Game Day

A glimpse of a Big Ten Game Day crowd. This shows the 10 am scene
at State Street Brats in Madison, Wisconsin.

Targeted Advertising and Personal Data

This is an important topic that I can only address in the briefest form tonight. A post in siliconvalley.com notes that Amazon and MasterCard are beginning to sell user data to advertisers. Both firms claim their data is aggregated and anonymous. We'll see.

The post's author, Levi Sumagaysay, accurately analogized data to 19th Century oil. That comparison is spot on.

Milan University Goes All English Language, All the Time

The Politecnico di Milano, one of Italy's flagship universities, has decided to conduct its business in English. According to a BBC report, "the university has announced that from 2014 most of its degree courses -- including all of its graduate courses -- will be taught and assessed" in the language of Barack Obama rather than that of Silvio Berlusconi.

This is a fascinating development, and to anyone familiar with Latin Europe, almost startling. Italy has a long, proud tradition in the sciences. The Politecnico, which specializes in science, has produced a number of leading scientists who didn't necessarily need English to contribute to the community of thought. Italians can be quite adaptable and I suppose learning to think in English can fit into that category.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of Italians are learning Mandarin. They're just not the scientists. Not yet.

Elvis' LA Home for Sale

Elvis' LA home (photo from LA Times)

If you have $13 million and you're an Elvis Presley fan, you're in luck. According to a BBC report, the King's LA home is for sale.

The home does not come with Elvis outfits, recordings of Presley's music, or bobble head dolls. I wonder what a house inspector finds when the buyer and seller approach closing. Better yet, I wonder what the selling agent's spiel would be.

Hundreds of LA Skateboarders, LAPD Involved in Hollywood Tangle

The movie involved in the Hollywood skateboard incident.

In what must be a first, hundreds of skateboarders who had congregated on Hollywood Boulevard for a movie premiere last night tangled with Los Angeles Police Department officers. The crowd, according to an LA Times blog post on the incident, were gathered for a movie opening. A Hollywood Patch story offers more details about the episode, which LAPD appears to have tried to downplay.

LA has experienced this sort of thing before, notably a Kaskade event last year in which a swarm of people appeared mostly through the influence of Twitter and other forms of "social."

Jennifer 8. Lee vs Full Disclosure

Earlier this week, digital publishing evangelist Jennifer 8. Lee had an opinion piece published in The Seattle Times. The article appeared just prior to the Frankfurt Book Fair, an event where small, medium, and big-league international publishing insiders buy, sell, or trade assets as well as gain (hopefully) useful information. Lee's piece doesn't say anything new or illuminating about the publishing biz. However, the article's appearance, and what it does not say, are curious. Let me elaborate.

Seattle is home base for Amazon, far and away the most disruptive force in publishing's often insular world. What goes uncited in Lee's piece is her enterprise's connection to Amazon, even though the Seattle-based firm is mentioned twice in the story.

Lee co-founded and runs a self-defined "literary studio" called Plympton. Its vision, according to Plympton's website, is to reinvent "how people experience literature by combining serialized fiction and digital platforms." A little over a month ago, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos launched a line of serialized fiction books that would appear on -- drumroll, please -- Kindle gadgets. Three of the ten titles were from Plympton's stable of assets. Supposedly, according to a Boston Globe story, Plympton and Amazon inked the deal 24 hours before Bezos announced it before a very high-profile audience in Santa Monica. Some have strongly doubted the public version of this story, specifically noting that Amazon's profound lust for secrecy and control would have ruled out any initiative that hadn't been thoroughly calculated for intention and impact.

Lee's Seattle Times opinion piece doesn't mention the Amazon-Plympton dots, never mind bother to connect them. This disingenuous stance, from a former New York Times technology writer, makes me wary of the writer's intention. Just what was the point of this piece? Who was its target? (C'mon, you know in your heart it wasn't the subscribers of The Seattle Times.) According to the thumbnail bio at the end of the piece, she "splits her time between Boston, San Francisco and New York." Hmmm.....no second home in The Emerald City.

There are many unanswered questions in the publishing world. These are just a few of them.

