Friday, July 11, 2025

Frangry.



As I've written before in this space, and I am painting with a football-field-wide broad brush, one of the major differences between amerika today and the amerika I grew up in is that we've become over the last forty years a nation of spiritual bullies.

I remember talking to my deceased friend Fred about this. "We used to root for Jimmy Stewart fighting Potter, or political corruption in old movies," I said one night over a Pike's Ale (the Ale that won for Yale!) "We used to root for Gary Cooper to take down the Frank Miller gang. Or Bogart confounding the Nazis, even if it meant giving up Ingrid Bergman."

Today, our Stockholm-Syndrome Nation roots for the pistols.


"Bomber," (Fred's baseball team nickname for me) "you're right. Now people root for entrenched powers and make excuses for big money. They forget that most entrenched power was born on third and thinks they hit a triple."

In the four years since Fred died, the amerikan infatuation with bullyism has grown more fervid and intense. 

That's the only way I can understand our current mal-administration, our unjust bombings, our militarized police, our lack of social safety net and healthcare, the evisceration of public education and the mandatory-ness of "accepting" at every turn 4,000 words of small-type "terms and conditions," just to download a substack.

Not to mention the yuck-symbolism behind 45-percent of all vehicles on the road being 7,000-pound pick-up trucks that are seldom used to pick-up anything more than processed cheese food from our local infarction factories.

Many people have remarked through the years at my anger. 

Fine. And go fuck yourself.

I am angry. 

(George Shaw once said, "the power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those who haven't got it." You can substitute anger for cynicism and it works just as well. George, I'm sure, would agree with George.)

Angry at companies that cut service but never cut prices.
Angry at taxes that hit me more than the mega-rich.
Angry at people who give air to the trumps, the musks, the malefactors. Angry at the semantic bullshit like calling tax-cheat job-creators. Angry at our collective acceptance of lies and the lying liars who, like Mary McCarthy said about Lillian Hellman, "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'"

Angry at the rigging of the system by people like Mark Read, out-going CEO of WPP. Read literally destroyed half the market-cap of WPP, lost half the clients, can't win new ones, and fired thousands along the way. Read, when he finally leaves, will likely walk away with a life-long stipend along with scores of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars worth of parachute and parting gifts.

This man did to WPP what Atilla the Hun did to Pax Romana. 

What makes me angry though, isn't just what's been done. What's being done every day, and the well-clad marzipan flatulence that shrouds the fat gleam of privilege, it's that 99-percent of my world, seems oblivious to it all.

99 percent of the world knows the latest bit of asininity from the 29/12 news cycle (it's way worse than 24/7) but they don't know shit about the charade of the modern world. Many even defend it. A case of Cosmic Stockholm Syndrome.

The great Robert Riskin wrote in the Gary Cooper-Barbara Stanwyck movie directed by Frank Capra, a line delivered by Walter Brennan.

"I know the world's been shaved by a drunken barber."

Step one is knowing that.

Step two is not accepting.

Step three is speaking out.




Thursday, July 10, 2025

Latin. Or German. Or, Even, English.


Twenty-four-seven darkness is here.

Even with the sun bright through the greenhouse gases.

The control of every aspect of your life by a handful of giant monopolies is a fait accompli. 

Add to that the four-trillion dollar wealth transfer just passed by the odious amerikan government, where my money goes to the megarich so the megarich get megaricher, sending the debt through the stratosphere, a prelude to canceling every government service that ever "democratically" existed, from social security, to road repair, to health care, to the monitoring of food and the regulation of pollutants.

Once the debt accumulates enough, our taxes will pay for nothing but debt service, and the people with the real money won't pay tax at all.

This is happening large and small and everywhere. From our government. To everything you need, like internet, cable, air travel, phone service, food. They're all owned by malefactors of great wealth. 

You have to accept the terms and conditions.

Those terms and conditions can be summarized in two words: you're fucked.

If I had my way with you and the world, I would urge you to learn one sentence in Latin, that I learned from Joachim Fest. 

Fest was a boy during the previous nazi regime. His father was a resister and taught him to resist. His father taught him this trifle of Latin.

Etiam si omnes, ego non.

Even if all others, not I.

Fest translated that sentiment into German and shortened it.

Nicht icht.

Not I.

I'll translate it to amerikan and shorten it even more.

No.

No TV.
No corporatist crap.
No news at face-value.
No just getting along.
No acceptance.

Question everything.
No Press-releases are your enemy.
Spokespeople are liars.

