Mike Shannon played right field and third base for the St. Louis Cardinals from 1962 to 1970, when he retired from baseball after being diagnosed with nephritis. From 1972 to the present, he has provided the color commentary for Cardinals games on the radio.

As a baseball player, he was good but not great. He only had a lifetime batting average of .255 in 2,780 at-bats, but he was born in St. Louis, never played for any team other than the Cardinals, and has never lived anywhere else. In St. Louis, this makes him something of a god: I do not think that this guy could manage to pay for his own drinks anywhere in town. Not that he should be drinking at all, what with his kidneys.

Anyway, his position makes him a natural pitchman in St. Louis for just about anything. In the 1980s, for some reason, this meant woodenly pitching residental HVAC equipment. You can tell he’s a radio guy in this spot; his delivery is great, but he looks like he’s been propped up with a 2×4. In my memory, at least, he’s always that squinty.

Comfortmaker, :30, 1.1mb Quicktime.

I rarely watch TV news, but last night the TiVo, for some reason, recorded the NBC Nightly News.

Since they were broadcasting from Baghdad — something that’s surprisingly rare, except for short, stand-up talking-head shots — I gave it a try.

After a while, I saw this:

This was the best picture they could find of Bush? A few seconds later, they launched into a promotion of Sunday morning’s Meet The Press, and switched — directly from the picture of Bush — to this:

More than a little bit different, eh? I am once again reminded of why I do not watch TV news. This is a comically minor thing, particularly since everyone watching the news is likely to already have an opinion of both John Kerry and George Bush. And yet the NBC Nightly News — which is allegedly journalism, ladies and gentlemen — picks a picture that makes the President look like a stoke victim, while John Kerry is looking off into the distance toward the Bright Socialist Future.

I generally — remember, I don’t watch much TV news — find NBC and MSNBC to be the least blatantly biased of the TV news operations, so I’m surprised to see this. My guess is that some young liberal PA (or whoever puts together those shots; I’ll bet it’s someone low on the totem pole, though) thought that this was a perfect opportunity to Stick It To The Man.

Well, congratulations: you have nurtured the Seed of Doubt in my mind — doubt about the extent to which I can rely on your employer for good information.

Once again, life imitates The Simpsons:

Kent Brockman talking about The Leader before the Movementarians buy KBBL broadcasting:

Kent Brockman talking about The Leader a moment later, after being handed a note that the Movementarians have bought his TV station:

In the TV news business, whenever you discover yourself doing something even vaguely and tangentially similar to anything that Kent Brockman has ever done, maybe you should stop.

If you’re an ATV dealer and you can somehow prove that Yamaha does not have the best ATVs on the market, Gary Surdyke will give your wife a thousand dollars. Or at least he would in the late 80s, when this local-cable ad was produced.

I recently found a whole 60-minute 3/4-inch tape of old local tv spots, so you may as well resign yourself to seeing a lot of them.

Gary Surdyke Yamaha, :30, 1.1mb Quicktime.

The other night, the lovely & talented Nicole and I ate at Sweetwater Tavern, one of a small chain of quasi-upscale semi-’western’ themed restaurants.

I say ‘quasi-upscale’ because there’s nothing particularly fancy about the food, the service, or the decor: it’s just that nothing is horrible. There’s adequate staff to handle the volume of business, the food is tasty and arrives hot, and there are no fluorescent lights in the place. I consider this the bare minimum for operating a restaurant: unfortunately the restaurant industry seems to consider this quite a luxurious experience.

Anyway, so we went to Sweetwater Tavern, and we encountered these strange flyers touting a favorable review of the place from the Washington Post.

I say that these flyers were ’strange’ because we were already there. We’d been sold. At this point our opinion of the place would be formed largely by our own experience, not a review from the Post.

Anyway, what was particularly interesting about the flyer was the way the Post described the location of the location we were at:

I’d never realized the address of the place before: 14250 Sweetwater Lane. And if that wasn’t helpful, it’s near Multiplex Drive. In other words, it’s in the Sweetwater parking lot, near the movie theater. This is helpful if you’re lost in the maze of strip malls that surrounds the restaurant, but utterly useless if you are looking for it from, say, anywhere else. ‘Off Route 28 just south of I-66′ would be helpful. But no, this is the suburbs, and so everything’s address reflects its position not relative to any street you might be familiar with, but rather to its own parking lot.

The other two locations aren’t on other Sweetwater Lanes — though really it wouldn’t be surprising to find a place declaring its parking lot a street and naming multiple ones the same thing in the same area — but rather on ‘Gatehouse Plaza’ and ‘Waterview Plaza‘. Waterview Plaza is just off Leesburg Pike west of Cascades Parkway (i.e. right about here), and ‘Gatehouse Plaza‘ is at the intersection of Gallows Road and Arlington Boulevard — two major thoroughfares. Anyone vaguely familiar with the area could find a place described as ‘at Gallows and Arlington’ or ‘On Route 50 just west of the Beltway’.

We don’t get this, though: instead we get parking lots named as streets, and five-digit addresses thereon.

