Double Down - KFC’s Revolutionary Meat and Cheese Delivery System

Kudos to KFC (formerly Kentucky Fried Chicken, now rebranded as Kitchen Fresh Chicken or just KFC – much healthier) for coming up with the season’s hottest new fast food product. Everyone’s talking about it: the Double Down sandwich. The Double Down is a bacon and cheese sandwich. But what makes it revolutionary is that the two pieces of bread that heretofore positively defined what it meant to be a sandwich have been replaced with two slabs of breaded, deep fried chicken. Awesome.

Sandwich technology has changed very little since sandwiches were first invented around 230 AD. What’s been stuffed between the bread has morphed incrementally with shifts in taste and style. But the underlying mechanism – two pieces of bread holding together some interior ingredients – has remained more or less the same for millennia.

The KFC scientists who came up with the revolutionary Double Down concept may have gotten their inspiration from a ten year old Jack In The Box (California fast food chain) advertisement. Jack in the Box’s spokesman is a guy with a ping pong ball for a head. In the ad, circa 1997, Jack in the Box was conducting a focus group study where people were talking about its new burger – the Meat-N-Cheese burger. Nothing but meat. And cheese. The people in the focus group were saying how much they liked the meat and the cheese, but that maybe they should get rid of the bun. The ping pong ball head guy stormed angrily into the room and berated everyone, saying “if we got rid of the bun, you’d get MEAT and CHEESE all over your hands.”

The ad was a joke, but maybe the joke was on them. Having a sandwich without bread seemed at the time like a violation of some natural law. But maybe the seed had been planted for someone to shatter the dominant paradigm. Jack in the Box may have just been too rigid and set in its ways. (It may also have been sidetracked by a more pressing public relations situation – the fact that they had distributed a million bumper stickers with their logo that said “Eat Meat,” 997,750 of which were instantly cut down to read “Eat Me.” That was a fun time to be in California).

One of the fundamental challenges confronting fast food science has always been how to maximize the number of calories that can be crammed into a person’s face in one bite. The average human orifice circumference is a constant, at least until mainstream society comes to accept surgical procedures that let people temporarily unhinge their jaws, or African hoop kinds of contraptions that would, over the years, slowly expand the size of a person’s mouth. And so the only way to meet the continually higher American demand for caloric inputs is to increase the calories per cubic centimeter of the food. The formula looks something like this:

CCC x MOC = AIMC

(where: CCC = calories per cubic centimeter; MOC = mean orifice circumference; and AIMC = aggregate intake per mastication cycle).

The brilliance of the KFC invention was in realizing a fundamental inefficiency in the existing delivery platform technology: the bread in the sandwich was just wasted space. By making one simple adjustment – replacing the bun with deep fried chicken – the CCC element of the equation could be increased tenfold and consumers could be delivered the higher caloric input they demanded without any extra volume (and without the attendant negative externality of increased chewing requirements). Delivery of meat and cheese via fried chicken! The heightened efficiencies were astounding!

I haven’t actually tried the Double Down yet (I will, right after I check out Dunkin Donut’s new chicken parmesan flatbread sandwich), but I would think that grabbing fried chicken with your hands would be a little sloppy. KFC’s probably come up with some kind of Monsanto engineered coating that gives the fried chicken a freshly baked sesame bun-type tactile feel, and that lets you eat the Double Down while driving, without getting grease all over your BlackBerry.

All that remains now is for KFC to get people out buying the Double Down. The challenge is one of getting people to let their ids take over their egos. The dominant social mindset in the year 2010 is all about healthy living and moderation and exercise. But while everyone has some vague feeling that they should cut back and eat smart and all that, they still, at their core, want to binge out on fat, greasy, cheesy, deep fried piles of ambiguous animal flesh. KFC’s Double Down ad actors are perfect – good-natured, good-looking friendly faces letting the world know that it’s OK if a super sized Whopper meal isn’t enough to leave you satisfied. Unleash the id! Eat the sandwich of the future! Wrap your fixins in fried chicken! Nothing could be more natural!

Only time will tell how important an innovation the Double Down will prove to be. The best thing since (and substitution for) sliced bread? Or the last straw in inflating Americans to the point of collapse? In the meantime, I can’t wait to go get my hands on a tasty fried chicken fast food bacon receptacle.

My Bus Trip to Ségou

Despite what most Westerners think, living in the third world isn't all horrible all the time. My exposure to the third world was as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali, West Africa. There are certainly a lot of huge, fundamental forces that make life difficult in Mali. The net result is a life expectancy rate 30 years lower than in the U.S. But day to day life in a village in Mali can be nice. It's peaceful. You wake up with the sunrise. You have a clear view of the bright stars at night. You get to know goats by name. Telemarketers never call.

But travel in the third world really is horrible. Fortunately, there is sometimes a very fine line between horrible and hilarious.

A Peace Corps stint in Mali starts out with ten weeks of in-country training at a Peace Corps camp outside of Bamako, the capital. One week into training, after the fresh-faced volunteers have learned the bare essentials of living in Africa - things you would have thought we would know how to do already, like showering (but with a bucket), eating (but with your hands) and ass wiping (see previous parenthetical) - volunteers are sent off for a weekend visit with other volunteers who have been in the country for a while. This is what the Peace Corps calls the "demystification visit."

It's a good term. Demystification. The mystificated version of Peace Corps life - what you read about in Lonely Planet and daydream about recounting at sophisticated cocktail parties later in life when you're hip and successful - is supposed to be instantly transformed into the demystificated version - "holy SHIT; what have I done?" It also sends the fainter-of-heart volunteers packing for Cleveland earlier rather than later (if you ever wonder why Peace Corps houses all over the world have posters of Steven Spielberg’s 1982 "phone home" alien hanging on the walls, it's because "E.T.", in Peace Corps speak, means "early termination").

Anyway, my demystification visit was to Ségou. A Peace Corps staff member took me and five other volunteers - Matt, Misha, Andy, John and Tom - to a big dirt parking lot in Bamako and somehow figured out which bus we were supposed to get on. The bus was the sketchiest, most death trap-looking thing I had ever seen in my life. Little did I know that this would be the highest-end traveling I ever did in the country. Later trips would involve snuggling up with animals, having a wheel rip off a car, riding in the bed of an industrial dump truck, and sucking carbon monoxide two inches from where an exhaust pipe had maybe once been. Looking back, this demystification bus, with its individual seats and glass windows, would seem downright pretentious. The six of us got on the bus. Like cool fourth graders, we went straight to the back row.

