Seven Sons

Wieden + Kennedy are earning every cent from Nike.

And Tiger should tip them.

If you need an example of how to make lemonade, look no further.

Less than 30 hours to go in this decade.  No idea what we’ll decide to call this decade.  It’s not like they ever decided what they should call this one.  And now that we’re ready to shuffle the corpse of this one off in a few more hours in a haze of alcohol and bad decisions, it seems as appropriate a time to being writing the epitaph for the next one as ever.  The 2000’s haven’t been complete rubbish. Only mostly rubbish.

I for one navigated the chasm between my third and fourth decade on the planet only to find that in retrospect my thirties were a relatively useless span of years.  I changed jobs, gained weight, and started going gray.  Also it bears mentioning that for the modern American male, you spend the majority of your professional career while in your 30’s being viewed alternately as an overly ambitious career climber and an inexperienced whippersnapper.  Most often by people younger or older than you by less than a decade themselves. There’s something settling about forty.

But the past decade—like my past decade—is wholly remarkable for its utter lack of utterly remarkable things. Yes, yes, yes– there are images of the 2000’s forever burned in our collective memories.  The attacks on 9/11. President Bush and the “Mission Accomplished” banner on the deck of the aircraft carrier declaring the end to a war that we’re still fighting. Paris Hilton’s eyes lit up like a raccoon sifting through a trash can on her “accidentially leaked” sex tape. Notoriety is the new black.  It goes with everything. Sheryl Crow hit it earlier in the decade—”We got rock stars in the White House, and all our pop stars look like porn.”

Ford brought back a Mustang that looks like a Mustang, and Pontiac ceased to be. We have our first black president to close the decade. One that ironically began with our first special ed president. We spent ten years getting more. Too much actually.  And I suppose the challenge is to see if we can pay for it all in the next ten. My bold prediction is that we will have to learn to do without. Money, much like matter, can neither be created nor destroyed. Yet no one can seem to figure out where it’s all gone.

Banks have failed.  Automakers have failed—oops, covered that one already. Even Jay Leno—the most infuriatingly populist of the no-talent late night hosts—has failed. Jay has failed because he’s the ideal American product. Loud. Rich. Smarmy funny in that used car salesman way. But we’ve stopped buying American cause we’ve come to view the product as crap. We’re lucky Jay failed.  If he hadn’t, then all original scripted programming would’ve vanished into the air like the settlers at Roanoke. And we’d have been subjected to a Malcolm McDowell-like cavalcade of night-time viewing more fitting for an ill-thought through remake of A Clockwork Orange.

America makes art for the dinner theater crowd.

Okay. So I get this offer. From AT&T. It’s literally so not good I can’t not comment on it.

Here’s the pitch:

I can get “upto” five bars in my own home by buying this AT&T/Cisco prop from Tron for the low, low price of $150. What this magic device does is apparently poach bandwidth from your broadband connection.

Wait. It gets better. You could get a $100 rebate if you sign up for a $19.99 a month calling plan that gives you:

So, I can save $100 by spending $239.88 a year to help AT&T with their spotty network issues. Go. Me.

Thankfully, this is not an issue. I have, on average, 4 bars here. In my secret lair. So I decidedly won’t be contributing to the cause. And I’ll continue to have all my bandwidth for. . . research.

But you might like it. Visit AT&T’s site (featuring music that may drive you insane) or read Engadget’s unboxing.

Of course, I’m curious if this intersects at all somewhere down the litigation/Karma spectrum for AT&T doing an about face on iPhone applications using VOIP on their wireless network. I’ll leave to it to smarter people to chime in, but as far as I can tell this is the Bizarro version of that.

And if anybody has any insight into how much pipe this thing leaches: Post up below.

I’m not sure that the rule-of-threes applies to the death of a magazine. But it deserves an obituary.

I’ll start by saying I’m not much of a food magazine guy. I love to cook, but only because I love to eat. I like photos of food, and appreciate “food porn” as much as the next person, but every photo I have taken of something in my kitchen ends up looking like pancakes. I get Cooks Illustrated, but that’s more like an instruction manual for cooking engineers as opposed to a celebration of the artistic aspects of cooking.

I love to read about food. I came of age in my love for food writing with Bourdain’s seminal “Kitchen Confidential,” but quickly discovered more true artistry in Ruth Reichl and Molly O’Neill. I read MFK Fisher’s translation of Brillat-Savarin and then listened closely when she taught me how to cook a wolf. Lately I have been enthralled by Rochelle Bilow and this weekend I plowed through the Julie/Julia book by Julie Powell (can’t imagine the movie is as satisfying).

And today, maybe not so much tomorrow, but today… I am forced to confront a death of something important that I knew, but not well. Like losing a famous aunt whose home you have never visited. A magazine, silly enough, that I have bought maybe once or twice at the news stand, and ignored every ad in it. A periodical I cherished in absentia because of the name on the masthead. I’m not idealistic enough to feel any guilt about helping cause the downfall of Gourmet, but I am enough of a history buff to recognize the need to celebrate its 70 years of history, the comfort it provided in spite of its commercial nature, and the headlines that its death will garner in contrast to its lack of widespread notoriety in life.

