Month: January 2007 (Page 1 of 2)

What’s next, the Doritos’ diet?

I don’t own a Jackson Pollock, but neither does this guy. A forensic analysis by Harvard University has determined paintings discovered in 2003 and thought to be Pollock’s aren’t. They discovered some of the pigments used in the paints were not available until well after the artist died in 1956.

Wanna have some fun? Roll your own Pollock…

Here’s to the crazy ones…

Are you loyal to any particular brands? Brandweek’s 2006 Customer Loyalty Awards provide some insight to the leading brands in our 50 states and some of the results surprised me. For example, in Athletic Footwear, New Balance rated higher in loyalty than Adidas and Nike. More startling to me was in the Quick Serve Food category where Subway came out on top. Ugh. I ate there once. Two words: Microwaved steak. Also surprising is the dismal “show” of Coca-Cola in the “10 Teaspoons of Sugar in Carbonated Water” category behind Pepsi and nuclear-glow Mountain Dew.

If you are loyal to a brand, what, if anything would break that loyalty? Based on my experience, price is not a big factor, but the customer experience is. I’ll cite 2 examples in technology and one in automotive service.

Wireless Phone Service: Up until last weekend, I was paying around $160.00/month to Verizon Wireless for my Treo with internet/email capability and Megan’s phone, all on a 2,100 minute/month plan. Verizon is expensive, but my experience with their service has been outstanding. Last weekend I picked up a phone for Jessica and the service in their retail store was just over the top great. A retail associate helped us pick the phone (Pink Razr) and noted because of my company discount, it would cost us exactly $0.00. Everyone in the store appeared to be well trained and very customer focused. I’ll continue to pay high rates to Verizon because of the value of their service.

Digital Cameras: As I’ve written before, I got a bad PowerShot 70. I found out they were offering a “free” repair, so I sent it in. When it was finally returned several weeks later, I discovered the repair parts were used, scratched and not the same color as the camera! I wrote to them on October 22, 2006 to express my dissatisfaction. I’m still waiting for a response. In the meantime, I’ve purchased an HP digital camera and a Sony HD Camcorder for some $700.00. I’m done with Canon. No service, no quid.

Auto Service: Over the years, the Volvo service I’ve received from Bob DiNapoli at European Auto Werks almost makes me want to buy another one. Almost. Since Ford bought Volvo, I think Volvo quality has taken a hit, and Ford’s recent performance does not inspire confidence. Hmmm… but maybe Bob services BMW’s…

What brands are you loyal or disloyal to and why?

Reading about Filene’s Basement’s impending closure for up to two years while its building is renovated reminded me of my late paternal grandmother, Lillian (Coleman) Daley. My recollection had dimmed some, but there are some memories that remain. The first is from the perspective of a boy who’s eyes only rose to the tops of the clothes bins in the dusty basement during the mid 60’s. That perspective gave me a unique view of half crazed women rifling through piles of what I’d later understand to be flying brassieres’ Yes, it was scary down there.

The second story is actually a story that occurred on a second story. Um, okay, it was a third story, but I’m not changing that line… Anyway, the two bedrooms for my brothers and me growing up at 10 Pine Street were renovated attic space with ceilings sloped with the roof line. One night after some sort of a battle with probably my brother Kevin, “Nana” told me a story of how one brother carried the other when the brother couldn’t walk. I don’t remember the details, but I’ll never forget the punchline. She ended the story by telling how the young man doing the carrying said, “He ain’t heavy. He’s my brother.” Every time I’ve heard the Hollies song over the years since, I’ve thought of that moment.

Since the statute of limitations has long since passed, I can now tell this story… One night when I was in high school… I was 15 or 16… Evidently I consumed some bad hops or barley, because for some reason as I dragged my ill carcass up the front stairs, I was yelling for some guy named “Ralph” and vomiting. It very well could have been food poisoning… Well, no. Now that I’m thinking about it, I remember being in a prone position barfing out of an open car door in the parking lot of our hometown McDonalds. My friends of course were extremely worried about my welfare as they ate. I remember Bobby “Roggie” Rowe even asking, “Hey Leo, want a cheeseburger?” “Nana” was the first to reach me on the front stairs and she did all she could with her barely five foot frame to help me. Suddenly, a less sympathetic figure in the form of my mother appeared ranting like a lunatic in my general direction. “Oh, Carol, he’s just got some kind of a bug,” pleaded my savior Lillian in a high pitch as she threw herself in front of me like a Secret Service agent prepared to take a bullet. “A BEER AND CIGARETTE BUG?” bellowed my mother, certainly intent of curing me permanently of my “bug.”