The trip started off as an exciting adventure. We weren't in Kansas (or Indiana or Ithaca, NY) anymore. We clicked away on our new going-away present cameras, snapping photos of the endless, dry landscape, the mud huts, the donkey carts. We drank Peace Corps-issued bottled water. We talked about Jerry Garcia, who had just died the week before. Then, out of the blue, there was a loud KA-POW, and the front windshield of the bus shattered into a million pieces, showering glass all over the driver. The driver slowed down and pulled over to the side of the road. The other passengers glanced over towards the driver for a few seconds, then went on talking as they had been. The driver brushed himself off, smoked a cigarette, put his sunglasses back on, tied a bandana over his nose and mouth and pulled the bus back onto the road.

We couldn't believe it. If something like this had happened back in our homeland, a Fox news helicopter, a fleet of emergency vehicles, a lieutenant governor and two dozen personal injury lawyers would have been on the scene within minutes. A 60 Minutes expose and some congressional sub-committee inquiries would have followed within the week. Then there would be lawsuits, CEO press releases, workers comp claims, tell-all interviews and maybe even a book deal. But in Mali, this wouldn't even merit a longer-than-usual answer to the question "how was your trip?"

We got settled back into our seats by the rear window. It was hard to talk because of all the wind hurricaning through the bus, there being no windshield and all. But we laughed our asses off, slapped each other on the back, and were generally exhilarated to have been part of such a crazy experience. Not ten minutes later, probably because of the aforementioned skin-peeling wind raging through the bus, the back window ripped out of its bracket. It just popped right out - boink - landed in the road and smashed into another million pieces. Once again, everyone turned to take a quick look and went right back to their conversations. This time the bus didn't even stop. We were beside ourselves. "This is soooo insane!!!!" "No-one's even gonna BELIEVE this!!!"

But the volunteers who met us in Ségou did believe it. And they weren't that impressed. "Huh," they said, "Is it true that Jerry's dead?" "Any cute chicks in the new training group?" And that was that. We all wrote letters home about our crazy bus ride. But after a few months in the country, after we had become really, truly demystified, we stopped telling stories like that altogether. They didn't even rank. Yup, life in the third world doesn’t always suck, but travel in the third world always, always does.

Air Schadenfreude – Travels with a Decomposing Roadkill Elite Member

The days when commercial flying was glamorous and exciting are obviously long, long gone. The experience of flying went from luxurious and fun, to mundane but tolerable, and has now become an almost comic pain in the ass. Teetering perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy, airlines have to give the impression of value by charging low-seeming fares while at the same time squeezing every possible nickel out of each passenger. As with most products and services, the marginal cost of adding a passenger – the actual cost to the airline of having one more person come on board an already scheduled flight – is virtually nothing. So if a seat is available, and a person is willing to pay anything at all for it, the airline should take his money and welcome him on board. But, at the same time, an airline doesn’t want to cannibalize the rest of its sales by tempting people who would be willing to pay more for a ticket to wait and try to get a lower fare. The solution is for airlines to try to convince people that there are lots of different options available, each distinguishable from the others.

There have always been first class and coach class seats. At some point the intermediate business class arrived on the scene. Now it seems like seats on a plane have been divided up into a thousand different levels, each with a different price tag. Emergency exit row seats with extra leg room. Non-bulkhead seats with more storage for bags. Seats closer to the front of the plane. Seats just outside of the range of where you can smell the toilet. Aisle seats. Seats without a window. Seats near where the stewardess is going to stand during half the flight with her big ass in your face. And while it used to be luck of the draw where you were seated, now every minute distinction is up for auction. A strange airline lingo has evolved to try to make everyday junk sound enticing. Somehow, talking about “beverage service” and “in-flight dining offerings” must make people happier to spend nine bucks on a warm can of Bud Light and a six pack of orange peanut butter crackers.

But the most important factor in the experience of flying, much more potent than the actual physical characteristics of a seat you’re in or the services you’ve paid for, is the sense of where you stand in the hierarchy of flyers. However squished you are in your seat, whatever add-on fee you had to pay to scratch yourself while at cruising altitude, however many rain delays and runway holds and terminal changes and misplaced flight crews you have to endure, it’s all OK as long as someone else is worse off than you are. Air Schadenfreude. The mission for the airline is to make each passenger aware of what caste they are a part of and, more importantly, who among them is of a lesser order. Enter the loyalty reward program.

The airlines will never tell you this, but every person on a plane takes off and lands at the exact same time. Being bestowed with the honor of getting on the plane first really just means that you get to spend twelve extra minutes cramped in your uncomfortable seat. The twenty minute boarding ritual is a modern pageant designed to showcase to the passengers who is a member of what caste. A sort of debutante ball for overweight road warriors. The art of the membership awards program is to create an aura of exclusivity based on nothing. The fact that a lot of airlines actually lay down a red industrial carpet in their first class boarding lines is so laughably ridiculous that it almost qualifies as entertainment (except that there's no additional $6 fee for it).

The tried and true way to imply privileged exclusivity is to name a thing after a rare material. Metals have traditionally been popular. But while silver and gold and platinum status may have had some cache at some point, the words have been overused to the point of becoming not just meaningless, but almost insulting (credit card companies are the main instigators of this trend, but that's a story for another day). Even the proudest Platinum Elite member has to scratch his head when he realizes that dinner is going to be nine lightly salted peanuts in an extremely difficult to open little bag (and that's only if there's not a kid on the plane with a nut allergy). The problem now is that there are not many more rare substances whose names can be tapped. The airlines may be able to conjure up a few more exclusive categories - Hope Diamond Faberge Egg Elite Plus? Weapon-Grade Uranium Preferred? Bead of Sweat from the Furrowed Brow of the Dali Lama Select? - but at some point, they are going to hit the ceiling of elite-sounding physical substances.