Resistance, of course, is nearly futile.
You can't live without their internet.
Their airplanes.
Their phones.

But we can bark.
We can speak.
We can say 'that's a lie.'

More, 
We can say
Etiam
si
omnes,
ego
non.

Even if all others, not I.



 

Wednesday, July 9, 2025

The Anatomy of an Ad Campaign. (That's lasted over 21 years and won hundreds of awards.)

Debra Fried won't like this.

Which is all the more reason for me to do it.

Ogilvy when she was there, in the 90s, the 00s, the 10s and the 20s, was a place filled with legends. 

It took Debra a while. But Debra became one.

A legend.

Since these days you never know who's an "unreliable narrator," here's proof.


Debra and the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty will be linked forever. I doubt she's ever introduced without someone saying, "she was on the team that was behind that great Dove campaign at Ogilvy." 

Much of the world today can be characterized by a phrase I learned from Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Christopher Hedges. He calls today "an Empire of Illusion."

We saw that from Cannes over the last few weeks. Our entire industry seems to have a difficult time separating illusion from fact. So we Lion-ize work that never ran or made no impact, or wasn't paid for by clients and isn't seen by the public.

It's pretend. Like our industry has become.

But the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty is not in that camp. In fact, I'd go so far to say that if advertising is ever again going to be considered a legitimate profession--and perhaps the most powerful selling tool ever derived--we could learn a lot from Debra's experience on Dove. And from Debra's kindness, drive, intelligence, honesty and humanity.

Good work is a fight.
It always will be.
And Debra lived and breathed it in her account below.

Triumph is a beautiful thing on those rare occasions it happens. Debra's story of persistence and success brought tears to my eyes. 

It brought them again when I read it a second time.
And a third time.

Debra's story is a necessary story.
Not because it made me cry. But because it's more than a story about one important and successful campaign.
It's bigger than that. 

It's a story about life.
And the ardor it takes to prevail.
Churchill called it "blood, sweat, toil and tears."

What follows is long.
But as worth it as any of the 7,200 posts I've posted thus far.

Thank you, Debra.

(A real beauty.)


------


So real, it curled my hair.

A Dove story in five parts.


.

 



Three of the faces that launched The Campaign For Real Beauty


Part 1. When I almost died of intimidation in a hotel ballroom.

The briefing was too big for Ogilvy, so it was held in a hotel ballroom. Round tables were filled with creative directors, account people, strategists, designers and clients from London, Toronto, Chicago, New York and Frankfurt. As the big shots walked from table to table to shake hands, I was reminded of the scene in The Godfather where the Five Families meet and the Dons show their respect.

I said so to my partner, Jackie Leak, who agreed.

“Except no one will die,” she said.

“Let’s hope not,” I answered.

We laughed. Kind of.

For many, this was a first exposure to the notion of Real Beauty. For others, it was the culmination of two years of white-paper studies, work-sessions and late-night meetings. I was in the latter camp.

From the New York office, I’d been working on Dove with Chicago. Maureen Sheriff, Chicago’s great ECD, was generous and kind. She was the first person I’d ever known who used the word “gal” unironically and she knew Dove inside out. She took me under her wing (I guess that’s kind of a Dove pun?) in ways I’m still grateful for.

I’d dial into conference calls with Chicago, not getting half their jokes or stories, but Maureen always lassoed me in - “Oh, Deb. See, in Chicago, we’ve had snow for the past six days - that’s why we all have cabin fever.”

I was technically part of Chris Wall’s IBM group, although I didn’t work on IBM — I think Ogilvy just needed a place to put me and Chris said, “I’ll take her.” I’d finish a Dove call and shyly peek out of my office (God, remember offices?) while Chris paced around, gathering steam and audience members, as he told a story about Pytka. Everyone in Chris’s group - from Andy Berndt to Tony Arefin to Tom Bagot to Marc Klein - was funny and brilliant and had something to add.

Sometimes I found reasons to go to the printer so I could leave my office and loiter around the edge of their circle. Having been a good head taller than every kid in school, with red hair and freckles, Chris knew an outsider when he saw one. So he too, took me in, and was kind in ways I’ll never forget.

Every few days, he’d pop into my office to ask what was happening with Dove. At that point, we were gearing up to the big campaign while working on spots for facial cleansers and shampoo. Chris’s interest amused and touched me. A grumpy, rumpled 6’11” man hunkering down to try to understand how women feel about not wearing makeup is nothing, if not endearing.

