*michael parekh on IT*

ON APPLE'S MOBILEME MESS

BUMPS IN THE ROAD

Well, the critical reviews are coming in on Apple's MobileMe, the next version of it's long inadequate .Mac service (aka dotMac), and they're almost all negative.  Here's Walt Mossberg's review if you missed it, and here's the one by David Pogue. This PC Magazine review does a good job on the ins and outs of the service.

Think Pogue hits it on the head with this observation:

"Maybe it wasn’t such a hot idea for Apple to launch four enormously complex initiatives — the iPhone 3G, the App Store, the iPhone 2.0 software update and MobileMe — all on the same day."

And then ends ups the ante with this observation on Apple's inadequate reaction to a problem that potentially affects over 2 million subscribers:

"But the real problem is how Apple is responding. For a company that’s so brilliant at marketing, it seems to have absolutely no clue about crisis management..."

It’s amazing that Apple doesn’t recognize this situation. This is an airplane that’s stuck on the runway for hours with no food or working bathroom.

And the pilot doesn’t come on the P.A. system to tell the customers what the problem is, what’s being done to fix it, how much longer they might be stuck, and how he empathizes with their plight. Instead, he comes on once every three hours to repeat the same thing: “We apologize for the inconvenience.”

MobileMess, indeed."

Can't praise all things Apple, every day.

ON THE JOYS OF MUSIC ONLINE

REPEAT

As usual, Bob Lefsetz nails it about the state and fate of the music business, and the video business over time, as it relates to online:

"I'm not saying music SHOULD be free, just that it is. 
Record label saber-rattling has only resulted in driving music acquisition further underground, to the point where it's impossible to eradicate the free consumption of tunes.  Are you going to eliminate AIM transfers? RapidShare? 
How about outlawing P2P?  Well, now movies are being distributed legitimately via P2P, so that's no solution... 
The ONLY hope is to create a solution so enticing that people would rather pay than steal.  It's possible, after all, bottled water is being sold by the truckload even though water is essentially free from the tap and discarded empty bottles are anything but green.  But the public has been convinced they need their Fiji.  And the purveyor has even managed to mount a PR campaign saying THEY ARE green."

He and others have been making this point for a long time, but sometimes it just bears repeating.

Bob goes one better and describes the new way music geeks, and many ordinary mortals find joy in managing music got online:

"Turns out you can now buy a compilation on iTunes.  But I wasn't looking for it.  I haven't played my Fat Mattress album for nigh on forty years.  But today I saw it listed in this blog and I remembered, I had to download it.
Along with Thunderclap Newman's "Hollywood Dream", Ry Cooder's debut, a couple of Spirit albums...  Shit I didn't need, most of which I own on vinyl, but stuff that was worth adding to my digital collection.
And it used to be that you spent all afternoon alphabetizing your albums.  Now, it's aligning your iTunes library.  Are the titles correct?  I need to eliminate duplicates.  Let me check the timings... This is record collector fun.
And after deleting the 56k versions of Al Kooper's "You Never Know Who Your Friends Are" for their new, shiny 192k replacements, I started working on the Fat Mattress album.  There was one track that I absolutely loved...  What was it?  "Mr. Moonshine"?

And ends with this punchline:

"Music, when done right, cannot be described."

Amen, Brother.

ON ART LIKE TWITTER

HISTORY REPEATING

Thanks to some friends, I had a chance to attend an unusual art event in Laguna Beach California called the "Pageant of the Masters".  Understanding the concept behind this event at first was kind of like first encountering Twitter, the communication service that has enthralled most geeks everywhere.  It initially takes a little experiencing to get at the heart of what it's really about.

This Wikipedia entry explains the Pageant as follows (image source):

"The Pageant of the Masters is an annual festival held by the Festival of Arts in Laguna Beach, California. The event is known for its tableaux vivant or "living pictures" in which classical and contemporary works of art are recreated by real people who are made to look nearly identical to the originals through the clever application of costumes, makeup, headdresses, lighting, props, and backdrops.

The first Festival of Arts occurred in 1932, and the first presentation of the Pageant occurred in 1993. Since then, the two events have been held each summer, apart from a four year interruption caused by World War II. "

This year represents the 75th Anniversary of this unusual Art Festival.  Each staged piece is accompanied with live orchestral music from the period, and a narrator explaining the context of the piece for about 90 seconds.  It reminded me of the 140-character limit on putting up a message on Twitter.  You either get the piece in that short period or not.

It may help to view this 3:40 minute behind-the-scenes video of the Festival to get a better sense of what's special about the experience (embedded link not available unfortunately).

The whole thing is experienced in an outdoor amphitheater, with a live orchestra playing under the stars as various famous works of art through the ages are cleverly staged on the various outdoor stages (image source). 

The whole thing is about reliving something called the "tableaux vivant" experience, which as this other Wikpedia entry explains, was really how people got entertained for centuries, long before we were spoiled by radio, TV, and the internet.

"Before radio, film and television, tableaux vivants were popular forms of entertainment. Before the age of colour reproduction of images the tableau vivant (often abbreviated simply to tableau) was sometimes used to recreate paintings "on stage", based on an etching or sketch of the painting.

This could be done as an amateur venture in a drawing room, or as a more professionally produced series of tableaux presented on a theatre stage, one following another, usually to tell a story without requiring all the usual trappings of a "live" theatre performance. They thus 'educated' their audience to understand the form taken by later Victorian and Edwardian eramagic lantern shows, and perhaps also sequential narrative comic strips (which first appeared in modern form in the late 1890s)."

An amusing part of the history of this type of art involves Victorian censorship:

"Since English stage censorship often strictly forbade actresses to move when nude or semi-nude on stage, tableaux vivants also had a place in presenting risqué entertainment at special shows.

