Saturday, April 10, 2004

Home of coal-fired museums and bookstores

What is it...

...about Baltimore and smokestacks?

A choice for less of nothing

Brian Millar on why he dropped two orders of magnitude in his choice of TV stations:

...who wants OK? Not me. When there's 500 channels of people telling us how to become perfect cooks, gardeners, dressers and travellers, any compromise feels like, well, compromise. And that's the problem with choice. Whatever I choose probably won’t live up to my expecations, leaving me to feel that somewhere out there, there was the thing I missed, the one that would make me happy right now.

A few years ago I worked with a big UK supermarket chain. We did some research into why people shopped organic. Was it for health? A commitment to the environment? To sustainability? The real reason was quite shocking: in the organic aisle, there’s only one kind of carrot, two kinds of potatoes and one kind of lettuce. People were paying a premium to escape being confronted with twenty varieties of spud.

Still seems like yesterday

My father died 25 years and one day ago.

It's still fun to try

Can you connect the dots between Clear Channel clearly taking advantage of its position as the biggest owner of both commercial radio airwaves and promotable concerts and also being on the receiving end of record fines for airing the Howard Stern Show before the FCC decided to start tightening its sphincter around insanely unconstitutional bans on common forms of speech?

How about when you throw in all this weird shit about a chicken?