“Ok, Gal,” Maureen said when I met her. “I’m pairing you with a guy named Rock Pausig on this one.” Together, Rock and I created a series of spots for a new line called Dove Face. They featured women whose beauty was considered “interesting.” One of them had a “bit of a nose.” Another was older than most models. They cut to title cards that said things like “We don’t want to fix you for a simple reason. You’re not broken.”

At the time, the work felt novel - a beauty brand telling women they didn’t need fixing. If we’d shot it with actual real women, versus models, it might have made some noise. But that was before.

A few months later, I sat in a conference room with Maureen, Mel White, the very lovely Amy Starkman (an account person in those days) and Vel Richey-Rankin, who was as intimidating as Maureen was welcoming. Vel was almost six feet tall and dressed in either all black or all white - slim jeans, tailored shirts and cowboy boots. She wore no makeup, except a slash of red lipstick, which stood out on her angular face and complemented the shock of platinum hair that topped her head. She had modeled when she was young and had the bone structure to prove it.

Vel had zero fucks to give before that was even an expression. She didn’t smile if she didn’t feel like it, which I found thrilling and intimidating, but not in that order. She had no qualms about saying “You call this a brief?” to strategists, and “You call this an ad?” to creative people. She lived on a ranch somewhere without internet and was flown in for big Dove projects. I was in awe of her.

Vel, Mel and Maureen, among others, had worked on a book that laid out what Dove believed, didn’t believe, would and wouldn’t do, how it photographed women, what it stood for, whether it had a sense of humor (it did, but it was witty, not “funny.”) We agonized over lines like “Dove is honest and outspoken, but not judgmental.”

“Well, maybe Dove is a little judgmental, like in a good way?” one of us would say.

“It’s more opinionated than judgmental though,” someone else would say. “And maybe not so much opinionated as clear-eyed.”

“Yeah. It’s big and bold in its thinking but kindhearted and welcoming,” someone else chimed in.

We talked about Dove like it was a person - a friend who fascinated us. I’m surprised we didn’t give it an astrological sign.

The book was white and square and beautiful, which is no wonder, since Brian Collins and his group, BIG, designed it. It was about 75% done when I was invited to jump in. I mainly made edits and added a line here and there. I wrote a few pages that I think made it into the book unscathed. Each page took hours and had to pass muster with Vel - no easy task. I gave my copy to someone and never got it back - a mistake I regret to this day.

Our main clients, Silvia Lagnado and Alessandro Manfredi, were every bit as discerning and hard to please as Maureen and Vel. They were passionate about us taking our time - something hard to fathom given today’s timelines. “Get it wrong, and we create a campaign,” Silvia would say, “but get it right, and we create a brand.” And then, with her steady gaze and tone, she’d add, “We’re going to make this campaign famous.” Her conviction made it impossible not to believe her.

At the time, those words took guts and vision. Because back then, Dove was a bar of white soap that got soft and messy in your grandmother’s soap dish. No one hated Dove. But no one cared about it either.

So there we were in a hotel ballroom. With a brief that Silvia boiled down to one phrase - “Widen the parameters of beauty so everyone feels welcome.”

Steve Hayden - the great Steve Hayden, who wrote 1984, the most famous Super Bowl spot ever, got up to speak. He cleared his throat and talked into the mic. To my surprise, he was gentle and scholarly. Most creative people made more of a scene ordering a salad in the cafeteria than Steve made at that podium.

He talked about what a humbling, exciting opportunity we had. He implored the creative people to be tough on our ideas, but kind to each other. He suggested to the account people that they support even the most crazy ideas. And to the clients he said, “If I can ask you to do one thing, it’s to let your creative team behave like magnificent assholes.” Everyone laughed except Steve, whose blue eyes remained gentle and focused. “They need to be assholes,” he said, then looked toward the creative people. “It’s your job to ask questions people don’t want to answer. To keep pushing when you believe something will work. Be difficult.” He paused. “Because that’s how magnificence happens.” Only then did he smile, as he looked toward the clients. “So, please. Let them be assholes. It will benefit everyone in this room. And this project deserves it.”

We cheered. I teared up.

Part 2. When we worked hard and shopped hard.

