Today marks a year since my tib/fib fractures of my left leg and one day short of the surgery to pound 14.25 inches of titanium rod into the tibia thorough the knee. (My misadventure and recovery are more than covered in posts available in this blog’s Health category.)

A sipped a couple of bourbon on the rocks for the occasion. In light of my relatively successful rehab, this is a celebration of sorts.

Yet, this has been a lost year in many ways. I was already pretty depleted after 19 years as a tech writer/editor/manager. The economy and the region’s high-tech industries already were in their own rehab units, with fewer jobs and most employers trying to buy or rent cheap. My last company was one of many sold and dissolved. Then there was that financial meltdown thing. The few employers who had guts and felt personal responsibility to keep their section of the economy perking then seemed to lose all courage and conviction — understandable perhaps, but hard on us contract tech communicators.

I’ve had phone and in-person interviews for contract and permanent jobs, but no offers, just as close as second choice from a long list. That was with a hiatus of several months when I was in hospital, using a walker, on opiates, on crutches, with a cane, and doing other things. Other things included:

• Remembering that I had switched as necessary from newspapers to trade magazines, from one industry to another, to computerized everything, to high-tech reporting and reviews, to telecommunications, to  hardware and software manuals and on and on.
• Thinking about what I would like to write.
• Realizing that I turn out computer manuals superior to the vast majority (I know, not too hard, but I do know how to think like a user and like a network admin — very useful and unusual skills).
• Realizing that I could do more manuals and help system well and quickly, but that the thrill was gone.
• Allowing myself some meditation time.
• Accepting that another set of talent in the cooking and broader food categories are more interesting.
• Admitting that trying to switch to food writing would mean establishing myself from scratch…yet again…with all the emotional overhead there.

In my year, we had many other stresses, like a student in a distant college and a move from my long-term Boston neighborhood to another (JP to HP). Fortunately, my wife’s job was stable and sustains us.

So there I was yesterday at the Boston Media Makers meeting putting out a group query about how to promote myself as a food writer. I got one biz card and I’ll put a query to the group. I’ll ask video blog/group founder Steve Garfield about the video blogging he does for his food-writer wife.

I already blog here and there and podcast over here (coming up on three years of weekly poddies).  I remain intrinsically shy, but I don’t feel I have any shame left and no longer mind blushing. I think even I can self-promote.

I have the article concepts and roughs. I have a couple of books in various forms of preparation. Moreover the best part of a move like this would be the unqualified comment. As a tech writer, I always felt I had to say something to the effect I wrote computer manuals and help systems, knowing it wasn’t exactly writing writing.

There’s nothing like a lost year, is there?

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, broken bones, recovery, writing, career, Boston Media Makers, food writing

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Just let the term roll around in your cranium — space salesman.

From my many days as a magazine writer or editor, I knew dozens of them well. To a one, they had limitless ambition and zero shame. They sold advertising in inches, fractional and full pages, spreads and more. That was the space they sold.

Of course, what they really sold was both hope and fear. Advertisers anticipated that targeted displays of their products or services would bring sales and profits (hope). They also knew too well that their competitors would aim for the same customer in the same magazines, and just maybe grab market share if they did not match their ad quality and quantity (fear).

From my newspaper days, I had see similar drives by the soft goods/alcohol/toy and other advertisers. Chums in broadcast said it was much the same there.

This mass and ubiquitous selling of the intangible only works when media successfully sells its own value. Controlled-circulation magazines, for example, first prove they have only great potential customers reading their freely distributed issues. They get subscribers to qualify, which generally means filling out a postal card claiming to be in the business, thus a target for advertisers as well as worthy to read about the industry. As important, the magazines pay auditing companies to verify their circulation in numbers and qualification.

Trust Us

Then they set their ad rates to match the alleged value of say 32,000 or three or 100 times that subscribers, a.k.a. readers representing companies just waiting to buy your stuff.

TV and radio were much the same, with the added wrinkle of target demographics. They could claim the best age clusters or zip codes of audience and such. Then each show would be its own product offering so many of this and that and so much market share in a time slot and day.

We all knew it was kind of a house of cards or more accurately like the emperor’s new clothes. The claims that the space or time really translated into advertisers’ sales and profits have always been spongy. Except where advertisers can include a rebate coupon or such that they can actually count, who can really attribute greater sales to a particular ad placement.

What advertisers do know beyond coupons is that certain ad campaigns are more effective than others. They rarely have a control group that can isolate the effectiveness of placements in one medium or one network or magazine. They are too busy with scattershot advertising (fear again).  On the other hand, if they switch campaigns and see a big uptick or plunge in sales, pow, zap, that’s almost tangible!

