Now I know why Netflix is so vilified by some customers

On Christmas day, I received an email from Netflix, addressed to "Paul," welcoming me as a new customer. Realizing that this was probably a gift to Paul and someone fat-fingered the address, I went to Netflix's website to find an email contact address.

No luck. They don't want email. They want me to call.

I didn't want to call, but I felt sorry for Paul, so I sent a note off to every address I could think of that might work, including their PR department (admin@, help@, etc).

Bounce bounce bounce.

Ohhhhh-kay. I knew there HAD be one or two valid addresses in circulation, so I snooped around and sure enough, lots of people complaining about the same thing and offering some valid addresses, including the president's. You'll notice I found a handful of others also. Well, I didn't REALLY want to bug this important man on Christmas day, but just on the off-chance he was checking his smartphone after opening presents... I mean,  it couldn't hurt, could it?

Well, someone DID get my email and did respond, but instead of thanking me, they pretended Mr. Netflix actually gets into this inbox and rest assured I wouldn't be troubled with any more email from them.

What did I expect? Oh, I don't know. How about a real person thanking me for taking an hour out of my (Christmas) day to track down company contact info that they decided not to post so I could help them keep a customer happy.

I hope Paul is happy. I think I spent more time helping him than anyone else.

Merry Christmas, Paul

A Modest Proposal[1]

Move Christmas.

I mean Christmas. Not Kwanzaa or Hanukkah or any other Holidays (etymologically "holy days") that happen to fall around the same time and become diluted alternatives (which deserve their own focus apart from Jesus).

I had a Sunday School teacher, Mr Parenti (a large, good man who loved Jesus) who said you know where Jesus is truly celebrated by how hard the Devil works to subvert it. Easter and Christmas are top examples of where Jesus is under assault. (Mr Parenti was putting a slight twist on an old bit of conventional wisdom - you know what someone truly stands for by who their enemies are.)

Thanksgiving is a notable exception, Mr Parenti said. He said that there is no Easter Bunny or Santa for Thanksgiving "because Jesus isn't in it." I agree, to a point.

Christians do observe Thanksgiving in a way the world does not. If you are in a Christian home for Thanksgiving, it's different from the world, and you know it. However, Thanksgiving is still fairly ignored by Madison Avenue, because there's little money to be made apart from food sales, and retailers are concerned about holiday spending, which begins the next day (or more commonly now, on Thanksgiving Day itself).

So I say: Since we don't know when Jesus was born, move the Christian Christmas to Thanksgiving, call it Christgiving - has a ring to it, don't you think? - and celebrate both on the same day. Let the world rush where it will.

How long will that give us? I figure another 2,000 years, give or take, before we have to move it again.

Unfortunately, we are living in a progressively diluted world, and every successive generation dilutes it further, not realizing they are living in a diluted solution already; and this will go on until the observance has only a vestigial resemblance to the original and there remain a few molecules of Jesus floating around in a solution of glitter and lights and apathetic renditions of seasonal sounds like so much Christmas morning vomit from the previous night's merry-making.

[1]
With apologies to Jonathan Swift.

Why did two Christmas Day tragedies get different coverage?

Why is the story of the burning of 5 family members in a million-dollar home on Christmas Day getting more press than the murder-suicide of 7 family members in a middle-class neighborhood apartment on Christmas Day?

Story 1
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/conn_house_where_died_in_fire_is_9L1w0pmo2b5XztIYVOWWQI ➚
Story 2
http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/texas-police-man-in-1274499.html ➚

In the first, the home is owned by a fashion marketing executive, and one of the victims played Santa at Saks Fifth Avenue. The story is tragic, and I am very sorry for them. The second has a Santa too, but he was the killer, and the family was anonymous. This story is tragic too, and I also feel sorry for them.

I'm not suggesting one merits more or less attention than the other (you know me better than that); I'm wondering why the press gave the first so much coverage, when, aside from the Nigerian church bombings, these two events stand out as singularly tragic on Christmas day, and both involve children and Santas in key roles.