There is a solution, though. Since what matters is not the intrinsic, objective level of the hierarchy, but the relative level as compared to others, it would be equally effective to start re-branding status categories at the low end. So instead of referring to the base level class simply as "coach," the low end could be pushed even lower. Even if you are a lowly Plywood Laminate member, you'd feel OK if you knew you'd be able to board the plane ahead of the Festering Flesh Wound members. And if you had purchased a Raw Unfiltered Sewage class ticket but were offered a free upgrade to a Decomposing Roadkill seat (not right next to the door of the bathroom, but still no window or ability to recline the seat), you'd feel like the king of the world.

So the next time you're stuck on a runway, 275th in line for take-off, sandwiched between two morbidly obese vacationers, wondering who really buys the automatic hot dog cooker / bun toaster from the SkyMall catalog, double check your ticket to see what your status level is. Maybe next time you can upgrade. Or at least make a creative suggestion to the stewardess on your way out for a new loyalty reward program level name.

Not that you asked me how you should live your life, but...

My wife asked me recently if I have a philosophy on life and I realized that yes, in fact, I do. And (like most thoughts I have) it can be expressed in four easy to remember bullet points. Far be it from me to tell you how to live your life. I'm just another guy slogging through each day, trying to be reasonably happy and successful. But if I could make one person one tiny bit happier (or make one person just slightly less irritating to the rest of the world) by enlightening him with my list, wouldn't it be horrible of me not to? So, without further ado, here is my four bullet point philosophy on life - the DanJanifesto Four Commandments:

I - Don't Be A Dick

II - Nobody Cares About You

III - Stop Complaining

IV - Throw People A Bone

Don't Be A Dick

I already wrote about this a while ago. Check out the full posting here. The concept seems simple enough. But it does seem to fall through the cracks quite often.

Nobody Cares About You

I don't mean this in the depressing "nobody loves you" kind of way, but rather in the liberating "nobody is going to pay one millisecond of attention to whether your pants are wrinkled" kind of way. You are at the center of your own world, but you're a bit player in the worlds of almost everyone else. People who like you will like you in spite of your bajillion minor deficiencies. And people who don't like you won't like you even if you fix every single one. So when you start to fret about whether the tone of your coworker's email was irritated or whether your barista noticed that your belt doesn't match your shoes, forget about it. They don't care. Nobody does. With that weight removed from your shoulders, you'll have more mental energy to think about warm apple pie or babbling mountain brooks or whatever it is that makes you happy.

Stop Complaining

It's OK to complain if someone you love has died, if your house burns down or if you lose a limb. But that should be about it. One of my former early-morning-shift bagel store coworkers used to respond, every single day when I asked her how it was going, by saying "it's gonna be one of those days." And I used to think, holy shit, it's 5:30 in the morning. What could possibly happen to you every day before 5:30 in the morning that would make you say that? Of course it's gonna be one of those days. Life is a vast patchwork of minor irritants, most of which are amazingly uninteresting. When you regale other people with stories of those irritants, you are probably not only boring them, but irritating them as well. If they locked themselves in a dark broom closet, they would likely just be bored, and not irritated. That means that when you complain, a dark broom closet is doing a better job at making the world pleasant than you are. This is not to say that you have to go around pointing out how lovely and inspiring every flower blossom or piece of dryer lint is (people who do this have to worry about getting their asses kicked in the men's room). But spending just an infinitesimal little molecule of energy focusing on the good stuff in life never killed anyone.

Throw People A Bone

Human beings are hard wired to think more highly of themselves than they probably should. But what's wrong with a little self-delusion? If thinking we're smarter, better looking and more generally wonderful than we really are gets us through the day, what's wrong with that? Why not let people think what they want about themselves and treat them like the superstars they think they are instead of the schlubs they may actually be? (Unless, of course, they're having trouble following rule #1, in which case it can be hard). If I tell you I'm 5'7" and can do 15 pull-ups, why not just accept that at face value, even if it doesn't even pass the laugh test? There's no finite amount of flattery in the world. And a little praise, while no skin off your back, can really make someone's day. So why not spread a little love? In the words of John Belushi in Animal House, "it don't cost nothin."

In Conclusion

If you've made it this far through my self-help tome without vomiting or blowing an infuriated gasket, well thanks for that. I know, easier said than done. And I know that, contrary to my commandments, I can be as much of a dickish, self-important, whining misanthrope as the next guy. But it's good to share. If I turn this posting into a book, sell a million copies, start a cult, buy a tax-deductible not-for-profit corporate jet and fly to Aruba, I'll save you a seat.

Dungeons & Dragons and the Sociopath / Technology Cycle

A recent decision from the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit got me thinking about whether it is easier or more difficult to be a sociopath in the modern world.

Last week, the Seventh Circuit issued an opinion upholding the right of a prison to bar inmates from playing Dungeons & Dragons. The plaintiff in the case complained, according to the New York Times, that the prison had confiscated his "books and other materials, including a 96-page handwritten manuscript he had created for the game." Oh, and the plaintiff was serving a life sentence for "bludgeoning and stabbing his sister's boyfriend to death." For some reason, this decision struck me as being just very very funny. Maybe it's the image of prison as being just as cliquey as high school. You have the Crips, the Bloods, the weightlifters, the shower rapists, the screaming lunatics and then, sitting over in the far corner of the rec room, some guys (all of whom, like the dungeonmaster himself, had probably bludgeoned and stabbed someone to death) hunched over a 96 page handwritten manuscript, rolling 24-sided dice and role-playing as druids and ogres.

Thinking about D&D led me, of course, to start thinking about sociopaths. I didn't realize that D&D was still around at all. I figured that was one of the pastimes that had been killed by the internet. I guess prisons tend be behind the curve on the technological front. (Is Fios available in your neighborhood? Enter your cell block and number here find out.) In high school, D&D was at the forefront of sociopathic activities. It was a means for zitty, fantasy-obsessed kids to spend days locked away in dank basements, with no contact with the outside world, living in a made up fantasy land. I was never one of the D&D guys. Not because I was any less zitty or sociopathic than they were. It's just that jazz band was my bag.

