Captain Digital

Random musings on politics, society, and pop culture from the Internet's marketing curmudgeon.

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Archives for 2009

When Marketers Attack!

I’m in Dallas tonight, an overnight stop on a trip home. I went to Stonebriar Mall to find a replacement case for my crapalicious Window Mobile phone (Never again. Just trust me on this…you do NOT want a Windows Mobile anything. Ever). So I’m walking along, minding my own business, and suddenly I’m accosted by a mall cart sales rep, offering me a free sample of something I don’t want and don’t need. I wave him off. Not to be deterred, he says “can I ask you a question?,” and starts to invade my personal space. Oh, but I’m ready for him this time. “Nope. Sorry…In a hurry…gotta keep moving…thanks anyway,” I say, as I power walk away. You see, I’ve been here before – literally and situationally. The mall cart salesreps are the slimy underbelly of live sales. They prey on people who respond to a question like that with a naive willingness to answer what they think is a reasonable request. If you’re the type that doesn’t wish to offend, you’ve got “sheeple” written all over you as far as these jackals are concerned.

I hate that. [Read more…] about When Marketers Attack!

Why I used to like Garrison Keillor.

G. Keillor - an entertainer who is no longer entertaining
G. Keillor - an entertainer who is no longer entertaining

I love things that are funny. I’m kind of an equal-opportunity fan of humor…I love everything from lowbrow slapstick comedy to very cerebral, sophisticated humor. In 1894, I discovered Garrison Keillor and A Prairie Home Companion. I was enthralled. Here was a show and a writer/comedian who was witty in a very subtle, self-mocking way, that struck a chord in me that had heretofore been silent. I immediately sought out as much as I could find on Keillor – his books, recordings,et cetera . A couple of years later, when I heard he was taking his show on tour, I contacted the show and finagled a trip back to Baton Rouge, so I could see the show, live, and interview Keillor.

During the press conference on that Friday afternoon before the first show, I asked Keillor, “how does it feel to be in the buckle of the Bible Belt?” He looked very thoughtful and quiet, and said, “I’ll have to think about that.” Friday evening, as I sat in the audience, Keillor stepped up to the microphone to begin his monologue and said, “this morning, someone asked ‘what does it feel like to be in the buckle of the Bible Belt?’ That question was also on the mind of Senator K. Thorvalsen…” [Read more…] about Why I used to like Garrison Keillor.

Cats & Dogs & Men & Women.

For the record, I never thought I was a “cat person.” I’ve always been partial to dogs. Part of that was because you can train a dog to do what you want. You can’t tell a cat anything. (Well, you can, but not so’s he’ll listen.) When I was a kid, if we had a pet, it was a dog. (Okay. To be accurate, I once had a hamster, and a rabbit that hung himself – named “Lucky,” natch.)

Growing up in Louisiana, you have to take French lessons in school – it’s the law. I hated it, particularly the idea that nouns had gender. How in the Hell can you keep that straight? And why were all dogs “feminine” (la chien) and cats “masculine” (le chat)? I mean, there are male and female dogs, and male and female cats, right? What’s the idea of assigning an entire species a gender? [Read more…] about Cats & Dogs & Men & Women.

Winners…and Winners.

Well, the Steelers pulled it out. At the last minute (well, within the last minute). They are now the winning-est franchise in NFL history. (Which means the Cowboys have GOT to get on the stick and win some more Super Bowls.) But the Cardinals are winners in my book, too. They kept it competitive all the way through the game, and never quit. They had something to prove – that a 9 and 7 team belonged in the big game as something more than a fluke. And prove it they did – they were way more competitive than I’d expected. With a decent season next year, they will finally be able to drive a stake through that ‘curse’ that has put them as perennial losers. They looked like a franchise that could have easily won it all. Next year, they just might. All in all, a good game, an interesting game. And a game that they’ll likely be talking about for years to come. Nice job, gentlemen. On both sides of the field.

Television’s Global Village.