In the nineteenth century they took such titles as "Nymphs Bathing" and "Diana the Huntress" and were to be found at such places as The Hall of Rome in Great Windmill Street, London. Other notorious venues were the Coal Hole in the Strand and The Cyder Cellar in Maiden Lane. In the twentieth century London the Windmill Theatre (1932-64) provided erotic entertainment in the form of nude tableaux vivants on stage."

As long as the performers were perfectly still, but nude, the work was considered "Art", and was OK to be shown in public.  But the slightest physical twitch by a performer could get the actor and the producers thrown in jail for breaking the public decency laws.

And we thought our rules and rulings around "wardrobe malfunctions" were draconian.  History just keeps repeating itself.

ON WEB VIDEO'S ROAD TO THE BIG TIME

EVOLUTION

Interesting news on the mainstream media front, as NBC gets ready for transitioning it's venerable late-night "Tonight Show" from Jay Leno to Conan O'Brien next year.  More details from the New York Times:

"With a new round of shake-ups in late-night television set to begin next year, Lorne Michaels   has decided to try to get a jump on things by starting NBC’s next edition of “Late Night,” with its new host Jimmy Fallon, as a nightly entry on the Internet.

Mr. Fallon has been named as the replacement for Conan O’Brien when Mr. O’Brien takes over the “Tonight” show from Jay Leno next year, and Mr. Michaels, the long-time boss of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” who also serves as executive producer of “Late Night,” told television reporters here Sunday that he wants Mr. Fallon to work out as many of the rough spots in his presentation as possible in performances on a website.

Mr. Michaels said he did not know yet which site he will use to post the shows with Mr. Fallon, but he was sure of several of the plans:

The web performances will likely begin in the fall, long before the transition from Mr. Leno for Mr. O’Brien is set to take place. The entries will not constitute anything like an entire hour-long show. “I expect that we’ll do something like five or 10 minutes,” Mr. Michaels said.

But he said they most likely will be on every night, to try to establish the rhythm of a nightly show. And he said, “I’m going to post them at 12:30 every night, so people will begin to look for Jimmy at that time.”

So far, the news has been fairly well-received by web media, with this reaction from SIA being an example:

"This is the equivalent of a Broadway show opening out of town to work out the kinks, and it sounds like a great idea to us."

And this from VentureBeat:

"Plenty of other television shows have “webisodes,” short clips of original footage from a television series that play on the web, but this is the first time the web will be used as a minor leagues of sort for the big leagues of traditional television."

I agree it's a natural evolution of the video content on the web, from the chaotic, bubbling, organic soup of "user-generated content" (aka UGC), to more traditional media content, on web properties like YouTube.

But I can't help but ask the question in my mind...how long before a major "TV show" debuts on traditional media to "work the kinks out", before being released on the web, to the real global audience?

ON A DIFFERENT SPIN ON HOME PRICES

EYE OF THE STORM

This week ended with a seemingly endless torrent of bad financial news sharply knocking the financial markets around.  And by all indications it'll be more of the same next week, as the financial markets decide what to make of the turmoil in housing stalwarts Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, with a back-drop of ever-rising oil prices. 
So it was startling to see this cover story in Barron's this Saturday, titled "Bottoms'-Up:  This real-estate rout may be short-lived".  Kind of like spying a teeny bit of sun in the darkest of rain-storms.  Here's a piece of their argument:

"Home prices are down nearly 18% from the market's peak, according to Case-Shiller, and inventories of unsold homes are at near-record levels. Foreclosures are mushrooming on "subprime" properties, or homes whose purchase was financed with subprime debt. Blowback from the crisis has left mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae (ticker: FNM) and Freddie Mac

(FRE) financially strapped, while many other lenders lack the stomach -- or money -- to offer new mortgages. Noted market experts such as Pimco bond-fund manager Bill Gross and economist Mark Zandi of Moody's Economy.com predict the meltdown in housing will continue for many months, with home prices declining by 10% or more from today's depressed levels.

Yet, such pessimism appears overdone, based on much recent data. Sales of existing homes are showing tentative signs of increasing, while the plunge in prices likely is nearing an end. Total inventories fell in May to 4.49 million existing homes for sale, or a 10.8-month supply at the current sales pace, down from an 11.2-month supply in April, according to the National Association of Realtors, in just one statistic emblematic of the nascent trend.

YES, THE SUPPLY OVERHANG still is humongous, but at least the numbers are moving in the right direction..."
Still other numbers suggest prices are close to bottoming. The S&P/Case-Shiller Index for April, released just last month, showed the biggest year-over-year price decline yet, of 15.3%. Buried in the numbers, however, and widely ignored in the media, was the news that home prices actually rose, albeit slightly, between March and April, in eight of the 20 markets covered by the index (Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Portland, Ore., and Seattle). This was in sharp contrast to the readings for March, which showed prices falling in 18 of the 20 surveyed markets. Also, the pace of monthly price declines is starting to slow in most of the markets with negative readings."

The piece goes on to cover a whole lot of reasons why the broader real estate market back-drop is still bad, and doesn't get carried away with the bullish case.  But the very attempt to go through some reasons that not all the news is bad, is notable in a period where the successful trade has been in one-direction, down. 
We now go back to our regularly scheduled torrent of relentlessly bad economic news.

ON DARK SUMMER THRILLS

NO JOKING MATTER

So this Friday, we've got the new iPhone 3G release from Apple to look forward to, but what about next Friday?  What can we look forward to then, to give us a break from the dog days of summer? 

Why, "The Dark Knight" of course, the next Batman movie.  This time, the caped crusader goes up against The Joker, played by Heath Ledger in his last role before his untimely death.  Time magazine already has a review up and this is what they have to say:

"The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan's second chapter in his revival of the DC Comics franchise, will hit theaters with all the hoopla and fanboy avidity of the summer season's earlier movies based on comic books.