Ruth Reichl, the erstwhile editor of Gourmet and the protagonist of several incredible (meaning hard to believe but nevertheless true), poignant books centered around food, may retire in comfort tomorrow. One can only hope that the passion she exudes in her autobiographies is real enough to keep her written word in constant circulation in a post-Gourmet world. With the charity of history her epitaph will not read “the last editor of Gourmet magazine.” It will read “an artist whose palette was taste and whose media was the written word.”

Rest in peace, Gourmet magazine.

There is a great “aside” in this bike blog about the “race to the bottom” concept. I have been thinking about this a lot subconsciously lately, I never really had a name for it. Each day recently we have made the boy pick up the 18 toys he has managed to leave lying around the house and simultaneously shop for his birthday next week. I think our family is above-average when it comes to intelligent consumption, social consciousness and conservation… but boy, do we still have a long way to go. We’re taking a stab this week at putting  a bunch of stuff on craigslist, including my 8′6″ long board that I break out every 3 years. It’s mostly just taking up space.

” Effective Jul 13, 2009, your plan will change to the new eMusic Basic plan which gives you 30 downloads for $11.99 every 30 days.

We’re sorry that we’ve had to retire your current plan, but we’re confident that you’ll find even more music to love among the many new additions to the music catalog.”

Grrr. The eMusic selection of reasonably-priced, non-RIAA sponsoring, indie-only music tracks is coming to an end. I don’t doubt that the other majors will follow soon, but this feels like the end of your local college record store to me.

Note to Ford: Give Us the Focus RS: “Why should Europe have all the fun?”

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Seriously, in the grand scheme of all that Ford is doing right (in comparison to the rest of the U.S. carmakers) why can’t they simply bring over the good cars they already make. No, not just the über-rare Focus RS, but the rest of the Foci over in Europe are cars that people might actually want to drive and would give them a nice jump on the future CAFE standards.

Slate has an interactive graphic tracking job losses over the past few years. Blue dots track job growth, red dots track job losses. Watching the red grow looks like something out of a crime show.

For folks who just can’t get their head around what’s going on with the current economic downturn:

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

While it’s pretty simple (it sort of had to be) I think this is nice piece of work and does an admirable job of taking the worst economic situation most of us have faced in our lifetimes and presenting in just over eleven minutes.

     Okay,  I think it is pretty safe to say that I have never agreed with anything that any of the aforementioned nitwit CNBC analysts have ever said.  While we are a pack of tempermental bastards, they are a collection of immature, short-sighted, opportunistic, conservative, well, nitwits pretty well names them perfectly.

     However, I guess that like monkeys with typewriters and infinite time, one of them gets it right once in a blue moon.  Today, CNBC’s Rick Santelli had  a brilliant take

This subject has been boiling in my brain for a few weeks.  My wife and I are lucky to have a very nice upper income.  Hoever, we choose to live beneath our means.  If you go to one of those sites that helps you calculate how much house you can afford, we can afford about 3 times the value of our current home.  Why should those who live within their means bail out those who don’t?  Further, what about the renters?  Why should they bail out (through taxpaying) those who shouldn’t be homeowners but somehow are? Now, some of those homeowners who are in trouble got in trouble through no fault of their own.  But I don’t see a realistic way of sorting out the wheat from the chaff.  And, unlike Mr. Santelli, I do see the danger to the 92% of homeowners who pay their mortgages on time that the collapsing housing market presents.    

     All that said, the bottom line is the Obama  administration’s first stab at this is completely wrong.  Santelli (and sadly, Rush) get this one right.  It is the government rewarding bad behavior.  Here is how to solve this.  A bailout now with a built in pay back later.  The current plan would reduce the mortgage payments of homeowners in trouble to no more than 31% of their monthly income. My plan is as follows.  Suppose this means that  the mortgage has to be reduced from $200,000 to $150,000.  The federal government would take a lien on the  house for $50,000.  Eventually, the housing markets across the country will recover and begin appreciating again.  When the property was eventually sold, the government would receive 1/2 of any appreciation from the $150,000 figure.  In about 5 or 6 years, I would also start charging a 1% annual interest rate to preserve some of the value of the government’s lien.  Each time the house was sold, 1/2 the equity of any amount of the previous lien would go to the government until the lien was fully paid off.

     In my example, the lien would be $50,000.  The family lives there another 5 years and then sells the house for $170,000.  Normally, they would realize a profit of $20,000 over the  the $150,000 value of the home at its government-backed refinancing.  Instead, the homeowner would keep $10,000 and $10,000 would go to the government.  The new property owner would have a house worth $170,000 that had an additional $40,000 lien on it.  When that homeowner eventually sold, half of that homeowner’s profit would go towards the lien.  The lien could be paid off early with no penalty.

     I am aware that this is rather simplistic solution and that I don’t know enough of the mechanics of the  real estate market to get all the details right.  You have to figure out how to get the second and third buyer to be will to by a house at the value of the home and accept the continued lien.  Still, I think you could create a reasonable fair system along this basis that wouldn’t leave the responsible folks feeling like they’ve been suckers.