So, to that PepsiCo of the headline, it is blowing off the Super Bowl, says the AP. That’s gutsy, surprising, risky, and maybe trendsetting. You can be damned sure that other advertisers — beyond sugary drink makers — are paying attention.

For background:

• Pepsi has advertised at the SBs for 23 years
• Its chip folk, Frito-Lay will have spots in this year’s game
• Last year, it spent $33 million on SB ads
• Those ads this year should average $3 million per 30 second spot

A Million Here…

Pepsi along with FedEx was plain about its reasoning. Those companies said ads were too expensive. Moreover, Pepsi’s Nicole Bradley said, “In 2010, each of our beverage brands has a strategy and marketing platform that will be less about a singular event and more about a movement.”

Instead, the company will concentrate on online efforts. You can buy a lot of online presence for the millions it would have spent in the highly competitive, even mind-numbing, SB ad undercard.

We are to look for its Pepsi Refresh Project beginning in January…on the net.

So there is Pepsi charging off almost solo on its own safari. If it brings back higher customer poll numbers and even holds or gains market share domestically, that will be huge. Others would be sure to follow. Perhaps the absurd SB ad costs might drop and some companies might say they have brand recognition and no longer want to spend there, rather they might look more to online and heavens above, print.

I don’t drink soda, or tonic as we say up here. I get my bubbles from seltzer, ale and occasionally champagne. Yet, I have a 16-year-old Mountain Dew doer and from business curiosity, I’ll be watching.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, PepsiCo, Super Bowl, advertising

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To paraphrase Patrick Henry, the next gale that sweeps from the West shall bring with it a hell of a snowstorm…

In early February 1978, the Northeast got it, cripplingly so and in two waves. Boston and New York City in particular were paralyzed. I wouldn’t move to the former from the latter until the next year. In 1978, I saw cross-country skiiers high above the normal road level poling by my West Village windows.

Then I went to work.

My wife and I worked in mid-town a little over a mile apart, she at Scholastic Magazines and I at American Management Association HQ in the publishing part, AMACOM. Unlike trolley and car dependent Boston, New Yorkers moved by subway. The underground was just fine, thank you very much, even though sidewalks were more a hidden concept than anything visible.

Most AMA employees lived in the sticks suburbs. They were stranded. A subset of us in town struggled our way to the subway stations and the short distance to the HQ on the other end. The Scholastic/AMA attitudes to the loyal do-bees holds a management lesson.

In perspective, this AMA had long been addicted to rewards on the cheap. Their main business was providing educational programs for executives, with an underlying motive. Companies paid for the managers to take a trip to the site, charge some meals and hotel, and just maybe come back a tad better at what they did for a living. Companies understood that the price was a bargain — it was a one-off that didn’t add to the base salary package and thus have to be built on annually.

Not the Same

At Scholastic, the slogging workers who kept the shop open got catered meals and when all returned public acknowledgment from the big shots — plus a bonus. At AMA, we got (beat, beat) ta da! a Plexiglas paperweight.

Click on the thumbnail above to have a closer view of this 5.5 x 3.5 inch treasure. Revel in its power.

I had forgotten until we moved recently. I found it along with several similar tchotchkes.  I now vaguely remember keeping it for its absurdity value.

AMA’s president, Jim Hayes, appears on it in the form of his stock signature. Come to think of it, there were so few of us in the storms, it would have been a small thing for him to sign the cards individually before each was encapsulated for “short-term eternity”.

Nah, we at AMACOM often heard that it was a great place to be from…that it looked good on the résumé. That was true enough. Yet, like soldiers, slaves, peasants and other minions, we did not get our rewards in our daily lives. We had lower wages than others in Manhattan for similarly skilled writing, acquisitions and editing. For many of us, the from AMA could not come too soon.

On the other side of Fifth Avenue, Scholastic treated its loyal snow workers as though they had done the company a favor. On our side, we had “demonstrated commitment to the AMA spirit of service and quality (and thus were) deeply appreciated.”

We can measure the depth of that appreciation today in the 5/8th inch of plastic. The message was that we did what was expected of us.

Take What You Get

I had a slightly more personal stake in the paperweight as well. Many months, I played that same James L. Hayes in my small, subservient way. Most of my work was on the monthly magazine, Management Review.  I acquired and edited some main articles, was totally responsible for the separate little magazines inside in their domestic and international editions. Also, many months, I ghosted Hayes’ president’s column in the front of MR.

He was a charming and affable fellow, a perfect association president, and a great spontaneous speaker on general management subjects. Alas, he was an awful writer. To his credit though he knew that and certainly had enough managerial skill to be sure that a couple levels below him was enough talent to take care of that for him.

