Fritinancy

Here's a Sarah I'd Vote For

Thanks, AdFreak, Editrix, and Jezebel, for telling me about the droll Sarah Haskins, whose "Target: Women" segments on Current (the network started by Al Gore) are a bracing antidote to the marketing and media hogwash aimed at women. Like yogurt commercials: 

Or wedding shows. Or chick flicks. Or birth-control commercials that never actually mention, you know, sex.

Haskins's most recent segment takes on Sarah Palin--or, more precisely, the "P.A.N.T.H.E.R." voters who might be swayed by her. What's a P.A.N.T.H.E.R.? A "Proud American Needing Token Hillary Estrogen Replacement."

You'll find all of Sarah Haskins's "Target: Women" segments here. By the way, Harvard grad-slash-comedian Sarah Haskins is not triathlete Sarah Haskins. Read an interview with the funny Sarah here.

How Wowowow.com Got Its Name

What it is: a new website for women over 40. Content includes articles about health, fashion, love, marriage, and politics, as well as "intimate" celebrity interviews. And, naturally, a horoscope.

Who's behind it: five "media live-wire" femmes d'un certain age, according to an article in the Thursday Styles section of the New York Times--former book publisher Joni Evans, veteran gossip columnist Liz Smith, advertising executive Mary Wells, political columnist Peggy Noonan, and TV news reporter Lesley Stahl.

Media live-wires they may be, but cyber-savvy they are wo-wo-woefully not, according to reporter Stephanie Rosenbloom:

Web culture, from the technicalities of uploading content to the verbal nakedness that is blogging, was unfamiliar. Even acquiring a domain name was, as Ms. Smith put it at a gathering of some of the founders the other day, an uphill battle.

“I wanted to call the site AllTheGoodNamesAreTaken.com,” she said. (Actually, she wanted to call it Hot Voodoo, after the Marlene Dietrich song, but the other women shot it down.)

Ms. Stahl suggested adopting a name that incorporated the word “broad,” like broad-minded, but there were objections to that too.

“I went through a period where I really thought ‘After all we have done in our lives and accomplished — to call ourselves broads?’ ” said Ms. Wells, the founder of the advertising and marketing agency Wells Rich Greene.

Somewhere Ms. Evans has a long list of thumbs-down domain names (i.e., HerTube.com). “I remember how innocent we were,” she said. The name they settled on is a play on “Women on the Web.”

“We actually bought out a porn site to get this name,” Ms. Evans said. (Technically, they didn’t buy a porn business, just womenontheweb.com.) Now, “when anyone looks for that porn site, they’re directed to us,” said Ms. Evans, who became chief executive of the site after retiring last year as a senior vice president at the William Morris Agency’s literary department.

One is all for sisters doing it, you know, for themselves, but still. One despairs. One inquires:

1. Did it not occur to these ladies even once to seek the levelheaded counsel of someone with professional naming and domain-acquisition experience? Someone who could, say, mediate the discussion and provide a much-needed reality check?
2. Did anyone consider that the name might be confusing to read and say? (I thought it was pronounced woe-woe-wow until I saw the logo, which looks like Wow O Wow.)
3. Did anyone perform the simple experiment of saying the name aloud? (Consider the poor receptionist, saying "wowowow" 150 times a day.)
4. Did anyone ask, "How does 'Wowowow' advance our brand story? How does it express maturity, media savvy, a different voice? How on earth does it say 'Women on the Web'?"
5. Did anyone raise her hand and say, "Wowowow: this just sounds silly"?
6. About that porn-site redirect: did anyone ask herself and her colleagues, "Could this be a liability?"

And one more thing: a horoscope? Oh. Woe.

The site launches Saturday.

May Wiw? Mais Wiw!

Mary Sullivan of Way to Grow emailed to tell me about the latest buzzword in media: WiwWiwWiw. It stands for "What I Want, When I Want, Where I Want," and it's pronounced "wee wee wee" (in French: "oui oui oui")--as Susan Willet Bird tells it, just like the punchline in "This Little Piggy Went to Market." Shelly Palmer, who blogs about "media 3.0," used the term to explain the pressures that led to the Today Show's decision to add a fourth hour of programming.

WiwWiwWiw is by no means to be confused with Nintendo's Wii.

Good News

The New York Times, finally cottoning to the notion that information wants to be free*, has abandoned its pricey TimesSelect program and made all current web content free--including columns by Tom Friedman, David Brooks, and Maureen Dowd--as well as all archived material back to 1987. The change took effect this morning.

If you start noticing more advertising on the site, it's no coincidence.

Now Rupert Murdoch, new owner of the Wall Street Journal, says he's "leaning toward" making WSJ.com free as well. Full online access currently costs $79 a year. Like his counterparts at the Times, Murdoch would expect to make up the difference, and then some, in ad revenue.

