Cultural Oddity

Money is not intellectual

Here is an interesting article about "blogosphere", and how a blog can (should?)  make money:

"...publishers make money by selling readers, not adspace, and that if he’s going to make money, he’s going to have to do so by getting high-value readers that companies want to reach."

The author seems to think that a blog need to have a substantial content in order to make money:

"The job of the editorial side ..., then, should not be to maximize pageviews. Instead, it should be to create the best-quality content for the readers that Blodget wants: to build a large and loyal readership base which feels that it has a strong relationship with the site."

I could not agree less.

Creating a loyal reader achieves just that -- a loyal reader. A person who comes over to the site to read something of substance. This is not necessarily a significant fraction of people browsing around. Not to mention that an average the reader of high-quality content is probably purposeful enough in his/her visit to read, and not to click on them distracting ads around. For that, you need the types who buy stuff "just as seen on TV". Intellectual, they are not. But "The Basic Instinct" was highly profitable. As well as "The Hangover".

Sell them soap operas, not Shakespeare.

American Soap Opera

Here is a classic American Soap opera. It has a former Playboy model, an old oil tycoon, and, above all, American lawyers:

"It initially pitted Smith against the son of J. Howard Marshall over the $1.6 billion estate the oil tycoon left after his 1995 death at age 90. J. Howard Marshall had wed Smith the year before when she was 26.

Marshall's son E. Pierce Marshall died in 2006 and Smith perished after a drug overdose in 2008. Their heirs and lawyers kept up the legal fight that included one ruling awarding Smith $474 million."

Just as in a classic soap opera, the original cast (Anna Nicole Smith, her late husband J. Howard Marshal, and even his son E. Pierce Marshall) is gone and dead, but "the show must go on". The show in the courtroom, propelled by the real actors -- lawyers.

How surreal!

Dusty future

A quote from Associated Press's article about dust storm in Beijing:

"China's expanding deserts now cover one-third of the country because of overgrazing, deforestation, urban sprawl and drought. The shifting sands have led to a sharp increase in sandstorms — the grit from which can travel as far as the western United States."

Here you go. A future of man-handled earth. Coming to a location near you in the form of dust storm.

Pedophile Priests

Here is another wave of pedophile priest scandals. This time, current Pope is implicated in covering up a child rape by another priest. 

Well, sometimes it seems to me that there is a 50% coincidence between "organized religion" and "organized crime".

Apparently, there is no mechanism in the Catholic church to remove the Pope, because the latter possesses "supreme" God-like power.

Yeah, right. How antiquated!

These rules have to be changed in the modern times. Or Catholic church won't survive.

Life purpose of blogs

Calculated Risk has a recent post with embedded video, where another blogger talked about leading blogs about economy.

Something he said resonated with me. That was "insightful commentary". I think that's a distinguishing feature of the blogs, as opposed to the mainstream media.

Sure, blogs can have elements of entertainment, such as Mental Health Breaks at Andrew Sullivan's blog. Or breaking news, such as Google's management blogs. But a strong distinguishing feature of a leading blog has to be the insight. Otherwise it's hard to have a following in this media, which tends to be massive and anonymous (or meaningless) by default.

Right there

Americans have a strange usage of the words "right there". It's highly ambiguous, and at times it could mean something like "in the 2 mile vicinity of your target destination." And it would never occur to an American giving direction to do something simple and clear, such as to draw a map. Instead, he/she would indicate the path with a feeling of driving distance. As in "drive 3 lights, turn left, and after 2nd stop sign you'll be right there." Of course, in reality it could be 4 lights, not 3, and in the absence of redundant information it's too easy to get lost.

But the following passage toped anything I've ever seen so far (taken from here):

Entering campus at the Main (east) Entrance, proceed uphill along Coolidge Drive. You will  go through a traffic light and pass Hagar Drive.  Continue up Coolidge and it will make a sharp bend to the left in the trees near Stevenson College. Coolidge becomes McLaughlin Drive as you enter upper campus. Proceed until you get through 3 stop signs (Hagar Drive, Chinquapin Road, and the College 9 and 10/Social Sciences access road). After the 3rd stop sign you will cross a bridge over a ravine. Take the first right after the bridge which is an un-named paved road that leads up to the Fackler Co-Generation Plant and Lick Observatory offices. Follow this road around to the left  passing behind the loading dock of the Communications building. Continue up the hill with the whit trailer on your right. At the top of the road, on the right there will be a white greenhouse and our office which is the brown, double-wide trailer with a wooden deck and handicap access ramp.

Many-many things are wrong with these directions. Asking the driver to follow the ever-changing names of the road is asking for trouble. Add counting the stop signs, keeping track of the surrounding (ravine), and you wonder if somebody used these directions for real.

Indicating the path on a (google) map would have been way too difficult, of course.

On Johnny Depp

"Still, Depp had no problem getting into proper bizzaro spirit." --Entertainment Weekly on shooting yet another version of Alice in the Wonderland.

This pretty much sums up Johnny Depp for me. In a good way. He is a professional, and this is his specialty, after all.

The cause of similarities between the USA and the USSR

Something dawned on me while watching The Young Turks. For many years now I have been feeling like I'm back in the USSR every now and then. All the while living in the USA.

It's an odd feeling. It's not like the countries are all that similar. The lifestyle is distinctly different. The cultures are very different. But a strange feeling kept resurfacing that I've seen this before.

I think now I know why.

The funny ideology aside, the USSR can be viewed as one gigantic corporation. Where the top-level managers ("Politbureau") would make all the decisions. For everything. Which is, of course, highly unhealthy and inefficient.

As Cenk Uygur pointed out, the USA is controlled by corporations. In form, it is a democracy. But in substance, the so-called representatives have been bought and  controlled by corporations.

And so, the difference is one-corporation state or a dozen-corporations state. It's a very fine difference. So fine that it's unimportant in daily life. Once a corporation has the influence, you get all the goodies associated with the former soviet society:

• Taking the corporate survival over individual life.
• Economic inefficiency.
• Corruption.

International Women's Day

Back in the Soviet Union we had "International Women's Day" celebrations on March 8th. It's the day when you give flowers to all women you know, who are also relieved from many habitual chores. Such as doing dishes. At least for a day.

Here in the USA there is no trace of such un-compromised celebration of women. There is Mother's Day, of course. But that's just for mothers, not for every woman independent of age and family status.

And so I thought that to name March 8th as International Women's Day is a classical soviet distortion. That it's not really international, virtually unknown elsewhere.

Well, perhaps I was wrong. After all, CERN decided to celebrate it this year. And CERN is hardly soviet.

Moreover, Wikipedia (unless it's wrong) claims that the day is also celebrated outside the former soviet block, in such countries as Australia, Italy, Norway, Spain, Portugal, and Turkey.

It also claims that the tradition originated in the USA. Well, maybe the tradition will come back at some point. For now, the US counterpart of CERN, Fermilab decided to celebrate the March 8th as well.