Collateral Damage

There was no point in spending a dime on advertising for either one. Marketing them was like doing PR for YouTube: Sit there and watch the fish jump in your boat. That said, co-branding with these two things was a GREAT idea. I was down in Orlando last week and went to one of the 7-Eleven’s that were rethemed as a Kwik E Mart and I loved it. All they did was throw up some signs and boom! A hit was born. (I’ll post my pics at some point in the future. Best signage was the one of Hans Moleman frozen in the ice machine). Place was mobbed.

I haven’t seen any co-branding with HP & The Deathly Hallows, has anyone else?

Quick reviews (without spoilers):

Harry Potter & The Great Big Bags of Cash: The final HP was too long by about a third but better than I expected it to be. The actual writing, i.e. sentence structure and syntax, was much better than in the last two. In 5 &6 I approached each sentence concerned that I wouldn’t be able to find my way out once I started in. There were several things that seemed invented just for book seven — like a certain species’ use of a different type of magic — that felt like they were there only because the author had painted herself into a corner. Apparently Ms. Rowling feels that having characters wander around pointlessly builds tension or something.

Simpson’s Movie: It’s about a B to B+ episode. At 1.5 hrs long, it doesn’t suffer from the bloat and padding that seems to go along with most movies of TV shows. Also they didn’t let it get over run by guest stars. Tom Hanks is great and I was quite pleased to see Green Day go down with the ship. My only real complaint is that we were promised screen time for ALL the secondary characters and I do believe they missed one: God. The bearded one was conspicuously absent. Next time guys. Also, I want more musical numbers.

Until I saw Fanny & Alexander I couldn’t stand him. Fanny & Alexander was the first movie I ever saw that had the depth and complexity of a novel. My only exposure to his work before that was Cries and Whispers which I admired but didn’t like or enjoy. Fanny & Alexander leavened all that angst with a deep underlying joy.

BTW, my favorite odd bergman reference is in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey where Death, having grown tired of chess, tries other board games.

Want to stump someone with a trivia question? In about a month, ask them what Bergman, Tom Snyder & Bill Walsh have in common.

In an interview on NPR Gen. David Petraeus showed that logic is not a required course at the Army War college:

Q: A simple question that many in America are now wrestling with: Who is the enemy and what is the U.S. fighting for?

A: The enemy is extremism, we think, and it is extremism that comes in various forms.

I forget, is it the infantry or the artillery who are trained in extreme combat?

Isn’t moderation the best weapon against extremism? But if you do it too well you run the risk of being extremely moderate.

If the enemy is extremism does this mean we’re about to attack the X Games?

Maybe we could attack marketers who use the word extreme when ever they want to appear “hip” and “down” with the kids these days?

I look forward to the Armed Forces blowing up statues of Sen. Barry Goldwater who famously said that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.

Isn’t going to war a very extreme act?

One definition of extremism is “any political theory favoring immoderate uncompromising policies.” Invade the vice president’s office immediately.

This reminds me of something George Bush the elder said during the first Iraq contretemps: “We are fighting to prove that might does not make right.”

The war on extremism makes the war on terror look good.

I am just going to quote from Mrs. Collateral Damage’s blog here.

We interrupt our usual stream of Disney-related rambling and ranting to talk about, well, something really important.

My brother Al and his wife Anita have recently started a foundation to feed hungry children in Anita’s home country of India. On their website, Babies Need Food, they write:

On July 3, 2005, we gave birth to our beloved daughter, Angelina. We quickly discovered that when Angelina is hungry, her crying and desperation to eat is unbearable to listen to, even for a second. As we witnessed the intense desperation for food of our own little girl, we started thinking about all the babies in my home country of India, and how many of them go without proper nutrition during their first 2 years. Many fathers and mothers just don’t have enough money to provide an adequate nutritious diet for their babies. And many infants are left crying in their hunger.

At this point we knew we had to do something for some of the infants in India.

Yes, there are plenty of organizations working to feed the hungry, and to improve the national infrastructures of countries with high proportions of hungry people. So why am I asking you to support this one in particular? Because it’s personal. Because I see the pictures and hear the stories of my brother and his family visiting Chennai to distribute food to other families. Because it’s a small, family-run charity with zero overhead expenses. Because my nieces are growing up making regular visits to India to distribute food and clothes. Because I know there are more families asking for support than Babies Need Food can currently help.

Anita and Alan [. . .] made a personal commitment to financially support 50 mothers with infants. The supplies were purchased from vendors in India. Ministers from various congregations were requested to locate mothers and infants in need.

