The year in ideas

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This past Sunday's New York Times Magazine was a great issue. The theme? A list of the most interesting ideas of the year as suggested by a slew of people in various industries. As such, it's not a definitive sorted list but just an alpha listing. Some hit, some miss, but all are fun to read. That's probably why I loved Waking Life, the movie. I just like to riff on ideas. Especially those of a contrarian nature.
I'll have to list a few of the more interesting ones when I get home. For example:
Why does Britney Spears appeal to so many people? She is the virgin whore, appealing to both women and men. She flaunts her sex appeal but then plays coy, claiming to be a virgin, to not comprehend the types of messages she sends with her revealing outfits and suggestive lyrics and dance gyrations.
The first revolution in golf ball design in years, coming to a golf shop near you in March 2002.
Evidence-based medicine, a new technique that has debunked lots of myths, such as the placebo effect.
The end of shoelaces. As invented by Nike.
The end of the police lineup as we know it.
Non-romantic dating, or speed dating.
The death of the X-files conspiracy trope.
[On a side note, can I please note that trope is a fabulous word, enormously under-utilized. If I can use just one new word this holiday season, let it be trope.]
Modeling reality with a computer, and, related to that idea, tracking murderers with software. I used this idea in my failed attempt at a 50,000 word novel in November. The father in my story becomes obsessed with modeling everything with computers and loses touch with his own family.
There's a whole list of these ideas on the NYT website, but they only keep this content up for free for a week, so if this whets your appetite, rush over and read them while you can, before this generic link becomes stale.

Jaded

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I went to a Seattle Symphony holiday concert on Friday, and it was jarring because it's been so long since I've really celebrated the end-of-year holidays in a blowout style. In the interim, I wonder if I've become too diseased with irony to appreciate the simple messages of carols. This singer, Brad Little, came out on stage, all 6 feet 8 inches tall (maybe more) and started talking about holiday cheer and twinkling lights and young children frolicing and all I could think of was Troy McClure from the Simpsons, or any of Phil Hartman's character sketches from old SNL. He had that kind of voice. Frighteningly, I think he was serious. I wonder if he cusses in private.
Saw Ocean's 11 yesterday, and it was charming good fun. For me, that is mass popcorn entertainment, much better than the summer spectacles from earlier this year. All about capitalizing on movie stars for their basic star power, good looks. Give them good lines, dress them up nice, let them show off a bit. Good guy wins, gets the girl, gets the money. None of the characters are more than sketches, mannequins which the actors can drape themselves over for the duration of the film.
I've realized a few things. George Clooney is a big movie star (he has recovered nicely from his Batman and Robin debacle). He even has the necessary womanizing rumors floating about him to qualify as a modern rat packer-lite. He also looks good in a tuxedo with the collar undone and the bowtie slung around his neck, untied, like a scarf, an essential quality for any leading man. It says, "I'll dress up, but not all the way, because I'm not a black tie stiff, I'm a little bit of a loose cannon, but not sloppy. I'm fun and style, a rule bender, not a rule breaker. And damn, I look good with this tux half on, imagine what I'd look like if I tied this damn tie."
Brad Pitt dresses more and more flamboyantly in each successive movie as if to say, look at what I can look good in, I'm so damn good looking. Seriously has he worn the same pair of ridiculous sunglasses in any consecutive scenes in the last four movies he's made? My main grips with Pitt is that I have no idea where he comes from. What is he all about? It's a mystery. Pitt and Clooney fall into the category of guys that I don't mind my girlfriends drooling over, because even though I'm not gay, I have to admit that they've got that I don't know what, and if one of my girlfriends dated them, then hey, I'd get to hang out with Brad Pitt or George Clooney, and that wouldn't be so bad.
Julia Roberts, too. She radiates movie star power, but she's never really done it for me. I'm not sure what it is. Yet you know she's just something superhuman.

The problem with this country

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I realized in gauging reaction to the whole Ginger release in the U.S. what it is that bugs me about American life. It's the ruthlessness of the consumer culture. The idea that what makes the most money is right. Any idea that is thought to have a gold pot at the end of the road takes on a wholly unnatural life in the U.S.
It infects consumers with the idea that we need the next best, new thing. I'm as much a guilty party to this as well. Well, maybe I'm more victim than perp. I have this feeling I'll never know when I have what's good enough, because I'm caught up in this distinctly American Darwinian culture. Maybe that's the great American tragedy.
This problem infects the world of movies. Because of the power of media and marketing, and the economic incentives towards mass entertainment, true film art (and I'm not talking about artsy fartsy crap, which is still crap) becomes more and more difficult to both make and see. I realize this because my job recently was all about consumer marketing of movies, and thinking about movies in that way was extremely intuitive from a business perspective, but also sordid. As if a movie was a can of peaches.