It's the fifth, and three of the first four (Iron Man, Wanted and Hellboy II) have been terrific or just short of it. (The Incredible Hulk: not so hot.)

It's been one of the best summers in memory for flat-out blockbuster entertainment, and in the wow category, the Nolan film doesn't disappoint. True to format, it has a crusading hero, a sneering villain in Heath Ledger's Joker, spectacular chases — including one with Batman on a stripped-down Batmobile that becomes a motorcycle with monster-truck wheels — and lots of stuff blowing up."

So they like it, and it'll likely join a string of Super-hero movie hits from this summer.  But here's where the review really got my attention:

"In its rethinking and transcending of a schlock source, The Dark Knight is up there with David Cronenberg's 1986 version of The Fly. It turns pulp into dark poetry. Just as that movie found metaphors of cancer, AIDS and death in the story of a man devolving into an insect, so this one plumbs the nature of identity..."

Whoa, they compare this to The Fly, one of my all-time favorite sci-fi movies, where Jeff Goldblum puts in one of the best performances of his career in the title role.  And think it can share that company.

Now I've definitely have to add this movie to my "must-see" this summer list.

ON IRANIAN NUCLEAR TENSIONS

AXIS OF FUN

Now that Bush's Axis of Evil has been whittled down to one (Iraq and North Korea are now off the list, in case you missed it), it's time to focus of course on Iran, the remaining one.  Especially with the swirling "Will they/Won't they?" suspense around Israel pre-emptively hitting Iran's nuclear facilities. 

Reading the Beltway tea leaves, the only real question seems to be whether it happens before or after the U.S. presidential elections. 

So what better time than now to break for some comic relief on all this from Maz Jobrani, and Iranian-American comedian?  This YouTube clip is five minutes long, but chuckle-rich:

Maz is part of the Axis of Evil Comedy tour, complete with their own web-site.We now go back to our regularly scheduled Axis of Evil programming.

ON A GOOD COUP IN COLOMBIA

BRAVO

The government of Colombia seems to have pulled off a story-book operation releasing 15 hostages, held by the FARC guerrilla group.  Some highlights in case you missed the story:

"Colombian commandos in disguise spirited 15 hostages to freedom on Wednesday, including Ingrid Betancourt, a French-Colombian politician held for six years, and three American military contractors..."
"On Colombian television, Ms. Betancourt wept and smiled as she recounted a chain of events that seemed scripted for film, complete with Colombian agents infiltrating guerrilla camps and borrowing Israeli tracking technology to zero in on their target..."
"The rescue was a major victory in Colombia’s struggle with the FARC, a Marxist-inspired insurgency that has been trying to topple the Colombian government for more than four decades..."
"The United States was involved in the planning of the operation and provided “specific support,” the White House said. But officials there would not describe the nature of that support."

The story seems a model of international cooperation and coordination, complete with a yellow ribbon happy ending (more details on the operation here).  It likely will be a source of national pride for 43 million Colombians for years to come much as Entebbe was for Israel 32 years ago.  It'll also likely be a short-term photo-op bonanza of good-will PR for a host of politicians in all the countries involved.

These kinds of victories are rare for countries in general, and the whole world should celebrate whenever we get them.  Congratulations, Colombia.  Look forward to the movie.

ON P.O.W. INTERROGATIONS 2.0

FALSE POSITIVES

Remember the classic suspense movie "The Manchurian Candidate"?

The original one from 1962 with Frank Sinatra and Angela Landsbury, not the remake from 2004 with Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep? 

The scenes that stuck with me the most when I first watched this movie years ago, were about American prisoners of wars in the Korean war being systematically interrogated by North Koreans, with overseers from Communist China and Russia in the background.

In what has to be one of the strangest bits of life imitating art, the New York Times reports that:

"The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners."

Make that life imitating art imitating life.  The piece goes on to add:

"In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the C.I.A. and the military.

In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners."

Another factoid from the piece:

"The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”

Cut and Paste works every time, even though actual results may vary.

ON SUPREME COURT'S GUN RIGHTS RULING

JUDGMENT DAY

Like many Americans, I'm still trying to digest this week's Supreme Court decision defining owning guns as an individual, and not a group right.  Again, like many other critical decisions from the Court in recent days, this too was a close one, squeaking by with a 5-4 vote.  This contrast brought out between two of the important votes this week, in a "Letter to the Editor" to the New York Times, did catch my eye:

"It is sadly ironic that Justice Antonin Scalia wrote just this month, “It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.”

Those words, excerpted from his vigorous dissent to the Supreme Court’s decision to affirm the right of habeas corpus to detainees at Guantánamo Bay, quite accurately predicts the outcome of this week’s ruling overturning the District of Columbia’s handgun ban, a ruling that Justice Scalia himself wrote.

Whether any Americans will be killed as a result of granting detainees the right to challenge their detention in a court of law is debatable at best. But whether more Americans will be killed as a result of a proliferation of handguns in Washington is a foregone conclusion.

Mark Abramowitz

Pittsburgh, June 27, 2008"

Food for thought indeed.

ON OUR MISSION IN AFGHANISTAN

DOING THINGS RIGHT

A New York Times headline titled "Laura Bush Visits Afghanistan" made me do a double-take this Sunday morning.  First, here's what the story is all about:

"KABUL (Reuters) - U.S. first lady Laura Bush appealed to the international community on Sunday not to abandon Afghanistan in the face of resurgent Taliban violence.

Rocked by daily battles with Taliban rebels that have killed some 12,000 people in two years, Kabul is to ask international donors in Paris this week to fund a $50-billion five-year development plan it hopes will undercut the insurgency.

Mrs Bush said a major thrust of her unannounced visit to Afghanistan was to shore up the international commitment as Afghan, U.S. and NATO forces struggle to contain Taliban guerrilla attacks and suicide bombs..."