During the next six months, Jackie and I marched in and out of Steve’s office, campaign after campaign in hand. Steve killed some, made others better, and inevitably said “keep going.” Jackie and I did a lot of pacing. We fell in love with ideas that we hated an hour later. We talked. Thought. Argued. Made up. Thought some more. We sent each other Blackberry messages in the middle of the night that started with “What if we…”

One day, we walked in to Steve with a tagline that said, “Let’s make peace with beauty.” He was silent for a few seconds, which made me nervous, so I said, “The ‘peace’ part works because…” and he said, “Because a dove symbolizes peace. I get it.” Others might have said that meanly. Steve said it kindly. And excitedly. “I love it,” he said. I’d never heard those words from him and it was all I could do not to leap to my feet. If Jackie and I had been good at high-fiving, we would have been doing it that day.

That tagline was adopted by Ogilvy Toronto, whose clients liked it as much as Steve, but in the rest of the regions, it didn’t take.

Everything about that year was emotional. Jackie, Amy and I sat in Steve’s office a few times a week during long conference calls with London and Toronto. We rooted for each other but every team wanted to be the one with the winning campaign. At its best, it made us better. At its worst, it made us - or at least me - behave in ways I regret.

“Ok, clients are loving the New York work the most,” Steve would say on a Monday, and we’d shriek with joy. By Wednesday, he’d say “Well… it looks like London shared another idea that they’re liking more,” and we’d shake our heads, muttering “fuck.” The next thing we knew, Chicago had a whole new take and then, the next week, it was us again.

We paced around like politicians checking the results on election night.

Everyone’s work was good. Some of it was great. Most of it got killed. Sometimes, it was a case of timing. If a campaign hung around for a while, someone shot a hole in it. One hole begat another. And before you knew it, your perfect soufflé had collapsed. If you slipped something in a bit later, people might say “Huh - that’s interesting.” If you timed it just right, the new idea had enough time to gain favor but didn’t hang around long enough to die.

But it wasn’t just timing. It had to work.

“The Campaign For Real Beauty” became our tagline because it was the opposite of “Let’s make peace with beauty.” It was neither clever nor slick. It was a nuts-and-bolts line to its core. Which is exactly why it made sense. This campaign wasn’t trying to seduce anyone. Nor were its women. They were frank and honest and didn’t really care if you liked them or not because they liked themselves. And therein lied the campaign’s power.

We planned to shoot it with all the trappings of a beauty campaign - beautiful studio, cool music, gorgeous natural light, with Rankin as our photographer.

Casting (my first experience with street-casting) took forever. Our women had to be willing to do press, and were asked how they felt about their bodies, their ages, their hair. It was very personal. As we pored over our selects with Rankin, in the New York office, someone commented on how we didn’t have enough plus-sized women in the mix. Our choices were limited and we were leaving for London the next day.

One of the administrative assistants walked past our glass conference room and Jackie and I looked at each other. Jackie jumped up and marched her into the room. And with that, Tabitha Roman became famous.


From Ogilvy admin to Times Square billboard.


We shot the first campaign in London. The day before the shoot, the stylist realized she was short a few things.

“Want to run to Topshop with me, girls?” she asked.

She was asking the right girls.

Jackie and I ran around the store, throwing tops, pants and dresses into a shopping basket.

“Yes!” Jackie said, as she held up a black strapless dress. “They have it in 14 and 16!”

The two of us had done lots of wardrobe together, but this was the best by far. We weren’t shopping for fashion, we were shopping for women.

Part 3. When shit got real and I went curly.

Until the week of the shoot, our ads had headlines about making peace with big noses and frizzy hair, full thighs and small boobs and bits of copy about how it was those very things that made us different, and therefore beautiful.

And then, Joerg Herzog from the Frankfurt office had a different thought. “What if we scrapped the headlines and used tick boxes instead?” he asked. He showed us a scrap of paper with a layout. Next to one, tick box, it said “Fit” and next to the other, “Fat,” for instance.

The thought was that we’d ask consumers to weigh in. Not everyone was sure. Did we want to invite people to “grade”women? Some of us had had enough of being rated on a scale of one to ten to last a lifetime. Others felt that inviting people into the conversation would make Dove talk-able and communal. It made sense. And with that, reams of headlines and taglines were put aside in favor of one-word questions with tick boxes and an intentionally clumsy tagline. I started writing lists of word- combinations, like “Wrinkled? Wonderful?” and “Grey? Gorgeous?”

In my heart, I thought it was the images that drew people in - the shock of seeing women who were bigger, frizzier, frecklier and older than the Cindy’s, Naomi’s and Christy’s of the world. I thought those images in Times Square would have had the same effect with or without the tick boxes.

But I could have been wrong. In this case, I was glad to be wrong.