Sociopaths have been around forever. No human being in history has ever made it through life without, at some point, thinking that people are all horrible and ridiculous and that a life spent alone in the woods eating moss off the sides of trees would be infinitely more pleasant. Throughout most of history, there was very little change (other than trends in beard styles) in the typical lifestyle of a sociopath. The world wasn't very crowded, so finding a spot where you could hang out for a few decades without ever seeing another person wasn't that hard. But things started to change around the time of the industrial revolution. As more of the population moved to cities, and increasingly specialized divisions of labor made it harder for any one person to produce all of the things needed to survive in the world, people had to rely on one another more and more. And more reliance on other human beings made it harder to avoid contact with them.

For a while, it seemed as if living the sociopathic life would become a dying art. First trains and then roads and airplanes started making it possible for people from all over the world to show up right on our doorsteps. Then the telegraph and the phone and radio and TV signals beamed over the airwaves brought them into our homes. Now the internet and email and tweets and BlackBerries force society upon us wherever we are. Technology, it seemed, would make human contact unavoidable.

But no! Sociopaths are now as abundant as ever. Quietly, in the background, technology was evolving on a parallel track. Automation would swoop in and save sociopaths from extinction. While technology was making it possible for humans to spread their humanness faster and wider, the automation of formerly human tasks was making it increasing easy to avoid human contact altogether. The loom eliminated the need for knitting circles. Electric cow milking machines made it possible for dairy farmers to milk hundreds of bovine without having to chat with other farmers. Automated electronics vending machines in airports made it possible to buy replacement cell phone chargers without having to talk to the kid at the Cellular Circus kiosk.

And then computers changed it all. Food and excrement disposal are really the only absolute essentials for survival. But with food, excrement disposal and a computer, the whole human-less word became available right at the fingertips of any sociopath. The combination of Peapod online grocery delivery service (a service now available through most brick and mortar grocery stores) and indoor plumbing have made it possible to conquer the most basic needs without any direct human intervention. The Visa / Amazon.com / eBay / UPS network has make it possible to buy just about any object that has ever existed on this planet, also without ever having to so much as talk to another person. And, finally, the primary purpose of the entire rest of the internet is to provide whatever kind of escapism (99.9998% porn; 0.0001% Runescape and other on-line D&D knock-offs; 0.0001% other, by most accounts) floats any sociopath's particular boat. The idea that, in ancient times, sociopaths had to leave the house, gather in some other person's dank basement and play D&D to avoid contact with normal society would be incomprehensible to any high school age sociopath today.

Endless ink has been spilled, and dissertations written, about the effects of technology on disseminating ideas and information. But the renaissance of the sociopath, a creature that was driven to the very brink of extinction, has gone largely unnoticed. It's understandable. Sociopaths don't get much media attention (except when they bludgeon and stab their sisters' boyfriends to death and are described on local newscast by the neighbors as "the quiet type, kept to himself mostly"). So lets take a moment to appreciate this feat of technology, and tip our hats to our secluded web-surfing friends. Prisoners may no longer have the right to play Dungeons & Dragons, but the rest of unincarcerated society is as free as ever to withdraw gracefully from the squalor of humanity.

Supreme Court Liberates Corporations from Shackles of Oppression

The Supreme Court has just handed down a decision - Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission - that gives corporations almost limitless power to influence elections. My own opinion is that this is a terrible outcome, and is going to shift power even further from the weak to the powerful. But even more disturbing is the basis for the decision - the First Amendment command that "congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech." The drafters of the First Amendment unfortunately moved on to the next amendment (the gun nut one - not exactly a masterful piece of drafting either) before specifying just exactly whose speech it was that was not supposed be abridged. You might think it’s obvious that the speech in question was supposed to be limited to that of human beings. Dolphins can speak, but no-one thinks the Constitution is supposed to give them rights. But apparently it’s complicated. Central to the Citizens United decision was the question of whether corporations have free speech rights.

Here is what the court had to say: "Speech is an essential mechanism of democracy, for it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people." "Speech restrictions based on the identity of the speaker are all too often simply a means to control content." "Political speech is indispensable to decisionmaking in a democracy, and this is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation rather than an individual." "By suppressing the speech of... corporations... the Government prevents their voices and viewpoints from reaching the public." And here is the clincher: "Wealthy individuals... can spend unlimited amounts on independent expenditures... yet certain disfavored associations of citizens - those that have taken on the corporate form - are penalized for engaging in the same political speech."

Got it? We must not discriminate! A corporation can’t help being a corporation. Just because a speaker happens to have been born a corporation (or do corporations choose to be corporations?), why should its opinion be any less valid than yours or mine?

To be perfectly clear, the Citizens United court was not considering the free speech rights of people who work at corporations or live near corporations or are otherwise affected by corporations. It was considering the rights of corporations themselves. I am all about corporate directors and officers and shareholders and employees having strong opinions about who should be president and whether global warming is real, and spending their own money to try to make their voices heard. And don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against corporations. I’m a corporate lawyer. My drawers at work are full of corporations. Some of my best friends are corporations.

But still, at the risk of sounding like a bigot, corporations are just different than you and me.

If you kick a corporation in the shin, it doesn't feel pain. (Corporations don't have shins.) If you break up with a corporation or fail to notice that it got a haircut, it doesn't feel sad. If you chain a corporation to the boiler in the basement for its entire adolescence, feed it nothing but dirty water and stale bread and make it pee in a jar, it won't even mind. Corporations are just webs of permits, contractual agreements and filings with the Delaware secretary of state. They don't have dreams and ambitions. They don't experience disappointment. They can't think. They can't talk. They’re not really anything at all. And so how can it possibly be that they should have free speech rights that cannot be abridged?

My personal list of who or what should be able to claim free speech rights, in descending order of legitimacy, goes something like this: a living adult human being, a child, a gorilla, a house pet, a fish, a shrubbery, a coffee table, a fungus and a fresh pile of dog shit. Note that corporations don't even make the list. That's right, a fresh pile of dog shit has a more justifiable claim to free speech rights than a corporation does. Dog shit has at least passed through the body of a conscious living being that is capable of some level of thought. Dog shit is full of living organisms - bacteria and amoebas and such - that move around in some kind of organized fashion and have a set function in sustaining the earth's natural processes. Corporations have none of this.