Quite a few news outlets apparently decided you and I are more interested in the first, would watch it closer and respond better to the ads that would accompany it.

That is tragic as well.

From my fireplace to yours...

I had a tough time this year. It was among the busiest, most stressful that I can recall in a long time, and my mind the most fragile and least able to fend against the constant onslaught of frenetic inanity.

The fog lifted at about 4pm Christmas Day when a very good Christmas ham was in the oven, all the gifts were open and assembled, and I was drinking a cup of tea and realizing, now, a quieter, more peaceful season was descending.

Some TV channels broadcast a Yule Log over night on Christmas Eve. A couple years ago, WGN did the Yule Log with Old Time Radio, which I have somewhere on DVD but have squirreled away where I can't find it right now. But WXMI Cable 295 did it this year accompanied by music, which turned out to be a softer, tranquil collection uncluttered with ads or rock'n'roll or hip-hop or cutesy kids yearning for front teeth or hippopotami.

I recorded it, if you'd like to have it:

Two hours from Christmas Eve WXMI-DT Cable 295 (Antenna TV)[1]
Yule_Log_WXMI_Antenna_TV_2011-12-25_0030.zip
Yule_Log_WXMI_Antenna_TV_2011-12-25_0040.zip
http://www.mediafire.com/?lloll5l49oc52➚

You know what else Antenna TV did? Something that TV Land used to do back in the old days when they were truly retro and did "Merrythons": They played hours of classic Christmas sitcom TV - Hazel, Dennis the Menace, George Burns and Gracie Allen - and they cut in delightful little flashes from previous and upcoming holiday programming (you'll see a block at the end of the 2nd Yule Log). The only thing I would have asked more of was holiday movies, perhaps a block of old royalty-free versions of A Christmas Carol.

My Christmas is stretching out over week this year, as I have company coming, and I am enjoying keeping the spirit a little longer, and a few presents still under the tree, now that for most everyone else it's reduced to so much crumpled paper and bows and day-after shopping.

[1]
.ts files will play with any good media player. See my page on combining and playing.

Wake up, John Doe, you're the hope of the world.

There's something swell about the spirit of Christmas.

 

 

How is it that we keep applauding simple sentiments like this but never manage to embrace them?

That was rhetorical, because I know the answer. It was stated best IMHO about 2,000 years ago. And certainly recast many times since in many good ways, but never quite as well.

Jesus and Santa Live Here

If there’s one mortal personality most closely associated with Christmas, it's Ebenezer Scrooge, a man I am growing to more closely identify with each passing Christmas.[1]


My favorite Scrooges, all for sentimental reasons:

Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol
My earliest memory is Mister Magoo. This was has Jim Backus voicing Scrooge. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0123179/ ➚


That was so early, the images are little more than a few dark frames as though seen through a Viewmaster, but it's precisely that distance and dimness that lends so much charm, charm that would quickly disappear were I to watch it again as an adult, and so even though that opportunity's been available, I've chosen not to.

I'm very fond of Jim Backus for other reasons, of course. He was Thurston Howell, III on Gilligan's Island, which I've promised to blog about in earnest as a collection of pop culture allegories on human nature.

Albert Finney in Scrooge
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066344/ ➚
I watched this with my father and little brother Tom late into the night when first broadcast, all the lights off, me and Tom lying on thick orange shag carpet in front of our large console Zenith TV. Scrooge was released in 1970, so it probably appeared on TV in 1971, making me, uhhhh, very little.

Mom would kill me if she knew I was telling you this (she doesn't come here as far as I know), but that carpet is still there, and it's as soft under your feet as month-old Kentucky blue grass, and it looks like new.

George C Scott in A Christmas Carol
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087056/ ➚
This was 1984. I was a senior in college. I was alone, all my roommates had gone home for Christmas. I had finals up until the afternoon of the last day of finals week and my ride for Pennsylvania was leaving the morning after that; I was among the last to leave campus that year, I think.