Well, as with most good works, the need overwhelms the resources! The day after the initial distribution to the 50 infants, 67 more mothers with infants arrived, seeking help! And the number of infants needing nutritional support continues to grow.

Please consider making a contribution of any size. It costs $8 to support one child for one month - about the same cost as a couple Dole Whip Floats! At this time that so many of us are excited about going to Walt Disney Word during the Free Dining promotion, maybe we can appreciate our own good fortune and pass along some pixie dust to another family.

If you have questions about Babies Need Food, please contact Al and Anita through email at info@babiesneedfood.org . I know they will appreciate hearing from you.

I don’t care if he’s dead. I’m voting for Pat Paulsen. Or Pogo. Or Willie Nelson. Or Chris Rock. Yeah, I’m voting for Chris Rock.

Oh Cindy ain’t you noticed
That several of your friends have moved on
And the street outside is just a little too quiet
And your local papers run out of news
I’m not persuading you or disengaging you
But Cindy you and me we gotta move

– Cindy Incidentally by Ian McLagan, Ron Wood, Rod Stewart

Having announced my lay off from Brandweek on the blog, it is only now fitting that I announce my new job on the blog — because the blog got me the job. Starting July 30th, I will be the person responsible for social media at Spoke.com. Another title: blogmeister.

Except for a brief stint as a bartender, this is my first non-journalism job since graduating from college and I couldn’t be happier. Not only do I like the job I’m going to (it’s a really neat company) but it’s a relief to be out of journalism.

Being a journalist these days is like playing baseball for the Cubs. Sure sometimes you get a hot streak but you know that no matter how well you do your job you’re playing for an organization that really doesn’t know what the fuck it’s doing. I am tired of working at places that are still trying to adjust to the internet era. I’m tired of telling people that paper isn’t the primary means of exchanging information anymore. Print is still an essential and important medium — it’s just not the most important one. You’d think, given the amount of ink and electrons spilled on the topic, that this message would have gotten through. Yet this basic issue is still being debated in many, many corners of my for-now-former profession.

While this by itself is troubling, even more troubling is the difficulty journalism as a whole is having adjusting to the fact that they don’t get to dictate the story any more. By and large the management of journalism and the way journalists think about what they do is still mired in the top-down mentality and utter lack of transparency of the print era. Journalism — as in what you produce — hasn’t changed. A good, well-reported story is still a good, well-reported story.

But journalists want that story to come out of a magic black box that no one else gets to look into.

This isn’t an irrational behavior. It stems from the fact that a journalist’s job is frequently to listen to people tell them that bullshit is beautiful. If the journalist then runs a story saying that, “Oh, actually bullshit is just bullshit,” then someone is going to get mad at them for saying that. That person, company or organization is going to want to explain why the story is all wrong. Sometimes that person or whatever will know less about the story than the reporter does. Or he/she/it will have a very specific reason for wanting another take on the story to be aired.

A good reporter gathers as much and as many facts as possible before deadline, takes a deep breath, steps back from all the facts he/she has gathered and then tries to make sense of them. Do this long enough and you start to be able to spot patterns of behavior that you then apply to other stories. These are the priceless instincts it takes years to develop. That is what separates a professional journalist from a citizen/reporter. It is easier to fool the latter. All reporters and editors sometimes follow those instincts too closely. They fail to apply the same skepticism to their own beliefs and actions that they apply to others. Do that too long and you become a cynic. Cynicism is the inability to remember that there’s a chance you might be wrong, that you’re judgment is not and never will be 100% accurate. Unfortunately cynicism is as endemic to journalism as black-lung is to miners.

The solution to cynicism is sun light. When it comes to other people’s businesses, journalists are that sun light. They let the public in on how and why decisions are being made. Reporting may curtail cynicism on the part of the public — who didn’t understand why something was done — and it may curtail the cynical actions of the people being reported on who now know someone is looking at what they’re doing. When it comes to journalism itself, though, we’re still closing the doors and pulling down the shades.

We don’t want to talk about how the assumptions and decisions that go into reporting, writing, editing and publishing a story. That is no longer acceptable to our audience. Our audience, a.k.a. the Whole World, wants to have a conversation. Marketers are just beginning to figure this out. The smart ones are realizing that they no longer can control what is said about their products/brands. (The really smart ones know they never did.) So they are starting to have conversations with consumers. They are listening to what consumers like and dislike. That, more than anything else, is what consumers want: to know that they are being listened to and to have their questions answered. Even when the answer is “No, we’re not going to do that.” The vast majority of people will understand that they are not always going to get their way, if you are able to explain (not tell) why they are not going to get it. This conversation helps you understand what the public expects of you that you were not aware of and it is a great source of insights that you would otherwise have remained ignorant of.