In many ways, of course, corporations are better than fresh dog shit. They’re responsible for all kinds of happy things like growing the economy and employing workers and fostering innovation and making funny beer commercials. Reasonable people can stay up all night debating how much corporations help and hinder our society. Talking about the appropriate role of corporations in our society is interesting and important. But to bolster arguments in favor of corporate power by saying that corporations must be allowed to express themselves is nuts. Duct tape and curling irons play important roles in society too, but no-one thinks their opinions should carry the same weight as a human beings’. For the Supreme Court to take this position is disingenuous at best, and a naked power grab at worst.

Any person who would make an argument like this, one that so obviously doesn’t even pass the laugh test, is either: (a) retarded; (b) on crack; or (c) trying to achieve a pre-determined outcome without having a principled reason upon which such outcome can be based. The Supreme Court Justices are not retarded. I've read their stuff and, although most of it is written by legal clerks, they've obviously got at least some minimal capacity to construct rational thoughts. They're probably not on crack. Crack is easy to find in DC, but lighting up a big rock out on the front steps of the court, right in plain view of the Capital, just doesn’t seem like their style. And so I guess that just leaves choice (c), which is scary and sad.

If I ever run into Justice Kennedy at a cocktail party, I’m going to corner him and make him look me in the eye and tell me that he really truly believes the arguments he made in Citizens United (oh, and in Bush v. Gore too, while I’ve got his attention). I’ll bet you he looks away or tries to change the subject. In the meantime, I’ll have to just keep complaining to my friends. Or maybe I’ll just incorporate a bunch of corporations. They have opinions, apparently. And they’re good listeners too.

The Soup Wars and Choosing a Cell Phone Plan

The current most raging advertising war seems to involve the Verizon / AT&T cell phone coverage maps. On my daily 15 yard walk from the subway to my office, I see about two dozen of the maps plastered all over the downtown storefronts. The maps are supposed to depict where you can get good Verizon or AT&T cell phone coverage. From the looks of the Verizon maps, Verizon service covers the entire country except for a few little blips in places where most people will never, ever in their entire lives step foot, and AT&T covers virtually nothing. The AT&T maps are about the exact opposite. Lawyers are on the scene. Lawsuits and countersuits are flying. It’s a battle royale. I have AT&T service, though I have no idea why. I think I started at some job at some point that had an AT&T deal or rep, or I had an office mate that used AT&T. Before seeing the maps all over the place, I completely and utterly did not give a shit about my cell phone service. When I try to call someone, I usually can, so that's pretty much that. But now, with all this cutting edge, obviously very scientific information posted all over the city, I have to think about whether I've been making the right decision. What if Verizon would be better for me? What if I've been depriving myself of my full potential all these years?!

Advertising wars have, I assume, been going on since around the time human beings began communicating with language. In my lifetime, the main ones that come to mind are Coke v. Pepsi, Chevy v. Ford and Mac v. PC, with a little sort of sideshow involving Campbell’s and Progresso soups. These past wars were really just battles in the culture war. Mac users, an overall wealthier and more educated crowd than the unwashed PC user masses, like to talk smugly about the design components of their computers and about the fact that they "work without crashing." I can't really characterize the two sides of the Chevy / Ford battle (when I owned a pickup truck, it was a Toyota). But a debate that has produced so many millions of "I'd rather push a [Chevy / Ford] than drive a [Ford / Chevy]" and Calvin pissing on a Ford / Chevy bumper stickers obviously resonates at some pretty deep level of our nation's personal identity. I can't explain the Coke / Pepsi thing either. The amount of collective time our society spent proselytizing about one or the other kind of carbonated sugar water was astonishing. But that was during the '70s. Maybe, other than wife-swapping and trying to find gas, there just wasn't that much to do back then. The brief flare up of the Campbell's / Progresso soup war (rising at one point to the level of a LaDainian Tomlinson Superbowl ad) doesn't merit much discussion. I think people have pretty much given up on eating soup altogether. McDonalds and Burger King are so deeply intertwined with our society that their PR campaigns are almost not really advertising any more. They're more like gravity or CSPAN broadcasts of congressional hearings - things that make up the very essence of how we live our lives, but that have become so ubiquitous as to be almost imperceptible.

OK, so advertising battles are nothing new. But what should I do about my cell phone service? Of all the ad wars, the AT&T / Verizon one seems like it should be the one most based on objective facts. All I need to know is, if ever I find myself walking down the street in Oskaloosa, Nebraska and needing to download a funny new ringtone, will I be able to do so? Cell phone service is based on cold, hard facts, not self-image. I've never heard someone say anything like "I would just never date anyone who's a Verizon subscriber..." or "well I'm not surprised, he is an AT&T subscriber after all..." My wife uses Verizon and I use AT&T. And of all the unbelievably stupid things we've fought about over the years, which cell phone providers we've chosen has never been one of them.

My friend Josh, the most logical decision maker I know, would tell me to make an Excel chart where I plug in percentage estimates of the amount of time I will likely spend in various parts of the country over the course of the year, cross reference that with service availability in each location, multiply by some cost per month factor and come up with an objective determination of which service is best for me. But the problem with this kind of analysis is that it would take some moderate amount of time and effort, which goes against my policy of doing the absolute bare minimum amount of work necessary to make a decision.

So how about letting society as a whole make the decision for me? James Surowiecki has a "wisdom of crowds" theory that says that independent, unaffiliated groups are, in the aggregate, mind-bendingly accurate in their determination of objective facts. When asked to determine the number of jelly beans in a jar, or a person's age, the aggregate determination of such groups is vastly more accurate than most individual guesses. A distinction has to be made between the wisdom of crowds and groupthink. The difference is that while groupthink results when people are isolated and holed up together (usually in a meeting room, with their boss), and no-one dares to derail the seeds of a horrible, ridiculous idea, the wisdom of crowds is supposed to be able to diffuse and correct whatever stupidity any one person comes up with. Groupthink was the process by which General Motors made the decision to produce the Pontiac Aztek. The wisdom of crowds was the reason GM discontinued production of the Aztek after about a month.