* From remarks by Stewart Brand at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984. Brand's full quote: ""On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other." Link.

More Foolish Things

So I'm in my car this morning en route to San Francisco, experimenting with acceleration techniques to boost the mpg on my Civic Hybrid and listening, as is my wont, to Sunday Weekend Edition on National Public Radio. The "British sailor case." The Final Four. The women's Final Four. And here's something interesting: a segment about a New York City councilman, David Yassky, who thinks cell phone rings have gone too far. According to program host Liane Hansen, Yassky says "distracting ringtones in the workplace cost the economy more than $1.2 billion each year." Yassky tells Hansen that he wants to control "ring rage" by restricting the number of available ring tones in NYC to just four that have been screened and approved by a panel of audiologists.

Nice ring tones, I'm thinking. Wonder where I can get one?

End of segment; time for sponsorship message. And here it comes, delivered by NPR's friendly-voice-of-God:

Weekend Edition is underwritten in part by The Soylent Corporation, makers of protein-rich products in a range of colors. Soylent Green is people!

Yeah, that's me on the Bay Bridge, banging my hand on the steering wheel: April Fooled by NPR one more time.

It's a long and glorious tradition at the network. I first became aware of it in 1992, when John Hockenberry, then host of Talk of the Nation, bamboozled listeners (including this one) into believing that Richard M. Nixon was casting off the mantle of disgrace--and finding a way around Constitutional law--to enter the presidential primary and seek a third term in office. As I remember it, various legal scholars (Norman Ornstein among them) weighed in, and a bunch of callers who'd been let in on the joke expressed degrees of very convincing dismay and enthusiasm. The show included a clip of "Nixon" (actually comedian Rich Little) announcing his candidacy. It wasn't quite Orson Welles's War of the Worlds, but it did qualify for inclusion in the Museum of Hoaxes.

Listen to today's foolery (minus the ad, unfortunately--anybody out there find a working link?--and plus a disclaimer that I imagine the lawyers forced them to include) and see links to some past years' jests, but not the Hockenberry/Nixon one, which dates from the pre-digital era. And, by the way, you can also download those audiologist-approved ring tones.

Lucky

All things considered, I'm pretty lucky. All the key indices--health, shelter, friends, food--check out remarkably well. People actually pay me to do something I love--write and develop names--which I consider to be a stroke of insanely good fortune.

On the other hand, maybe I'm not lucky at all. Here is what the choreographer Twyla Tharp has to say about luck in her marvelous book The Creative Habit:

Look at the luckiest people around you, the ones you envy, the ones who seem to have destiny falling habitually into their laps. What are they doing that singles them out? It isn’t dumb luck if it happens repeatedly. If they’re anything like the fortunate people I know, they’re prepared, they’re always working at their craft, they’re alert, they involve their friends in their work, and they tend to make others feel lucky to be around them.

So how do you get luck? Here is Tharp's advice:

Be generous.

I'll repeat that: to get lucky, be generous. Here's why:

Generosity is luck going in the opposite direction, away from you. If you’re generous to someone, if you do something to help him out, you are in effect making him lucky. This is important. It’s like inviting yourself into a community of good fortune.

I'm thinking today about luck and generosity and the "community of good fortune" because my friend Jon Carroll has reminded me that it's time once again for the the Untied Way. That's not a typo: it's "untied," not "united." Each December for the last umpteen or so years, Jon has devoted one column in the San Francisco Chronicle to the Untied Way, an invention of his that makes a very important point about luck and generosity. Namely: if you're blessed with the first you have an obligation regarding the second.

What is the Untied Way? Glad you asked.

The Untied Way is a nontraditional charity. It has no officers, no headquarters, no brochures, no regional offices and no guidelines. It is not a tax-deductible organization because it is not an organization at all. It issues no receipts, nor do letters come in the mail thanking you for your generous contribution.

The Untied Way does not have a Web site. The Untied Way does not sponsor a fun run, a masked ball, a gourmet dinner, a silent auction, a noisy auction, a turtle race or a runway show. It does not have buttons, badges or stickers. It will not send you address labels in the mail. The Untied Way has no overhead at all, and 100 percent of its donations go directly to those in need.

All you need to participate in the Untied Way, writes Jon, is access to an ATM, and lucky people always have access to an ATM.

Go to your ATM and take out some money. How much money is entirely your business, but the sum should be sufficient for you to notice its absence. It shouldn't hurt, but maybe it should pinch a little.

Then--and here's the beautiful, simple thing about the Untied Way--"you take your fistful of dollars and stroll down the avenue. When someone asks you for money, you give him $20. You repeat this until you are out of $20 bills."

