Let's take a moment to calmly examine how our lives or those of our loved ones might be improved by participating in the current fad of mud slinging and hate-mongering. They can't. Only the lifestyle of the purveyors of hatred will be improved.

Elia Kazan's 1957 movie, with superb performances by Andy Griffith (sans Opie) and Patricia Neal at her finest, put on display the insidious nature of political posturing. Scale this to today's huge media machine, including the mindless retweets on Twitter and you may see why there's so much fear in the air.

More timely now, perhaps, than when it was first released in 1957, Elia Kazan's overheated political melodrama explores the dangerous manipulative power of pop culture. It exposes the underside of Capra-corn populism, as exemplified in the optimistic fable of grassroots punditry.

A Face in the Crowd will scare you, should scare you to death. It's history talking to you, saying "you never learn, do you?" Do yourself a favor and see this movie.

Orange France is the company whose non toll-free number I called twice a week for six weeks to get the phone line whose bill we were receiving every month connected to the Internet.This is the company who, week after week, told me "We guarantee you that we will fix this or call you or send an SMS with the staus of your issue within 72 hours."

This is the company who has a specific support email which auto-responds with a surtaxed phone number to call for support.

This is the company whose support people (at multiple levels) told me "I don't understand, I'm looking at your record and I see it isn't connected. Yes, it should have been done. I am submiting an escalation request."

This is the company whose support person told me after 6 weeks, "You have to go to an Orange store to get the order cancelled and the equipment turned in."

Orange France is the company whose store, pictured above made me wait an hour while prospecive suckers tried iPhones.

This is the company whose employee in the store pictured above told me "We can't cancel the order."

This is the company whose employee, when told "Orange support line told me to come here specifically to get you to cancel my order."  in the store pictured above told me

"Yes, I know they say that on the phone, but it isn't true. We can't do it."

This is the company whose employee showed a Powerpoint at HDComm with smiling children and marketing "We care" language that is 100% false and hypocritical.

Orange France is a company I have no love for at all. Now you have an idea why. And I'm not alone.

 

 

Here's a link to a cassette recording of his reading of Eleanor Updale's Montmorency: Thief, Liar, Gentleman? 

I'm not sure how well-known this book is, but I'd never heard of it before I found it by looking for audio recordings by Fry.

 

I have listened to this unabridged audio book at least 20 times, and just finished it again.

It is a great story line, but what makes it come alive is Fry's reading. I wish Audible and Amazon would record more titles with Mr. Fry, I could listen to him all the time. He also reads "Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy", originally a BBC production, which I've also listened to a hundred times, first on the BBC longwave, week by week, then on Audible's recordings.

 

 

Seriously?

You clicked on this link?

:-)

 Probably, you are better off with the Withings:

A scale that Tweets your weight.

The idea being that you'll be sufficiently embarassed if you don't lose weight. That might just keep your heart beating a little longer.

It's one thing to grow a language, adding foreign words in common usage. It can also happen by modifying existing ones like Chris Borgan's recent use of shareability - perfectly logic and understandable. Funny by the way, Chris was challenged about the existence of the word, but he didn't inventshareability, I just saw a reference to it from a 1986 article and hundreds more recent.

Inventing a whole new language of web nomenclature and navigation is something we're occasionally asked to do by customers. Simply stated, here's why this is not a good idea. The way you visit web sites is a kind of language. Everyone expects to find information like contact, visit, menus, wine lists, technical product data, company background, opening hours, etc. They expect this to be in a language they know, the one they've seen on a million other sites.

 

The temptation to be too creative is strong, and I have erred more than once in that direction. One day I thought it would be cool, instead of calling the search "Search" we'd call it "Find". It works on a level where you read it in a text like this, but not on the level of the scan you do when you first reach a site. Most ergonics folks will tell you the first 20 seconds are when the critical decision to invest in actually reading a web site takes place.

A commercial web site can, in effect, be a visual answering machine. Realizing what the visitor is most anxious to find there is your number one priority.  Here's a funny thing that happened to me in California, when I wanted to reserve a table in a restaurant. I went to the web site, which was one page. It had all of the information I wanted right then: address, directions to get there, phone number, open hours, and descriptive stuff I skipped, since I already knew all about it and wanted to book a table there. Now here's where it gets funny: I called the "Reservations" number, which was shared by the same owner's other restaurant. Here's what I heard:

Thank you for calling *****. We are open from **** to *** Monday thru Friday and from *** to *** Saturday. Sunday hours are *** to ***.

