Date posted: January 11, 2008 - Friday
Title: TW3 1/11/08
Current mood: satisfied
Stop Screwing With The Format, Damn It
OK, I'll admit it. I got caught in the battle between Beta and VHS tapes. I was a Beta man all the way. Technically, Beta was a better format, but US manufacturers weren't going to pay Sony the royalties for the use of the format so they pushed VHS and it became the dominant videotape format in this country.
Leaving me stuck with about 1,000 Beta tapes full of movies and television programs I wanted to keep. The only consolation is at least I didn't invest heavily in 8-track tapes when that format battle was going on.
And now they are at it again. DVD, HD-DVD or Blu-Ray.
DVD players and recorders have come down in price from the hundreds of dollars when they first came out to the point where you can get a player for under $80 some places. I saw a DVD player advertised for $30 this week and a DVD/VHS player for $70. And recorders are only a little more expensive.
So now along comes the HD DVD and Blu-Ray formats with the recorders costing hundreds of dollars. I saw advertisements this week for players ranging from $400 to $500; and they don't even make a Blu-Ray recorder that I know of.
Then there are the individual movies where the Blu-Ray format costs in excess of $10 more than the same title in the regular DVD format.
Look, I don't need to see the dandruff on a gnat's eyebrow or Mel Gibson's nose hair as he performs in his latest adventure. So the hype for high resolution with HD DVD or the Blu-Ray format leaves me cold. For the most part I watch my DVDs on a television that doesn't have a high resolution so there is no need to pay outlandish amounts for a new player or movies in that format.
I guess it's all a part of the American obsession with something new being better, but that isn't always the case.
Now it looks like the Blu-Ray format will win out in the end because one of the major studios just announced it will stop issuing titles in both HD DVD and Blu-Ray formats in favor of the latter. And since Blu-Ray is a Sony product I guess they get revenge for the US dumping on the Beta tape format.
I suspect, eventually, they will abandon the regular DVD format altogether in favor of the higher definition ones (which, of course, makes all old DVDs useless since they are incompatible with the newer players).
I can be just as much of a technophile as anyone else at times, and I will confess as a still photographer I was always drawn to very sharp images, but I do get tired of the constant reinvention of media which costs the consumer over and over again in the name of 'progress' and more profits for manufacturers.
So, can we just pick a format we can all agree on and stick with it for a while?
A Little Clever Creativity
A while back advertisers seemed to have a better sense of humor and used a little more creativity than they do these days. It just appears to me like the hard sell has won out for the most part now and the use of creativity and a clever concept is rarely used in television commercials.
But maybe there is a ray of hope. Several things I have seen lately stick in my mind and I think they are clever.
Verizon has a great ad where a girl gets a pony as a Christmas gift. Her girlfriends, of course, get new multi-featured phones from Verizon. But the topper is when her friends ask the girl of the horse bites. Yes, is her rapid reply. Clever!
Wendy's is using an obnoxious red wig in its' latest round of commercials, but I do have to admit the one where the guy is eating the "Air Supply" burger is funny. Pull the string on the burger and it sings an Air Supply song.
Then there is the Subway commercial. The accountant asks a guy to justify his business-lunch burger expense with a receipt and the guy asks if he can just Xerox his butt as proof he ate a fattening burger. The accountant takes one look at his ass and allows the expense. And the topper is the guy breaks the Xerox machine while trying to copy his behind.
I hope these things are successful and maybe we won't have to suffer through more and more bad commercials. If we are going to be inundated with advertising anyway couldn't it have a little wit attached to it?
Home Electronics With A Side of Paranoia
The annual Home Electronics show opened on Monday (January 7) and apparently manufacturers think you're all paranoid out there.
This is the annual event where makers of home electronics trot out their latest and greatest products and hype them to the American consumer. It's where you see the new DVD recorders, televisions, GPS units and all the other little 'toys' that spark your interest and cause you to salivate (hopefully).
This years' show apparently will also appeal to your fears.
Some of the featured products include a night-vision home security system with cameras that cost $2,500 each. They have been previously sold to airports for security and used to cost as much as $15,000. But, electronics being what they are, the cost has come down and now they want to market to the high-end, paranoid consumer.
Another manufacturer hopes you will be scared enough about your child, pet or grandfather to buy one of their "PocketFinders". It looks somewhat larger than a silver dollar and clips onto the child or pet and is a location device that works with GPS and a cell phone system. It also will alert a parent if a minor child drives over 65mph in a car. And, yes, I did say Grandfather before. Apparently there is an intention to market the product so you can keep track of an aging parent.
Worried about data security? Another company is producing an external hard drive that is in a fire safe. They come in 80gig and 160gig models and the manufacturer says the product will protect data for up to 30 minutes at a temperature of 1,500 degrees. Since the product is also a safe you can store things like CDs and papers in there as well.
This electronics show expects to host some 140,000 visitors this year and have some 2,700 electronics manufacturers present. On Tuesday I even got an e-mail from Sony (I have purchased Sony products before and so get advertising e-mails from them) which touts a section of their web site where information from the show will be shown.
OK all you paranoids, your fears can be overcome with electronics now.
Give Us A Holiday Break
It is January 7. I am in Costco picking up a few things; salad, fruit, bagels, beef jerky and D-cell batteries.