(IMDb says the release date was Dec 17, 1984; that would likely have fallen near the end of Calvin College's final exam schedule.)

So I watched this new version alone, and enjoyed it all the more for that; the combination of youth, loneliness, and Christmas made an indelible mark in the holiday portion of my mind forever.[2]

That week I also watched an hour-long Facts of Life Christmas special (you know that show, with Blair and Tootie and Mrs Garrett, etc).

(IMDb says the Christmas episode I would have watched was "Christmas in the Big House" and aired Dec. 19, 1984. I know for certain I was still on campus and alone, but it would have been late, and I suspect final exams were over.)

I felt especially lonely that year, not because I should have been, but because people close to me had all left, and I was not yet home; yet there was a still, peaceful alignment with something, and it stays with me still.

[1]
Grammar be damned. That's how people talk. If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with "split infinitive" on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a ballpoint pen through his heart.

[2]
Experiences like this are recorded in a thin layer above our reptilian brains, just above autonomic responses, where sex and hunger and cold shivers lie.

As Dorothy says, it's not a place you can get to by a boat or a train. It's far, far away. Behind the moon, beyond the rain.

It's where Jesus and Santa live; it's where I write, where my Dad went when he died, and where I go when I am sad, or at peace, like now, on Christmas morning, the house still asleep but for me. You can feel things there. I can feel my daughter in my arms, and people that I've hugged and are no more, and people that I never hugged but wanted to, and review every taste and scent and flicker of every Christmas I've ever lived.

I'm not lumping all these things together, real and imagined, as deserving equal merit or consideration or time, but this layer defies inspection, like the ocean surface, which is not a thing, but a boundary, a demarcation that is constantly undulating, rolling, lapping, renewing, recreating.

And it is were I keep Christmas, and keep it well, if such a thing is possible for any of us.

Merry Christmas.

 

Christmas Madness

A holiday challenge: Watch one hour of prime time network or major cable TV before Christmas. Note the tone of each Christmas-themed commercial.

You will find: The majority are shallow, frenetic, musically inane, and seem to assume we can't understand a message if it isn't irreverent or struggling to rise above 6th-grade humor.

Why are we so afraid of being sincere, genuine, and vulnerable?

I believe it is (largely) because 1) many of the people that create the messages we consume have been hurt beyond repair; 2) that the naiveté of the holidays is associated with children, and that maturing children naturally avoid the association into adulthood; and 3) the jaded response of those hardened by 1 & 2 eventually rubs off on the rest of us, who after awhile tire of trying to be jolly in a world of grumps.[1]

I occasionally tell myself I'm going to stop celebrating Christmas. I mean totally. No tree, no gifts, no music, nothing. Because the world has lost it's balance, its moral bearing, it's sense of propriety and good will.

It doesn't matter if those things are right or wrong, if they descend from gods or are inventions of men; they are necessary for an ordered, peaceful, productive world in which we try not to kill each other too much, give each other enough to eat most of the time, and ensure heat and shelter for those that are cold and homeless.

Of course, I won't stop celebrating. I have a little one to make Christmas for, so she can make Christmas for her own children someday, and a wife that enjoys it as much as she does (if not more), and a 20-year-old son that still shares my belief in Santa. Those things are too special to let go because Madison Avenue and Wall Street persist in their progressive cheapening of the season.

This cheapening is collective, BTW, we are doing this together as a herd, and share responsibility for the frenetic madness as much as those accelerating it.

[1]
Setting aside for the moment whether it's right or wrong, we also respond this way to spiritualism and religion. It's "grown up" to be a skeptic or an atheist, to wear your wordily wounds like a badge of honor. But we needn't take sides on this to mourn the loss of our childlike attachment to elevated ideals exemplified by elevated personalities. Should I perish one day with such a simple faith, I can't help but think it will make the trip out of this world a little more tolerable.

 

I Met the Real Santa Yesterday

At Centerpointe Mall in Grand Rapids (used to be called Eastbrook Mall). He was the kindest, gentlest, most genuine Santa I have ever met, and I've met a lot.