It’s that time of year. Super Bowl Sunday. The one time of year that just about everybody in the country stops what they are doing, to do the same thing. Watch TV. Some watch it because their teams are in it. Some watch because they love football, and are but one game away from going cold-turkey ’til the summer rolls around. Some watch it for the commercials. And some watch it just because it’s the thing to do.

Some (like me) watch it from the comfort of their homes – largely, for me anyway, because I hate cigarette smoke. Some host Super Bowl parties. Some watch from sports bars or other public places. The important thing, though, is that it gives us all a commonality of purpose and experience. [Read more…] about Television’s Global Village.

Stimulate Me!

Washington D.C. seems to be obsessed with the idea of stimulating the economy. On the surface, this seems like a noble idea – our economy is in the tank right now, and the sooner we get it moving in the right direction, the better. Unfortunately, looking to Washington to fix our economy is rather like asking some thug that smashed your car window and stole your CDs to repair the car and give it a nice detailing. And putting Congress in charge of writing a bill to allocate funds for economic stimulus is not too different from putting the foxes in charge of the hen house and expecting the hens to thrive and egg production to rise.

Um…no. Don’t think so. [Read more…] about Stimulate Me!

Project Momentum.

There are two things I hate regarding the realities of business. I hate having to stop work on a project before it’s complete. But I hate having to return to a “cold” project after being away from it for a period of time that’s long enough to make me forget everything about it.

I’ve been working on a video game project lately. It’s not rocket science, but like all projects that require coding, you get into a thousand different decisions and judgment calls that force you to have to go back and remember what you did, why you did it, and rethink your choices.

In a way, it’s more difficult to come back to a project and work on it again (even if you comment your code religiously). It’s kind of like how they say it’s more difficult to relocate down the street than it is to move across the country. Familiarity breeds contempt. Something like that.

I crack open the source code, and I have to spend an hour or so, reviewing what I did – and why I did it. And of course, if I’m adding something, odds are, I’m going to have to either hope I was prescient enough to write code that can be easily adaptable, or code that was designed for expansion.

In a way, it’s kind of an out-of-body (out-of-mind?) experience, akin to the concept used by SciFi writers, where the protagonist is thrown into an alternate universe, where things are almost the same as the way they are back home. But not quite.

No big point here, fans of reason. No solutions offered. No revelations revealed. Just observations. And a wish that it wasn’t so bloody hard for me to go back and edit old code. Sigh…

TyperActive.

I love typography. Always have. From a very early age, I’ve been fascinated with letterforms. When I was in elementary school, I used to rubber-band two pencils together to create a crude way to draw Blackletter (a.k.a. “Old English”) lettering on posters. While other kids decorated their textbook’s book covers with drawings of muscle cars, military tanks or alien spacecraft, I decorated mine with words in a variety of typefaces. Blackletter, calligraphy, Cooper Black, Bodoni, Futura – you name it, and I experimented with it. As I grew into a career as a freelance artist, I discovered that typefaces could provide a subtext (no pun intended) to ad copy and headlines. The face I chose to design something had the power to communicate meaning, context, and even tell people how to think about the words on the printed page, before they’d even read them.

Waaaaay cool. [Read more…] about TyperActive.

Sauce for the Goose.

For the last eight years, I’ve suffered along with the rest of my fellow Conservatives, having to put up with much of Hollywood, the mainstream press, cartoonists, and just about everybody on the left who had access to a microphone, make George Bush out to be some kind of drooling moron, one step above a “developmentally disabled” charity case. The left has righteously proclaimed that they are not biased, and had no axe to grind regarding Bush & Co., and that it was all in the twisted imagination of Conservatives, that they were out to “get” Bush. What excesses they DO cop to, they claim were “all in good fun,” and they point to the fact that they also skewered Clinton (admittedly an easy target) during his Presidency. (My personal fave was the crack about Hillary forbidding the installation of a walk-in humidor in the Clinton Presidential Library.) They also protest (too much, if you ask me) regarding their treatment of Obama, claiming that they have not turned a blind eye to him, his past, and his mistakes, and asserting that they are not so enthralled with The Chosen One, that they refuse to be as critical of him as they have been of W.

Time to show yer cards, boys. [Read more…] about Sauce for the Goose.