Just occurred to me

Complaining “You should appreciate me more!” just prompts people to think of all the reasons why they don’t.

Pasta Bowls

The other day I realized I had a problem in that every time I thought of Mario Batali, celebrity chef and restaurateur, I immediately thereafter thought of Rick Warren, celebrity pastor of Saddleback mega-Church and author of The Purpose Driven Life.

It’s not that I confuse one for the other. It’s that when calling up the mental image of Batali, my brain likes to skip on over to Warren too and vice versa. (Synapses misfiring?) Perhaps a neuroscientist can explain all this to me.

Another possibility is that these men share traits in common besides endomorphic body types, and on some intuitive level I know this but can’t articulate it. In any event, here’s evidence that I’m not completely insane.

PS. I almost titled this post “Girth of a Salesman.” But I thought better of it. But not better enough not to include this note.

Final Chapters

Why are the last chapters of books that wrestle with social and political dilemmas so often so disappointing? David Greenberg writes:

Practically every example of that genre, no matter how shrewd or rich its survey of the question at hand, finishes with an obligatory prescription that is utopian, banal, unhelpful or out of tune with the rest of the book. When it comes to social criticism, no one, it seems, has an exit strategy….

Read the rest of this entry »

Screech Owl Design

Where will I buy my next stash of greeting cards? Here.

And I suppose now’s a fine time to dust off some cuteness by Michael Kinsley:

[Click to enlarge. Even still you may have to zoom in.]

How Frustrating Design Meetings Get Frustrating

It starts with wireframe templates. You’ll be sitting in a design meeting and presented with pleasant-looking professional pages that show the basic layout of the eventual website pages, with industry-appropriate stock photos and lorem ipsum dummy text where the eventual words will go. Designers create boxes for these words, which they refer to as “content,” and everyone figures they’ll figure out later what words should populate these content boxes.

But people read words, not boxes. It strikes me as weird, if not totally ass-backwards, to create boxes first, and promise yourself you’ll ponder the words to fill them later. 

Because say you create three boxes, but once you start crafting your message, it’s obvious that everything you have to say can fit in one? Say you’ve four boxes, plus the technology to push updates onto Twitter and Facebook, but haven’t figured out who at the organization will be Tweeting, how often, and in what voice, and you’ve really, now that you think about it, only two “types” of “content,” leaving you unsure of what to do with those two extra boxes?

Starting with wireframes before a GREAT deal of thought is given to text also creates busywork down the line. If your home page has six boxes, and you’d like to keep your page looking fresh so as to reward repeat visitors with new and dazzling information, you now have six content that require regular updating.

One solution (and I really need to think more about this) is to encourage more organizations companies to start , at least, envisioning the traditional blog model that sites like the Atlantic use well: one central column that provides many chewy things to read, can be updated often, and then a top banner and sidebar populated with custom categories that link to pages and older (but still relevant) content.

“Very different skill sets”

On DBW [Digital Book World] Insights, Forrester Research’s James McQuivey comments on book publishing CEOs:

Some of them are expressing real significant concern [that] you can only retrain people so much. People aren’t ready to be retrained, or don’t even have the baseline skills needed to go from being a publicity manager for titles to being someone who follows Twitter and promotes activity on a Facebook page. Those are very different skill sets.

Because the baseline skills needed to follow someone on Twitter are, um…. But basically I think McQuivey’s saying that CEOs are cracking their knuckles in anticipation of laying-off well-compensated senior staff members who are discovering that their ability to get a Today Show producer on the phone doesn’t command as much respect or dollars as it once did.

About that prospect, I feel total ambivalence. But the notion that individuals with ample experience and demonstrated dedication cannot be or aren’t “ready” to be retrained is grotesque. It’s simply a prissy / Victorian way of saying that bosses would prefer to replace these publicity managers with younger staffers paid one-fourth of their predecessor’s salary. Yay, progress!

best “How to Be Useful” Google alert to date

The Fat Controller enlists Thomas to teach the silly Logging Locos how to be useful.

At 7:15 a.m. I was not awake enough for that sentence. The existence of the “Fat Controller” was also news to me.

Earlier:

As long as I’m keeping a running list, cont. II

As long as I’m keeping a running list, cont.

As long as I’m keeping a running list of “how to be useful” mentions…

Sting contemplates his new Christmas album

Institutional Learning, Pratfalls (?) Thereof

Questions presented by morning coffee with Richard Eion Nash:

When you’re a scrappy upstart working alone and your education in an industry (in this case, publishing) is incremental and goal-driven, not process-driven, are you better equipped to innovate? Most professional training is on-the-job and formulated along the “this is how we do X” model. This is how we write a press release, this is how we craft jacket copy, and so on.

But if you — knowing little or nothing about industry procedure, and having no institutional inertia at your back — had to drum up attention for an author or book, would you even decide to write a press release?

Or would you adopt other means?

Snow

You may have heard. There’s snow on the ground in New York City. These were taken yesterday, on the eastern edge of Chinatown:

Not Angry, Just Fat

I spent part of Saturday flipping through long-neglected clip files, separating old letters and ticket stubs from pages ripped from The New Yorker. I wasn’t expecting to discover that I had anticipated, in some minor-key sense, my new-found appreciation for Rovio Mobile products.

Yes, I drew these. No, I do not remember the inspiration, if that word even applies here. Heh.