Netboox

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I wish there was a library through the mail. I got a Seattle Public Library card, and I haven't used it once. The books area spread out across a whole series of different buildings, and it's too hard to find out if the book you want is available at one building versus another. I wish they offered an option to check out books online and have the book shipped to you, and then when you're done you could ship it back to them and get the next book on your list. Like Netflix for books. They could even charge a monthly subscription fee. I bet it would be net revenue positive for them.
Of course, the problem with books is they are bulky and a pain in the butt to ship (unlike DVDs, which are of a uniform, compact form factor), and there are lots of them so it would be hard to keep all titles in stock. I could live with the latter. Maybe the solution to the former is to only allow books of a certain size to be available through the mail, and to always use book rate to ship them.
I spend too much money on books.

The early days

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Had dinner with Brian and Julie tonight. Helped Brian set up his DVD player with his fancy new Sony tube TV. I love watching people light up when they first experience a sweet home theater setup. Maybe I'm just a home theater snob, but part of it is I just believe that if you're watching high quality film or TV, you should experience it the way it was meant to be seen. Would you rather see the Mona Lisa in person or look at a small replica in a book?
Afterwards, we went over Brian's archive of "classic" e-mails from his history at Amazon. We just sat around laughing our a$$es off at some of the crazy hijinks that occurred over the years, some of the classic personalities we've worked with. The early days of Amazon were all about extremes. Everything was outrageous. These days life at Amazon is like traveling on an ocean liner on steady ocean waters. In the early days we were in a raft made of wood tied together with twine, barely holding together against the onslaught of 40 foot waves of a massive white squall. I'll always be glad I was there for those first several years.
One thing about a company as it grows larger--it is difficult to retain pieces of the company culture uniformly across all the employees. This year, for the first time, I ran into a non-trivial number of employees who seemed to want to shirk the annual tour of duty in the distribution centers. Since I've been held back this year to work on a special project, I'm not sure I can vent without seeming like a hypocrite, but I have to bite my tongue hard when I see how some people justify not volunteering to help out, or listen to excuses that some people come up with not to have to go. Some people gloat over not having to go. It kills me.
In part because I remember when in our early days people would work all day and then head to the DCs and work all night, catch an hour or two of sleep, then do it again the next day. I remember in the early early days when I saw one executive work the DCs for 36 hours straight, until he could barely stand. You'd see everyone in the company in the Seattle DC, fired up to make it all work. I think the type of people who try their best to hide from DC duty, and it is a small minority, are like poison to the company spirit. It's tough for me to stomach, especially because some of the people are actually really nice.
Not that it isn't hard work. But I can't think of any other retail company that doesn't ask the same of its employees at holiday season. In the same way that sports bring out a person's real personality, this annual holiday retail call for volunteers is a litmus test of character.
Ugh, I'm being preachy. Let me flip it and salute my peers who are away at the DCs, who volunteered because they wanted to help, who left without a complaint, and are working hard to get everyone's holiday shipments out on time. Folks like Bill, who I knew would be a great hire for Amazon because the first two holiday seasons at Amazon, he worked in Fernley and then Seattle and busted his butt. And folks like Jason, who try to keep the early Amazon spirit alive by rallying folks to meet our volunteer needs. There's a long list of folks, and I'm really proud to work at the same company with them. They're the types of people, if you started your own company, you'd hire first, because they would step up and accept the responsibilities of ownership.

Don Baylor

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In his wonderful new Historical Baseball Abstract, Bill James points out exactly why I dislike Don Baylor so much:
"But personally, I find him almost intolerable, because, to me, he seems to be engaged in a perpetual charade designed to project the image of great strength. As a manager, he seems to be using this image of great strength, great conviction in the rectitude of his actions, as a substitute for having any reason for what he is doing."

Strange dreams

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I had a dream in which I was peeling off my skin to reveal a new me undereneath. Nothing quite as gory as the scene from Poltergeist, or other X-files inspired bloody moltings. It's a dream that begs for more than the simple interpretation of such things, but I woke up with no intuition about it at all. Maybe I just want to lose my biking tanlines.
The other dream, a strange one in which I have to go rent a super compact white car to drive George Bush across a bridge that will be going up. At the same time, I have to study hard for a class whose final is tomorrow and I haven't been to a class all quarter. I always have that dream. Why?
The Bears have nine lives. They are an embodiment of NFL parity. They really aren't that good, yet they have the best record in the NFL. They have no pass rush unless they blitz. James Allen is immensely frustrating to watch. He is a shifty when he should be plowing forward. The only running back who is fun to watch who jukes around like that is Barry Sanders. The Bears need the A-Train back in a big way.