Parisian Wall Art

Parisian mural by Jerome Mesnager
(photo from BBC)

The BBC provided a Power Point-style report on Parisian murals which looks better than it reads. The images illuminate the notion that art can enliven urban spaces. Cities that take risks in this area, such as Philadelphia, Miami, and Los Angeles, have strongly benefitted from this approach. If content yearns to be free, then walls yearn to be painted.

Luc Delahaye Wins Photography's Prix Pictet

132nd Ordinary Meeting of the Conference
Photo by Luc Delahaye (photo from Christie's)

The Prix Pictet is one of photography's most prestigious awards. This year's winner is the French photographer Luc Delahaye. His work, along with those shortlisted for the Prix Pictet, is on exhibit at London's Saatchi Gallery until October 28th.

While Jack Welch Dumps Fortune Magazine, Reuters Dumps Welch

In the media story of the week, former GE boss Jack Welch committed what in baseball would be considered running oneself into a double play.

Jack Welch
(photo from Reuters)

Welch jump started the action late last week. He was upset that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) produced an unemployment statistic that was highly favorable to President Obama's re-election efforts. Suspicious of the stat's timing, Jumpin' Jack reached for his Twitter account and released a highly critical tweet. His innuendo about Chicago politics and his assertion that the BLS cooked the numbers gained attention for all the wrong reasons. The BLS bureaucrats, whose reputation as being beyond political reach was confirmed by former George W. Bush administration members, came across as blameless. Meanwhile, Welch came across as an arrogant asshole and a witless shill for Mitt Romney.

Well, the empire has struck back against Welch. A story in today's Chicago Tribune notes that Welch and his wife, who co-write a column for Fortune, have parted ways with the magazine. The Welch camp has spun this direction as something of their own choosing. At the same time, Reuters simply dumped Welch.

Once upon a time, this could never have happened to Welch. He and GE carefully cultivated his mystique during General Electric's high-flying days. At that time, GE owned NBC and no one wanted to tangle with the firm's clout. Wall Street analysts shamefully gave GE a golden pass, even though most publicly acknowledged its finances were an unfathomable black box. Welch himself was lionized by a fawning media as a fiscal wizard, while GE managers were considered corporate America's A-team. Their place was subsequently taken over by Goldman Sachs, whose time in the sun is beginning to come to a close.

For Welch to utter his suspicions about the BLS took chutzpah. These remarks came from a man who manipulated GE's performance figures over the years, who "managed" the media so that unwanted questions were rarely asked (and even more rarely answered), and whose firm required a federal bailout after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy.

I suppose a better question than Welch's being dropped from the media's varsity teams is why Fortune and Reuters kept him as long as they did.

A Detroit Sports Fan's Memory of the Lindell A.C.

Uniforms of Detroit pro athletes
in the Lindell A.C.
#71 (top left) belonged to the great Alex Karras.

Every once in a while, The New York Times publishes a piece that's genuine and fun to read, instead of postured and calculated. Today's exhibit on the genuine and fun side discusses a long-gone Detroit bar and burger joint called the Lindell A.C. I've never been there and didn't know about it until I read Times contributor Bill Morris' piece in today's online edition of the paper.

The story is wonderfully told, with plenty of color, feeling, and just enough nostalgia without getting schmaltzy. Morris notes how athletes unselfconsciously mingled with fans at the Lindell, and how today's sports stars work hard at keeping their distance from those who pay admission to see them play between the lines. Morris' piece is also something of a valentine to a Motor City that was, and to the Detroit that remains proud -- even defiant -- in the face of profound adversity. (The mood in Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino approximates this sentiment.)

Go read Morris' story, which is linked here.

Rothko Painting at Tate Modern Defaced

A mural painted by the late artist Mark Rothko was defaced earlier today. The vandal, according to a blogger quoted in a BBC report on the incident, used "a marker pen" to scribble some words in a corner of the piece.

The Rothko work was one of the so-called Seagram murals, originally prepared for display in New York's Four Seasons Restaurant. They were never installed there.

Episodes in the last half-century, as a separate BBC report notes, have spotlighted how vulnerable art works are to vandalism. The article does not mention the deliberate destruction of the world's artistic heritage over the past decades, with the Taliban's elimination of centuries-old monumental Buddhist sculpture among the more recent outrages. The BBC piece focused on acts of individual insanity, rather than state-supported lunacy.