"The U.S. military alone spends some $100 million a day fighting the Taliban, but daily spending on aid by all donors amounts to only $7 million, aid experts say.

The Taliban, backed by al Qaeda, have vowed to step up suicide bombings this year in an effort to wear down Western public support for keeping international forces in Afghanistan."

The double-take was due to two questions that came to mind:

1.  What was Laura Bush doing in Afghanistan right now? 

I mean it's not like former First lady Hillary Clinton visiting Bosnia a dozen years ago.  This is a place where First Ladies could actually come under some serious sniper fire.

2.  Why isn't Afghanistan getting similar focus by the President right now?  I mean, this is where 9/11 really got started, and the guys who were a part of it, are re-establishing themselves all over again.

Instead, we're hoping that a "soft-touch" international fund-raising effort for Afghanistan lead by our brave First Lady might actually do the trick. 

Well, Laura Bush gets a whole lot of credit in my book for making the effort, but President Bush loses a bit for not doing his fair share.

ON SOME UNIQUE OBAMA SUPPORTERS

FOR THE RECORD BOOKS

After last night's historic win by Barack Obama in the Democratic primary for President, it's only appropriate to remember that the candidate has supporters around the world. 

Especially in Obama, Japan, which one would would presume, was ecstatic upon hearing the results overnight.  Here's how crazy some citizens from Obama, Japan were over the candidate, a few weeks ago, in this CNN report:

Their enthusiasm is infectious, to say the least.

Congratulations, Senator Obama, on a primary race well-fought and won.

Disclosure:  I remain a McCain supporter.

ON VISUALIZING CONCEPTS

SEEING IS BELIEVING
It's not everyday I find myself nodding in agreement with a Gizmodo post, but this one is a no-brainer. Here's the post in question:

"These concept virtual goggles don't take into account any, you know, technology that actually exists, but I don't really care...
They're certainly cooler than any other glasses display that I've ever seen.
Let's make these a reality, engineers, shall we? Click the photo for a bigger, more detailed version. [Blutsbrueder Design via PSFK]"

It's not very easy re-thinking goggles with built-in microphones.  This one does seem pretty elegant and practical at the same time.  At the very least it should be in the next Star Trek movie. 

Or maybe Quantum of Solace, the next James Bond movie being released later this year.  The picture above could easily be a still from the next Daniel Craig Bond saga.

ON STAR TREK MUSICAL "MALARKEY"

REMEMBERING

Like millions around the world, I've been a life-long fan of all things Star Trek ever since the original series launched on TV in the 1960s.  So this sad weekend development deserves to be noted and remembered in my book.  Here's the headline item from CNN.com:

"LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Alexander "Sandy" Courage, an Emmy-winning and Academy Award-nominated arranEdit Post | Post | *michael parekh on IT* | Your Weblogs | TypePadger, orchestrator and composer who created the otherworldly theme for the classic "Star Trek" TV show, has died. He was 88."

Don't remember the original Star Trek music theme?  Let me help you with this one minute clip from YouTube:

Now Mr. Courage obviously accomplished a great deal more in his life than just this iconic theme that went onto the be the basis of every Star Trek music piece over the last four decades.  But this piece of course is what he'll be most remembered for in the mainstream consciousness.

Of course, how the piece got developed is an interesting story in itself.  Here's an account from the Washington Post:

"His fanfare-style introduction to "Star Trek," eight notes played by the brass section, followed by the wordless melody with a prominent soprano voice won him enduring recognition among generations of "Trekkies" and even casual viewers of the science fiction show.

"Star Trek" originally aired on NBC from 1966 to 1969 and has been in perennial syndication.

He told an interviewer that he never was a science-fiction fan. "I think it's just marvelous malarkey," he said. "So you write some marvelous malarkey music that goes with it."

Apparently, the show's creator, the legendary Gene Roddenberry, didn't want any modern electronic music.  So Mr. Courage had to look elsewhere for inspiration.

"To write the "Star Trek" theme, Mr. Courage thought back to a pop song from his childhood that conjured images of going into the far distance. He came up with "Beyond the Blue Horizon," popularized by Jeanette MacDonald, and featuring a fast, train-like rhythm pulsating beneath the soaring melody.

Mr. Courage adapted the idea to the "Star Trek" job, which he completed in a week. His vision of the music included a soprano singer (Loulie Jean Norman), a flute, an organ and maybe a vibraphone. But he said the show's producer, Gene Roddenberry, wanted to accentuate the female voice. When Roddenberry was done, he said, the music "sounded like a soprano solo."

And like most great show biz stories, there's an interesting twist about money, as the Washington Post piece goes on to explain:

"Burlingame, author of "TV's Biggest Hits," said Roddenberry went further to annoy Mr. Courage by adding words to the instrumental theme. The lyrics begin: "Beyond the rim of the star-light/My love is wand'ring in star flight."

"It was horrible," Burlingame said. "Courage was never consulted, but Roddenbury from that point on was entitled to take 50 percent of royalties. . . . This upset Courage, understandably, not that he wrote a lyric, but that he wrote a lousy lyric that would never be sung anywhere."

Exploiting that loop-hole, Gene Roddenberry managed to get a 50% discount on the theme for a long, long time.  Given that this is the music business, it's not anywhere that others have not gone before.

ON OUR HARD WORK IN SPACE

ONE STEP AT A TIME

The international effort to finish building the third brightest object in the sky, after the Sun and the Moon, got a boost today with the successful launch of the Space Station Discovery.  The New York Times explains:

"The space shuttle Discovery, with its crew of seven astronauts, lifted off Saturday afternoon for a mission to take a tour-bus-sized science laboratory to the International Space Station, the $1 billion “Kibo” module.