The fundamental difference between journalists and marketers is that journalists have a professional responsibility to tell people things that they don’t want to know. Journalism cannot tailor its product to what the audience thinks it wants. When it does it fails spectacularly (See George Bush Desert Classic, Run up to the) and we all suffer for it. Merely confirming what the audience already believes means losing the audience’s trust. Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted is still the best description of journalism’s brand value that I’ve ever come across. This is a great brand value to have. Problem is that no one except some journalists are aware that that’s what it is.

For years my standard comment about the profession I was seemingly born into has been, “We’re in the communication business, therefore we don’t do it very well.” We think everyone else knows what journalism is and how it operates. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a reporter (sometimes me) say, “He asked me why I wrote that headline for the story.” This is followed by a snort of derisive laughter as in, “How dumb can you be?” Well the reason people don’t know that reporters don’t write headlines is because we don’t tell them. We as a profession have made the classic mistake of forgetting that others don’t know the story as well as we do. Reporters and editors know that a wall exists (or should exist) between the business side of a news organization and the news side. That’s one of the reasons we laugh when people suggest otherwise. But the fault is ours, not theirs. If we don’t tell people they’re not going to know. That basic fact applies to journalism itself just as much as it does to the things we cover.

Some places address this by having an ombudsman or some such. While this is a good thing, the idea that one person is the sole liaison between an organization and all its customers is absurd. All reporters, editors, etc., need to do that. Even if they do not answer every question about a specific story they have to regularly discuss (on the interweb via blogs, podcasts, vcasts, wikis, message boards, etc.) how and why they come to the conclusions they come to. Why was this person quoted and not that one? Why was this the first story in the broadcast? When are you going to run that funny picture of Aunt Thelma and the cow that I sent you? Doing this helps to breakdown the wall between “us” and “them.” It is another way of getting out of the newsroom or of letting other people in to it.

The more journalists do this the more non-journalists will understand and appreciate what journalism is and why it matters. That doesn’t mean they will like us. The only times people really like journalism is in the wake of a major, major shit storm like Watergate. Fortunately those don’t come along that often. To paraphrase the great social activist Saul Alinsky, “Don’t worry boys, we’ll weather this storm of approval and come out hated in the end.” That’s the way it should be.

 ”Advertisements that contain sexual hints or flirtatious language are easily seen on some local television channels,” CCTV said on its Web site.

You say that like it’s a bad thing …

Elsewhere in the case of China v. Capitalism, Beijing has tried to cash in on the “Ratatouille” craze by shipping rats to restaurants. OK. That’s a lie. But it would explain why

Live rats are being trucked from central China, suffering a plague of a reported 2 billion rodents displaced by a flooded lake, to the south to end up in restaurant dishes.

Here in Boston we don’t have to ship rats to our restaurants. They come of their own accord.

There is a new hazard at the George Bush Desert Classic

BASRA, Iraq (AFP) - The Iraqi port city of Basra, already prey to a nasty turf war between rival militia factions, has now been gripped by a new fear — a giant badger stalking the streets by night. Local farmers have caught and killed several of the beasts, but this has done nothing to dispel rumours of a bear-like monster that eats humans and was allegedly released into the area by British forces to spread panic.

Great now we face an additional threat from RUS.

Buttercup: What about RUS-es?
Wesley: Rodents Of Unusual Size? I don’t believe they exist.

Doesn’t Wesley already sound like he works for the administration? (Earlier in the movie he proves he isn’t aware that one of the classic blunders is getting involved in a land war in Asia.)

Remember: If we don’t fight the giant badgers in Basra, soon we will be fighting them here. This syllogism so favored by the Administration was also used during Vietnam. In Dispatches, Michael Herr has the perfect response: Well maybe we could beat them here.

BTW, if the headline doesn’t make sense CLICK HERE and prepare to laugh. A lot.

I may have to vote against Sen. Ted in the next election because of his failure on this issue which has been so important to all the members of the Collateral Damage household. Our own Diamond Joe Quimby put out some serious political weight behind this and lost. Not only did he appear in a video for the effort but

Kennedy urged everyone on the e-mail list of his leadership political action organization, the Committee for a Democratic Majority, to vote for Springfield, Mass., in a USA Today contest to determine which of the 14 American cities named Springfield should assume the status of real-world equivalent for the Simpson clan’s hometown.

But all was for naught: Springfield, Vt., was the winner of an online voting competition conducted by USA-Today, on behalf of Twentieth Century Fox, to host the premiere on July 21. The Vermont town, population 9,300, was the top vote-getter, followed in order by Springfield, Ill., Springfield, Ore., and Springfield, Mass.