Spectreman

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I used to watch this show all the time as a child, and for some reason the other day I thought of it. It was such a distinctive show that I can still remember particular scenes even though I haven't watched an episode in years. What stuck with me was the real graphic tragic nature of many of the episodes. Children's parents would be transformed into monsters which Spectreman would kill, but only with great sadness. Spectreman himself would go through all sorts of trials and tribulations. Blindness. Sickness.
What was innovative about the whole show was the idea that the villains, these ape people from space, created monsters from the pollution or evil of the earth. These creatures were mankind's own failings come to life. It wasn't just about a giant robot beating up on space invaders, as many Japanese cartoons are today. In this way, it is similar to old Godzilla shows (though I think Spectreman may have come first?). That's what Hollywood missed with their adaptation of Godzilla, this whole idea that Godzilla arose from mankind's nuclear waste as a symbol of the perversions which are possible with advances in technology, and science.
The Japanese have a very strange love-hate relationship with technology. It's fascinating.

Free market baseball

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Congress is looking at ways of curbing Major League Baseball's antitrust powers. What's interesting about this is the idea that if it passes, owners of teams would have more ability to move their teams to different cities.
I'm of two minds on this. One is that I've always thought a clear way to solve competitive issues for small-market teams is to allow them to move to bigger markets. Why does New York City only have two baseball teams when its market is, and I'm guessing here, 10 times as large as the Montreal market? That is what free market economics is all about, allowing the business to chase capital and customers wherever they might be. The argument against this is that teams might constantly move around, and fans would not have stable teams to root for in their hometowns. I wonder, though, if that would really happen so often. Would it really be that cost-effective to buy a team and move it year after year? I think there would be more stability than one might suspect.
What's more, it's a problem that could be solved by setting some rules that restrict a team from moving again until it's stayed in a city for some minimum period of time.
Of couse, there are numerous options to prevent the Yankees from being the best team year after year. Look at football and what they've been able to do to achieve more parity. True revenue sharing. Salary caps. It all comes back to what type of competitiveness you'd like to see in the sport.
And of course, none of this excuses lousy management. Microsoft is a beast, but it did so primarily by being a smart business. The Yankees, damn them, have had a great run, but a lot of the players that have been core to their run have been straight out of their farm system (Jeter, Rivera, Williams, Posada, Pettite). It's not as if they bought all their World Series rings. There are very few cases, the Expos being one of them, where a baseball team's lack of competitiveness is primarily due to lack of money. The A's are a sign that a team can be in a small market and also competitive, and that's because Billy Beane, their General Manager, is a smart smart guy.

The bees knees

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Brett Favre threw one of the most beautiful passes I've ever seen last night. In the 3rd quarter, he launched a rocket down the right sideline and hit Bill Schroeder in stride for a 43 yard TD pass. That thing was a tight spiral missile, probably never went more than 12 feet off the ground. He is so much fun to watch because he has a great fastball which, combined with his gambling personality, makes him an old school gunslinger.
If he had played with better receivers over the years, who knows what kind of stats he'd have.

Pearly whites

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I finally upgraded to an electric toothbrush. I tried it last night for the first time. It's a strange sensation, and doesn't quite provide the tangible feedback through my fingers that tells me I'm doing a good job. But afterwards, my teeth were indeed clean. A $100 toothbrush is definitely a status symbol, as well as a badge of personal hygiene. But I will miss brushing away with a regular toothbrush. I was good at it.
An electric flosser, now that would be something. I am an obsessive flosser, but I think that process could be improved. Every day I feel like I'm going to strangle the tips off of one of my fingers with dental floss.
I have my 6 month checkup tomorrow morning. I'm feeling supremely confident.

Meet Ginger So this is

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Meet Ginger

So this is Ginger, the Segway Human Transporter. Check it out in action.
What's cool? Using sophisticated gyros and motors, it mimics a human's sense of balance, so it holds you upright. It senses where you want to go by how you shift your balance on it and it takes you there automatically. I've heard from folks who've ridden it that the feeling is uncanny. And it can move an adult around for a full day non stop on something like 10 cents of electricity. Until Harry Potter brooms become a reality, I suppose it's the closest thing to a machine that moves according to your thoughts.
Amazon.com is buying some for industrial use, so maybe I'll get to ride one in the near future at one of our fulfillment centers. To change the world, I'd have to want to ride this to, say, downtown Seattle to go catch a movie instead of driving my car. I'll have to think about whether that's the case. Where would I park it? How would I carry things? Will they build baskets for this thing?
The consumer model will cost $3000 and go on sale in a year. I can't wait to put one on my Amazon wishlist. I'll start saving now.
I think Dean Kamen is actually more interesting than Ginger. This on Kamen from Time:
A bachelor, Kamen lives near Manchester in a hexagonally shaped, 32,000-sq.-ft. house he designed. Outside, there's a giant wind turbine to generate power and a fully lighted baseball diamond; in the basement, a foundry and a machine shop. Kamen's vehicles include a Hummer, a Porsche and two helicopters--both of which he helped design and one of which he uses to commute to work each day. He also owns an island off the coast of Connecticut. He calls it North Dumpling, and he considers it a sovereign state. It has a flag, a navy, a currency (one bill has the value of pi) and a mutual nonaggression pact with the U.S., signed by Kamen and the first President Bush (as a joke, we think).