Hayes was fond of my ghostwriting. My references and quotes from ancient Greek and Roman as well as more modern European writers and philosophers made him look well read and analytical.  There really wasn’t any harm in such veneer, as underneath, he knew the business theory that AMA members craved.

Those snows of nearly 32 years ago long ago melted. The paperweight remains. In its little paper box (no expensive lid, thank you very much — just a plastic bag), was an unsigned note on embossed AMA note paper. It reads:

This plaque speaks for itself. I hope that in the years to come, it will be a reminder to you of my deep appreciation for your outstanding efforts in the winter of ‘78.

I am reminded and chuckle once more. The snows were deep, the appreciation shallow.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, Boston, New York City, AMACOM, Scholastic, Jim Hayes, blizzard, paperweight

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For those of us who walk without a claque cheering each step, Tiger Woods’ temporary retreat is somewhat refreshing. We can hope he inspires other sinful billionaires and multi-millionaires.

While his adultery offenses seem to be in the civil, not criminal class, he shares much with disgraced quarterback/dog fighter Michael Vick. Both were on top the world, on top of their game. Both had lost their ability to see cause and effect — odd for bright folk. Both stand to lose considerable money from direct sports earning and endorsements.

Also, both came around to sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.

In Woods’ case, his contrition may well be a gambit to restore his halo and general glow. In theory, he could return as the world’s best-ever golfer, chastened and somewhat humanized, ready to deposit those absurdly large checks as a fallen and risen hero.

It is more difficult to sympathize with Tiger. He is far beyond set up for life. There is no way he could have the time and attention to spend all his millions upon millions.

Yet whether his willingness to swap a polo shirt for a hair shirt publicly (including on his self-promotional site)  would be meaningful…if it serves as a societal model. He or his publicist leads on his site with:

I am deeply aware of the disappointment and hurt that my infidelity has caused to so many people, most of all my wife and children. I want to say again to everyone that I am profoundly sorry and that I ask forgiveness. It may not be possible to repair the damage I’ve done, but I want to do my best to try.

Contrast that with the more standard fare from criminals and klutzes. At its most risible, then President Bill Clinton ask us to parse the meaning of is in efforts to avoid personal responsibility for his adulteries.  More typically and seriously, pols on the take or violent criminals pull out the old, “I’m innocent until proven guilty,” “Everyone deserves a fair trial,” and “Because I bargained and was not convicted of the crime, I am totally innocent.”

Personal responsibility has been blown away in the gusts of obfuscation and nitpicking.

How refreshing (and cost saving) it would be if criminals accepted their guilt and took their punishment. Think a 1930s or 1940s movie with the malefactor thrusting his wrists out for the handcuffs, saying, “You caught me copper!”

On the other side, a matching huge need is for slate clearing afterward. Except for these piqué-collar transgressors like Woods, the larger society would dog criminals into continued poverty and to their death. Whether it’s our CORI laws that keep punishing ex-cons or the unwillingness of employers to hire them, we have also lost the concepts of rehabilitation, restitution, and payment of societal debt.

Even in prison, convicted criminals are targets of the self-appointed self-righteous. It is not only winger columnists and bloggers, ordinary folk speak of “country clubs” where prisoners can access books, TVs or adult-education courses. Somehow the loss of liberty, the right to vote, the power to earn income, and the contact with family and friend is not enough punishment to many who have all those privileges.

The idea of two or 10 or more years of prison as the penalty for a crime is to repay society and ideally to come out a chastened citizen ready to behave appropriately.  How did larger society lose that and demand perpetual punishment after the sentence served?

Regardless, Woods and Vick are on the big-shot end of the seesaw. As needed, they got and bought the high-end, nitpicking, plea-bargaining lawyers. They can emerge from court ordered or self-chosen exile to making more in a year than most people can fantasize about for a lifetime.

While that makes it difficult to be too sympathetic, wouldn’t it be great of Tiger’s confessions and acceptance of his resulting loses reinforced this as a trend? Just try not to be too cynical about the possibility that this is a ploy to hasten his return to big bucks and adoration.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, contrition, Woods, Vick, responsibility

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Confusing Doctors Again

Not much funny about breast cancer, eh? However, the medical community is giving us a big yuk on mammogram schedules.

Like the ending of G.I. Joe cartoons, the moral of the episode invariably included, “And now we know…and knowing is half the battle.” In this case, the U.S. Preventive Health Task Force announced new guidelines for routine breast-cancer screenings. Fundamentally, instead of annual mammograms from 40, the new rule would be every other year from 50.