Man, we lost to Oregon and I didn’t even know they had a Springfield. Maybe that explains why Ted’s still in office: He realized he couldn’t cut it as a private sector lobbyist.

Chowda Head.

One way to decrease their stress: Stop killing them. Or there’s always Xanax for fish — I’m sure you could sell Pfizer on it.

Chelsea?

The “herbal weight loss patch which its makers said helped former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, shed 26.5 lbs. in under a month. … Customers are instructed to stick the patch to the area of the body where they want to lose weight and then just wait for the fat to flow out of them.“

Could we put one on Hillary’s head?

BTW, there’s a great list of this year’s dangerous Chinese imported products at WhoSucks.

Mohammad would have gone to this mountain but only if he wanted fondue.

From the release: Get ready for Mount Rushmore to roll into your town this summer! Instead of granite from the Black Hills of South Dakota, the profiles of presidents Washington, Jefferson, T. Roosevelt, and Lincoln will be carved out of real cheese as part of the Cheez-It(R) Big Cheese Tour. The 700 pound portable cheddar cheese version of our nation’s first grand fromages, created by veteran cheese carver, Troy Landwehr, will help raise awareness of products made with 100 percent real cheese.

Given Mr. Landwehr’s physique, I’m surprised it wasn’t co-sponsored by the American Association of Heart Surgeons.

I now understand why there is an interweb. So we can all create our own Simpsons avatar. This is exactly how I look in real-life. Go here to make your own. This could be the greatest viral EVER.

Earlier this year I saw Paris J’Taime, 22 short films by 22 directors (Gus Van Sant, Alexander Payne, The Coen Bros., Gerard Depardieu, etc.), all about love and guess what city? They were trifles, mostly, as they should be. Pleasant and touching looks at the City of Light — if it wasn’t commissioned by the Paris Tourist Bureau then they just got a freebie. What I remember most is Gena Rowlands and Ben Gazzara and Fanny Ardant (right) and Bob Hoskins. Not only are they great actors but they were all portraying something almost never seen in American movies: Passionate crazy love among men and women of certain age.

Paris J’Taime is postcards from Paris. Ratatouille is the novel. Its story and sense of place is both deep and surprising. Unlike other Pixar movies, this was actually a movie I’d never seen before. I love Pixar and think they have made some of the best movies I’ve ever seen but the others were all riffs on familiar themes. Toy Story is a buddy movie — a great buddy movie to be sure — but still we knew going in that the Woody and Buzz were going to wind up as friends. Finding Nemo is a superb story of love, loss and letting-go, but even so I’d seen its basic idea before (for more of my thoughts about Nemo go here). Ratatouille, the story of a rat who becomes a chef, could easily have been another “fish-out-of-water makes good” movie but it isn’t.

(WARNING: Lots of spoilers below)

It never takes the obvious route. It is never hack (which is comedians’ name for the easy and cliche). It isn’t “HEARTWARMING.” Every choice made by the people involved is true to the story and the characters and not just what the audience expects. As a result it gives the audience so much more than mere easy laughs. The big challenge that our hero (voiced by the wonderful Patton Oswalt) overcomes is not will he become a chef, it’s how to make peace between being a rat AND being a chef. When his family comes to his aid it’s not a big sweeping emotional moment, it’s a much more realistic “yeah we’re family and this is what family does even when they’re angry at each other” moment. In other words: It’s a true moment, not a Hollywood one.

One of Ratatouille’s greatest strengths is that it never forgets that rats and people eating food are not something that go together. Even when the rats ride to the rescue and run the kitchen, the movie is smart enough to include a stomach-jarring shot of rodents swarming. If this had been made just by Disney Ratatouille would have had an ending where the restaurant is saved, the rat and the human both get the girl and snoooooore. That sort of happens, but not in the predictable way that ruined so many of Disney’s later animated movies.

Also it’s hard to imagine the later Disney movies including the scene where our hero and his father walk by the exterminator’s shop in the Marais whose window is decorated with dead rats in traps. (I’ve been by that store a number of times, it is quite wonderful.) Pre-Pixar animation at Disney long ago gave up being willing to actually upset the audience. For all that Lion King was willing to show the father’s death, it did it without the terror and darkness that makes Pinocchio one of the greatest and scariest movies I’ve ever seen.

The only complaint I have with the movie has to do with its marketing. Disney/Pixar missed out on the perfect tie-in: A celebration of the wonderful Musée des égouts de Paris, the museum of the sewers of Paris. It is a truly unique place and the only museum in Paris whose gift shop already had plushy rats in stock.