The campaign was way bigger than any one of us. When it finally ran, I wasn’t sure how much (if any) credit I deserved. I confessed this feeling to Maureen Sheriff and she fixed me with her steady eyes.

“Gal, you gotta put that thought away,” she said. “Your lines were what led us here.” I wasn’t sure, but she was. “Same is true of everyone in this room. We all built on each other’s ideas. Every one of us,” she said. She reminded me of things I’d written. Things I’d said. Things I’d added to the white book.

“And on top of that, you let your hair get curly,” she said. We laughed, remembering a day when Vel had met my eyes during a meeting and said, “So when are you gonna walk the walk?” I asked what she meant. “You always talk about getting your hair blown out,” she said, “and you’re writing all this stuff about how beautiful we all our when we’re real.” She smiled and gave me a “ball’s in your court” shrug.

The next Monday, I sheepishly walked in with a headful of loose waves and glanced in her direction. “I’ll be damned,” she said and wrapped me in a hug that was hard and soft at the same time.

Part 4. When we fell in love for real.

The shoot itself was incredible. One of our women, whose tick boxes would ask the world to vote on whether she was “wrinkled” or “wonderful” was undoubtedly the latter. A stylist introduced us, mentioning that she was 96.

“That’s not actually true,” she said, and the room stopped. Had she lied about her age to get into the shoot? We braced ourselves. We didn’t want to lose her.

“So, how old are you, really?” one of us asked.

“I’m 96 and a half,” she said, beaming.

I laughed so hard, I cried. And then, I kept crying. As each new woman got comfortable in front of the camera, her freckles, her crows’ feet, her weight, her wrinkles, not only came out of hiding, but also, came out to play. To be seen. And celebrated. Every one of us who’d sat on the sidelines in gym - or dabbed at our skin with concealer - or lied about our age - came to truly understand something for the first time that day- we were not the problem. At the end of each woman’s session, we clapped loudly for them. And quietly, for ourselves.

Finally, we had one last woman to shoot and were hoping it would go quickly because we’d been there for a good 12 hours. She stepped out from the dressing room. Her features were stunning. Conventionally gorgeous, she wouldn’t have belonged with our rag-tag group - except for the fact that her head was shaved. Which made her not only gorgeous, but intimidating.

Until she told her story.

She’d gotten alopecia as a teenager and had worn a wig for years. Only recently had she started to go without one. Rankin talked quietly with her for a while, and then asked us to leave the studio so he could shoot her alone. We hung out in the lobby for a very long time. When we were invited back in, she sat on an apple crate, wearing a robe.

“Should we tell them how we shot you?” Rankin asked.

There was a beat of silence.

“I was nude,” she said with a shy smile.

She explained that they had talked about why she had opted to stop wearing a wig - she said it had been a decision to stop hiding. She talked about how scary that decision had been - how vulnerable she’d felt the first time she went wig-less in public. I said how, when we’d met her at casting, I’d assumed her bald head was a choice.

“Oh God, no,” she said. She paused. “But I did have a choice in how I was photographed today,” she said softly. “And I wanted to be brave.” She looked at Rankin with soft eyes and his smile wasn’t that of a hot-shot photographer. It was that of a kind man.

She was quiet for a minute.

“This is first time I’ve felt beautiful since I lost my hair,” she said in a whisper. A tear slid down her cheek and landed on her clavicle, shimmering like a tiny pearl.

                                                                     A pre-tick box layout.

We looked around at the circle of freckled, wrinkly, curvy non-models, most of whom were still there. Champagne was poured. Glasses clinked. Exhaustion gave way to relief. In that moment, at least for me, The Campaign For Real Beauty got beautiful.

Part 5. After all was said and done.

Obviously, Silvia was right - Dove is famous.

Lots of people have won lots of awards.

Some may feel they’ve gotten more or less recognition than they deserved. Who knows - everyone who works on Dove works their imperfectly beautiful asses off.

As for me and the people I worked with?

Sometimes we were magnificent.

Sometimes we were assholes.

But more often than not, we were beautiful - more than we realized.


Tuesday, July 8, 2025

Out, Out, Damned World.






Out, out, out, out, out.


In the red, white and blue aftermath of jingo amerika's July 4th, I think we, if you're still a human, need to think with some perspicacity about the language we use and the words and semantic concepts we embrace, we accept and we propagate.

It was hard up here in this dumb head-in-the-sand town I am in on the Gingham Coast, not to question the the Jonestown-ness of bacchanal all around me.

We've swallowed the Kool-Aid, hook, line and battery-acid.