“This isn’t awesome” — but the commercial sure is. I wonder whether Geico has two different ad agencies? Most of their ads are horrible, but this is pretty clever.

Tiny House, :30, 2mb Quicktime.

Don Boudreaux quotes Chris Dillow:

We all know a centrally planned economy is a stinking idea. So why is a centrally planned company a good one? (This question was raised by Hilary Wainwright years ago in Arguing for a New Left. Disappointingly, it’s been ignored.) Hayekian arguments can be applied to company bosses as well as central planners. For me, what’s really offensive about capitalism isn’t (just) the huge wages paid to bosses, but the fact that their claims to justify such rewards — that they are capable of managing massive institutions — are utterly unfounded.

Boudreaux disagrees:

Dillow’s question is fair, but the answer seems to me to be obvious: private companies, even massive ones, are private. Shareholders voluntarily buy (and sell) stock in these firms: creditors voluntarily lend (or not) money to these firms; workers voluntarily work (or not) for these firms; suppliers voluntarily supply inputs (or not) to these firms; and consumers voluntarily buy goods and services (or not) from these firms.

Boudreaux is right inasmuch as the money earned by Titans Of Industry is not earned at the point of a gun. But he doesn’t address the question of whether the central-planning model is a good way to run a company.

Think of your average corporate environment: Everyone uses the same computer and the same software, because that’s efficient. Everyone gets the same chair — except those in Success Track #6 and above, who get nicer chairs — because that’s efficient. If you run out of toner and the supply department is also out of stock, you won’t be printing anything for weeks or possibly months, because (usually) it is entirely forbidden to go down to Office Depot and buy some out of petty cash. Not being able to get work done so the company can save $4 on toner is, you see, efficient.

Et cetera, et cetera. Unhappy companies are all different. If you’ve ever worked for a large company, insert your own example of horrible inefficiency in the service of Procedure here. Scale the average American company up a million times and give it an army and ICBMs, and what you’d have is largely indistinguishable from the Soviet Union.

As everyone participating in such a company is doing so voluntarily, there’s no real moral problem with this. But it’s still central planning, and it’s still going to be inefficient.

If you are, for some reason, still using Windows, you might find this little movie worth your while. It turns out that the Windows Indexing Service — which appeared to just be a drag on system performance all these years — actually works.

It’s just that, to get Windows to use it, you have to prefix your query with an exclamation point in the search box. Because that’s obvious and convenient, not to mention well-documented. And because you’d want the default search behavior to be the slow and frustrating one.

EFF offers up this list of endangered gizmos, products that are at risk of disappearing (or that have already disappeared) because the do some harm to (or, in may cases, merely frighten) the copyright industry.

I can’t help but think that ‘endangered gizmos’ — that’s the EFF’s phrase — is a misnomer, though. These things will always exist as gizmos as long as there’s any demand for their capabilities; but as long as the copyright industry is determined to never evolve, they will not exist as products, i.e. it will be difficult or impossible for anyone to make significant amounts of money from any of them.

This — the failure of large business plans due to the hidebound thinking of the copyright industry — has already happened twice, by my count.

The first failure was the famous collapse of the telecommunications industry in about 2000. It’s true that shenanigans at Worldcom were a part of that (Worldcom was essentially lying about its capacity, traffic, customers, and revenue, and since Worldcom was (at least on paper) the largest factor in the telecommunications industry, this threw off everyone’s picture of the industry as a whole, leading to bad decisions), but it’s important to remember that in 1998 and 1999 everyone thought that the near future would bring a lot more traffic to the network. Look at the kind of traffic that Napster was generating, and that without any advertising, with dodgy technology, with significant legal risk to the users, and with nobody in particular interested in seeing to it that there was content available! Imagine what would happen when the movie studios and record companies started taking advantage of this new distribution mechanism!

You’ll still have to imagine, of course, because it still hasn’t happened. The few online music- and movie-selling ventures are limping along (relative to the illegal underground file-sharing networks). They all take, as their first commandment, Thou Shalt Not Be Able To Copy The Files Freely, which is probably a reasonable condition. But then they charge their users more, generally, than they would pay if they were to go out and buy a CD. They’re paying for the convenience of not having to go to the record store, the copyright industry says. Ah, but they’re not getting as much value as they would if they bought a CD. We’ll just pretend that’s not true, the industry says. And then they’re surprised when consumers manage to accurately evaluate the relative values of the products anyway.

In any case, I’m still sitting here on a network connection no faster than I had seven years ago, and literally billions of dollars have gone down the tubes. On the other hand, the continued viability of the record industry in exactly the same form has ensured that the public is not denied access to the talents of top-notch professional ‘artists’, like Ashlee Simpson.

The second failure was the celebrated collapse of the AOL/Time Warner merger. To be sure, there were a lot of reasons this merger failed, but in the end I think the single most significant cause was the unwillingness of Time Warner to consider taking advantage of AOL’s ‘walled garden’ of an online service to distribute their products.