Alas for the medical community, this is only the latest care that exposes its frailty, its reliance on fungible vetting for diagnosis and care. Truth be told, most doctors have as much to do with medical science as pop journalists do. They wave the current perceived wisdom, call, “Aha!,” and congratulate themselves.

So in the media including talk shows, they find women to say this is putting their lives at risk. They find doctors who say they are confused. They find researchers who were behind the previous perceived wisdom implying that a massive die-off of U.S. women will follow. A few alarmists also say this is all insurance companies need to deny annual breast-cancer screens to women who want them anyway.

The joke here is that this is common, if less dramatic and less discussed, in the profession. With a herd instinct, nearly all non-specialist doctors have to rely on the best guesses from the most accepted reports and studies. That means they end up continually circling back pretending that each change of diagnostic or treatment protocol is a breakthrough and G.I. Joe style new knowledge.

I became aware of this first when I was in elementary school. My mother ran Red Cross chapter, putting her in charge of and teaching first aid, home nursing and such, with the accompanying textbooks. I remember her alternately laughing and complaining when the national organization revised those manuals every year or even less as the American Medical Association changed its mind.

One trigger was burn treatment. It was cover or leave exposed to air and use gooky medicine or let it form a scab on its own. Back and forth it went with one major reputable study after another.

With the imprecision of care and the reality that most primary care physicians — PCPs or what we used to call general practitioners or family practitioners (GPs or FPs) — are not particularly good diagnosticians. They reply on plugging symptoms into their experience or searching software or a book for the most likely fit. In all likelihood, they end up treating symptoms with drugs and never diagnose anything. That means 1) the body cures itself, 2) symptom relief is coincident with improvement, or 3) yet another patient on a long-term regimen of a drug which may or may not address the cause of the complaint.

We really can’t fairly call that medical science. Yet, we do cut docs some slack here. Much of the time they are pretty much the best health gamble around. We know they are not likely to discover or cure underlying causes, particularly of chronic problems. We also know that the system requires them to move a lot of patients through, so that they really don’t have time to muse or deeply investigate or even research beyond reading current medical journals. They aren’t scientists.

Moreover, they are easily misled by extrapolations from the research on which they rely. An obvious example is the silly reliance on body mass index (BMI) for individuals. While useful as a broad-brush measurement for big groups, it is often invalid per patient. Thin looking folk with little muscular development may have fine BMI but have organs swimming in their fat. Athletes with well developed muscles are often obese or overweight by BMI while being very healthy and having a great body fat level, much more meaningful than BMI.

It is easy to see how PCPs can fall back on the lazy solution of BMI though. Plug in a height and weight and there’s a number for comparison. Doctors worthy of their oaths would look at and palpate patients. They would take the same two measurements, but put them into a hand-held body-fat analyzer instead (those are very accurate and inexpensive at $25 to $50). Then nutrition and exercise recommendations would be meaningful. Oops, let’s not forget that most PCPs know little about diet or exercise.

So we are stuck with a system that hurries docs along, encouraging them to be reliant on easy ways out for diagnosis and treatment. We end up with increasingly unrealistic guidelines in many areas, while the population gets widely wide and heavy. Those guidelines have not resulted in greater longevity either, we struggle around 17th in the world, despite our disproportionate health-care cost and use of prescription drugs.

Treat Cause or Symptom?

A real solution would be a hard one, finding and treating underlying causes for conditions. As our system is now, that would happen only if considerable research was done asking such questions as is the mid-term and long-term outcome for patients better with treating symptoms pharmaceutically or changing the underlying cause of their problems. In a country where nearly all medical research is funded directly or secondarily by drug companies, you can imagine how likely it will be for such massive studies to occur.

In many areas, the research that our docs rely on seems misused as well. Consider for one, the famous Framingham Heart Study. It is a massive, on-going and very useful project, even though it has the limit of covering only men, only in a age range, and with rebutted results in the British Medical Journal among other places. Yet is is a hook to hang a medical hat on and as such used for various guidelines.

One such is that acceptable blood pressure has dropped from 140 to 130 to 120 to 115 upper number, for example. One effect is from the study that the recommendation is that over 90% of men should be on anti-hypertensive drugs by 60.

You needn’t be the worst cynic around to question the relationship between drug companies, doctors and that guideline. Think in contrast if PCPs worked with patients to reduce body fat, up potassium intake, reduce stress and such. would the patient be better off than a remaining lifetime of one or more drugs?

What would G.I. Joe say? Maybe, “Well, we’ll never know and not knowing leaves us unprepared for the battle.”

Cross-post note: I have other medical rants here. This one will also appear at Marry in Massachusetts.