I understand that societal decisions are not always great. Decisions made by the masses are responsible for the Holocaust and the fact that Two and a Half Men is the most popular sitcom on TV. But deciding which company I should send my monthly $49.95 payment to? I may be willing to delegate that decision to the country at large. Whatever the breakdown is in market share, Verizon and AT&T each have millions of cell phone customers. And just the fact that both companies are still around must mean something, right? Crowds ferreted out the Pontiac Aztek almost immediately. The Chia pet is a strange anomaly - an idiotic ten dollar piece of shit that has managed to stay on the market for decades - but that can probably be chalked up to manic holiday gift-giving desperation. Yes, I'll just assume that if AT&T is still around after however many years of hawking cell phone service, its service must at least not so abysmally, horrifically terrible that all of its customers have defected and left it for dead. And that's good enough for me.

So maybe now I can put this decision to rest, and spend as little time each day thinking about my cell phone provider as I do about pickup trucks, soft drinks and soup.

Update from the Tiger Woods Ad Agency Crisis Management Department

I did a post a while back (Why Wolfgang Puck Should be Stoned to Death and Dismembered) about how celebrities should go about choosing what products to endorse. Obviously, you couldn't write about celebrity endorsements with about discussing Tiger Woods - up until Thanksgiving, one of the most successful product pushing human beings on the planet. When the news broke that Tiger had been screwing a different cocktail waitress just about every time he walked into a hotel room, everyone got misty eyed thinking about how that must feel for his wife and little kids. Not me. I immediately thought, oh my god! what is this going to mean for Deloitte & Touche?!

First off, let me say generally that I have not been weeping over Tiger's corporate sponsors and their potential public relations nightmares. Companies are stupid to make such huge investments in supposedly super-human individuals who are supposed to convince the hoi polloi that they too can become virtual gods if they buy whatever junk the celebrity is hawking. Shame on the companies for getting bent out of shape when their enlisted demi-gods turn out to be just as schmuck-like as the rest of us. And shame, even more, on the rest of mankind for being so retardedly biologically predisposed to thinking that buying whatever junk is being pushed will make us even one iota less schmuck-like.

A lot of people seem to assume that Tiger's screw up is going to mean the end of all of his corporate endorsements. I don't think so. And I think the determining factor will be the underlying message of each particular ad. For ads that are trying to say "we the company are like Tiger," well that's really no good. But for the ads, which are most of them, that are trying to say "you will be like Tiger if you buy our crap," Tiger's banging his way around the globe may not be a bad thing at all.

Accenture has reportedly pulled the plug on Tiger already. They fall into the first category. I have no idea what Accenture actually does (I don't think anyone knows; they're some kind of consulting offshoot of Arthur Anderson), but, judging from their ads, they're apparently supposed to have the laser beam focus, commitment to achieve and clarity under pressure that Tiger has. So then when you re-evaluate Accenture in light of these new developments – start thinking that your Accenture consultant is probably going to spend a few minutes in your office walking you through some business models and then work all afternoon and all night to try to get into your secretary's pants – you might have a bit less confidence that Accenture's services are really what you need. Same analysis for Deloitte & Touche. I haven't heard anything yet about what they're planning to do with their Tiger campaign, but I can't believe they're going conclude that Tiger Woods continues to be the picture perfect poster child for scrupulous accounting practices (in which case, at the very least, walking through airports may become one small notch less irritating).

A few products have unique considerations. Gatorade has discontinued its Tiger Woods sport drink, but claims to have made that decision before the brouhaha. I believe them, mainly because I've tried the Tiger Woods sport drink and it was the nastiest shit I have ever had the displeasure of putting in my mouth. Buick can probably keep Tiger on. Most of its target audience probably still have rabbit ears on their TVs and haven't figured out how to make the transition to digital TV. So they probably haven't even heard the news about Tiger yet.

But almost all of the rest of the products endorsed by Tiger are in the second category – the "buy this and you'll be like Tiger" group. Take Hanes and Gillette, for example. The target demographic for these ads are 100% male. Guys who are (almost by definition) trying to look stronger and younger and sexier. So how will the fact that its spokesman has been busted screwing dozens of young, sexy women affect its message? Uh, you connect the dots. A few minor tweaks to the scripts (i.e. photoshop Tiger into Axe body spray ad and have him say something like "awwwww yeeeeaaah boy, you know what I'm talking about...") and these ads will be ready for prime time. Why did all those cocktail waitresses want to nail tiger in the first place? Why, because of his sexy boxer briefs and incredibly close shave, of course.

Don't hold your breath for the corporate press releases acknowledging all this. But somewhere deep in the bowels of the Tiger Woods wing of the advertising industry corridors of power, someone is making the not-so-ridiculous point that, if your main spokesman turns out to be an irresponsible, adolescent pig, and if your whole advertising regime is based on hawking stuff to people who, deep down, basically dream of acting like irresponsible, adolescent pigs, you might not have such a big crisis after all.

Class Warfare on My Way to Work

The last thing I want to do every morning while riding the subway to work is to ignite a class warfare riot. But I realized one morning last week during my commute that, if everyone on my subway car suddenly banded together into an impromptu posse, dragged me out into the street and beat me to a bloody pulp, I’d have to admit, in between kicks to my broken ribs and lashes across the destroyed flesh of my former face, that they had point. What was I doing to deserve such treatment? Reading a magazine that had this ad on the back cover:

“You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation.”

The Patek Philippe Annual Calendar 5146G and Calatrava cufflinks advertised here are, respectively, an $18,000 sport watch and a $4,000 pair of gold cufflinks. The story the ad is presumably supposed to convey is something along the lines of this: You are a powerful, powerful man who has arrived at the pinnacle of prestige and power. Your pectoral muscles are flawlessly chiseled, surpassed in beauty only by the impeccable cut of your custom tailored sport jacket. You are not balding even a tiny little bit. Your trophy wife is young and perky. Your dick enormous. Forget just being able to know what time it is. If you buy this watch, you will be transforming your capital into an object that will not only appreciate handsomely over time, but will demonstrate to the world your formidable level of success.

But wait! There’s more! Your personal success is so momentous that it can hardly be contained in a single human body. Thus the need to pass it along to your progeny - your flesh and blood, the fine young man who has been so fortunately endowed with your exquisite genes and an ample portion of your hard working capital. For a member of that next generation, so entitled yet so soft, it’s good to have at least one natural defense – a watch signaling to potential predators that the same $750 an hour lawyer who’s on retainer for dad (defended him during his insider trading suit? maybe brought an eminent domain case so dad could demolish the neighbor’s house on the vineyard to make room for a larger dock?) would have complaints served on said predators within thirty seconds of having laid a finger on junior. Just imagine how priceless the moment will be when you make that special trip to your son’s prep school to pass along your 5146G and Calatrava cufflinks so that he too can look after these items for yet another generation.

