Friday, June 27, 2008

Sartorial Savior

I saw an article about the Pope's shoes yesterday.

Yep.

Apparently, there are rumors floating around about the Pope’s suspiciously fashionable footwear: that they may, in fact, be made by Prada. So, the Vatican came out with a statement refuting these scurrilous rumors—indicating that he does not wear Prada shoes after all, but the shoes of a cobbler from Novona, Italy (that’s going to be good for that guy’s business—Papal props).

Though this article was full of gems--including that his Holiness’ “brightly colored red shoes and attractive sunglasses have prompted many to deem him a 'style icon' "-- my favorite was the assertion of a Spanish writer named, incidentally, Prada.

“The Pope is not dressed by Prada but by Christ," he said.

As if JC didn’t have enough to do, now it appears the Thou-Shalt-Nots may extend to fashion faux-pas.

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Monday, June 23, 2008

Blue Gorillas, State Babies, and the Complexities of the Mortgage Market

Like everyone else, I’ve heard a lot about the mortgage crisis. About risky loans, and the effect that their failure is having on the economy. It all seems extremely complex though--so my understanding of it all is, at best, basic.

Naturally I notice the ads for mortgages and refinancing online. Not only because they are topical, but because they are strikingly ubiquitous.

The only example image I was able to find online was the dancing alien. There are several varieties of dancing aliens. This one is a wearing a wig and a bikini.
















But there are others as well. There is a dancing Santa, moving with the grace you wouldn't expect from a rotund gentleman in fur. And one with dancing blue gorilla, throwing his hands in the air as if he simply didn't care about balloon payments.

There are a number of ads with silhouetted man and woman in lascivious, throbbing dances reminiscent of the iPod ads. On one ad, they are a dancing tattoo on the arm of a man, while a disembodied hand is adding another tattoo that reads "Calculate New Payments." (He will regret at least one of those tattoos, I'm sure.)

The dancing habits of various species seems to be the advertising strategy here.

There are other ones I've seen too though, non-dancing ones. There was the one with the cartoon babies—an identical one for each state in our union, with the two letter postal designation on their diapers. They were holding hands in a sort of peaceful, happy sit-in..... the idea being that you should click on your state's baby for more information on great mortgage rates. (incidentally, you should find out what your State Baby is if you don't already know. New York's is the Recalcitrant Strollerdweller.)

Each of these things, seemingly, has nothing to do with a mortgage. It’s hard enough to think of why there would be one ad like this, let alone dozens. There is, of course, only one reason for these ads.

They work.

People click on these ads. And loans are made to the people who click on them. The fact of the matter is that transactions worth hundreds of thousands of dollars are often begun with a dancing blue gorilla.

Suddenly, the complex mortgage crisis becomes a little more clear.

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P.S. This is a YouTube video cataloging some of these ads.

P.P.S. And this is what you need to do to remove said ads forever. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks promising:

"Windows users can block a web server's content by adding it to their hosts file, which maps domain names to IP addresses. If you use this to map an ad server's domain to 127.0.0.1, which is an address for your own computer, you'll never see its ads again.

Windows XP keeps the file in the C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc folder.

The following line will stop the music for the dancing mortgage people and any other advertiser using the same broker:

127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net"

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Thursday, June 19, 2008

A site by any other name.....

My mother is now on Facebook.

While this is amazing--and if you know my mother, you know just how amazing it is--it's not best part of the story.

It's not that she's on Facebook, you see. It’s that she called me to ask how to get on it, and called it “SpaceFace.”

If you are on it as well, I hope you'll be my SpaceFace friend.

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Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Chug not, lest ye be Chugged

A new word has entered the vernacular.,according to the Urban Dictionary:

Chugger (n) -- charity mugger. One of those people who stands in the street with a big brightly-coloured bib and quite possibly a clipboard soliticing donations to the Feline Liberation Army or some other worthy cause.

Chuggers are rampant here in New York, as they were in San Francisco. Jittery, grinning, cultish in their exuberance on the indifferent city sidewalks. They hold their clipboards at their sides, and ask passers-by if they might stop and talk about their cause. One group is especially prominent, and I have heard their trademark question so often that it shakes me:

“Do you have a minute for the environment?”