I have it on good authority that the Santa visits some malls himself this time of year to spot check Santa-helper quality (that is where the phrase "secret Santa" comes from, you know).

Well, there's always a chance I could be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure I met the Big Guy himself.

 

(The outfit is from Mom and Dad; believe it or not, this is Dee Dee’s third year in it. It is a little small now, but how could we resist?)

Sometimes ostensibly weaker language is viscerally stronger

For example: two guys are moving palettes off a truck with a forklift; a palette slips off the forklift and crushes a third worker.


One guy says to the other, "Man, ________________."

Which is stronger?

A. Man, that's fucked up.
B. Man, that's messed up.

In my formative years, it was B. Stronger language was reserved for smaller inconveniences, which made it more common and less impactful.

Language is as language does; it is a set of conventions shared by a speech community that agrees on the rules and exceptions. There is no right or wrong. Language is the clearest example I know of that demonstrates arbitrary convention used to organize human activities. It is also the clearest example I know of that demonstrates how arbitrary convention can be elevated to nearly divine status (and perhaps not nearly, but precisely, if you consider the Tower of Babel story).

Language is so closely integrated into everything we are and do, some linguists believe it confines or constrains our perception as effectively as our five senses limit our consumption of the physical world. I am inclined to agree, which is why I won’t read a book in translation to enjoy its literary merit. I will read it to understand structure, content, context, etc, but there is no way I nor anyone else can expect to comprehend the Aeneid, eg, as it was understood by those who listened to it at or around the time it was composed.

Indeed, there are gradations of comprehension/appreciation so fine, they range from the example above down to a book written in my own language only a generation ago. Who now can fully comprehend Studs Turkel’s The Good War➚who was not there? Or over here with a dad or a brother over there?

Please don’t mistake this as justification for not trying to understand a perspective rooted in another time or language. Let’s be patient with what we don’t fully understand and allow it more time, scrutiny, and tolerance.

The Balomatic Always Stays in Focus!

Scientists tell us there may be an infinite number of parallel universes, and among them every possible variation of the lives we live now, some very slightly different from the one we know, some greatly different, some even without us.[1]

They also tell us that time is relative to motion within our universe, so my time while moving is not your time while standing still, and both distance and speed increase the difference.

And so I have lived uncounted lifetimes, some that I ponder daily in this life, some that veer here or there ever so slightly and years later have carried me afar. The fork in the road is not just a metaphor.

Who doesn't wonder what if? And how much more is there to wonder at, if there is more what was and is and will be than we can reckon, and in each of those, another us, wondering the same, some happier some sadder, some hungry some full, some cold some warm, some utterly miserable some sublimely elevated.

If I could single out one timeline to enjoy today, it would lead here:

 

My doppelgänger would go out west with a butterball wife, two kids young enough to be cute but not old enough to know it, a station wagon big enough for all of us and a dog we left at home, and we'd stop at the Wigwam Motel on Route 66 and stay a night in a teepee-shaped lodge, then it's off to the Grand Canyon and I'm wearing Bermuda shorts with a big camera around my neck and not caring that everyone else knows we're tourists and I'd take a million pictures and when I got home have them made into slides and invite friends over and we'd drink iced tea from iced tea glasses and we'd watch the pictures on a projector and listen to an LP on the console Magnavox of authentic Hopi Indian chanting and afterward the children would sleep and women would visit in the kitchen and the men would get into the good brandy and smoke Chesterfields.


Mrs Doppelgänger would be a casserole of Hazel and Alice with a side of Birdie and scoop of Mrs Livingston, a storybook TV kitchen wife in a floured apron full of earthy wisdom and warnings and an occasional grimace that turns into a smile after 30 minutes.

I am have will taken that trip as seen from a sufficiently distant observer as interested in me as I am in him-her-it, uncounted ever so slightly different trips.

That was is will be back in the days before interstates, when a vacation cost you not a few tires, when an airplane trip was as likely as a trip to the moon, when American Indian reservations were fairytale places painted in Movietone pastels, when every husband loved every wife and child and neighbor and God and country, when tolerance was co-existence veiled by delicate misconceptions.