I never saw her before she died. It seemed she went from good health to no health in just a couple weeks 18 years ago. Megan was due imminently and I chose to stay home instead of making the trip to Florida. The next time I saw her, she really didn’t look like my grandmother. The little woman from Nova Scotia who had survived an abusive alcoholic husband and many trips to unimaginable places in search of her heroin addicted son was still clutching her Rosary beads, but she was gone. She got to know and love Jessica, but never met Megan who was born a couple weeks later. Oh, how she would have loved Kyle and he her. My boy would have had lots of fun with “Nana Lily.”

After the wake, I was the last one in a small room as the funeral director closed the casket. I lost it. I’d been OK up till then, but I guess the thought of never seeing her again was overwhelming. As I write this, it’s clear to me it still is. I miss you Nana. I love you.

The hygienist was scraping away and I was trying to relax as the sharp cold steel crept closer to my vulnerable gums. The abrasion continued and I let my mind wander away from the smell of decay now wafting out of my mouth agape. With all the flossing and high-tech brushing and Listerine-ing, my pie hole still smelled like a sewer pipe exiting Newark on a hot August day. I cannot imagine spending every day in peoples mouths. My daughter Jessica once wanted to be a dental hygienist, but I described to her something like the aforementioned and she chose… Well, she didn’t do that. I wondered just how long I had been going to my current dentist, and doing a little simple subtraction, (2007 – 1987 = 20) I surmised it was close to twenty years. “Almost to the day,” replied Cathy through her mask, looking at my record. “Your first appointment was January 5, 1987.” Twenty years… That’s about 21,915 cups of coffee stains for those of you keeping score, and I’m vainly going to pursue a whiter shade of pale for the old incisors and cuspids. Yep, by early March I’ll have a new fake smile, but I’ll still really mean it.

The participle dangling from the tattered black background was the first sad clue. I couldn’t really describe it as a blog. Not a well kept one, anyway. It was in complete disarray with verbs strewn everywhere and overused adjectives soiling the digitally pixilated walls. There was the stench of a bin on the floor full of unchanged kitty alliteration. An avocado refrigerator had not been cleaned in…well, ever and was reeking… filled with little nuggets of words hardened and crusty; no longer worthy of consumption… Well, not by anyone of sane mind. I looked around and saw there was some effort of upkeep in the past. There were nearly two years of neatly stacked archives, but they were accumulating the inevitable dust of time and disregard. A picture of a vaguely familiar man hung in a back room. In one of those Déj? vu moments, I felt I’d been there before and I recognized the face, but I can’t recall the name. The smile of the man seemed genuine. Was he happy at that moment? What happened to him? My fear is he’s buried somewhere under the mountain of run-on sentences piled up in the IP address of a lonely dark place. I’ll keep looking…

Certainly I am not “the” Swami. That godlike mark belongs to Jeff ever since he predicted, dead on, the exact record of the Boston Red Sox in 1993. By the way, it was 80-82 and his stunning prescience transpired before a pitch was thrown that year. That makes me a Swami-wannabe, a Swami-poser… Yes, an imitator and a fraud. That, of course, doesn’t stop anyone these days from spouting off about, um, anything.

With that, here’s what will happen in the AFC and NFC Championship games later today:

• Chicago led the NFL by forcing 44 turnovers this year. For the Bears to win, that defensive trend has got to continue today. They’ll take two from Reggie Bush and one from Drew Brees.
• Rex Grossman will “stay within himself” and not turn the ball over.
• Many people favor the Saints as a trendy pick to help heal the still gaping wound of Hurricane Katrina. If not for poor clock management and a terrible decision to punt late in the game by Eagles coach Andy Reid last week, the Saints probably wouldn’t be playing today. The fairytale ends today in a flood of Bears defenders.
• Bears coach Lovie Smith is one of two African-American coaches with a shot to get to “the game sandwiched between very expensive commercials and Prince.” Mr. Smith has a dream. “The dream I have had all week is the Chicago Bears being presented with the George Halas Trophy at Soldier Field and for Virginia McCaskey (the late Mr. Halas’ daughter) to accept it.” Dreams can come true.

• Colts safety Bob Sanders will not finish the game. On one of his kamikaze dashes from the Colts secondary, a Patriot will lay him out. When he can’t answer where he is or what day it is, his work will be done for the day.

• Backup prediction – Tom Brady will hit Ben Watson with a touchdown pass straight up the field into the zone vacated by Mr. Sanders.

• Kevin Faulk will throw a touchdown pass. Earlier in the week, I thought it would be Lawrence Maroney, but I’m not sure he can throw. Kevin Faulk can.
• Peyton Manning will not “choke,” nor will he win.
• Much has been made of the kicking game with former Patriot and Hall of Famer Adam Vinatieri now kicking for Indy. Yes, kicking will be the difference in the game. Each kicker will get 3 shots in the game. The best clutch kicker in the history of the game will miss one. The rookie won’t.