I unsuspectingly walk around the corner of an aisle and what hits me between the eyes?
Heart-shaped boxes of chocolates.
Yep, Christmas is barely two weeks in the past and already there are Valentines Day products on the store shelves. Now I will admit it wasn't hyped as Valentines' stuff, but what else could it be? I mean, what other time of year is a heart-shaped box of candy displayed?
I put it down as a fluke. January 8 I am in a Savon buying some specialized batteries. What did I see? Yep, a whole aisle being stocked with huge, red, heart-shaped boxes of candy.
I know from news reports this last Christmas season was the worst in five years and that December overall sales were the worst in seven years, but can't they give us a little break before hyping the next gift-buying season?
The Train Wreck You Can't Avoid Looking At
I refer to the sad, messed up life of Britney Spears.
I will admit I took my shots at her when the "no panties" incident happened, but since then she has entered a phase of meltdown that just astounds me. I have never been fanatical about her music, but it was pleasant enough. It is her life choices that make me sad.
I'm not sure where it comes from, maybe her parents, but to see someone with so few tools to deal with life is just gut wrenching. Poor choices of actions, poor choices of friends and poor choices of how to deal with trouble just seem to plague this girl. How does someone get to this depth of self destruction?
I try to avoid the sight because it is so painful. There would have seemed to have been some promise there, but it has all been flushed away.
A life gone so wrong is such a tragedy. And why isn't there someone who can rescue this child from the abyss?
Big Mac, Fries and a Double, Decaf, Non-fat, Mocha Latte, Please
Yep, the Golden Arches are poised to get into the caffeine business big time. Plans are in the works to install coffee bars in nearly 14,000 McDonalds around the country. It's the company's biggest menu change in 30 years and puts them head to head with Starbucks in the fight to sell America's favorite legal stimulant.
Actually, the company is just protecting its' market share. Starbucks altered its world-domination plan to put a location every 1,000 feet across the country and poached into the fast food arena when they started offering hot breakfast sandwiches along with their muffins and Frappuccino at drive through windows. McDonalds has fired back by upgrading its drip coffee and now going full on into the bean wars.
It all seems to be the result of Americans being too lazy to get out of their cars and put a little effort into their quest for food and legal stimulants. And the changes seem to be working for McDonalds because reports say the company had turned around what was a sagging business in a changing market.
It hasn't been so successful for Starbucks though. This week the corporation fired its' chief executive and handed control back to the company chairman. All this in an effort to reverse a downward slide. The company also plans to actually close some locations and slow down the pace of opening new locations.
Fear not though, the Golden Arches seem more than willing to take up the slack in the battle for the taste buds of America's coffee connoisseurs.
'Political' Humor
OK, maybe a little misleading, but the results of the New Hampshire voting had to make me laugh.
No, not who won and who lost (not too interested really), but the fact that all the political pollsters go things so wrong. My local paper on Thursday featured the headline, "Pollsters are wondering why they got N.H. wrong." I had to chuckle out loud.
Those purveying the 'art' of political polling have been pretty cocky since the Lazersfeld and Barrows Study in the 1940's.
(Historical Note: Lazersfeld and Barrows published a study in the 1940's about conducting survey research. They had found a town where the population held the right amount of men, women, old, young, Democrats and Republicans and was a mirror of the general population of the country. They conducted surveys in this town which turned out to be very accurate and so gave credence to the viability of being able to predict how people would vote in an election.)
We've all been subjected to the pundits of the major television networks predicting who in going to win an election; sometimes long before the polls have closed. There have even been some reasonable questions raised about how these early revelations of election results might have affected the outcome of the final results.
So I drew at least a little quiet joy from the pollsters blowing the call in New Hampshire. Maybe this election will be the one that fools all the 'experts' and maybe frees us, and the politicians, from the influence of political pollsters.
Too many political campaigns and even administrations are run by polls. Politicians, seeking that edge which will ensure victory, base their speeches, policies and decisions on what a poll tells them the public wants. They don't use common sense (assuming, of course, they have any common sense) in charting the course of the nation.
So maybe we should all thumb our noses at political pollsters. Give them the big raspberry and vote our own opinions instead of those that are supposedly "correct" according to the experts.
"Hey, Why Can't I Make A Phone Call?"
I saw a movie once where a character said the definition of FBI was Federal Bureau of Idiots.
Well, maybe he wasn't so far wrong.
A recent, heavily-edited report on the FBI shows it apparently can't find its' checkbook to pay a phone bill. Telephone companies have been disconnecting the wiretaps the FBI uses for criminal surveillance and even some terrorist investigations because they haven't paid the bills. One office was $66,000 in the hole when the taps were cut off.
The FBI made light of it saying that no investigations had been compromised because of the lapse in accounting, but they took a heavy-handed pen to the report before letting it see the light of day.
This bureau likes to come off like some group of super cops, but there have been far too many lapses and missteps to maintain an untarnished image. I can remember back to the days they were trying to find and capture Patty Hearst. It took them 19 months to locate this 'dangerous terrorist' and she was so scary she peed her pants when captured.
If they are really serious about stopping organized crime and protecting the country from terrorists you would think a simple thing like paying a phone bill wouldn't be too much to ask.