Tags: massmarrier, harrumph, doctors, mammogram, health care, doctors, diagnosis, drug companies, guidelines

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For those of us who worked business and trade magazines, BusinessWeek’s disgrace will take come adjustment. In today’s Financial Times is a little piece on the bottom of a page about McGraw-Hill shopping the once dominant book for $1.

That doesn’t have the emotional pull to many, not as powerful as daily newspapers collapsing. Yet to me, it’s as striking in its way as a car maker going down.

For a couple of terms, in the business press, we tend to refer to:

• book, which outsiders could call magazine
• property, which non-publishing sorts would call a book
• trade magazines, generally monthlies or weeklies devoted to specific industries like construction or restaurants
• business magazines, which can cover trades but tends to be more financially and managerially oriented, like Inc. or BusinessWeek
  
• editor, on a magazine can mean that, but generally senior editor or such means a writer who gets more title than money

I worked them all. I did a big handbook for McGraw-Hill (for corporate directors), was on the staff at Inc. and Management Review, wrote for computer and electronics pubs, as well as construction and materials handling ones. I began to know BW folk when I worked at the New York HQ of Conover-Mast, which Boston-based Cahners bought to triple its size.

BW is where writers hoped to go to get lazy and overpaid. Several from Conover-Mast ended up there when Cahners tried to move our books to Boston and Chicago. Some writers went to the dark side, public relations, but most scuttled back ashamed later to return to trade or business press writing.

The Conover-Mast books tended to have a rivalry with equivalent McGraw ones, and sometimes titles from other houses. At Construction Equipment, where I worked, we tried to catch (and successfully passed) Construction and Highway and Heavy Construction in both ad pages and revenue, as well as writing awards.

I worked for a great writer, John Rehfield, who inspired us to greatness in our little trade maggy ways. He was a civil engineer, but he was both enormously funny and a facile writer. He was an astounding anomaly in a field where most editors know their business but have a terrific problem putting that knowledge into intelligible words. In fact, when John offered me the job, I asked why. I had come out of newspapers and the only construction expertise I had was as a carpenter’s helper for two summers in college. That brought a big laugh as he put a hand on my portfolio and waved his arm toward the editors beyond his office. “You’re a writer. I can teach you anything you need to know about construction. I can’t teach an engineer how to write.”

When Cahners moved CE to Chicago,  I stayed in New York with the energy and publishing. Many Conover-Mast writers found other companies as well. A few ended up at BW. While I never had much interest in a job there, they sure did like the money and prestige of sailing on McGraw’s flagship.

And now, any one of them could buy the big book for a buck. It’s circulation is still over 900,000, but ad revenues have plunged with other print media’s and it loses money…ever week, as the expression goes.

It’s had a great run. I think of comparisons such as Digital Equipment Corporation. Some might say DEC failed as it went from mini-computer giant to subset of Compaq and then HP and then to nothing. I say despite founder Ken Olsen’s stupidities about personal computers and other blunders, DEC paid a lot of salaries and shareholder dividends for decades. It was successful for most of its run, as has been BW.

Like Greek myths, such tales can be sad. The Titans and heroes have their flaws or lose out to the next generation. Maybe it is better to turn to Latin — sic transit gloria mundi..

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, BusinessWeek, Cahners, Conover-Mast, McGraw-Hill, Rehfield

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“What is a mini-computer?,” asked my neighbor on the next plastic folding chair. “Is that like a Blackberry?”

Ah, the educated ignorant! Let us be kind to them in our responses, to earn the same from others who observe our own inscience.

In triple fairness, I note:

1. She was probably 30 or so
2. She is a lawyer
3. She did not pull the lamest cover of I-wasn’t-born-yet

I have no doubt she must know many things I do not. That wouldn’t include much about the law. After J-school, writing for papers and magazines, and recently blogging legally related issues, I can likely walk lockstep with her there. However, she surely has areas of knowledge I do not.

Yet, I wondered how it could be that one could get a couple of college degrees and be raised in the Boston area without knowing such a fundamental economic and technological topic. I briefly discussed mainframe, mini and workstation technologies along with the huge impact DEC, Data General and such folk had for so long here.

We sat before the opening session of the Unitarian Universalist Urban Ministry annual meeting. The 140 or so of us are fairly bright and socially active folk. I would suppose that as a group, we read much more news than average. Thus, I wondered how she could have grown up without knowing of the fundamental drivers of the Massachusetts economic boom and cultural transformation when she was a tot. Did they not get newspapers, did she not read them, did they not discuss current events at the dinner table, or did she glaze over when business and technology were in the air?

The joy here is that among human shortcomings the easiest to overcome is ignorance. Except for the most advanced subjects, not knowing is far, far easier to correct than not being able to understand — the difference between ignorant and stupid. Share a little knowledge and everyone comes up to speed.