We are located at ********, across the street from **** and just around the corner from ****. We are proud to announce the opening of our new restaurant ***** this summer. (Long description follows....)

"For Restaurant A, press one. For restaurant B, press 2"

How long would it take you to figure out that the last line of this message should have been the first?

Did you know you can still smell the wine barrels in the Chartrons district of Bordeaux? Here on the quais, it's more coffee and food from local shops and restaurants preparing the fare for lunch.

The night we recorded Greg LeRoy's guitar video, he brought over a bottle of Courvoisier that is at least several decades old. I've never tasted Cognac this good. The nose filled the entire house. A few drops left in the bottle kept that delicious aroma in the house the next day! No burn, just an unforgettable taste.

We toasted Greg's dad Henry LeRoy.

I published this link earlier: http://vuc.li/ReportPhish

It explains how to report a phishing email received on Gmail. Last night, I got what appeared to be an authentic email tellimng me my account was charged by NewEgg. Like a lot of people, I do a lot of transactions on the net, so it isn't impossible that invoices come in via email, although I've heard of NewEgg and I know I haven't bought anything. The mail was not marked as suspicious. I got another copy today, and it was covered with bright red warnings about phishing attempts. I reported last noght's email and I know that thousands of others must have as well. This is one way that Google can determine the suspicious nature of an email, a form of crowsourcing for the benefit of all.

In the last few days, I've received literally dozens of fake Amazon "Thanks for your purchase" emails. Like you, I know these are fake and I know how to look at the source of the mail using the "View Original" option in the "Reply" menu. But are we so smart as to never get bitten? I have inadvertently clicked on a spot on web pages before, and when reading Gmail, you're on a web page. A tiny slip of the mouse button, and you may swallow a trojan without even knowing it.

Please be sure to report spam and phishing attempts to Gmail or wherever you get your mail, because it really does help others identify them, and once they are identified, like ugly, stinging insects, they can be avoided or even exterminated.

In 19ss (sixty-something), I played 5 or 6 nights a week in a bar in downtown Minneapolis, the Vincent van Go-Go. We called it "The Vincent". I can't recall if the bad had yet changed names to The Soul Heirs, or were we still Froggy and His Friends? I know that Doug "Froggy" Nelson quit early on and Warren L. replaced him on drums. Warren is still around in Mpls, selling clothes, something he was always interested in more than anyone in the band. He picked out the "uniforms" we wore and called the combinations for each night. "Clown and pumpkin tomorrow night, guys!". That referred to a checkered top and pumpkin-colored pants.

On bass guitar was Charlie L. The latest news I have on him was his arrest for pilfering 'script drugs in houses listed on the real eastate market. When bass player Michael Brown joined us, Charlie played rhythm guitar. He was the main vocalist and sang Ray Charles' version of You Are My Sunshine. The less said about that, the better, I think. When Charlie took the occasional guitar solo, my longtime friend Zippy Caplan qualified the sound as "nursery rhyme leads". Michael was a cool guy, very laid back black dude who played the shit out of a Fender 5-string bass. We used to go out for food after the gig mosts nights, usually to Embers.

The waitresses were memorable at the Vincent. Phyllis and Jackie are the two who come to mind. I tried, but never got next to either one, but they were both very nice to me. I don't like the expression "hit" with relation to women, by the way, and have always thought Jimi's "Let me stand into your fire" the ultimate perfect image of the act. Nevertheless, I did neither with either.

I recall only a few of the tunes we played. I remember practicing the harmonics for hours in the solo of Nowhere Man by the Beatles. I think we probably also played Sea of Love, as I can recall Charlie singing that. We must have played more Beatles tunes. Also She's An Artist, Don't Look Back, or whatever that Dylan tune was called. I remember Dave "Snaker" Ray (RIP) or Spider John Koerner (holy moley, Spider is like a decade older than me). One of these guys came in to the bar one night and told me I "needed some guitar lessons". I took that advice decades later when I took a lesson from the truly great Ted Greene, who wrote a book every guitar player should study, regardless of what kind of music you play: Chord Chemistry.

I look back at these days of (relative) innocense with pleasure. I was lucky I guess not to fall victim to forces that ruined many peoples' lives indefinitely, including drug and alcohol abuse but also getting drafted into a particularly ugly and motiveless war. And this bar gig came just at the very beginnings of what was later know as the sexual revolution.

Recorded a few things last night with my friend Greg LeRoy in Santa Barbara

 

 

Greg is a versatile guitarist and one of the things he does well is solo gigs for wine tasting, parties, etc. If you're in the Santa Barbara area, lok him up for your event.