The module is the largest part of three shuttle payloads that will bring the full Kibo assembly up to the station. It will be the largest “room” on the station, and will eventually sport an exposed area, like a back porch, where some experiments will be exposed to the harsh vacuum and temperature extremes of space."

This is the 123rd Shuttle mission, and nine more will be needed before the International Space Station (ISS) is complete, in all it's glory, spanning over two football fields.

As this Wikipedia excerpt remind us, it'll take almost a decade to finish:

"At an estimated cost of €100 billion (~$156 billion) for the ISS project from its start until the program's end in 2017,^[9] the ISS will be the most expensive object ever built by humankind.^[7]"

It's easy these days to take Shuttle flights and Space Stations for granted, going on in the background as it were (unless of course when something going horribly wrong, which has happened more than we'd all like).

But it was a a beautiful, picture-perfect Shuttle launch today, and the work of science aloft continues.  Great to see it live on TV every time.

ON WHY TIME WARNER KEEPS LOU DOBBS

POINTED Q&A

This bit from the Wall Street Journal's D6 Conference in Carlsbad, CA, caught my eye.  Silicon Alley Insider reports:

"Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes spent a good 45 minutes talking about weighty issues about digital media, social networking, the future of AOL, etc, at the D conference today.

The first question from the audience: "Lou Dobbs is a hateful xenophobe. Why are you employing him?"

That's our paraphrase of Consumer Electronics Association head Gary Shapiro's query. Our paraphrase of Bewkes' response: I don't really like him, either. But hey, what are you gonna do?

A more comprehensive paraphrase: "We get a lot of questions about that. We try to get [CNN] to be impartial. I personally disagree with positions that Lou has, and talk to him a lot about it. And we are constantly at pains to identify what Lou says as commentary."

D6 went up a notch in my book, especially Gary Shapiro, for kicking things off with one heck of a relevant question.  Wish Bewkes had a better answer.

ON MEDIA POLARIZED POLITICS

THE NEW REALITY

The Wall Street Journal is running some excerpts from  former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan's new book, "What Happened".  Obviously, most of the national attention around is how he seems to have turned on his former boss and his administration.  But here's the bit that resonated most on my end:

"The permanent campaign also ensnares the media, who become complicit enablers of its polarizing effects. They emphasize conflict, controversy and negativity, focusing not on the real-world impact of policies and their larger, underlying truths but on the horse race aspects of politics – who's winning, who's losing, and why…
The press amplifies the talking points of one or both parties in its coverage, thereby spreading distortions, half-truths, and occasionally outright lies in an effort to seize the limelight and have something or someone to pick on.
And by overemphasizing conflict and controversy and by reducing complex and important issues to convenient, black-and-white story lines and seven-second sound bites the media exacerbate the problem, thereby making it incredibly hard even for well-intentioned leaders to clarify and correct the misunderstandings and oversimplifications that dominate the political conversation.
Finally, it becomes much more difficult for the general public to decipher the more important truths amid all the conflict, controversy and negativity."

One could argue that the explosion of blogs and social networks on the Internet, have exacerbated this trend, allowing the micro-partisan issues to be amplified and distributed faster, not to mention more efficiently than ever before. 

It's unclear how we put Humpty Dumpty back together again, or if it's even possible at all.

ON A NOTABLE TV NEWS MOMENT

CANDID CAMERA

This is a priceless moment in talking head political punditry and interviews, from a couple of weeks ago in case you missed it.

It's MSNBC's political talk-show host Chris Matthews asking Kevin James, a conservative radio talk show host, what Neville Chamberlain did in 1938 that tagged him an appeaser to Hitler in the history books.  The clip is 9 minutes long, but it's worth it. 

By the way, Chris Matthews' line at the end of the clip is a great punch-line.

Here's to more candid interviews on TV news, regardless of party lines.

ON CLINTON'S ASSASSINATION REMARK

HOPE BEYOND THE GRAVE

It's interesting to see the media finally address directly the true nature of what Hillary Clinton said earlier this week regarding the assassination of Robert Kennedy, and the length of past Democratic primaries.   If you missed the actual quote, here's a link to the YouTube video:

The Washington Post has this to say about it:

"Smart candidates don't invoke the possibility of their opponents being killed. This seems so obvious it shouldn't need to be said, but apparently, it needs to be said.

"We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California," Hillary Clinton said yesterday, referencing the fact that past nomination contests have stretched into June to explain why she hasn't heeded calls to exit the Democratic race. She was in an editorial board meeting with a South Dakota newspaper, and she didn't even seem to notice she'd just uttered the unutterable."

The New York Daily News had this to say on her explanation of why she said what she said:

"Her lame explanation that she brought up the 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy because his brother Ted's illness was on her mind doesn't cut it. Not even close."

The Washington Post explains why this doesn't quite fly since she'd said the exact same thing back in March:

" In fact, she had used similar, more carefully phrased language back in March, in a Time magazine interview: "Primary contests used to last a lot longer. We all remember the great tragedy of Bobby Kennedy being assassinated in June in L.A. My husband didn't wrap up the nomination in 1992 until June. Having a primary contest go through June is nothing particularly unusual."

What's also extraordinary about all this is that the media hasn't called out the Clintons on the core point they were allegedly trying to make, that the 1968 primaries ran until June.  What they don't point out is that those primaries started in mid-March, vs. the early January time-frame for the current primaries.  By that measure alone, the current primaries are running way over the historical ones cited in terms of the time-frame to pick a nominee.

Of course, there was the inevitable apology from the Clinton camp, as the Washington Post goes onto explain:

" Clinton issued a statement apologizing "if" she'd been in "any way offensive," and a spokesman tried to clarify what she meant."

But the NY Daily News goes to the heart of the matter when they say:

"We have seen an X-ray of a very dark soul. One consumed by raw ambition to where the possible assassination of an opponent is something to ponder in a strategic way. Otherwise, why is murder on her mind?"