People have made fun of AOL for years, and rightly so. The AOL service sucks; very soon after AOL started offering flat-rate service plans and stopped paying content partners for time users spent in the partners’ sections of AOL, there’s been nothing available on AOL that isn’t also freely available on the public network. A few people, those particularly tied to their AOL e-mail addresses or to a particular pre-existing forum and its inhabitants on AOL, will keep paying. But other than to those people, AOL just doesn’t have a lot to offer.

But wait: since the merger, AOL/Time Warner owns both an enormous collection of movies, TV shows, music, photographs, magazine articles, books, etc., etc., etc., and a walled garden of an environment with which to distribute these things — most of which produce exactly no revenue for the company as things stand today. AOL subscribers have access to none of this, though: with an AOL account, you don’t even get to watch CNN video for free, because they’d rather try to get an additional $12.95 a month from you than to increase the value of your $24 a month AOL subscription.

Again, billions of dollars down the drain. I’m sure that there are hundreds more stories of similar things, if smaller in scope.

This is the real danger of the copyright industry’s greedy risk-aversion. I have little doubt that I will always be able to do what I want with information that comes my way. In some cases, this might require strange software downloaded from places like Sweden; in others, it might require building little devices that are, strictly speaking, illegal. Any scheme that would be totally impossible to get around would also be too cumbersome to use as intended, and the market would reject it in short order.

But since it’s impossible to sell things anonymously on any large scale, it’ll be impossible to base any businesses on new capabilities. Remember that the copyright industry tried to sue the VCR out of existence. They seem to have learned nothing from the fact that, far from destroying their business, the VCR allowed the movie studios to create new products that have earned them billions and billions of dollars.

There is recently reason for a tiny bit of hope, as Sony — a gadget company that also owns a music label and a movie studio — has admitted that it’s in error:

Sony missed out on potential sales from MP3 players and other gadgets because it was overly proprietary about music and entertainment content, the head of Sony Corp.’s video-game unit acknowledged Thursday.

What Sony apparently has yet to realize, though, is that they have also missed out on potential sales of music and entertainment content itself because they’re overly proprietary about it. Sony (and its competitors, both in the consumer-electronics industry and in the copyright industry) will eventually fully see the light, or they’ll be replaced by other companies that have seen it. If it doesn’t happen soon, though, we’ll spend yet more time deferring the enormous profits and entirely new industries that new technology makes possible.

The following forty-six websites were all observed to blocked by the nanny filter on the network at Panera Bread late in the afternoon of 23 January 2004.

I got the list of URLs to try by loading in the contents of my own RSS aggregator, as well as the blogrolls from instapundit.com, dailykos.com, and atrios.blogspot.com.

There seems to be a slight anti-conservative bias in the list, but this could be due to nothing more than the fact that Glenn Reynolds — widely considered ‘conservative’ — has approximately one zillion sites on his blogroll, and that the filter blocks websites related to ‘weapons’. Certainly there are also a bunch of lefty sites that are also blocked for no real discernable reason.

For each site that seems to be improperly blocked, I’ve stuck in a short quote that should serve to illustrate what the site is like.

Many of the sites branded as “adult/mature content” — as Tinotopia once was – probably got that way by using four-letter words once in a while. The question then is: why is Panera protecting its customers from this? I can understand them not wanting people looking at farmsluts.com in there, as it might put other customers off their feed. But political weblogs? I think the problem is that the main market for the nanny filter consists of schools: and so when you use the network at Panera, you are assumed to have the intellect and sensitivities of a child.

(more…)

I was sitting in Panera Bread last night, fumbling around with proxies in an attempt to get around their ham-fisted network filtering. Now they’re blocking an art gallery’s website for ‘nudism’. The site does, indeed, feature photos of paintings and sculptures featuring people without clothes on, but I’d hardly classify this as ‘nudity’, much less ‘nudism’. I didn’t have time to check whether they block the National Gallery Of Art, but I’d bet the answer is no: even the people at SonicWALL would see that that’s silly.

They’re also blocking Cory Doctorow, for reasons that are an utter mystery to me.

As I was saying, I was sitting there trying to make use of the network at a blazing 100 kpbs or so — did I mention that the network was also slow? — when in my distraction the over-loud piped-in music caught my attention, and held on. It was bad, noodley jazz without any real genius or even feeling behind it.

I could not help thinking of how this stuff must be produced: I imagine that someone, somewhere, locks a bunch of musicians in a room with horns (it’s heavy on horns, the better to cut through the Panera background noise) and dope, turns on a tape recorder, and goes away for a few days. When the someone comes back he duplicates the tape and sends it off to people who need jazz in bulk. It’s sold by the yard.

We used to joke that Dressel’s Pub, in St. Louis, always played the World’s Longest Jazz Album, because it never ended and it seemed, at least, to never repeat: but at least that peculiar album contains recognizable and good music.

Anyway, I present for your listening enjoyment two snatches of jazz by the ton, as recorded last night at Panera. You can download the file here, or listen to it in the embedded Quicktime thingy that will appear below if your computer supports Quicktime. It’s kind of quiet, and there’s a lot of background noise, but this is how Bulk Jazz is meant to be, er, enjoyed.