Obese people festooned in flagginess. Drunken barbecuing. And signs and t-shirts everywhere with the words "independence," "liberty" and "freedom" on them. Also, trucks the size of two-bedroom apartments, spewing toxins everywhere from their un-mufflered 5.7-liter Hemis.

I'm reminded of what Tacitus said about Rome's military and foreign policy. They make a desert and call it peace.” In amerika, we give you nachos and call it freedom.

Patriotic, ain't it.

Meaningless words. Or words that are bludgeons of complicity. 

We are independent. 
But we have no healthcare.

We are free.
To have our taxes transferred to the rich who pay no taxes. And we are in debt from birth to death.

We have freedom.
To hate brown people, to breathe dirty air, to be subject to one of the two-dozen or so monopolies that really run our lives.

All while supporting the largest, least-accountable military in the world. And militarized police all around us, also accountable to no one and wielding the business end of a truncheon, an automatic weapon, masked and carrying a shield.

I think as all this gets worse, we need to pay attention to the language all around us and the vise grip of authoritarianism tightening around our jugulars and scroti. We might want to watch this:


I think we can see, as Plato saw in his Republic, that the characteristics of the state, apply too to how we act, how we believe, our judgments on fairness, right and wrong. In other words, I wish we had been paying attention, as an industry, to our mean-ness, our victimization of people and our maniacal fervor to extract everything possible from every person, including our co-workers.

I dream-woke a sentence an hour ago. I wrote it down so as not to forget. That's what got this post going.

I wrote.

"We target people. If that doesn't work, we retarget them. We assess and extract their lifetime value. We maximize our returns. We move them through a funnel and send programmed messages to them wherever they are in order to get them to perform to the metrics of our performance marketing."

I am not a Christian. Maybe I don't understand the increase of god-ness in every political speech from every politician, almost everywhere.

Does this sound like "Love Thy Neighbor"? 

God is merely mind-control.

As an industry, or a bloated governmental kleptocracy, is this how we should be treating people?

Going back to David Ogilvy and amending him.

We are doing worse than treating people like morons. We're treating them like morons and victims. We're treating them like morons and we work to wrest their money from them, not even providing value in return, instead we sell never-ending subscriptions. 

My guess is most people pay about $200/month on subscriptions they don't even realize they have.

Forget about the nation or our world for a minute. Is this how we want to behave? Is this how we want our industry to treat people.

In my small, beautiful, quiet office up here in Connecticut, I am surrounded by books I love and from which I learn. I buy ten a week. Because I want love, beauty and intelligence around me, that's all.

But maybe the thing in my office I enjoy most is the paper-shredder I bought for $99. As a tool, it has a certain mean-ness to it, a lupine aggressiveness.

As the Roman playwright Plautus wrote 2400 years ago, "Homo homini lupus." "Man is wolf to man" is a Latin proverb.

One of the highlights of my remaining days on our dying anthropocene planet is getting wickedly stupid direct marketing from various banks, investment companies, ISPs and other extortionists. The slow grinding of their incessant come-hithers in my aggressive shredder is as pleasing as almost any consummation.

Of late, as my linked in feed has gotten more filled with platitudes, pablum, boasts, self-promotions and far-right-wrongisms, I've taken to shredding, slowly and inexorably, ten or twenty "connections" a day of the more than 31,000 people I am linked in to.

I am doing the same to more and more companies. More and more social organizations. More and more purveyors of lies and garbage.

If it's dumb, I give it the thumb.
Insult my head, I'll give you the shred.
My best resistance is to ignore your existence. 

It's hard to not see the darkening that is happening all around us. 

But I get, maybe, three lumens per shred. A little light each time I toss out someone who says their f-in' ad for mayonnaise is influencing kulture.

Getting three lumens back is not a lot of illumination.

But the English movement to abolish the trans-Atlantic slave-trade started when women decided not to put sugar (which came from the slave-economy of the British West Indies) in their tea. Spoonful by spoonful an evil was attacked.

One misanthrope in Connecticut shredding people, ignoring blowhards, not buying junk from monopolies won't do much. Pollution is too all-around us.

But every little bit helps.


Monday, July 7, 2025

Breaking Up is Hard to Do.



They're building an addition to a house across the street from us up here on the Gingham Coast. Since the cable companies--which rake in billions and are owned by billionaires--aren't regulated, the wires that connect the internet to the various homes and businesses around here are strung overhead, along with all sorts of other 19th-Century infrastructure. 