They weren't the good-ol' days, they were just old days lived sunrise to sunset just like we do today by folks who were mostly trying to do the right thing most of the time.

If I could single out another one tomorrow to enjoy, it would be different, and different the day after that.

Visit the Wigwam Hotel➚

 

 

[1]
The best layman's explanation of this I've seen recently is Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos ➚4-part series on PBS. The book is here ➚

Also very good, and one of my favorite authors to listen to in audio books, Michio Kaku's Parallel Worlds➚

Umberto Eco: Apple is Catholic, PC is Protestant

Noted yesterday by Herculodge➚(great radio site I visit daily).

Umberto Eco➚ (from 1994, rather prescient, but then, it is Eco after all):

The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach – if not the kingdom of Heaven – the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.

DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: Far away from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.

You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come to resemble more closely the counter-reformist tolerance of the Macintosh. It’s true: Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions: When it comes down to it, you can decide to ordain women and gays if you want to.

Great book if you’re in for an intellectual roller coaster ride: The Name of the Rose ➚

As an aside, I think the greatest successful minds are in a way the least inventive: their genius is in appealing to what is the same in most of us.

You can’t be a successful business person, marketer, novelist, dress designer, etc, without on some level being thoroughly pedestrian.

A Modest Thanksgiving

Saturday 12/11/2011

Thanksgiving doesn't need to be fancy to be thankful. It doesn't need football or parades. It doesn't even need to fall on Thanksgiving.

See my Picas album here ➚

(Picasa is now more closely integrated with Google+ and I can't figure out how to embed a slideshow; I'm sure Google doesn't want me to, they want me to share it with a "circle", which is easy; however, Clarence doesn't have many people in his circles. Charles does; Clarence doesn't. So maintaining an alter ego through Google on the web is going to be a challenge.)

Where the sun sets on Grant Avenue

This is a view across the street behind the homes and up the hill where the sun sets on Grant Avenue, and has set in just this way for as many lifetimes as have begun and ended on our side of the street.



The homes go back a couple generations. The tree line goes back a hundred years or more. The sun and clouds and stars go back millions.

I took these pictures the evening before Dad died, which turned out to be a matter of hours before he died. This is what he saw from his bed in the evenings during the few times he was able to open his eyes.

This was a typical sunset, one of thousands just like it that I watched for years. I heard as a kid that Erie was voted by someone at some time as having some of the best sunsets in the world. I don't know how you judge such things, but if it is possible, I can believe it is true.

(Erie has been an industrial town for many years; it is difficult, knowing what we know about pollution and the affects of certain minerals in the atmosphere, not to make the connection with refraction and pretty colors. To this day, if I smell roofing tar, I smell the Public Dock - not road pavement, but roofing tar, they are different; I always presumed Erie had manufactured roofing tar because the smell was so similar, but it could have been something else; there were always barges lined up with gravel and heaps of rocky substances when I was a kid; that may have been iron ore, as there was iron processed in Erie.

I don't think that is true anymore; the bay front has become developed with a convention center, the dock has been renamed and a tower built at the end of the pier, an attractive roadway has been built that gives a nice ride along the bay where yachts are docked, and there are other things, and they are all nice, but I miss the old days: the barges, old guys fishing off the dock, the popcorn and peanuts and toys, the waves slopping against the Flagship Niagara moored alongside the dock opposite the Li'l Toot, which was a dark and tubby tugboat.

Having grown up around the lake and ships and seen and heard and smelled the water and things that happen on and around it, I developed youthful fantasies of joining the merchant marine or stowing away on a tramp steamer. The charm remains with me still.)

Old Erie Public Dock


Some more pictures of Old Erie:
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~paerie/oldphotos/OldtimeEriePics.htm ➚

Coming of a Certain Age

Everyone talks about the firsts; we recall (most of) them fondly: kisses, true loves, jobs, children.
We don't talk about the lasts: the last day you worked, the last day you drove your car, mowed the lawn, prepared something to eat, went to the bathroom by yourself.