Amusingly though, some use knowledge as a weapon or as a test. While not exclusively reserved to the prep school/Ivy types, this is most common in those who have grown up hearing how brilliant and wonderful they are. Some of them love to correct others, even their peers. Each minutia can be a little badge on their sashes of superiority. It is obnoxious.

Life in general and conversation in particular are ever so much more pleasant without the self-righteousness and melodrama. No one needs to be shamed public because of not having learned some tidbit or not having learned it precisely in the form you did.

I hope my row mate has the chance soon to mention the wonders of the 1980s, when technological and economic marvels, mini-comuters, powered the glories of Route 128 and the Massachusetts Miracle.  She’s a UU. I’m sure she’ll spread the information gracefully and in the spirit of knowledge.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, innocence, UUUM, minicomputers, ignorance

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Nothing profound here about inconveniences and impossibilities of the physically disabled. Reporters and editors seem to like an annual piece on the likes of how hard it is for those with non-motive or non-functioning legs to get around Boston and the environs. It shows sensitivity, don’t ya know.

I have a couple more months of keener understanding of the frustrations and the resulting compensations and planning that go into navigation. I have folded the walker and use crutches. I can’t fully put weight on the broken/rodded leg and I have to take it slow and rest, but I can see being ambulatory.

My wife has been relishing the idea of picking up my spirits. There’s no way I could safely career through Blackstone Street on a Haymarket day. That’s been my walk almost weekly for nearly 30 years. I am tired of looking at tomato-like-objects and other never-ripe-and-never-ripening things in the groceries. Yet, as chief cook, I am saddened and ill at ease not having chosen, touched and mentally inventoried my food stock.

So as a stopgap, we headed out to stores recently, ones we figured would have motorized carts or wheelchairs. Not only can I not carry things while on crutches, I thump very slowly and make my leg sore or worse.

Dedham Super Stop & Shop

We had seen motorized carts at the big S&S just south of West Roxbury. I called and confirmed that they had them — two said the lady on the phone. So last week, we went there for groceries (and to placate me).

We chose this and then two stores this weekend partially because they had wide aisles.

This S&S was the type a local newspaper might sensationally cite as a scandal for this. As it turned out, I hobbled my way into the store and we did indeed see one cart by one entrance. It required a store key, so we then walked and thumped to the service area.

They gave us the key and we were on our own. We returned and figured out what we thought was the obvious procedure. There weren’t any instructions on the cart or nearby. However, we unplugged it from the wall socket and inserted and turned the key. The little light on the steering bar can on, but it would not go forward. Trying to put it in reverse started the back up alarm beeping, but it did not move.

My wife returned to the service area and saw the other cart. It was inoperative, in a storage room and its basket was full of sundry cleaning supplies.

Some self-important fellow said he’d show her how to use the cart. He blundered full to it and had the same experiences and lack of success. He gave up too.

I lost there and by then my leg was sore. My wife and youngest did the shopping while I sat like an invalid, which I am, in the small, dirty coffee room in the front. Someone had left a Boston Herald. I had thought I’d be shopping, so I didn’t bring a bag with the pens. I ended up doing the three comics page puzzles mentally. It was not exactly the thrill of a lifetime.

BJs and Shaws

Since my injury and operation, we have not restocked things I normally acquire. It was past time for a BJ’s run for the likes of smoked turkey slices for the adults, turkey hot dogs for cost center three, and their big old bags of French roast beans.

It’s a pity that BJ’s produce is so expensive. That necessitated a run to a green grocer or supermarket. As the Dedham BJ’s is across Route 1 from a Shaw’s, we were primed for a second barely suburban shopping trip. Our subtext with availability of wheelchair or a motorized cart, ideally a working one.

BJ’s was a pleasant surprise. We immediately saw two motorized carts by the front entrance. The checkout woman who punches your receipt on the way out reached into the cabinet beside her and handed us a key.

The cart had a sturdy seat and was long with a pretty large basket on front. The controls were simple and plainly marked with clear arrows and drawings for forward and backward. The steering yoke was sensitive. Releasing the forward stick stopped the cart in only a few feet. The speed was a good walking clip, maybe four miles per hour.

We shopped easily with it, except for those pesky humans. It was the same as when you walk in BJ’s but a little more restricted, when shoppers space out and stop suddenly in an aisle, there’s no way to get around them with the cart. We waited. Similarly, at any pinch point, like near the fish counter or by the huge cases of cow parts, I cut a rectangle to the next area to avoid the congestion of huge red shopping carts.