Show me MLB commissioner Bud

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Show me

MLB commissioner Bud Selig claims 25 of 30 baseball teams lost money last year. That's completely unbelievable. But let's say that it's true (and I'd love to let some auditors go over the books for a few months to check that out). Let's see, owners get hundreds of millions of dollars from Fox and ESPN and local networks to broadcast the games, they get huge new baseball stadiums that are funded by tax payers (I'm still bitter about paying for two damn stadiums here in Seattle), they raise ticket prices every year, and they can't make any money? What do they want, a government subsidy? If that's true, I should be running a baseball team. You bet I'd figure out a way to make a team profitable.
Except maybe the Expos.
Dean Kamen's secretive new device "Ginger" gets unveiled this Monday on Good Morning America.
Baseball gave out its end of year awards today. I find the whole process of allowing sportswriters to vote on these awards to be so imprecise that the awards are meaningless. The two Chicago sportswriters were the only two who voted Sammy Sosa as the National League MVP. I'm from Chicago, and even I recognize that Barry Bonds had a far better season. In the AL, as Rob Neyer points out, the only two sportswriters who had Boone--Ichiro--Giambi as their top three choices were the two Seattle Tacoma writers. These hometown biases might even out across a pool of writers and might not even alter the vote in any year, but to me it just means that the awards themselves are fairly arbitrary as a barometer of value among the top players. As are any subjective awards, right? We should all think for ourselves.

Dumber than he writes The

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Dumber than he writes


The literary world has enjoyed the whole Franzen-Oprah spat from
the sidelines. Nothing so fun since Wolfe and Updike traded barbs.
Really, Franzen comes off looking like an ass. Yeah, it's true,
Oprah has selected some real stinkers. Franzen's mistake is thinking
that he owns his brand and can declare himself part of the literary
elite. Most of the influence he can exert on his place in literary
history was done when he penned the last sentence of the book
and sent it off to the printers. His destiny is for the readers and
the critics and the world at large to decide.
He is a good writer. But about PR and branding he's a rookie.

Apple iPod Lots of advertising

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Apple iPod


Lots of advertising for the new Apple iPod.
Certainly, for the price, it offers a ton of memory. I'm sure
it's easy to use, as most Apple products are. I see many
problems though. I don't know that MP3 players are really
essential gizmos for anyone I know. They fulfill a niche
market right now. I'm skeptical of static memory buffers
on hard-drive MP3 players because I use them primarily
when I'm exercising and if they skip while jogging that's
an automatic negative in my book. Maybe the 20 minute
buffer is sufficient, though. That's a lot.
But mostly, it's the Apple-centricity of the thing that
makes me wonder how lucrative it will be as a product.
The thing doesn't support Windows PCs right now, and
hey, all my MP3 tracks are on my Windows desktop
and that's probably the case for millions of users in this
country. The firewire interface which is embraced and
supported by Apple on its PCs is rare on PCs today.
Most Windows PCs require installing a firewire card
to support that, and that automatically the chance that
95% of Windows PC users will have firewire.
I love the way Apple computers look. But Macintoshes
are doomed to be niche items by economics. Any
product created for a Windows platform sells into
an installed base a gazillion times larger. It is
difficult to justify sinking heavy R&D into creating
products for Macs when you first should commit that
budget to Windows computers. Sure, OS X might
be easier to use than Windows XP (I don't know if it
is since I don't have Windows XP and haven't
really figured out all the nuances of OS X) but
it's not enough of an advantage to outweight the
economics.
That doesn't mean Mac lovers can't enjoy the Macs
they use, nor does it mean that Apple doesn't make
great products. It's strictly business.

Xmas shopping Christmas shopping has

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Xmas shopping


Christmas shopping has begun in earnest. Unfortunately today
I sent a Share the Love e-mail for all sorts of gifts I purchased
from Amazon so some recipients probably know what they're
receiving. I have been such a space cadet for the past month,
e.g. going to the wrong airport for my flight back to Boston.
I'd like to think these are the distractions of genius but more
likely they're evidence of the onset of senility.
The weather in Seattle now is brutal. Biting cold and heavy rain.
My next personal vacation will absolutely be to some place
sunny. Absolutely. My office is an ice chest. I am wearing
a scarf indoors. I may attempt to start a small fire using
old Powerpoint presentations.