Why, indeed?

P.S.  Dave Winer has a spot on post on this matter...well worth reading, and listening to the Keith Olbermann Special Comment:

ON LONG-AWAITED SEQUELS

MOVIE MAGIC

Indiana Jones fans of course will be lining up this holiday weekend to catch the fourth installment of the franchise, given that it's been two decades since we saw the last Indy flick back in 1989.  Regardless of the reviews, which have been lukewarm to positive, it'll be on the must-see list of even the most casual Indy fan.  As the New York Times reminds us:

" “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” is a movie for boomers of all ages, though you can bet the bank that plenty of tots will be tagging along with Mom and Dad, Granny and Gramps.
Like the 1981 blockbuster “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” the first in a monster franchise that has spawned two previous movie sequels, a television series, comics, novels, video games and Disney theme-park attractions, this new one was directed by Steven Spielberg, cooked up and executive produced by George Lucas (with Kathleen Kennedy) and stars Harrison Ford as the archaeologist-adventurer-sexpot with the sardonic grin, rakish fedora and suggestive bull whip."

The movie apparently brings lots of old characters back, along with a sprinkling of some new faces:

"The bad guys this time are cold war Reds first seen poking around an American military base and led by Irina Spalko. A caricature given crude, playful life by Cate Blanchett, Irina owes more than a little to Rosa Klebb, the pint-size Soviet operative played by Lotte Lenya, who took on James Bond in “From Russia With Love.”

Dressed in gray coveralls, her hair bobbed and Slavic accent slipping and sliding as far south as Australia, Ms. Blanchett takes to her role with brio, snapping her black gloves and all but clicking her black boots like one of those cartoon Nazis that traipse through earlier Indy films. She’s pretty much a hoot, the life of an otherwise drearily familiar party. Among the other invited guests are Ray Winstone, John Hurt and Shia LaBeouf, who plays Mutt, the young sidekick onboard to bring in those viewers whose parents were still in grade school when the first movie hit. Karen Allen, who played Indy’s love interest in “Raiders,” is here too, with a megawatt smile and a bit of the old spunk."

But speaking of long-awaited sequels in movie mega-franchises, we all have a new Terminator movie to look forward to soon, as Gizmodo notes:

"Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins has started production in the New Mexico deserts, with Christian Bale and Sam Worthington on board to star in the film as John Connor and Marcus Wright, respectively...

"Terminator Salvation will be set in 2018 where John Connor is fighting Skynet to ensure the future he's destined for..."

""Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins" marks the latest installment of the multi-billion dollar Terminator franchise and will be the first film in a new Terminator trilogy. The film is scheduled for a North American theatrical release May 22, 2009."

Hopefully, the second and third movies in that trilogy won't keep us waiting for a couple of decades.

ON DISNEY'S PUZZLING ONLINE MOVE

BUY vs. BUILD

This Wall Street Journal article lays out one of the most perplexing things about how established companies, leaders in their industries, behave with an incumbent's mind-set.  Titled, "Fans resist end of Virtual Disneyland", the piece explains:

"For Walt Disney Co., the task of opening a virtual version of Disneyland on the Web was relatively easy. Closing it, though, is proving to be quite a bit more difficult, thanks to the wrath of obsessive fans of Disney's theme parks.

Virtual Magic Kingdom

This screen allows Virtual Magic Kingdom's gamers to build an  avatar they can play with.

In conjunction with the 50th anniversary of Disneyland in 2005, Walt Disney launched a free online game called Virtual Magic Kingdom whose look and layout mimics Disneyland's. Users created avatars and explored the online park's various regions, such as Tomorrowland and Main Street; chatted with other users; and participated in online promotions that crossed over into real-life activities at the company's resorts in California and Florida.

Disney's notoriously obsessive fans got deeply into this. Using their online personas, fans of Virtual Magic Kingdom -- VMK to aficionados -- accumulated points by playing games and completing tasks inside the world. These points could then be used to buy in-game objects like animated hats, pins and furniture to decorate their virtual private rooms. Points could also be accumulated in the real world through purchases of Disney movie DVDs and the like.

When players tired of the online world, they could keep playing VMK as they visited Disney's theme parks. There, they could go on scavenger hunts tailored specifically to them -- and use their rewards to purchase special Virtual Magic Kingdom items that increased their status among fellow gamers.

On Wednesday night, however, Disney plans to throw everyone out of VMK and lock the gates -- erasing their online profiles, lives and collections of virtual trinkets and real estate. Disney says it never intended the 50th-anniversary promotion to run this long, but money is also a factor: Virtual Magic Kingdom is free, and full access to Disney's other online game sites -- like Club Penguin and Toontown -- costs as much as $9.95 a month in the case of Toontown."

The closing apparently has raised hue and cry from some Disney faithful, both online and off.  The 18 month promotional experiment did however manage to garner quite a few "sticky eyeballs", as we say in the online business:

"The situation shows how sticky things can get when free, nonrevenue-generating gimmicks blossom into hits. In 2006, Disney boasted that one million avatars had been created inside VMK, though the company declines to say how many users the site actually has (individuals can create multiple characters). The site, which operates from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m. Pacific time, still boasts a few thousand daily users."

Couple of remarkable takeaways from this little quote.

1.  Disney managed to get a million folks to translate their off-line affinity for Disney parks into some online activity.  It fizzled in growing users from there  of course, since the whole thing was designed just as a short-term "promotion" for the perennial off-line properties.

2.  Disney actually had off-line operating hours for an online site, which presumably can be accessed 24/7, from anywhere in the world.

Some of these questions popped into my mind reading this saga:

1. How much does it cost to keep the site running?  How does that cost compare to other promotional initiatives by Disney for it's off-line properties that last for years or indefinitely?