Oh, sure: you have objections to this methodology. Jon answers your objections. The bottom line is, anyone who asks you for money probably needs money. And you have excess money. Simple as that.

Every time I read Jon's column, which varies only slightly from year to year, I'm reminded of the Jewish philosophy of charity. Actually, in Hebrew there is no equivalent of the word "charity." "Charity" comes from the Latin caritas, meaning "affection" or "esteem." Christian charity is based on love. But the Hebrew equivalent of charity is tzedakah, which means "justice." You don't have to love someone to practice tzedakah. You just have to have a sense of what's right. And--get this--the very highest form of tzedakah is utterly anonymous. You don't know who's receiving your money, the recipient doesn't know where the money came from, and you get zero credit for your unselfishness. You do it just because it's the right thing to do.

Maybe that doesn't work for you. In that case, consider Twyla Tharp's advice: to get lucky, be generous. Don't pretend to be anything but self-interested. The person who gets your $20 won't care. He's self-interested too. He gets money; you get luck. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

See you at the ATM. And...good luck. Really.

Drove My Chevy to the Levee

Back in the 1950s, singer Dinah Shore burbled at TV viewers to "see the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet." For the last month, Chevrolet has been playing the patriotic card once more, but with a deeply disturbing twist. General Motors' 60-second TV spot for the Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck, titled "Anthem," features John Mellencamp singing "Our Country" against a montage that shifts from uplifting (Statue of Liberty, factory workers) to unsettling (civil rights boycotts, Vietnam battle) to shocking (Hurricane Katrina, 9/11 memorial). And what's Richard Nixon doing in there, like the Spirit of Walpurgisnacht Past? (Watch the ad, and read Slate.com writer Seth Stevenson's critique, here.) The original spot, according to car blogger Jalopnik, included footage of a nuclear mushroom cloud. (Jalopnik called the ad an "Amerigasm.")

Polarizing? Oh, just a tad.

Robert Farago blogs in The Truth About Cars:

When asked WTF they were thinking, the edgy ad guys responsible for the spot were even, um, edgier. According to Bill Ludwig, Chief Creative Officer for the Campbell-Ewald ad agency, "If you want to make a statement that rings true with the majority of people, you are going to piss off some people.” This, we can presume, was a large part of Ludwig’s goal. In case you missed it, “There are a lot of cynical people out there who don't react well to this, and a lot of people who will never get behind the wheel of a pickup. So let them get into their Volvo sedans and complain about this spot that they see as exploitive. This is not for them."

Yeah--downshift this, you latte-drinking, same-sex-marrying, French-speaking, Volvo-driving wusses!

The campaign could be seen as a desperate attempt by GM to stanch the bleeding. In fact, yesterday's New York Times reported that improved sales of the Silverado were in part responsible for GM's smallest loss in two years ("just" $155 million). Not exactly the same as a profit, but still.

Times media critic David Carr, also writing yesterday, says the ad is "landing with a thud in the advertising community, and not just because it achieved the impossible: making viewers nostalgic for Chevy’s last anthem, Bob Seger’s 'Like a Rock.'”

“I feel a little violated when I watch it,” Advertising Age ad critic Bob Garfield told Carr. “I don’t mind when they have a tent sale on President’s Day, but those guys have been dead for 200 years. I’m not sure I’m ready for a Rosa Parks sale-a-bration.” Veteran ad man Jerry Della Femina said, "You see all these moving images and at the end of it, all you get is a lousy Chevy truck.” 

Concludes Carr: "When it comes to selling bars, trucks or even politicians, you can wave the flag or you can drape one over a coffin. You can’t do both."

There's a spoof of the ad on YouTube, but it's hard to top the original, which approaches self-parody.

How You Say?

Some experiences are just harder than others to put into words. How do you explain to a friend why you love a certain band? Or are smitten with a particular fragrance? In the face of such aesthetic challenges, most of us tend to sound like monosyllabic teenagers: "Good beat." "Smells yummy."

Fortunately, some of us try a little harder. Which is why I've been following with interest the efforts of a couple of enterprising innovators, Pandora and Chandler Burr.

Pandora (headquartered right here in Oakland) is an online music service that purports to use the "Music Genome Project"--there we go with the DNA again--to help you "find the music you love." Type in the name of an artist or the title of a song (almost any genre except classical) and Pandora will "launch a streaming station to explore that part of the musical universe." (Naming footnote: Pandora was originally called "Savage Beast Technologies," probably a mis-allusion to Congreve's "Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast." Opting instead for the name of the hapless Greek lass who loosed evil on the world was, shall we say, a bold move. The corporate site refers delicately to Pandora's "curiosity.")