The normal red cart is too big for our typical BJ’s run. We don’t buy those comical boxes of food or household supplies. The motorized cart’s basket held plenty for us.

After checking out, we transferred our treasures to the free boxes and put those in a regular cart to push to the van. I drove the motorized cart back to its station, climbed upright on my crutches and thumped back over to the front to return the key.

BJ’s did it right. Pay attention Stop & Shop.

Shaw’s was next and was in between. There were supposed to be two motorized carts, but one was nowhere to be found and the other didn’t work. However, they did have one wheelchair with a small, very small basket attached.

My wife enjoyed plunging through the store pushing and pulling me this way and that. It must be what a toddler gets in the stroller. I remember cost center one giggling and saying, “Faster! Faster!” I’m not quite there yet, but my wife is ready.

We barely jammed our two-liter seltzers, laundry detergent and dead animal parts into the basket. Had we a larger container, we surely would have gotten more.

Checkout was much the same as BJ’s. The groceries ended up in bags instead, but we transferred those into a regular cart, parked the wheelchair and I was up on crutches again.

No Country for Lame Men

Overall, in our tiny sampling, this area is not set up for the unusual. There must be quite a few people who do not travel with their own wheelchairs or carts. Probably many of those learn who gives a damn and shop at those stores.

I can’t believe with all the myriad details these big stores incorporate into their routines that maintaining a couple of motorized carts is a stretch. Shame on Stop & Shop and on Shaw’s for not doing so. If they can check their restrooms and maintain their sanitation records, they can schedule cart health. I used to cover the grocery business and know how integral record keeping and equipment maintenance is to them, at least until it comes to accommodating the disabled.

Leave it to BJ’s, the most pedestrian and blue-collar of the bunch to do it right. I’m sure to them, it’s just another part of the store and seeing that there are working motorized carts for the disabled is someone’s assignment.

That really shouldn’t be all hard for the store. Not doing it makes it hard on a few customers though.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, grocery, wheelchair, shopping, crutches, BJ’s, Shaw’s, Stop & Shop

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Shepard Fairey is an art slut, and very good at it.

The quantity of high dudgeon and low blows he gets stun like fireworks on the Fourth. Consider:

• The Associated Press demands credit and payment for posterizing an image of Barack Obama.
•  A non-profit media group revels in the ironies of Fairey adapting others’ art and in turn seeing Wal-Mart run with his.
• A lengthy review/critique labels him straight-out a plagiarist and piles on slurs from others.

I don’t care much for his art per se and won’t go to the ICA here for his show. However, the copyright issues are fascinating. The legal classes I had in journalism school still hum in my brain.

Plain folk’s proclamations about copyright, image ownership and such are likewise amusing as well as fascinating. Many of us think we can’t be photographed without our permission and maybe even payment. We think no one can publish a picture of us without those too. We tend to think that our ideas belong to us forever and that if we see something resembling them, we can sue for and receive bucks. Those are all wrong and misinterpretations of copyright and privacy law.

All that reminds me of the Monty Python Anne Elk/dinosaur sketch. The character is typical of many artists, writers, lyricists and academicians — very few ideas (in this case, one), but what’s hers is hers alone. The dialog includes:

Yes my word you may well ask what it is, this theory of mine. Well, this theory that I have–that is to say, which is mine–…is mine.

…All brontosauruses are thin at one end, much MUCH thicker in the middle, and then thin again at the far end. That is the theory that I have and which is mine, and what it is too.

Fairey is a commercial artist, out of the Rhode Island School of Design. He has made an astonishing quick success, largely based on sampling and adapting widely. He uses common images, like the three examples below, with the AP pic, an art nouveau poster and a Soviet one.

To cross the t and for amusement, I note that I claim fair use for the images below.

I was around and briefly worked at the

Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan when Andy Warhol was criticized as a thief as well. His most famous image of a Campbell’s Soup can found a lot of detractors. It wasn’t art, it was copying, it insulted real creative types…

I wasn’t that hot for Warhol and am not for Fairey. To me, they fall in the clever category. Hell, I’m often clever myself and clever is cheap and abundant.

Yet the recurring slam I read of Fairey is that he doesn’t attribute his influences, or credit them as AP would like it. Yet, several underlying factors are working here.

1. He hides nothing. His influences are well-known and he admits adapting constantly.
2. He does in fact make a work his own, obviously and dramatically.
3. The level of professional jealousy is plain to the point of being embarrassing.

He may push the boundary somewhat, but not to illegal extremes. As with any artistic work, including writing, ideas are not subject to copyright. The precise expression of an idea is.

For example, book titles and themes cannot receive copyright protection. Any of us could write a book Moby Dick and even involve a plot of a struggle against internal and external natural forces. However, using the same characters and hunting a white whale are flat out. Even here though, a parody of a work almost always has its own protection as an adapted form for comic effect.