Recently I caught a piece of the “VH1 Honors” show on high-def MTV featuring tributes to Queen, Judas Priest, Def Leppard and “the hottest band in the land,” KISS. The segment I saw was the “All Star KISS Tribute Band” cranking a cover. It was some damn fun flat-out rock and roll and after watching it again last night “on 11” courtesy of my DVR, I spent today with these scary bastards ripping “God of Thunder” through my head:

• Gilby Clarke (Guns N’ Roses) on guitar
• Scott Ian (Anthrax) on Gino’s “Axe” bass
• Tommy Lee (Pam Anderson) on drums
• Slash (Guns N’ Roses and Volkswagen) on guitar
• Rob Zombie belting out vocals
• Special guest Ace Frehley (KISS) on guitar

I can’t describe the carnage so here:

Maybe it’s the mounting toll of death and the waste of treasury, but lately I’ve been thinking about the seemingly intractable situation in the Middle East, its causes, and if there’s any hope for a resolution. The cost in capital is enormous and the human cost immeasurable. It’s tragic, but we’ll never know if a child killed by a suicide bomber or a B-1 Bomber would have grown to cure cancer or evolve fusion beyond the experimental.

The tax dollars of you, me and our grandchildren is at $357,000,000,000 and climbing. Many US corporations and their investors benefit from this spending, but just think of how that capital could have been invested instead of being literally vaporized… One estimate suggests we could have provided over 17 million students four-year scholarships at public universities. How about alternative energy? It’s estimated only around $25B a year is invested worldwide in renewable energy capacity and research. What technological miracle might we have produced for $357B? It’s beyond me to speculate, but it sure would buy a lot of solar panels and at $1.5B to $2B a pop, it would build about 200 new nuclear power plants.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but we’re in Iraq to fight terrorism? I don’t recall there being any terrorism in Iraq before we got there. Oh, Saddam… that’s right, we needed to remove that ruthless dictator and free the Iraqi people so they could enjoy democracy and Wal-Mart. Didn’t we support Saddam and Iraq in their war against Iran in the 80’s? Oh, he killed his own people. Um, don’t the Saudi’s do that? How’s their record on civil rights? I’m confused. Oh, the oil thing… Nevermind.

Now I’m not a fan of Rosie O’Donnell by any stretch. I thought she was pretty good in “Harriet the Spy” and “A League of Their Own,” but in general I just find her loud and obnoxious. Aside from her current kindergarten spat with “The Combover,” she’s been ripped recently by the boys on FoxNews for saying, “…radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America.” On this point, we agree. As I’ve written before, manipulating red-state Christian fundamentalists with anti-gay and anti-abortion themes helped put Mr. Bush in the White House with a Republican congressional majority and here we are. 2,973 mostly civilians died on 9/11 at the hands of Islamic fundamentalists and over 50,000 Iraqi civilians have died in the war since our arrival, and neither of these losses are justified. In my opinion, flying a plane full of civilians into a building full of same and raining 500lb bombs on a Baghdad neighborhood full of civilians to kill the Hussein brothers have one thing in common: they evoked terror on innocents.

Now the drums are faintly beating again and the winds of war are blowing toward Tehran. Why? Well, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been an outspoken critic of Israel, even allegedly claiming that the Holocaust is a myth. Crazy, yeah, but I think he’s crazy like a fox and is playing domestic politics to appease an Islamic fundamentalist population. He also insists Iran has a right to develop nuclear technology, and that has Israel understandably concerned. Which brings us to the Jewish state.

I find it curious that in 2007, there are still many countries with an adherence to a specific religion, mostly Islam and Buddhism. It may come as a surprise to many that Israel is primarily a secular nation, and by law every citizen has full and equal civil rights, regardless of their religion. In practice however, some in the large Israeli Arab/Muslim community may dispute that. But that’s no different than the racial profiling that has gone on here since 9/11; the primary responsibility of government is the safety of its citizens and Israel is the best there is at it in spite of constant threat.

Isn’t it time to get the parties back to the table and find a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Before I began researching this, I thought that turning Jerusalem into neutral land, like that of the UN in Manhattan that is “international territory” might be viable. The UN website describes their NY site thusly, “The land does not belong to just one country, but to all countries that have joined the Organization.” In fact, such a proposed solution was passed on November 29, 1947 as United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181. It deemed Jerusalem a “corpus separatum” or international city, to be administered by the UN. I think a better solution would be co-administration by a Palestinian-Israeli governing body with a commitment to “freedom of worship for all.” Unfortunately the resolution was only accepted by the Jews, and was rejected by the Arabs in Palestine. The bloodshed has continued nearly unabated since then.

I’m not optimistic, but wouldn’t three hundred and fifty seven billion have gone a long way toward getting these people in a room to find peace?