Jack's Rant June 28

You Can’t Do It, We Can’t Help

In 1977 – 1978 my parents built a home in Lake Elsinore. This house was build some 30 years ago to be the place where my parents retired. Retiring it is. My father had a thing for wood. And every square inch that could be paneled, stained or shuttered was. After he passed away in 2004 I moved my things from storage, then in Van Nuys, to my father’s home until I could figure out what to do with my life.

In 2005 I moved all of my things into storage again and there they sat until I relocated to Houston in 2006 where I lived for a year. With promise of a new career in Salt Lake City with a new non-profit cable broadcaster, I again packed my things up and put them in storage, in January of 2007.

When I arrived in Salt Lake I discovered, after being there for three weeks, that things were not going as planned and the funding they were hoping for fell through, but I was assured that it would be in place, likely before May.

Okay. What do I do until then.

The house in Lake Elsinore had been on the market for a while, and it had been reduced in price by $150,000 without much action. As you can tell from the “before” photos, it would take a very particular type of person to want to buy this property.

I thought, oh, I’ll just go stay at the house in Lake Elsinore until the job in Salt Lake comes through. Good idea. Free rent.

However, what I failed to realize is that the house was staged, and it didn’t have cable TV, a phone or internet connection – in fact, it didn’t even have a TV yet alone dishes.

Well, May came and went and still no news from Salt Lake so I thought I’d better find something to do with my life. Clearly thinking that I’d find something in L.A. and move back there, I thus began my job search.

And I did. Find a job, that is. But what I didn’t realize is Lake Elsinore is like the Bermuda Triangle, once you’re here, you can’t leave.

In January of this year I became resolved that it looked like I’d be in the house until property values improved, and, tired of paying the $250 a month for my things in storage in Houston, resolved to take it out of storage, and move it to Lake Elsinore.

I had bought all new living room furniture and den furniture when I moved to Houston, and I realized that it was not going to go with the style of the wood paneled walls. As I reviewed in one of my earlier blogs, covering the paneling was more of a task than I had realized it was going to be.

Knowing that my things were going to be delivered on or about April 15, I set upon a quest to redo the living – dining room in February, thinking I’d have it finished before the furniture arrived.

No such luck.

So, long story short, a task that I thought was going to take a couple of weeks to accomplish, ended up taking almost 4 months, with the final boxes being put away or unpacked last Sunday, June 21st.

So, there you have it! My next project is going to be the landscaping, but I think I’ll have my head examined before I begin that one!

Jack's Rant June 2

"Let them eat brioche..."

When Marie Antoinette heard that the peasants of France had no bread to eat, she is quoted as saying "qu'ils mangent de la brioche." Brioche being a very rich bread made with egg and butter, certainly something that a peasant in the field could not afford. But as most of us don’t know what brioche is, other than Julia Childe and a whole country of Frenchmen, someone misquoted her as saying “let them eat cake”. It doesn’t really matter, it became a banner that helped spawn the French revolution and that poor little Marie paid with her head for saying it.

It’s amazing how a single phrase or quote denotes a political figure. Think of George Washington and we get “I can never tell a lie”. Think of Harry Truman and you recall “The buck stops here”. Richard Nixon had a couple, he was a regular word smith, but my personal favorite is “I am not a crook!”

Our mass media is obsessed with finding the perfect sound bite. Every time a new person enters the lime light of the political arena they are open game for the hungry mud slingers, either from the republican or the democratic side of the fence to start digging into someone’s past, searching for some forgotten nugget from some erstwhile speech, interview or article published in some obscure newsletter bythe local PTA.

Taken out of context, edited without regard for what the true meaning was, and blown out of proportion to the extent that the fallout stays in the news for days, even weeks. And the Rush Limbauch’s of the world dance in merry circles rejoicing that they have another day’s fodder for the uninformed masses that hang on their every word.

Last week President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to fill the soon to be vacant seat on the Supreme Court. No sooner than her name hit the wires than the conservative press unleashed its gaggle of fact finders like the wicked witch of the west sending out her flying monkeys to capture some gem of unspeakable dirt on the Justice to be.

And this is what they dug up: During a speech at the University of California at Berkeley, in 2001 Sotomayor said, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

That’s it? That’s their best shot??? How many hundreds of hours of video and audio tapes did they have to screen to find that? How many of thousands of pages of legal opinions did they have to comb. In her entire career as a federal judge, that’s all they could come up with?

And guess what, she’s right. The Supreme Court is filled with white men (and one woman) who have lived lives of privilege, likely never having seen the inside of a thee bedroom apartment in the lower east side of the Bronx, yet alone lived in one.

Here is a woman, born in a lower middle class neighborhood in the Bronx raised by a single parent, who by all accounts had absolutely no chance to do anything with her life other than get married, raise children and go to church. But somehow she didn’t know that. She believed in the American Dream where all people are created equal and have an equal chance to succeed. And guess what, in 1972, she made a huge leap toPrinceton University, an Ivy League school that had only started accepting women undergraduates in 1969.