In the United States, what we should consider our brilliant and unique ideas need help if we want to play Anne Elk. We have to give them specific and recognizable expressions so that anyone copying them can get into civil legal trouble.

The AP is shameless. Their own loose agreements with newspapers, writers and photographers lets them profit almost endlessly from circulating the work of one in many places. Their demands seem to want to redefine copyright to include heavily adapted works.

Likewise, less successful commercial artists wail a sad chorus behind Fairey. He should attribute his influences and sources he adapts. That kind of ubiquitous, recurring tag line should chill any creative type. The chorus pretends not to understand how most creative types work.

On the other hand, criticism that Fairey is not original in his themes is fair and obviously true. He is a talented repackager. He is an art slut.

That’s the way it is, sports fans (credit Pat Conroy, The Great Santini).  If you are a better artist who doesn’t have his fame and income, mutter about what a hack he is. Just don’t expect laws and underlying concepts to change to accommodate your hurt feelings.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, Obama, Fairey, ideas, copyright, art

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O.J. Simpson lied to me directly. Come to think of it, that’s not much of a distinction. It would be hard to count how many could say the same.

Mine was about 30 years ago, heading into his last season as a running back with the Buffalo Bills. He lied about about his football career.

As a newspaper reporter and editor, I knew lots of convicted criminals. Some were sources, on or off record, or in some cases part of a package, such as interviewing maximum security inmates. In my new life as a magazine editor, I got to meet higher-class liars and crooks. Some of them would never be convicted of anything.

Regular readers here will remember another, Ed Mattar. I did a fat old book with him that McGraw-Hill published. He was a high-level fraudster who leaped to his death rather than go to prison.

Simpson I only interviewed one time. It was about his non-football shilling of products.

There was an elegant symmetry though. The product was orange juice. Even then I wondered whether the personal story he told was real, embellished or another lie.

You can see a clip from the period on YouTube of him pushing TreeSweet juice.

I ran several magazines, the biggest being Convenience Store Merchandiser. There are a lot of convenience stores and a lot of companies wanting them to sell their orange juice, cigarettes, condoms, skin magazines and potato chips. (Oh, yeah, ask me about monthly turns on rolling papers or the right schedule for starting popcorn in the store.)

Part of the coverage was to talk to vendors as well as store folk. It worked doubly well if there was an angle the stores could pitch to increase traffic. Thus, the great back, Orenthal James Simpson, was fit to quote.

When I heard he’d stop by the National Association of Convenience Stores annual conference and exhibit, I asked for an interview. Honestly, we all knew that other than O.J.  getting paid to pitch O.J., we didn’t have much intersection.

I have to say he was charming. He clearly knew he was good looking, famous and oh so smooth. He had the smiling and affinity things nailed. Yet, even if he were being honest, he was hard to believe.

The obvious lie came after the real business of juice and such. Then I just had to ask whether he would blow off the Bills after the 1977 season. He looked at me very sincerely and totally incredibly proclaimed he intended to spend the rest of his career in Buffalo.

Nearly everyone knew he hated it there and was looking hard to get to someplace warm, ideally California. As it turns out, he got hurt and the Bills were happy to trade him to the 49ers when he asked next. He spent his last two years playing in San Francisco.

For the juice stuff, I’m not sure. His nickname, some say, just comes from his initials. He told me that his mother, Eunice, worked in a hospital (true). He said she brought home leftover cans of O.J. that would have gotten tossed otherwise. He loved it, asked for it constantly, and got his name from that affection.

He was pushing TreeSweet juice. That was independent, later became part of Kraft Foods, and seems to have disappeared when Adam & Eve (the fruit juice folk, not the sexual devices ones) bought the brand. They apparently folded it into their other lines.

O.J. said that TreeSweet was the O.J. he grew up craving. Thus, he went on, he was delighted to become their spokesman.

As Jerri Blank would say in Strangers with Candy, “Then we’ll never know.”It’s really not important whether Simpson told the truth, whole truth and nothing but about O.J. I suspect it wasn’t necessarily TreeSweet he drank and that the nickname came from his initials, later reinforced with his enjoyment of the beverage.

I also suspect that his social skills and conversational lubrication made him prone to telling good stories. People like a polished tale, more than most of us demand rigid honesty.

Simpson heading off to prison did recall those few minutes. That in turn recalls the peril of reporters. If it had been important my readers and me whether he was staying with the Bills or what O.J. O.J. had in the fridge as a child, I would have pursued those bits. They weren’t. I didn’t and now I’ll never know.

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