It’s enough to warm a man’s heart. Or, on the other hand, if he’s on the subway, possibly enough to make a man decide to get in on the action with the posse that’s kicking the shit out of me in the street.

Most of the people I ride to work with in the morning, myself included, are not merely looking after their watches for the next generation. They’re looking at their watches so that they will know what time it is. So they get to work on time. So they’ll get paid every other week. So they can afford car insurance and dog food. And while there’s nothing wrong with being rich and babysitting cufflinks for future generations, there is something very nauseating about aspiring to such pretention by parading around with an ad like this on the back of your magazine.

Ads are among the most truthful windows into peoples souls. Gazing deeply into a person’s eyes, watching him perform under pressure, talking intimately about his most deeply felt fears and convictions? All good ways of learning about his true inner being. But not nearly as market-tested as an ad. Advertisers understand us better than anyone out there. It’s their business. Ads don’t paint a picture of us as we are, but rather of us as we want to be.

And so, in a way, being moved by a tableau depicting such smug, unabashed douchebagedness is even worse than actually being a douchebag. There are a million reasons a person can be a douchebag – genetics, upbringing, bad day in the office, ring around the collar – and so, when you come across one, you can just write him off. Probably just came out of the box that way. But to want to be, affirmatively aspire to be, get turned on the by idea of being, a douchebag, then, well, good luck with that mob on the subway.

In my defense, the ad above was from the back cover of The Economist magazine. And while, granted, that publication can be a tad bit smug in its worldview, it’s interesting to read and has good commentary on the forces that make the modern world turn. And I read other stuff too. Good literature. Trashy fiction. Biographies. Rolling Stone. Seriously, I’m a well rounded guy. But until The Economist comes up with some other wares to hawk on its back cover, until I can feel confident that my neighbors won’t think that my idols include a douchebag-looking business tycoon and his equally revolting-looking son, I’m going to have to limit where I read it. No more taking the Economist out in public. The risk is just too great. I’ll just stare at the wall on the subway until The Economist comes up with a new idea. And hopefully put off the class warfare revolution to another day.

Disney’s Neighborhood of Drooling, Mutated Trolls – A Trip to Celebration

My wife was recently holed up at a nice resort in Orlando for a conference, so I decided to go join her there for a long weekend. I had been to Disneyworld once when I was a kid and to Disneyland about a thousand times when I was the activities coordinator at an international summer high school. I am also kidless and cynical to the core. So going to Disney on this short trip was not in the cards. I asked everyone I talked to what there was to do in Orlando if you didn’t want to go to Disney. The general consensus seemed to be, don’t go to Orlando.

But there was one sightseeing destination I couldn’t pass up out of a morbid sense of curiosity. The town of Celebration. Celebration is a planned community that was developed by Disney in the mid 1990s. The idea was something along the lines of, if so many people love to visit the magical manmade paradise that is Disney, there must surely be lots of people who would love to live in that kind of world all the time. The whole thing sounded pretty contrived and twisted to me. I always assumed that if human beings tried to engineer a too-perfect society, there would always be some fly in the ointment that would cause the whole experiment to collapse into a horrific cesspool of anarchy. If this ever happened to Celebration, the reasons for the failure would be something like these (and I could still be right that Celebration will end up there; just give it a bit more time):

Inbreeding: Whenever a population starts getting a bit too cozy and too unwilling to socialize with outsiders, it’s just a matter of time before people who shouldn’t be breeding with one another go ahead and breed. If the Celebrationites aren’t careful, the whole process of picking out the perfect mates for their perfect kids, so that they can beget an ever-expanding stable of perfect grandkids, could go awry. And instead of schools full of above average students of the month with straight teeth, excellent moral compasses and high earning potential, you’d end up with a whole society of people with mixed up chromosomes, low SAT scores and the wrong number of fingers. As any realtor will tell you, once any neighborhood hits a certain critical mass of drooling, mutated trolls, you can kiss your expected real estate appreciation rate goodbye. With declining property values comes a decreasing tax base, then underperforming schools. And over the course of two or three short generations, bang - your peaceful, affluent oasis has morphed into a ghetto full of deformed mutants trying to screw their sisters.

Disease: Despite what you might think based on the extreme proliferation of Purel and anti-bacterial everything, human beings actually need to be exposed to some level of germs and disease to survive. Like just about any natural process, immune systems need to be used to stay effective. By completely eliminating from its territory certain disease-producing sources, Celebration may inadvertently be setting up its own future demise. Take, for example, an almost, but not quite, empty beer can with a cigarette butt floating in it. In college (I have absolutely no idea why), we called these Wallies. Suppose the person who didn’t quite finish the beer had one kind of minor infection and the person who put out the cigarette had some other kind of minor infection. That’s one infested Wally. At some point, a person living in an environment where lots of Wallies are present is going to cut his finger on a Wally and get some portion of that complex infestation sucked up into his bloodstream. Over time, it’s no big deal. His body has learned to handle it. And while no single Wally may ever make it over the threshold into Celebration, at some point, some rebellious Celebration teenager is going to sneak out to a party, cut his finger on a Wally and stumble back to his lovely home. With all the back patting and hand shaking that must go on at Celebration (not to mention the inbreeding; see above) the Wally germs could be transmitted across the whole town in a matter of hours. Just as colonizers have been wiping out indigenous populations wholesale over the years with their new-to-you diseases, one careless Wally finger cut could spread a lethal plague across Celebration.

Anarchy and US Military Intervention: Finally, there is the unknown sociological question of what will happen when children who have been raised in Celebration, who have never seen a blade of crabgrass or a payday check cashing store, are confronted with the ugly human world that surrounds them. Some such kids might just come of age, declare to their parents, “dude, this is the lamest place on Earth,” and move out. But others could be so severely traumatized so as never to be able to leave Celebration again. A wall could be erected. All ties to the vile creatures outside severed. But then how would the hired help get in? Who would scrub the sinks? Deliver the water cooler replacement jugs? At some point, the military would have to be brought in to free the hostages from themselves. However it played out, it would almost certainly involve some kind of Branch Davidian / Waco showdown. And those never end up well.