2. What are the pros and cons of moving the site from it's marketing/promotional departments, to the operational side?  What if this were turned over to some in-house employees with a "start-up mentality", and ask them to see how something like this could be turned into a sustainable virtual presence of Disney's real-world properties?  Could it be morphed into being both a permanent promotional and an entertaining  online property in it's own right?  And of course, could that be turned into a profitable operation in the long-term?

3.  Would an effort like this cost anywhere near the $700 million it cost Disney to buy Club Penguin last year from outside entrepreneurs with the right "startup mentality"?

4. Or is buying third-party online properties, the only real strategy for a leading incumbent like Disney to get it's online game?

I'm sure there are some questions and issues I'm missing in why closing the promotional site and not doing anything else with the latent opportunity is a real good idea.  Just saying.

ON A BETTER DEAL FOR AUTHORS

HAPPY ENDINGS

Forbes takes a crack trying to imagine how the book industry could be changed by the internet, casting Amazon as the potential savior of the humble author.  This is an exercise long imagined by many internet and media observers, and the "what ifs" have been going on for almost two decades.  Forbes begins to set up the argument as follows:

"Archaic beyond belief, it's an industry that treats its most important asset--the author--badly. Can this go on?

The book market in the United States is worth about $32 billion a year; the rest of the world, an additional $36 billion. Who makes the money? Not the author.

Retailers take almost 50%. The agent takes 15% to 20%. The publisher gets squeezed--it's cause for huge celebration if they make 20%.

"On a book that costs $24.95, the author gets at most $1 to $1.50," says Eileen Gittins, chief executive of Blurb, an online print-on-demand publisher of photography books."

The article then goes on to posit how Amazon could change things in the author's favor:

"Amazon is poised to revolutionize the book printing business through vertical integration. Let’s look at the numbers. Assuming that Amazon already pockets 50% of the retail price of a book, it could directly engage with authors and cut out the middlemen: the agent and the publisher. That would free up 30% to 40% of the pie, which can easily be split between Amazon and the author.

Let’s say, in the new world, Amazon becomes the retailer, marketer, publisher and agent combined and takes 65% of the revenues, offering 35% to the author--we end up with a much better, fairer world."

The piece doesn't offer any particular reason why this should happen now and why it hasn't happened already given that Amazon has been a big player in book retailing for over a decade now.  Neither does it mention new channels of possible distribution via Amazon like it's fledgling Kindle electronic book reader.

But more to the point, there's no reason why the split to the author needs to stop at 35% via online distribution.

In a separate but related example, Apple is about to unleash an online distribution store for software applications via it's iTunes store for the new and improved 3G iPhone to be related in a few weeks.  The split in that case for third-party application developers would be 70/30, with the developer keeping 70% and Apple keeping the smaller 30%.

And of course the same potential has been long anticipated in the music business, where the artist today makes a much smaller piece of the revenue pie and online distribution has for now merely expanded their ability to make more selling not the music but concert tours and related goods off-line.

The authors/creators/artists in all these industries are waiting for the split to get much better in their favor.  And it's been a long wait for all for some online nirvana.

ON CRICKET RE-MADE

SLICE AND DICE

The Wall Street Journal has a great story on how Cricket, one of the world's biggest sports, and almost a religion in India, is being dramatically morphed and gussied up for big-time media commercialization in that country with over a billion fans:

"A new cricket league in India is attempting to take over the sport, backed by nearly a billion dollars, loud music and cheerleaders.

The Indian Premier League, which began its first season three weeks ago, is a massive departure for cricket. In the traditional format, team members dressed in white play eight hours a day for five days, with breaks for lunch and tea.

In the new format, games last about three hours total. During breaks, spectators sing and dance along to Bollywood songs. One team flew in the Washington Redskins cheerleaders for three weeks to train its squad of dancers and perform at matches.

The league consists of eight teams based in different cities around India, and they will compete in 59 games total over six weeks. It is the first ever city-based cricket league in India and the first to allow foreign players. Foreign players make up about 35% of the league, but each team can play no more than four per match. (A team can have 11 players on the field at a time.)"

The money commitment to date is also big, as the article goes on to explain:

"Backing the teams are some of India's best-known names from business and entertainment. Mukesh Ambani, head of part of the Reliance corporate empire and one of the world's richest men, and liquor baron Vijay Mallya each paid about $112 million for a franchise. India's biggest Bollywood star, Shah Rukh Khan, spent $75 million along with two partners for a team in Kolkata, formerly Calcutta.

The total paid for all eight teams was more than $700 million. Sony Entertainment and Singapore-based sports agency World Sport Group paid $918 million for the 10-year broadcasting rights.

Games are also being shown globally. Willow TV, a California-based company that provides live video of cricketing events on its Web site, owns the rights to distribute the games in North and South America across television, radio and the Internet."

It's too early to tell how successful this venture will be, but there are signs that the new cricket format is attracting new viewers, especially women. 

It also remains to be seen how successful the new format and league team end up being with the broader population of Indians around the world.  In recent years, this Indian diaspora has also been a great growth market for traditional Bollywood movie fare in the form of DVDs, Pay-per-view, and theater exhibition.  Perhaps Cricket 2.0 will be as well-received around the world over time.

ON THE DAY AFTER AND BEYOND

MSFT/YHOO DAY 2

After the dust settled on the first trading day post Microsoft withdrawing it's bid for Yahoo!, 279 million shares traded hands, and the stock closed at $24.37.  That's a touch under $7 billion dollars worth of Yahoo! at the closing price, and compares to the average trading volume in Yahoo! of about 34 million shares a day.

The topic of course lead Techmeme all day, including this post by Yahoo! co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang on the company's corporate blog.  To Yahoo!'s credit, they've kept the comments open on their blog, and most of the hundred comments I went through seemed to reflect some pretty unhappy shareholders.