Former Clinton Press Sec Joe Lockhart Leaves Facebook

Joe Lockhart
(photo from allthingsd.com)

Joe Lockhart, Bill Clinton's press secretary from 1998 to 2000, is saying sayonara to Facebook, his current employer. The news was released on a late Friday, thus guaranteeing minimal coverage except to those consiglieri paying attention. The story, with some additional juicy details about other recent, high-level Facebook departures, originally appeared in allthingsd.com, a website owned by Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Lockhart is a highly seasoned political communications expert, having worked as press secretary for Democratic presidential hopefuls Walter Mondale, Mike Dukakis, and Paul Simon (no, not the singer). What's interesting is Facebook's connection to Democratic Party insiders. In addition to Lockhart, Facebook board member and operational brain, Sheryl Sandberg, worked as Larry Summers' chief of staff during his stint as Clinton's Treasury secretary. It's also instructive to recall that, just prior to the opening of the movie The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg donated millions to allegedly help the public schools in the very Democratic city of Newark, New Jersey. This highly publicized event, principally designed to deflect the The Social Network's highly unflattering portrait of Zuckerberg, included Democratic stalwarts such as Newark mayor Cory Booker and major Obama media pal Oprah Winfrey.

Connecting the dots of these relationships suggest the Land of Like has obtained political protection from unwanted pressure or inquiry. That situation could change very quickly if Barack Obama becomes a one-term president.

Miguel Cabrera and Baseball's Triple Crown

Triple Crown winner Miguel Cabrera

On a night when two presidential contenders engaged in a debate, one candidate earned an undisputed victory. He's Miguel Cabrera, the Detroit Tigers' third baseman, who has just won Major League Baseball's triple crown. It's a stupendous achievement, last accomplished in 1967 by the Red Sox's grumpy Carl Yastrzemski.

Yaz had the advantage of playing half of his games in Fenway Park; Cabrera spent half his season in Detroit's spacious Comerica Park. Players understood the dimensions of Cabrera's achievement and often spoke in awe that any of their peers could accomplish what the Detroit star did. For baseball and its fans, Cabrera's success is a tribute to the spirit of competition and the very hard work it takes to be a champion. In a sports landscape filled with spoiled, conceited, corrupted athletes, Cabrera's winning of the Triple Crown is a very welcome sight. Congratulations, Mr. Cabrera.

Voting Stories

Sample ballot from Palm Beach County, FL
from the 2000 presidential election

With the first Obama-Romney debate scheduled for tomorrow evening, I thought about some of my experiences involving voting.

When I was a young boy, I lived in a small central New York town. Small town elections are goofy affairs, in that voters actually know the candidates and understand how short a shadow their reputation casts. That reality didn't stop my parents from exercising their franchise. Mom and Dad voted in a wooden building within walking distance of our house. What made my parents' voting memorable is that they claimed the election officials openly wore partisan Republican political badges. I have every reason now to believe my folks. At the time, I thought voter fraud was something that took place far away, in corrupt Chicago or the Kingfish's Louisiana.

I don't remember the first time I voted. It just wasn't as memorable as, say, taking my road test for a driver's license. However, I have cast my ballot in nearly every November election. The exception was the time I lived in Italy. The Italians have a novel way of conducting elections: everyone returns to where they were born and votes there. It's no joke. The trains are filled with people going to their birthplace, like so many salmon swimming upstream to spawn. Italian elections are about as honest as those held in rural Texas or The Wire's Baltimore.

The only time I felt genuinely apprehensive about voting was in 2004. George W. Bush, who had gained the presidency without winning a plurality of the national vote, was running for re-election. The feeling in '04 was that the fix was in for W. My wife and I cast absentee ballots, went to Canada for Election Day, and watched the Bush v. Kerry results from across the border. It was a creepy, depressing experience, soon magnified by the revelations about Abu Ghraib, the extent of domestic spying, and the pervasive sense of trickle-down corruption.

I don't know how this year's presidential election will turn out. I just hope my vote doesn't get counted for Pat Buchanan.