The Real Celebration: As of yet, none of these scenarios has played itself out. The video above is from the real town of Celebration. The town is just an immaculate, very well painted, nicely mowed little village. Cars aren’t parked on the streets. Lawns are perfect. Stretch golf carts have car seats buckled into the back. The kids at the Starbucks order complicated drinks as if it’s second nature. There’s even some degree of economic diversity (there’s no planned ghetto / place-you-absolutely-do-not-want-to-wander-into-at-night section of the town, but there’s a range from solidly well-off to preposterously rich). Wandering around Celebration, it was hard for me to put my finger one what it was that felt so horribly wrong about the place. I guess it has something to do with thinking you can, or even wanting to, create some kind of paradise just by putting up a façade of unblemished perfection. If whitewashing over all of humanity’s inherent blemishes is a person’s idea of the most wonderful place to live, then Celebration is it. But if you find life in spontaneity and weirdness and all the quirks that make people people, then I’ve got to imagine that Celebration would feel like a tomb. It was a fun place to visit, but I’m glad to be back in my neighborhood of untrimmed shrubberies and the occasional Wally.

Narrow-Minded Reactions to the End of Time

My early morning runs usually start off very peacefully. I look at the trees, listen to the rhythmic thudding of my feet on the pavement and think about cheeseburgers or the smell of fresh laundry. But then I inevitably glance at my watch and then start trying to figure out how fast I'm running and what my time would be if I extrapolated it out over a longer distance. And I start to go crazy. My brain overheats and I have to sit down on the sidewalk and scratch numbers into the dirt with a stick, rocking back and forth with anxious frustration. And that's no way to start a day. I am just not mentally equipped to convert seconds into minutes into hours. No-one is.

The problem is not us; it's the system. The way we measure time is ridiculous. 60 seconds in a minute. 60 minutes in an hour. 24 hours in a day. 7 days in a week. 365 days in a year, except every fourth year when another day has to be tacked on to straighten things out. And even that doesn’t work, so every so often, on no schedule at all, another second has to be added (most recently at the very end of 2008). Then there are time zones and international date lines and daylight savings changes and some vigilante corner of Indiana that has rejected the daylight savings system adopted by the rest of the state. Insanity! I don't know how this system - the betamax of measurements - ever managed to survive throughout the years, but it's time for a change.

How hard could it be to declare that there shall be 10 seconds in a minute, 10 minutes in an hour, 10 hours in a day, 10 days in a week and 10 weeks in a year? A metric system of time.

When I try to make the case for this new system, I am invariably confronted with small-minded, bullshit, status quo-clinging resistance. Here is a sampling of the reactions I get and my responses to them.

Small-Minded Bullshit Reaction #1: The way we measure time is based on how long it takes for the earth to spin on its axis and revolve around the sun. It reflects the resultant shifts in seasons and tides and larger celestial forces to which human beings, like all animals, are subject.

Response: That all may have been true a while back, but since around the time of the light bulb, humans have been completely detached from nature. Months and seasons and whatever complicated stuff is going on out there in the universe have no bearing whatsoever on modern life. Only one in sixteen people in the first world can verify by first hand knowledge that there is even such thing as a sunrise. When moving between the florescent lights of home and the SUV and the florescent lights of the gym and the florescent lights of the office, what difference does it make what time or month or season it is outside? Getting in touch with the natural rhythms of the earth is like going on a diet. Possible in theory, but you are not going to do it. I know three people whose days are timed by the rising and setting of the sun and who are genuinely in touch with the cycles of the seasons. But they don't know what day of the week it is anyway and so shouldn’t be too worked up about revamping the global time keeping system.

Small-Minded Bullshit Reaction #2: My timeshare platinum elite membership wouldn't work out right anymore if the months got all jumbled up. I paid good money for the premium plus week in Bermuda.

Response: You never should have bought into a timeshare in the first place. When was the last time you actually used that? Have you ever really been able to trade your week for another vacation you truly wanted to take? Anyway, Marriott global could probably work out a new algorithm for converting 12 month time into metric time in about an hour. There will be a convenience charge and a few new blackout dates and transfer restrictions, but an upgrade will be available for a small monthly fee.

Small-Minded Bullshit Reaction #3: Length of days and months and seasons are important to farmers. They have to be in tune with the earth to create the food that sustains us all.

Response: Maybe, but there aren't really any farmers anymore. A few of them have lingered around, but that's just because of some random remnant government subsidies that make it worthwhile to produce food that people don't want to buy. And natural is overrated. Food made from natural things gets old and rotten. No match for the Twinkie and other such modern marvels that have 2000 year shelf lives. I'm sure you knew a guy in college whose basement-grown pot was a bajillion times more potent than anything mother nature ever created. Nothing natural about that, and I bet you weren't complaining too loudly. We should just stand aside and let ConAgra and Monsanto work their magic. Their robots and square, genetically engineered tomatoes don't care what time the sun comes up.

Small-Minded Bullshit Reaction #4: What about airplanes? Aren't they all coordinated by some kind of 24 hour time based clock?

Response: Probably, but how complicated could it be to recalibrate schedules for all of the flights in the world? Remember what a big deal everyone thought the Y2K revamp would be? Turned out to be nothing. If people are really that worried about having eight planes land on the same runway at the same time, we could just shut off all air travel for a few months while the airlines figured out how to adjust their radar screens and such. It might not be such a bad idea anyway to give all airline executives a time out. Maybe while they're working on the time issue they could also brainstorm about why all airlines have been more or less bankrupt since about 1980.

Small-Minded Bullshit Reaction #5: Would changing time mean I would have to replace all of my watches and clocks and my VCR and toaster oven and Mr. Coffee?

Response: That's right. But those things are all designed not to last more than a few years anyway. The new system would just be a little shot in the arm for planned obsolescence and, who knows, may be just what the economy needs right now.

In conclusion, there is no good reason why we should continue to use an antiquated system of measuring time based on planets and stars. The human race has progressed much too far. A bit of logistical planning will be needed, but that will all work itself out. In the end, all the running math I need to do will be easier, and my days will start off on a much more mellow note. And that will make it all worthwhile.