Many existing Yahoo! shareholders seem to be jumping directly to Anger on the seven stages of grief, whilo folke selling the shares in presumable disgust.

At the same time there seem to be quite a number of folks (and folks at institutions), who're already at the final stage (Acceptance and Hope), amongst the buyers of Yahoo! shares today.  Presumably, these shareholders are a patient lot, and likely less concerned with where the stock closed today, which was the subject of a post by Fred Wilson yesterday and today.

Following Fred's lead though, I thought I'd ask the following question here*.

Quizzes by Quibblo.com

I picked eighteen months because presumably the remaining and new shareholders of Yahoo! have a longer-term horizon for going with Yahoo! in the wake of the Microsoft bid.

Feel free to re-post this quiz on your blog.  As Fred points out in his post on "Distributed Polling" today:

"The poll I did yesterday on Yahoo!'s closing price has been taken almost 2,200 times in about a day. How did it get so many takers? By being distributed on many blogs at the same time."

Let's see what the Wisdom of the crowds has to say how well (or not) the folks on the buy-side of today's 279 million shares will do over time.

* There's a typo in option 2 in the poll above.  The official original Microsoft bid price should read $31 instead of $32.  Editing the Quibblo quiz would erase the existing poll and results, so I'm highlighting the error in this footnote.

ON A YAHOO! VICTORY OR DEFEAT

BINARY OUTCOMES

The big discussion today on Techmeme of course, is the news of Microsoft officially withdrawing it's offer for Yahoo! over the weekend (and Yahoo!'s official response).  The bid-ask at the point of break-down of the talks was apparently $33-$37, with some large Yahoo! shareholders rooting for a result at least in the middle.

Fred Wilson has a post with a survey question on where Yahoo! might close Monday afternoon, which is an interesting short-term exercise.

Quizzes by Quibblo.com

More critical for longer-term shareholders is whether a future without Microsoft promises higher or lower returns in a reasonable time-frame.  Unquestionably the Microsoft bid has instilled a higher urgency in Yahoo! management and board to prove this to be the case. 

Now we go from one waiting game to another.

Disclosure:  I'm a long-time Yahoo! investor.

ON AN INCREDIBLE NAVAL PROGRAM

ALL ABOARD
This New York Times article on how the Navy planned and implemented a multi-year, multi-billion dollar contract for a whole new class of warships, has to be read to be believed.  I had to read it a couple of times to let the series of decisions made by the various parties, to fully sink in.  Here is the context of the program:

"A project heralded as the dawning of an innovative, low-cost era in Navy shipbuilding has turned into a case study of how not to build a combat ship. The bill for the ship, being built by Lockheed Martin, has soared to $531 million, more than double the original, and by some calculations could be $100 million more.
With an alternate General Dynamics prototype similarly struggling at an Alabama shipyard, the Navy last year temporarily suspended the entire program.

The program’s tribulations speak to what military experts say are profound shortcomings in the Pentagon’s acquisitions system. Even as spending on new projects has risen to its highest point since the Reagan years, being over budget and behind schedule have become the norm: a recent Government Accountability Office audit found that 95 projects — warships, helicopters and satellites — were delayed 21 months on average and cost 26 percent more than initially projected, a bill of $295 billion.

In a narrow sense, the troubled birth of the coastal ships was rooted in the Navy’s misbegotten faith in a feat of maritime alchemy: building a hardened warship by adapting the design of a high-speed commercial ferry. As Representative Gene Taylor, the Mississippi Democrat who leads the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower and Expeditionary Forces, put it, “Thinking these ships could be built to commercial specs was a dumb move.”

Each ship was initially budgeted to cost less than quarter of a billion dollar, since the idea was to build military versions "off-the-shelf" commercial ferry designs.

You're not going to believe how many things went wrong as this program was implemented, and what remains yet to be fixed.  Some examples:

"In their haste to get the ships into the water, the Navy and contractors redesigned and built them at the same time — akin to building an office tower while reworking the blueprints."

"With that in mind, Lockheed and General Dynamics proposed different high-speed ferry models as the template, and in 2004, the Navy selected the two companies to compete for the business. The model for the Freedom was a ferry built in Italy. An Australian ferry was the model for the General Dynamics prototype, named Independence.  Lockheed had virtually no shipbuilding experience."

"...the Navy agreed to reimburse the companies for cost overruns rather than setting a fixed price, leaving little incentive to hold down costs."
"Normally, the Marinette yard prefers to get modules 85 percent to 90 percent completed before they are transported to the ship erection building. In the case of the Freedom, with its repeated design alterations, better than half of the 39 sections fell well short of that goal.  The risks seemed obvious, yet neither the Navy nor the shipyard was willing to reconsider the timetable"
"Yet if the project was troubled, the Navy’s oversight at Marinette was less than robust. Because of staffing reductions, the Navy office responsible for supervising shipbuilding initially dispatched no one full time to Wisconsin. Even after a team arrived, it failed to appreciate the severity of problems.

“We had very junior people on site,” Admiral Sullivan said."

The sad thing is that the way this program was conceived and implemented seems more the rule than the exception with most Pentagon programs across the services.  Head-shaking stuff indeed.

ON THE PENNSYLVANIA PRIMARY

IT'S HERE

After weeks of waiting, it's finally here, the Democratic primary day in Pennsylvania. 

Almost forgot how exciting these things have been to watch of late, and this one's going to be no different, even though the conventional wisdom has Clinton besting Obama by single or double-digits.

The Pennsylvania primary hits a bit closer for us, since we have family around the State.  So it makes it a bit more personal.

Like many other millions, I'll be glued to CNN, MSNBC and others through the evening, but especially focused on CNN with John King doing his thing on the big-touch screen election Etch