldn't hear her because of the chainsaw in the background. She said "Excuse me, I'll go outside." When he asked about the chainsaw in the house she explained "I needed something fixed and his skillsaw was broke." Makes a guy homesick.

Sorry.

William R. Jones was executed on Wednesday for the murder of Stanley Albert.

Don't get mad.

Blog the fuckers. "Well, fuck TDK tech, and fuck the whole tech pimp universe while we're at it. It was a mistake to pin any hope to those sort of bottom-feeding shitbag no-talent single-celled whoremongering sons-of-bitches in the first place. From now on, I'm only selling myself directly to the client. Just like I've done since I started working for myself." I don't know who or what TDK Tech is but they fucked with my man Andy so fuck 'em! And tell your friends. Oh yeah, they got a pussy Web sit, too.

I Are A Suspect.

From a William Safire Op/Ed piece in the NY Times. "Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend  all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database." Not good.

Blogging is hard work.

It's like caring for the child I've avoided having all these years. You think you're writing it for yourself but then you get a few friends that check every day and complain when you fail to post with some regularity. I've said before that blogging has reallying made me think about my life. If you do nothing but work ten or twelve hours every day, there's a) not much to write about and b) damned little energy if you did. I remember reading that your day is like a pie. Each thing that you do takes a little slice. If it's all gone at five o'clock, there's nothing left for you. I gotta save some pie and quit giving it all away at the office. In the meantime, we're only accepting complaints from those with your own blogs.

Tell your friends

Did I mention that Barb built a house in Destin, Florida? Well, she did and it's for rent. Great for family reunions if you're into that kind of pain. A better plan might be to get some friends together (there's three bedrooms) and split the cost for a week. You can check it out at AmberjackLanding.com. I'm through with getting shitty service in over-priced hotels in places I didn't want to go to in the first place. My vacations will all be "One cold drink from the beach."

Watching a lot of BBC America lately.

Changing Rooms, Ground Force and So Graham Norton. The U.S. version of Changing Rooms is called Trading Spaces but it seems a poor substitute for the original. And few TV shows are more original than So Graham Norton. Can't describe it. You have to see it.

Tears in my ears.

I've spent the last few minutes of the last few nights on my back laughing so hard tears trickled down to my ears. I'm highlighting my way through Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel by Scott Adams.

"You can ignore almost everything that is asked of you and in the long run it won't matter. Either the tasks will become moot or your boss will forget what he asked you to do, or someone else will do it." Or, "If you stall long enough, every corporate initiative ends, even layoffs."

I particularly enjoyed the description an encounter with a salesman for a local radio station that was trying to convince Adams to buys advertising for the resturant he co-owns. Adams asked the sales person how many listeners the radio station had.

"The sales weasel explained, 'You have to spend money to make money.' I pointed out that he probably knew the number of listeners and that I could decide on my own if it was worth knowing. The weasel responded by explaining how many human beings lived within listening range of his station, i.e. weaselmath. I asked how that mattered if they weren't actually listening, just potentially listening."

"Then he explained that it's much morer expensive to advertise on other radio stations on a cost-per-relevlant-listener basis. I asked how he knew that if he didn't know how many listeners he had."

"He explained to me that some of my competitors were advertising on his station and they must be getting some benefit or they wouldn't be doing it. I pointed out that most of my competitors weren't advertising on his station and if not advertising wasn't working, they wouldn't be doing it. It wasn't a good meeting."

God help us if radio listening ever becomes as brutally measurable as the Web.

Enough Rope

is a collection of "short fiction" (not sure how this differs from short stories) by Lawrence Block. He manages to write about death without bumming me out. Favorites include Batman's Helpers; The Merciful Angel of Death and Out the Window. Ed Gorman writes a much better review of the collection.

Table Watching.

More poety from Halley Suitt. "Crash, heart ache heading your way boy, when I look into her icy porcelain face. Pretty english girl looks -- china shop white skin and black straight hair, but more than English, something mixed in there to make her more exotic, maybe half Japanese, and very beautiful. But may I tell you, kind eager guy, run for your life. She's fine and special and complicated in ways you will be so sorry to learn about and she'll do you serious damage dear. She leans back in her seat, stretched as far away from him as she can. Nothing on the menu is right. Something he did last night, brings a slightly sour expression to her face. Run now."

OZ.

The annual Learfield Halloween Party was the best ever. Children trick-or-treated from office to office. We have great photos but didn't put them online for all the obvious privacy issues. Our IS department can kick your IS department's ass.

Tough women with guns.

About the only thing that pulls me off line these days is a good book. This week it was Sue Grafton's latest, Q is for Quarry; and Robert B. Parker's Shrink Rap. Grafton's never been better. My only knock on Parker is a silly one. To achieve hardback page count, he uses one inch margins, double spacing and paper so thick you can hardly dog-ear the page. But the dialogue is so good I find myself reading aloud. I think Parker is (almost) as good as Elmore Leonard. Barb does not share my opinion.

Much better.

After months of planning and hundreds of hours of work, we re-launched the corporate website at 5:00 a.m. on November 1. On time and only a little over budget. The look and feel is the work of a very talented designer named Kory Johnson. Her style is very sleek and clean. Everything beneath the hood was created by Gestalt, Inc. Chief Knowledge Architect Andy Waschick has spent so much time on our sites that he's had no time for his own. He has a blog but it's a sometimes dark and forbidding place that I dare not send you without his permission and note from your mother. Having Andy build your website is like... having Thomas A. Edison wire your home. It's likely to take a little longer because he's always creating and inventing and staying up all night in his workshop building a garage door opener before you have a car (or they've been invented). Somewhere along the way I stopped asking, "Would it be possible...?" because nothing is impossible for Andy.

The next phase for Learfield.com will be the development of a company-wide intranet. The thought of really connecting all of the employees in our company can be a scary one for some of our managers. Do we really want everyone to be able to communicate with everyone else? Do we really want them to be able to communicate with our customers and business partners? Hold on there, cowboy. Let's think about this for a moment. The Cluetrain is slowing down at our station and might or might not stop. I'd like to think it will.