Chandler Burr is a writer who specializes in a different sense: smell. His book The Emperor of Scent tells the true story of an idiosyncratic scientist with a novel theory of fragrance. Now he's been hired by the New York Times as the paper's first perfume critic. If you're a subscriber, you can read Burr's debut column here; if not, or in addition, you can listen to Bob Garfield's On the Media radio interview with Burr, "Eau-Stained Wretch."

There are interesting business angles to the Pandora and Burr stories--Pandora is turning every listener into a DJ, with implications for the recording industry; Burr's column may or may not be a shameless sop to the Times's perfume advertisers--but my beat is words, so that's what I want to talk about.

Here's what Jeff Leeds, writing in the Arts & Leisure section of Sunday's Times, has to say about Pandora's selection process:

Pandora’s innovation is to focus on the formal elements of songs, rather than their popular appeal. Say your favorite song is Aretha Franklin’s recording of “Respect.” Pandora will make you a personalized soundtrack that could include Gladys Knight and the Pips’ “I’ve Got to Use My Imagination” and Solomon Burke’s “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love.” (Why? Click twice and learn that Pandora thinks the Gladys Knight tune resembles “Respect” because it includes “classic soul qualities, blues influences, acoustic rhythm piano, call and answer vocal harmony and extensive vamping.”)

In all, the Music Genome Project has identified "400 distinct musical characteristics," from the straightforward "chromatic harmony" and "acoustic instrumentation" to the more arcane "G-funk synth line," "wet/dry recording sound," and--my favorite--"headnodic beats," which "will cause most people to sway their bodies and nod their heads in time, but are not ferocious enough to compel them/you to jump up and dance." To pigeonhole selections into this musical lexicon, Pandora employs a small army of $15-an-hour music "analysts." (Heads-up: Pandora is currently seeking specialists in French and German popular music.)

Pandora's approach, however tortured and tautological (I like funk because it's funky), is an earnest effort at describing the hard-to-describe. Chandler Burr, by contrast, tosses description to the four winds--none of that "woody topnotes with lingering aldehyde finish" stuff the scent mavens usually come up with. Burr tries to avoid adjectives altogether. Instead, he specializes in metaphor. He writes about a fragrance's "darkness" (and, poetically, about that darkness's "luminosity"); he says the smell of one perfume "is like looking down into a well of cool, dark water." He compares a certain scent he loathes to "laundry detergent spilled on an aluminum counter."

I'm not sure the majority of perfume buyers will find Burr's metaphors useful; personally, I'd rather know about those woody topnotes. But his fresh use of language does jolt us into thinking about the senses in a radically different way, and it reminds us of the ways in which smell--far more than the other senses--connects with memory.

I'll be keeping an eye, an ear, and a nose on Pandora and Burr to learn what new linguistic tricks they come up with. Meanwhile, I'm finding it all quite...headnodic.

Liquid Debits

This is not a political blog, but I don't pretend to exist in a bubble of words, names, and brands. I've been reading and listening to a lot of commentary about yesterday's thwarted "terror plot"--first-person accounts of airport inconvenience, opinions from both sides of the Atlantic and all sides of the political spectrum. But this piece by William Saletan at Slate made me stop reading and start thinking. Saletan's angry, eloquent essay builds to this conclusion:

In a liquid world, you can't seal off evil. All you can do is fight liquid with liquid. You have to absorb the tragedy, flowing around and through it. You need the strength of a river, not a rock. You need resilience. You can't be untouchable, but you can be undefeated.

Ay-Ay-Ay!

Hear, hear, to Steve Johnson of the Chicago Tribune for "An i for an I Has Left Us Ill at E's," published last week in the Los Angeles Times.

"The naming convention instigated by Apple's iPod is about to drive at least one consumer over the edge," the subhead warns.

First iMac, then iPod. Now there's a plague of "i" disease in the marketplace--iWake (clock/radio), iHome2Go (clock radio with portable alarm/speakers), iCarPlay, iCable, iStockPhoto, etc., etc., ad nauseam.

The problem, Johnson writes, is the way the lower-case letter "flouts the rules of English, in a way that's supposed to be rebellious but instead comes off as cutesy as a fudge store." He goes on:

The proper, capitalized I is a bold assertion. I am here. I stand straight and tall. I matter.

In the fey little vowel imposed upon us by the iPod, the self seems to be reduced to a mere whisper: i am sorry for imposing myself on you. i am insignificant. i listen to music as i walk around, but i do it with earphones on.

But it's a false humility. The essential quality of the iPod is narcissism: The world I can create in my head, through music or podcasts, is much more interesting than what you people can come up with. The iNames are an extension of that narcissism.

It's time to stop. It's time to say: e-nough.

Hat tip to brother Michael!