Now, of course I have a minute for the environment. Every one of us needs to have oodles of minutes for the environment, veritable hours of minutes, in this its time of urgent need. But I don’t have this minute, and I don’t want to feel like I’m a tree-hater simply because I don’t want to stop on the sidewalk. I don’t hate on Mama Naitch, Chugger, I simply have somewhere to be. (I am aware that this is fueled by my own Catholic guilt.) It’s gotten to the Pavlovian point—the moment I see someone with a clipboard, I instinctively cross to the other side of the street (and drool, though that's probably unrelated).

It’s as if telemarketers have taken to the streets, albeit for noble purposes, and become sidewalk trolls—demanding eco-moment of your time before you may pass. The thing is: I admire their commitment to the cause. It’s impressive to see someone welcome so much rejection--so many fake cell phone conversations-- in the name of what they believe. It’s just that I would rather they call or visit, since in those cases I could screen or pretend I’m not home. On the street, it’s just awkward.

I am trying to do my part for the enivironment. In fact, I just got an eco-calendar. It tells me a different thing every day that I can do to help the environment. So far the only suggestion I’ve seen is to take all of my extra pencils and glue them together to make a coaster. Not having a surfeit of No. 2’s around the house, this one isn’t for me—and I’m not entirely sure the impact it would have on Mother Gaia. But I’m out there, figuring it out, trying to do my part.

Some day soon I will once again smile brightly in the direction of someone who doesn’t know my name. I will politely demur when they ask for a moment of my time. And now, I know what to call them: chugger.

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Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Starbucks vs. Duane Reade

I have often wondered, as I am bombarded by the sight of so many of their respective outlets, just who has more stores in Manhattan...

Duane Reade or Starbucks?

Any guesses?

Turns out, it's not even close.

Duane Reade by a landslide. About 5 to 1 in Manhattan.

My curiosity is sated. At least until I can come up with some other inane, trivial either/or question to ponder.

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Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Newsiness.

I always enjoy walking the four blocks of sidewalk to my subway station every morning. As I am about to walk down the stairs, my friendly newsman always says "Good morning. Have a good day!" and I get a brief glimpse of the headlines for the day.

Though I don't read it (and realize it should not be considered a reputable source of news), it's impossible not to admire the New York Post's headlines. I really enjoy them. They are masterfully over the top, written by pun ninjas with scythe-like wit. I often wonder if the people that write them ever chuckle to themselves at the cheesiness. Do they ever just shake their head and say "No, no we can't. This is just too much. We are a newspaper." My guess -- they never do. They revel in it: being the news and a parody of the news all at once. Case-in-belabored-point, this morning's headline.

The people at the Post probably couldn't believe their luck at the breaking of the salmonella-tomato story. I'm sure the editorial staff deliberated only momentarily before going to print with this:


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Thursday, June 05, 2008

Of Two Minds on the B Train

I was standing on my morning train, reading a book. As the doors opened at a stop, a woman rolled a stroller onto the train.

Spilling out of the stroller was a young girl, probably four years old. She was big-boned and bubble-cheeked--barely contained within her red, chocolate-stained t-shirt. She just sat there listless in this little rickshaw with the curved, umbrella-like handles. As if to complete her application for diabetes, she was licking an ice cream cone.

I began my mental assessment of the situation, tsktsk-ing in my head about this child’s health outlook. Seeing her attack this cone, an errant arch of vanilla above her lip, I thought about childhood obesity. About how we’ve created a culture where children are morbidly obese before they are kindergartners, and how a full 25% of NYC public school children are overweight. I sighed at the fact that this girl was learning to be inactive before she learned how bad it could be for her.

Then I thought about how I didn’t have an ice cream cone, and how I wanted one. And my legs tired, I thought about how it would be really nice to have someone push me around in such a comfortable conveyance. And I thought about how I never know as much as I think I do about other people.

Yet another of my regular companions on my subway commute: ambivalence.

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