She aced the place, graduating summa cum laude and went on to go to Yale Law School, where she was an editor of a law journal. She moved on from there to work as a trial lawyer in the Manhattan district attorney's office, as an attorney in private practice and then as a federal judge.

Never mind that she is Latina, anyone, white, black, purple or green who accomplished that is enough to make your eyes tear over and weep in sheer joy that the system actually worked!
Her record is stellar, her judgments remarkable and her impartial standings are not only well documented but well known.

And to all those conservative white pundits who are in a thither that a Latina woman should speak her mind, I say this:

"qu'ils mangent de la corbeau” – roughly translated “Let them eat crow!”
Au reuoir!

Jack's Rant, June 1

Big Brother, You’re Watching Him!

The art of knowing who might want to buy or trade what has been a time honored tradition as long as anyone can document. Vendors setting up shop to sell specific goods and services fulfilled a need of supply and demand. Moreover, most vendors over time learned what a particular patron might want from them, and would cater to their needs.

There is nothing new at all about this concept. But in today’s global market place, the individual feels more and more left out and catering to an individual’s needs comes at a price that many feel they can’t afford. Oh sure, you ask for a catalog from Crate and Barrel and before you know it your mail box is full of more of the same from Pottery Barn to Z Gallery.

The art of knowing and targeting your market actually began with Sears and Roebucks in 1895 when it published it’s first catalog – a 532 page book filled with just about anything you could imagine, and a few you hadn’t. In just five short years this mail order business turned out to be one of the most successful, and copied businesses ever conceived.

Anytime you bought something from the catalog your request was received by a processing center that verified that you enclosed the right amount of money, that the item requested was indeed what you wanted and before it was forwarded to the distribution center to be sent out, your name and address was checked to see if you had bought something from Sears and Roebucks before. If you were a new customer, a mailing “dog tag” was created – a medal embossed plate with your name and address – that was run through a machine creating a mailing label for shipping to use. If you were an old customer, the clerk would pull your tag and make a label.

But, one other important thing occurred. Whenever you purchased something from Sears and Roebucks the tag was run several times over index cards with what was purchased and when. That was filed by category, and also with your master card, and sometimes cross referenced with other categories.

So, over time, if you were buying a fair amount of farm equipment from Sears, when they had a sale on farm equipment they’d pull the cards of everyone who had bought farm equipment and send it to the processing center to have mailing tags printed. A special catalog was created for just those customers.

By today’s standards, this was very labor intensive endeavor, but it was the grandfather of the modern target marketing techniques used today.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of database companies that can provide you with mailing, emailing, phone numbers of target markets, based on age, sex, income, area you live in and just about any other criteria you wish to filter the data by.

Most all of us have supermarket “Value Shopper” discount cards that we swipe to save on in store promotions, available only to those shoppers who are in the “in club”.

Any time the supermarket chain wants to look at buying trends by zip code, or any other criteria that you gave them when you filled out that card, all they have to do is type in a few parameters and guess what? They can look at what you bought over the last week, month year or more! Even if you don’t have a card, the computer logs exactly what was bought on any transaction, time of day, etc. and can easily see what folks bought for Memorial Day last year to make sure they’ve got a good stock on hand for this year.

Ever noticed how some markets of the same chain have a much better “upgraded” goods in some areas, but not in others? That’s area demographic target marketing. All major chains from Home Depot to Bed Bath and Beyond practice this very specific target stocking practice. Simply put, you won’t find a Kmart on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills!

But with the advent of the internet, and the ability to buy things “on line” this has changed the rules for marketing companies who, up until the early 1990’s thought they had the game pretty well nailed.

Recently I bought a historical account of John Brown’s life on line from Amizon.com. Now, I receive an email from them periodically announcing when they have another new biography that they think I might be interested in. That’s pretty basic stuff that Sears figured out along time ago. But the internet has become much more sophisticated than purchase profiling.

There are several online companies that sell profiled ads. In simple terms, they track what websites you visit. Let’s say you’re an avid gardener and you subscribe to several webzines on the subject. It stores that information, by your sign on name or your Internet Explorer access code married to a particular computer. Then anytime you do a search for something unrelated, let’s say you’re looking for concert tickets, and there are ad windows for other products on that site, and this profiling marketing company has bought advertising access to that sight, it places an ad for gardening equipment, fertilizer, or a local gardening suppler on that site for concert tickets, in the mere seconds that it takes to load the site. It knows what interests you, and where you live! I’m not making any of this up. This has proven to be a muli-million dollar industry in just a few short years, and it’s getting more sophisticated everyday.

Using this model, cable companies are now designing programs to deliver specific advertising to just you, based on what you watch, when you watch and how often you watch.

Within a year’s time, it is estimated, all major cable companies will be able to offer this service to local, regional and national advertisers who are looking to advertise just to their target audience. Watch the Food Channel, Home and Garden and Do It Yourself networks – we’ve got a do it yourselfer who likes to cook, and every time you turn the channel on any cable network that allows for regional cable companies to insert commercials, guess what, you’re going to see the same set of commercials set to your personal demographic profile.
And you didn’t think anyone cared. Think again.

Bon Appétit!