An episode of Kraft Suspense Theatre, 'Their Own Executioners,' aired recently on WXMI HD (Comcast 295); it did an interesting take on what I'll call "Coming Of a Certain Age" stories, and balanced it well with youthful angst on the other side of the maturation teeter-totter. It isn't the flipside of Catcher in the Rye➚, but it was a pleasant, nostalgic echo of generation beginning to acknowledge it.

It was written by Luther Davis (who has a terrific history of TV to his credit, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0205065/#Writer ➚) and featured a young Dean Stockwell accused of murder; at one point Stockwell shouts "your driving me crazy," a line from Rebel without a Cause ➚ that audiences at the time would have recognized immediately.

The characters and writing are outstanding, and Hesrschel Bernarndi's delivery incredible (he also acted in one of my favorite pictures, Irma le Douce➚[1]).

Coming of age stories tend to get our attention, probably due to most of us having an immediate wistful connection to them, and nearly a lifetime to reflect.

Life changes at the other end are different; it is a difficult thing to watch a person age, retire, lose the ability to drive, become sick, dwindle and eventually die. They have only months or a few years to consider their obsolescence; little is written about them, and what is, is written by those on the outside looking in. (Arthur Miller's Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman➚ comes to mind, or Jack Lemmon in Save the Tiger ➚, though Lemmon may be more middle-age/midlife crisis.)

Kraft Suspense Theatre 'Their Own Executioners' is a type of this story; not explicitly so, and probably not intentionally so, but there is enough of it to digest it on that level.

Download and put together Kraft Suspense Theatre 'Their Own Executioners' here:[2]

http://www.mediafire.com/?be4so3pow31n2➚

Combine with MasterSplitter here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?bmm5f1te8e3jf➚
OR
Free HJ-Split here:
http://download.cnet.com/HJ-Split/3000-2248_4-10550268.html?tag=mncol;1 ➚
(Both will run as portable apps.)

I'd never heard of Kraft Suspense Theatre before. What I've watched so far has been very good. It doesn't have the surprise endings or ethereal qualities of Twilight Zone or Hitchcock or others in the genre; it's driven by the acting, which is quite good. I'm surprised, given as much retro TV and radio I've consumed, that I'd never heard of it before.

[1]
The first time I saw Irma le Douce was on the late late late show. I was alone, in my teens, in Holly, MI at my Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Ken's house on Pollock road. I watched in their den, a thickly carpeted and draperied room with rich browns and tans of wooden furniture, statuettes, and reliefs brought back from their missionary days in Africa. I watched with the lights off, enjoying the moon through the bare trees of the woods behind their house. (Their backyard was marvelously wooded; I could easily imagine deer and American Indians there a couple hundred years before.) The whole house was asleep but me. If I recall correctly, it was the same night as a massive brownout across the eastern US and I was watching coverage of the looting.

I happened to turn the channel to the beginning of this charming story about a French policeman rounding up a bunch of prostitutes and my pubescing mind was instantly engaged. There is a marvelous innocence of mature themes in older films, especially when painted in broad Technicolor strokes by familiar and friendly faces.

It's a wonderful if naive film from a wonderful director on a very old theme - the damsel in distress. Having survived the 70's, I read and watched far more stories that presented jaded, gritty views of prostitution and those that participate in it. (George C Scott in Hardcore,➚ eg, written by fellow alum Paul Schrader). There is a piece of me that wants to see the Cinderella side of any story (a la Pretty Woman ➚), but I don't let that show too much, as it's often perceived as hopelessly Pollyanna, or worse, uninteresting.

Still, it's a wonderful story, with wonderful actors, with a delicate innocence that touched me in a time and place that would stick with me for the rest of my life. Thank you, Billy Wilder.

[2]
.ts files can be played easily by Media Player Classic (http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/ ➚) or VLC Media Player (http://www.videolan.org/ ➚)