Despite the obscene profits companies like Comcast make (doesn't it seem that every sports team and arena is owned by them) they haven't invested in burying their wires. Why invest when you have a monopoly.

In any event, our internet has been out for a week and I can find no one but a bot to talk to. Only the bot can't listen. It can only answer the questions it wants you to ask. It reminds me of a guy that worked for I resort I stayed in once. He'd walk around the pool in the afternoon, nominally surveying customers. "How's the service," he would ask. "Fantastic or amazing."

I finally found a phone number to speak to a tech person at comcast's nazi-rune-derived subsidiary xfinity. Of course, she was located in a call center 10,000 miles from my problem, and I could barely understand what she was saying due to her accent. 





I thought for a moment about what if breaking up with another person was like breaking up with your internet (non)-provider. The dissolution might go like this:

BREAKEE:  Hello, thank you for calling your girlfriend, xfinity. Right now, I'm offering one free mobile-line when you buy one for just $10/month.

BREAKER: Listen, I've had it. I want to break up. And never see you again, xfinity.

BREAKEE: This call may be monitored and recorded for training purposes.

BREAKER: Please don't record this call and use it for training purposes. Just let me out.

BREAKEE: Thank you for choosing xfinity, are you calling about your scheduled service on Friday between 10 and 12.

BREAKER: No. I want to discontinue our relationship. I want it ended. Over.

BREAKEE: Thank you for choosing xfinity. How can I help you today.

BREAKER: I want to drop your service. I'm done.

BREAKEE: I'm tech support, you can't break up with me. You'll have to call someone else to do that. [Gives 800 number.] Do you want to cancel your scheduled service call?

Thank you for choosing xfinity today. Is there anything else I can do for you?

BREAKER: [Hangs up and calls next 800 number.]

BREAKEE 2: Hello, thank you for calling your girlfriend, xfinity. Right now, I'm offering one free mobile-line when you buy one for just $10/month.

How can I help you today?

This call may be monitored and recorded for training purposes.

BREAKER: Yes, I want to discontinue your service now. I want no more to do with you.

BREAKEE 2: Please give me your name and address so I can verify your account information.

BREAKER: [information given.]

BREAKEE: I see you've been a customer for five years. Why are you leaving?

BREAKER: Because a truck knocked down one of your cables and you won't fix it. Your bots keep telling me to reset my modem.

BREAKEE: Have you reset your modem?

BREAKER: Listen, my wife and I both run small businesses out of our home. We can't function without internet. And you people won't listen to my problem or send someone out to fix it.

BREAKEE: You have someone scheduled to show up on July 4, between 10 and 2.

BREAKER: It's been a week. That's sucky service. I just want to discontinue. I want to be done.

BREAKEE: You have to pay your final bill through July 8.

BREAKER: That's fine. I just want to be done with you. Cancel everything.

BREAKEE: I can give you a $40 discount.

BREAKER: No. Just cancel my account.

BREAKEE: You own your modem, but you'll have to return your cable box to an xfinity store near you.

BREAKER: Fine. Is everything done. Are we finished?

BREAKEE: I can send a repairman out now and get it fixed.

BREAKER: No. I just want out.

BREAKEE: Well, I'll send a repairman out in case you change your mind.

BREAKER: You've heard the phrase "a day late and a dollar short?" Where were you a week ago?

BREAKEE: I can give you a $60 discount.

BREAKER: Are we done? Am I through with xfinity. Have you cancelled my accounts?

BREAKEE: Thank you for choosing xfinity.

--

I went to a company called GoNetSpeed.
They showed up in a day.
The technician showed up two hours early--and called me first.
He installed everything in about two hours.
He cleaned up after himself.
It seems, for now, a better alternative.




Thursday, July 3, 2025

Still Standing.

When I was young, fit and fast, there was a running club in New York that had a slogan, "They said sit down; we stood up."

That defiant ethos was very much in vogue among people of my generation. We grew up during LBJ and Nixon and the second amerikan Civil War--with race riots and racism often enforced by "authority" figures. What's more, Vietnam was sold to us by a passel of authorities telling us a passel of lies. 

We grew up knowing how to "question authority." In fact, you couldn't consider yourself grown up if you didn't question authority.  

We questioned all sorts of authority--from ossified rules, to ossified parents, to ossified vice-principals still sporting buzz-cuts. 

Of course, as a generation we were as slavishly obedient as any generation ever. We just thought we were being antipodal. But, as I like to say, "blue jeans were what everyone wore to be different." Our rebellion itself was conforming.

We all rebelled as a group. All-together now.

All that said, I have a very bad reaction when someone tells me to do something or when someone tells me something too often. I immediately feel like someone's trying to gull me and I'm being force fed bushwa that will be good for someone but certainly not me.

That extends from meaningless demands to 'have a nice day' to asses who wear t-shirts that say, 'we're all creators, now,' to agencies that say, 'make dope stuff.'

As Ishmael spake, "Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball."

That's how I feel so often today.


More and more, I feel rebellious--and angry--over the siege against humanity being perpetrated by the trillionaire, non-tax-paying tech humanoids foisting "Artificial Intelligence" upon us with a binary bludgeon.


The phrase artificial intelligence in and of itself is a semantic thrust against common sense. There's no intelligence, really, involved. That's why, for instance, as advanced and life-threatening and splendid as we're told AI is, it still has a hard time telling a blueberry muffin apart from a chihuahua. My vaunted Alexa by Amazon gets stoopider not smarter as more and more prompts accumulate.

Meanwhile, the house across the street from us up here on the Gingham Coast is being added to, and the construction guys quickly knocked out the cable that gives our little cottage access to something called xfinity internet.

If you believe in the salutary power of AI to help people, to resolve issues, and the "intelligence" part of AI, I dare you to spend more than six minutes typing into one of xfinity's dozen or so so-called AI-empowered bots.

I doubt despite the over billion dollars comcast spends showing people gushing over their giga speeds and the faux live faux
blondes in faux call centers who are faux smiling while helping you, that you can find an experience outside of reading about the trump misministration that does more to make you want to buy a fox-hole obliterating flame-thrower to burn down the nearest (pick-one) monopoly that takes a bit out of your soul with every passing tweezer-full of evisceration.

I can get no help.

I am finally promised a tech will show up at my house between 10-2. But first a phone call that tells me I don't really need a tech, I can use xfinity's diagnostics to fix the problem. The same thing their AI-"enabled" bot told me 31 times after I typed 31 times, "a wire has fallen. I can't use your diagnostics."  The woman on the phone from xfinity repeated everything the bot said and I repeated everything I said. She told me that the bot didn't note that. Because the AI-"enabled" bot only answers the questions they want you to ask. 

It's a sham.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is also in the act.

Why is their AI "co-pilot" automatically put into every doc I open? I don't want it. I didn't ask for it. It annoys me. I have to turn it off each and every time I want to type, costing me time. There's no way to override the flatulence they've built into their system. And with each flaming fart of fatuous, we're told once again about the genius of it all.

Have you seen any genius?

Have you seen any seamless?

You might have "friction-less payments." That is if nothing ever goes wrong. Try to resolve something and you'll have more friction than a ton of gravel in a stale piece of cheesecake.

Meanwhile, as an antipode to AI, I've taken to keeping a running tab of things I read, see and hear that delight me. Things that make me think or laugh or thlaugh--that delightful and rare combination of amusing thoughts.

With each one I write down, I say, "could AI have done that?" The answer is always the same. 

Also, someone invariably will call me a Luddite, without really knowing what a Luddite is. 

I am not anti-tech.

I am pro-proof. I'm anti-making things suck and telling us they're better.

Show AI making my life better (by my definition of better) and I'm in. 

--

I found these three things over the last two weeks. Very human.

1. A description of the old New York Yankee right-fielder, Hank Bauer. One team-mate said his face was so grizzled and care-word, it looked like a clenched fist. The great Dodgers' manager Tommy LaSorda said, "Bauer's face looks like it could hold two days of rain."

2. Christopher Marlowe, the playwright and contemporary of Shakespeare wrote a line many assign to Homer. In writing of Helen, the world's most beautiful woman, who was abducted by Paris, thus starting the Trojan War, Marlowe asked, "Is this the face that launched a thousand ships/And burned the topless towers over Ilium?"

The science fiction writer Isaac Asimov used that description to create a new measurement for female beauty. He called it the "millihelen." It's the amount of beauty required to launch a single ship. A person who was one millihelen beautiful was one-thousandth as beautiful as Helen.



3. "Long ago in the ancient Greek land of Arcadia, writes Plato, the people made sacrifice to Zeus on the slopes of Mt. Lycaeon, “Wolf Mountain." 

"Their offerings included a single human being. When the meat of the animal victims was roasted and served to the worshipers, one bit of human flesh was mixed in. Whoever ate that bit was instantly transformed into a wolf."

― from "Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece's Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece"