The Crock Plot

Is Ronald McDonald a Poofter?

2008-07-03T18:40:00.000-07:00

Is the Big Mac a metaphor for sodomy? Is "supersize it" a code for something other than potatoes? Is a "Happy Meal" a sin? Something to be consumed only in the privacy of your own home?

The conservative American Family Association thinks there may be hidden meaning in the old Christmas carol urging you to "don ye now our gay apparel."

Make up your own mind. Surf here, if you dare. http://boycottmcdonalds.com/

Amazon.Com's melting down

2008-06-20T07:04:00.000-07:00

1. On around 10 a.m. on June 18, 2008, I placed an order (#104-7260042-2096242) with Amazon for a Motorola MOTOROKR 505 Bluetooth hands-free device to use with my mobile phone. This was a one-click order for two-day delivery on my Amazon Prime account.

2. At 11:27 a.m. on June 18, 2008, Amazon sent me an email confirming my purchase.

3. At 4:49 p.m. on on June 19, 2008 -- almost a day and a half after confirmation -- Amazon sent an email stating that my item was "displayed at an incorrect price" and that they had unliterally CANCELLED my order.

4. Ironically, I had ordered this same product (104-2001654-4645020) on June 4, tested it, found it suitable and thus bought another one. Or so I thought. The device is needed because a new California law which takes place June 1 requires that all phone usage while driving be hands free.

5. All of the responses from the online customer service are 'bot form messages. The phone numbers are as useless as Amazon's customer "service"!

After 45+ minutes on the phone with three different very nice but totally clueless and powerless customer "service" reps, they tell me that they can't or won't do anything at all.

These same reps tell me that there was nothing wrong with the price. It's that the product is out of stock?

WTF? Amazon can tell me when there is one or two copies of a book left and they take my order and a day and a half later cancel it?

So which story do I believe?

6. Offering a product and failing to follow through is a breach of contract and a violation of federal and state consumer laws.

7. I am one of Amazon's first Prime customers and spend upwards of $10,000 per year with them. THAT's going to change today.

8. This mess-up is legally a violation. In the middle of a recession, it's a slap in the face to a good consumer. Morally and ethically, it is simply wrong.

9. All this is a sign that Amazon is melting down. Their servers are crashing and their database can't track inventory. Plus, in the middle of a recession, they choose to screw one of their best customers? That's bad business. It costs Amazon FAR more money to acquire a new customer with my spending habits than it would have simply to do the right thing.

This company is headed downhill. I sold my Amazon stock this morning.

Guys, you can survive 'Sex and the City'

2008-06-03T07:05:00.000-07:00

The TV show has WAY more information about aging sluts than guys ever wanted to know.

From the LA Times: "Man should not live by bread alone. Every once in a while, he should turn off The Game, ditch the remote, put on some clean clothes and embrace his feminine side."

Embracing my feminine side is too much like masturbation. I'd rather embrace my wife.

The rest of the story here.

Rupiah's From Heaven?

2008-06-02T07:53:00.000-07:00

I'm fortunate enough to have a couple of books that have been bestsellers in Indonesia, but the following illustrates that some folks will do anything for promotion. Hope it works for him.

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) - If you're short of cash and don't mind running in tropical humidity and smog for a few bucks, read on.

An Indonesian businessman plans to throw 100 million rupiah (US $10,600) out of an airplane over the capital this Sunday as a publicity stunt to promote his new book.

"I want to create a rain of money in Jakarta," author and motivational speaker Tung Desem Waringin said. "It's a little bit crazy, but it's marketing."

Police spokesman Col. I Ketut Untung said authorities may not allow the plan to go forward because it could draw huge crowds and cause chaos.

Tens of millions of Indonesians live on less than US $1 a day and food and aid giveaways always draw large numbers.

The 42-year-old Tung said instead of opting for regular advertising for his book, he came up with an idea that "will make people happy."

Airline Fossils Need to Die, NOW

2008-05-24T09:25:00.000-07:00

Article, San Francisco Chronicle today, predicts that at least two of the following might be in bankruptcy by the end of this year: United, Continental, American, Northwest, US Airways and Delta.

I say don't wait. Like former racehorses with four broken legs, they all need to be administered the coup de grace to put them out of OUR misery. They're arrogant, sloppy, fat, nasty, stupid, obsolete creatures unfit for the current environment. This is where Darwin needs to work. Fast.

Good riddance, and the sooner the better. Good bye to surly ticket counter drones, frowning flight attendants, supremely dumb incompetent marionettes in the executive suites who think that treating passengers like downer cattle is the way to make a profit. I say take the forklift to them all and dump them into the rendering pot.

Article, San Francisco Chronicle today, "Virgin America stymied in its attempts to obtain additional routes."

Yeah, the bureaucrat trolls at the U.S. Department of Transportation are sandbagging Virgin America's attempts to grow, awarding routes and airport gates to the likes of the aformentioned dinosaurs above.

So there you have it, good airlines like Virgin America, Jet Blue and Southwest get screwed while keeping alive those who deserve to die.

More than 15 years ago, I got fed up with the sleazy bastards at American and United. I cut up my frequent-flyer cards and cancelled my airport club cards and left them on the check-in counter. I have not flown either airline since then.

I was the CEO of a company back then. I amended the company travel handbook to forbid reimbursement for traveling on those carriers.

If American or United are the only way to get somewhere, I don't go there. The sooner they die, the faster the American public can escape the U.S. equivalent of Aeroflot and gain access to decent transportation.

Sure, soaring fuel prices squeeze everybody. But when I fly Virgin America, Jet Blue and Southwest, I fly with people I can empathize with. Real people who treat passengers like other people and who offer a good experience and value for the price of the ticket.

I wonder if Jack Kevorkian is available for freelance work?

Oil, tobacco ... a lie is a lie is a lie.

2008-05-22T06:57:00.000-07:00

1994-Tobacco company executives testify before Congress that nicotine is NOT addictive.

2008-Oil company executives testify before Congress that they're NOT responsible for the high price of gasoline.

Uh-huh.

American Apartheid - No Negroes Allowed in Bookstores?

2008-05-21T07:51:00.000-07:00

This disturbing article appeared in the Guardian (U.K.) yesterday. I can find no words suitable for comment.

Why I'm not allowed my book title

It's called The Book of Negroes in Canada - but Americans won't buy that term

May 20, 2008 7:00 AM

Are we on the same page? ... Novelist Lawrence Hill

It isn't unusual for British or Canadian books to change titles when entering the American market. It happened to JK Rowling - Harry Potter has no "philosopher's" stone in the USA; and to Alice Munro, whose fabulous collection of short stories went from Who Do You Think You Are? in Canada to The Beggar Maid in the USA.

But I didn't think it would happen to me. When my novel, The Book of Negroes, came out last year with HarperCollins Canada, I was assured by my American publisher that the original title would be fine by them. However, several months later, I got a nervous email from my editor in New York.

She mentioned that the book cover would soon be going to the printer and that the title had to change. "Negroes" would not fly, or be allowed to fly, in American bookstore. At first, I was irritated, but gradually I've come to make my peace with the new title, Someone Knows My Name.

Perhaps the best way to examine the issue is to examine the evolution of the word "Negro" in America. I descend (on my father's side) from African-Americans. My own father, who was born in 1923, fled the United States with my white mother the day after they married in 1953. As my mother is fond of saying, at the time even federal government cafeterias were segregated. It was no place for an interracial couple to live.

My parents, who became pioneers of the human rights movement in Canada, used the word Negro as a term of respect and pride. My American relatives all used it to describe themselves. I found it in the literature I began to consume as a teenager: one of the most famous poems by Langston Hughes, for example, is The Negro Speaks of Rivers. When my own father was appointed head of the Ontario Human Rights Commission in 1973, the Toronto Globe and Mail's headline noted that a "Negro" had been appointed.

The term was in vogue right into the 1970s. For a time, the word "Negro" took a back seat in popular language culture to newer terms, such as "Afro-American", "African-Canadian", "people of colour" (a term I have always disliked, for its pomposity) or just plain "black."

In the last 20 or so years in urban America, we have witnessed more changes in racial terminology. For one thing, and regrettably in my view, many hip-hop artists have re-appropriated the word "nigger", tried to tame it, and use it so vocally and frequently as to strip it of its hateful origins. We are all products of our generation.

Given that I was born in 1957 and taught to ball my fists against anybody using that N-word, I can't quite get my head around using it these days in any kind of peaceful or respectful manner. Just as the very word "nigger" has risen in popular usage over the last decade or two, however, the word "Negro" has become viscerally rude. In urban America, to call someone a Negro is to ask to for trouble. It suggests that the designated person has no authenticity, no backbone, no individuality, and is nothing more than an Uncle Tom to the white man.

I used The Book of Negroes as the title for my novel, in Canada, because it derives from a historical document of the same name kept by British naval officers at the tail end of the American Revolutionary War. It documents the 3,000 blacks who had served the King in the war and were fleeing Manhattan for Canada in 1783. Unless you were in The Book of Negroes, you couldn't escape to Canada. My character, an African woman named Aminata Diallo whose story is based on this history, has to get into the book before she gets out.

In my country, few people have complained to me about the title, and nobody continues to do so after I explain its historical origins. I think it's partly because the word "Negro" resonates differently in Canada. If you use it in Toronto or Montreal, you are probably just indicating publicly that you are out of touch with how people speak these days. But if you use it in Brooklyn or Boston, you are asking to have your nose broken. When I began touring with the novel in some of the major US cities, literary African-Americans kept approaching me and telling me it was a good thing indeed that the title had changed, because they would never have touched the book with its Canadian title.

I'd rather have the novel read under a different title than not read at all, so perhaps my editor in New York made the right call. After all, she lives in the country, and I don't. I just have one question. Now that the novel has won the Commonwealth writers' prize, if it finds a British publisher, what will the title be in the UK?

Book Launch Reality

2008-05-19T18:22:00.000-07:00

By way of author/journalist Seth Mnookin's blog, herewith the reality check for authors.

It falls into the "sad but true" category and offers the best insight into the dysfunctional world of authors and book publishing.

Dumb Calif Bureaucrats Criminalize Home Winemakers

2008-05-08T13:17:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know that "dumb bureaucrat" is redundant. But, just in the nick of time the California state government has arrived and they're here to save us from ourselves. Again.

By declaring that competitions among home winemakers are illegal.

This story from The Santa Rosa Press-Democrat (the only real newspaper in Sonoma County) says it all.

Read it.

Weep.

Then let's ALL have a tasting of homemade wines at our homes. We need to set a date and then notify the bureaucrats. Let them come after ALL of us. Would make for some great YouTube Vids.

Home wine ruling a shock
Organizers and others stunned that state ABC would say events like Harvest Fair are against the law

By KEVIN MCCALLUM
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Home winemaking competitions abound in California.

From the Sonoma County Harvest Fair in the heart of Wine Country to the massive California Exposition & State Fair in Sacramento, fairs around the state recognize the skills of thousands of amateur vintners.

Numerous private winemaking clubs also hold regular contests so their members can see how their vintages stack up.

But they all have one thing in common: They're all illegal.

That's what state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control officials have told an Illinois man who wants to hold a home winemaking competition in Santa Rosa this summer.

"We told them it's illegal," said Matthew Seck, chief of the trade enforcement division of the ABC.

State law creates an exemption from California's alcohol licensing laws for home winemakers who produce up to 200 gallons a year -- but only if they are making it for their own consumption.

The exemption was essentially California's way, after regulation of alcohol fell to the states following the repeal of Prohibition, of continuing the federal exemption for home winemaking.

The problem is that the exemption is a very narrow one that does not allow people to share the wine they produce with others or remove it from the place where it was produced, Seck said.

Word of the state's position spread quickly though the ranks of the passionate home winemaking community, particularly in California, where hobbyists have access to some of the best grapes in the world and craft wines in garages, basements and barns.

"It doesn't make sense to most people, but that's what the law is," Seck said.

Seck declined to say what type of enforcement the agency might take against an amateur wine judging event. He said he was unaware such events take place at county and state fairs, and had never received a complaint against one.

But when the ABC receives a complaint or becomes aware that laws are being broken, it has an obligation to act, he said.

Threat of prosecution

In an e-mail to the Santa Rosa event's organizer, Joel Sommer, ABC investigator David Wright was clear there could be consequences.

"If you decide to hold your event please be advised that it will be without Department consent or authorization and could result in criminal prosecution," Wright wrote.

That got Sommer's attention.

The resident of St. Libory, Ill., and a self-described "Web entrepreneur" operates a winemaking Web site called WinePress. He was shocked by the response and baffled given the proliferation of other such events across the state, including the state's own fair.

"I was just trying to do everything legally," he said.

Sommer has held home winemaking competitions in Denver, Baltimore and St. Louis in recent years, and was looking forward to holding his first event in California. But the legal opinion threw his whole plan into question.

Many visitors to Sommer's Web site rallied to his defense, digging up legal research and offering support and strategic suggestions. Many suggested the ABC official was off base or overstepping his authority.

"This guy is drunk on power," wrote one poster.

The ABC's stance flies in the face of reality and years of history and tradition, said Nancy Vineyard, co-owner of The Beverage People, a home brewing and winemaking supply company in Santa Rosa.

"If that's the case, then just about every county fair and club across the state is breaking the law," she said.

"I've never heard anything like it," said Bob Bennett, an avid home winemaker from Healdsburg and head of the Garage Enologists of North County. "I can't think of why he's any different than the other (competitions)."

Such competitions are crucial for home winemakers to get feedback on their wines from experts in the field, said Fred Millar, president of the Sacramento Home Winemakers. He noted that many of the best professional winemakers started out as hobbyists.

"I'm really concerned. I think this could have a chilling effect on the whole industry," he said.

Others suggested Sommer just ignore the ABC and hold his event as planned.

"It's silly and it's a technicality and nobody really cares," said Andy Coradeschi, former president of Cellarmasters Home Wine Club of Los Angeles, which has held a competition for 34 years and last year judged about 220 wines.

Help from legislators

Seck declined to say whether county fairs or the upcoming California Exposition & State Fair's Home Wine competition would violate the law. He said he was unaware they held home winemaking events.

But legislators are moving quickly to make sure the flap doesn't interfere with the summer fair season. After receiving calls from home winemakers across California, state Sen. Pat Wiggins, D-Santa Rosa, is proposing urgency legislation to fix the problem.

"I think there is a concern that some of these events may have to cease without this kind of bill," Wiggins spokesman David Miller said.

Next week, Wiggins will introduce a bill, SB 607, that would add home winemakers to a section of the law giving greater latitude to home brewers. Current law for beer allows "personal or family use" and lets home brewers remove their brews "from the premises where manufactured for use in competition at organized affairs, exhibitions or competitions."

Adding wine to this section should resolve the issue, Miller said.

As "urgency" legislation, the bill requires a two-thirds majority to pass, but would take effect immediately upon the governor's signature.

Despite the warnings from the ABC earlier this year, Sommer remained undeterred and continues planning his event. The fact that he has already paid deposits to the Flamingo Conference Resort & Spa has motivated him, too.

He continues to "move full speed ahead" for the event, called WineFest, and hopes to get 150 people to attend.

The threat of prosecution initially made some posters on Sommer's site question whether attending was worth the risk. But most saw the threat as hollow and the risk minimal, he said.

"If they make an example out of me, fine, but at least we get the law changed," he said.

Move over wunderkinds, there are 2X more boomers entrepreneurs!

2008-05-02T08:13:00.000-07:00

A new study confirms what all of us older entrepreneurs knew already: there are a lot more of us than 20-something wunderkinds. The following comes from the Kauffman Foundation:

Challenging the perception of American technology entrepreneurs as 20-something wunderkinds launching businesses from college dorm rooms, a new study by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and researchers at Duke and Harvard universities reveals most U.S.-born technology and engineering company founders are middle-aged, well-educated and hold degrees from a wide assortment of universities.

In fact, twice as many U.S.-born tech entrepreneurs start ventures in their 50s as do those in their early 20s. Further, elite, highly ranked schools are over-represented in the ranks of these founders, and Ivy-League graduates achieve the greatest business success; however, 92 percent of U.S.-born founders graduate from other universities, according to the study, Education and Tech Entrepreneurship. The study analyzed U.S. engineering and tech companies founded from 1995-2005, representing the most current decade of data.

"Because entrepreneurship is an indicator of economic vitality in regions and across the country, this study raises important policy questions about how to foster greater tech entrepreneurship to boost economic growth," said Robert Litan, vice president of Research and Policy at the Kauffman Foundation. "Probably the most compelling fact in the study is that advanced education is critical to the success of tech startups."

U.S.-born engineering and tech company founders are overwhelmingly well-educated. While there are significant differences in the types of degrees these entrepreneurs obtain and the time they take to start a company after they graduate, the study reveals a direct correlation between a founder’s education and company performance.

In 2005, the average sales revenue of all startups in the sample was around $5.7 million, employing an average of 42 workers. Startups established by founders with advanced Ivy-League degrees had higher average sales and employment – $6.7 million and 55 workers, respectively. The success of these groups contrasted sharply with startups established by founders with high school degrees with average revenues and employees at $2.2 million and 18 workers, respectively.

Among other findings:

The average and median age of U.S.-born founders was 39 when they started their companies. Only about 1 percent of U.S.-born founders of tech companies were teenagers.
The vast majority (92 percent) of U.S.-born tech founders held bachelor’s degrees, 31 percent held master’s degrees, and 10 percent had completed PhDs. Nearly half of these degrees were in science-, technology-, engineering- and mathematics-related disciplines. One third was in business, accounting and finance.
U.S.-born tech founders holding MBA degrees established companies more quickly (13 years) than others. Those with PhDs typically waited 21 years to become tech entrepreneurs.
The top 10 universities from which U.S.-born tech founders received their highest degrees are Harvard, Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, MIT, University of Texas, University of California-Berkeley, University of Missouri, Pennsylvania State University, University of Southern California and University of Virginia.
Nearly half (45 percent) of the tech startups were established in the same state where U.S.-born tech founders received their education. Of the U.S.-born tech founders receiving degrees from California, 69 percent later created a startup in the state; Michigan, 58 percent; Texas, 53 percent; and Ohio, 52 percent. In contrast, Maryland retained only 15 percent; Indiana, 18 percent; and New York, 21 percent.

"While education clearly is an advantage for tech founders in the United States, experience also is a key factor," said Vivek Wadhwa, the study’s lead researcher and a Wertheim fellow with the Harvard Law School and executive in residence at Duke University. "That a large number of U.S.-born tech founders have worked in business for many years also is important in understanding the supply of tech entrepreneurs."

Other researchers include Richard Freeman, Herbert Asherman chair in economics, Harvard University and director, Labor Studies Program, National Bureau of Economic Research; and Ben Rissing, Wertheim Fellow, Labor and Worklife Program, Harvard Law School and research scholar, Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University.

Meetings!

2008-05-01T07:17:00.000-07:00

No comment needed.

This is from Seth Godin's often amusing, usually helpful and always interesting, blog

Dr. Frankenstein's legacy looms larger

2008-04-30T07:32:00.000-07:00

There's a famous (and very old -- 1959) book by C.P. Snow called "The Two Cultures" which laments the divide between scientists and everyone else. The problems are deeper now and the essence of the scientific issues have changed greatly.

But despite the hand-wringing of every scientific generation, the problem gets worse.

The problem gets worse because scientists have tried to solve it by themselves. They have successfully created an environment where ordinary people view them as a caste apart, a priesthood of the anointed who have the theological rights to intercede between the masses and the God of science. The publishing industry has bought into this and manages to make the problem worse.

My little thread of current agonizing about this begins with a Wired Online article, "Why is There so Little Science in the Sci/Tech Section of Google News?".

That contains links to two good nanotechnology blog posts: "Five lessons in nano outreach" and,

"'Science has a serious marketing problem,' says Google founder at 2007 AAAS keynote". (AAAS = American Association for the Advancement of Science.)

What's bad about these links is that they seem to advocate spin-doctoring as a solution rather than translating the science into a form that can be understood by the whole congregation rather than just the high priests.

Now, let me tell you a little story.

Back in the middle to late 1980s, I was a consultant to technology companies. At one point, I had more than half of the divisions of Hewlett-Packard as clients. Back then, HP was a totally engineering driven company, famous for bomb-proof test equipment, engineering workstations, semiconductor simulators and so forth. They made their billions selling engineering to engineers.

Then they got a consumer bent. Maybe you think that was the HP LaserJet which broke open the entire laser printer market. Nope.

The first product they wanted to sell into the consumer/business market was the HP plotter they felt people would want to have, especially to create color charts and graphs from that new PC program, Lotus 1-2-3. This was before inkjets. State of the art for PC printing was the dot-matrix, impact printer.

The HP's plotter division in Rancho Bernardo (east of San Diego California) was my client. When I first got there, the engineers proudly showed me the heft and strength of their plotters and the torture chamber in which HP's plotters would work perfectly in subzero temperatures and those in which you could literally fry an egg if you left the frying pan in long enough. They spent hours talking about obscure engineering protocols and how those (and the torture chamber photos) were what the felt were their competitive advantages over Calcomp -- their main competitor whose plotters were significantly less expensive.

Those worked when you sold to engineers, I told them, but failed to answer the consumer "who give a shit?" test.

They listened to me because I had once been a programmer and worked as an engineer. We began to create a program which translated the technology into something that passed the "who gives a shit?" test.

They became the market leader in business and consumer products. It's also no accident that, before the 1980s were over, the LaserJet had made the transition from a massive-steel-framed behemoth that could shelter you from a nuclear attack, to a light, streamlined, consumer-friendly product.

I'd say that science in general remains mired in the same trap. The public doesn't give a shit about something that they've been led to believe they won't understand anyway. The few that press on to understand get turned off when they buy a book by a Ph.D. which is either too complicated, too flimsy and in both cases fails to address the "who gives a shit?" issue.

Phrased in less scatological terms, for the vast majority of the rapidly shrinking universe of book buyers, none of the books offers a good answer to: "Why should I care? How will knowing this make my life better or help me understand my place in the universe?"

Just as engineers are not sympatico with consumers, pure scientists will never be able to answer those questions adequately enough to bridge the divide. The alternative will be greater reliance on superstition by the general public and deepening suspicion of science and scientists. Is there any doubt here why novels and movies usually portray scientists as Faustian madmen?

Dr. Frankenstein's legacy looms larger

Science Illiteracy

2008-04-29T08:32:00.000-07:00

People are getting dumber and dumber about science even as it assumes a greater and greater role in society.

Publishers of "popular" type science books bear much of the blame. Almost everything they publish is:
(a) Devoid of any real science content and condescendingly tries to explain things with the equivalent of hand puppets or
(b) Written way above the heads of intelligent people.

It's not just a book segment destroying itself, it is culturally destructive.

Religion and science both started as ways for people to try and understand the world around them. Science now shows us many things we once attributed to the supernatural. That means that intelligent people seeking the meaning of things try to grasp the science.

But the scientific establishment has developed into a priesthood of fancy mathematics that is impenetrable -- not only to the layperson, but to many, many scientists as well.

That is why, despite all the shelves full of "popular" books on science by PhDs like Brian Greene and Michio Kaku, scientific illiteracy grows and grows. This BusinessWeek blurb (above) illustrates what I am saying.

The vacuum between all of the establishment-PhD-written books and religious texts is now being filled with new-age, truly flaky interpretations of quantum physics as spirituality. And people are buying into this. But the "science" is all twisted and wrong.

Those pseudo-scientific spirituality books are finding an audience created by the scientific illiteracy created by the establishment PhDs.

This is not encouraging.

Comic Wars: Book Review

2008-04-28T08:35:00.000-07:00

This review appeared in Barron's on June 3, 2002.

If anyone decided to pattern a cartoon villain after Dan Raviv's depictions of Ronald Perelman and Carl Icahn in Comic Wars, the concept would be laughed out of the marketplace.

After all, riveting cartoon villains usually have at least one redeeming feature.

But in Comic Wars, CBS News correspondent Raviv spins an irresistible morality play: Allied against the forces of darkness -- duplicitous bankers, profane lawyers, spineless yes-men, and Perelman and Icahn -- Israeli immigrant and Six-Day War veteran Isaac (Ike) Perlmutter arrives in America with $250 to his name. Thirty years later, he's worth $500 million.

Raviv portrays Perlmutter's triumph as a victory of the will to do the right thing. The ultimate entrepreneur, who could make brains and sweat work where others needed money, Perlmutter first built a fortune buying and selling surplus goods. This success allowed him to take on larger operations -- including whole firms -- like shaver company Remington Products.

The comic-wars part of the saga begins in 1989 -- when Ron Perelman acquires Marvel Entertainment Group for $82.5 million, hyping the company as a "mini-Disney," and floating more than $900 million worth of junk bonds. Then, he train-wrecks it, in a DotCom-like meltdown: Based on unrealistic hype about revenue growth, Marvel's stock soars from its $2 IPO price in 1991 to more than $34 in 1993 -- in part fueled by bankers who didn't look too carefully at their deals so long as they made their ample underwriting fees.

Perelman grossly overpays for a series of disastrous acquisitions. And his cost-cutting disembowels the staff of artists and writers. As quality plummets, so do sales, helped by a boycott of Marvel by disillusioned fans -- and a decision to create a distribution monopoly that drove many of its best retailers out of business.

Meanwhile, Perlmutter, who had bought a crippled toy firm in 1990 and renamed it ToyBiz, teams up with Ron Perelman in 1993 -- in a deal giving ToyBiz the right to sell action figures based on Marvel Comics' characters (Spiderman, X-Men). The no-royalty deal cost Perlmutter 46 percent of his company -- and bound his fate to Marvel. When Perelman took over Marvel, it had had a 70% market share. But by 1996, it was 25%. And the share price had plunged toward $1 by the time the company filed for Chapter 11 on Dec. 27, 1996. "The great Ron Perelman," Raviv writes, "the man who ... conquered Revlon, was now a schmuck who could not run a comic-book company."

Corporate raider Carl Icahn launches his hostile takeover attempt for Marvel in November 1996. All he'd ultimately accomplish was an exchange of toxic insults with Perelman. But with the moguls distracted, Perlmutter executes a courageous maneuver: On July 31, 1998, he takes control of Marvel, scoring one of the most impressive victories since David slew Goliath. The story of how he pulled off this acquisition is a nail-biting thriller -- filled with more backstabbing, lies, broken promises and unexpected twists than a stack of action comic books.

Noble Rot: A Bordeaux Wine Revolution: Book Review

2008-04-25T09:13:00.000-07:00

An edited version of this appeared in Barron's on March 1, 2004

A stench wafts among the pricey vineyards of Bordeaux. According to Noble Rot by William Echikson, the stink comes from a cultural gangrene eating away at an arrogant and outmoded aristocracy so far into denial that it can’t see the mortal danger that corrodes it from within.

In the wine world, the term "noble rot" refers to a specific type of desirable mold that allows grapes to produce some of the world's most desirable and expensive sweet wines with Bordeaux's Château d'Yquem at the pinnacle. But Echikson uses the term as a metaphor for a syndrome of cultural and enological afflictions that have turned this august wine region on its Gallic nose. The fact that Château d'Yquem plays a key role makes the metaphor doubly relevant.

The obscure and irrelevant Classification of 1855 stars as the lead pathogen in Noble Rot. As Echikson points out, the old guard in Bordeaux still clutch at the 1855 classification in a last-ditch effort to sell inferior wine at very high prices to gullible snobs who crave tony labels. Indeed, this 1855 list was never about quality from the beginning, but about price and prestige. Not coincidentally for this book, Château d'Yquem came out on the very top of that listing.

Leading the revolution against the established order are les garagistes, a feisty band of winemakers, mostly from St.-Emilion and environs who, zut alors!, think that Bordeaux's over-priced, thin, musty swill should give way to quality wine produced through proper vineyard management and winemaking techniques. While there are some larger, well-financed operations in this movement, most have been labeled garagistes after a number of prominent winemakers who literally began in their garages and produced wines that sell at hundreds of dollars a bottle at retail.

The fact that many unclassified garagiste wines are now selling at far greater prices than those with a noble, classified château on the label has outraged the establishment which, in Marie Antoinette fashion, scream, "Let them drink plonk!"

Echikson gives the reader a very readable, enjoyable sand factually grounded account of how the upstart garagistes first tried to change the ossified classifications which stood like the Maginot Line between them, formal recognition and the establishment's pricing and sales system. When that failed, they simply swept around the flanks, establishing alternate pricing, sales and distribution channels that cut the old guard off like la guillotine.

Noble Rot could easily have been like most wine books: morphine for the soul, filled with geek-speak, pedantically self-important and impenetrable prose suitable only for treating people with a sleep disorder. Yet Echikson avoids this and has produced an accessible, thoughtful book so filled with interesting material about the business, the winemaking and the culture that it begs to be sipped and contemplated rather than quaffed.

What makes the book so engaging is the way that Echikson spins his story by following some of the key people on both sides of the movement, leading us through the conflicts, offering context and illuminating quotes that promote understanding.

We have the challengers: true garagistes such as Michel Gracia and well-heeled newcomers like Florence Cathiard of Château Smith-Haut-Lafite who are bound by a passion for great wine regardless of classification. On their side are avant garde merchants like Jeffrey Davies, modern wine consultants like Michel Rolland and Denis Dubourdieu and well-known wine critic Robert Parker.

The old guard sees evil in the fact that Davies and Parker are American as are many of the new vineyard and winemaking practices is evidence, according to the old guard, that this was "part of a grand conspiracy to destroy France."

Echikson aptly shows that the French don't seem to need any outside help to destroy their country since government regulations, a refusal to modernize, a pervasive rear-view mirror on progress and a general xenophobia are doing a great job without American intervention.

Noble Rot uses this attitude as one of the major manifestations of denial that keeps the decadent aristocracy from addressing the real issues, which is why American wine regularly out-scores French wine in France and that top global honors for that icon of French culture, the baguette, has gone to one of my local Sonoma bakeries on more than one occasion.

Commanding the defense of the old order is Château d'Yquem's Alexandre Lur-Saluces. Noble Rot details his decades of subterfuge, double-dealing, and attempts to cheat family members out of their rightful ownership and control of Château d'Yquem all the while running the place into the ground. The tale, told through a combination of interviews and extracts from court cases paints a gothic image that would never have been believable even on Falconcrest.

The old guard cast would not be complete without the context that most of Bordeaux's old guard were Vichy supporters and Nazi collaborators who received many a fascist pat on the back for shipping Jews off to the gas chambers, something that grand cru lovers might want to keep in mind.

Noble Rot begins with many threads which Echikson skillfully weaves together in the last part of the book to form a unified, disturbing and yet optimistic tapestry. As the author of wine books, I have visited Bordeaux on a number of occasions and met many of the people Echikson writes about. I found that after reading Noble Rot, I had a far more coherent framework on which to hang my episodic visits and knowledge.

California Vintners Still Delusional

2008-04-23T07:06:00.000-07:00

When my book, The Wrath of Grapes hit bookstores in 1999, I predicted a massive glut of wine would sweep through California and hammer wine prices starting in 2000/2001.

The wine industry responded like like stoners who've been smoking their shorts. "Glut? Ain't gonna be no stinkin' glut!"

Jay Palmer at Barron's wrote a detailed, well-documented article on this and came to the same conclusion. The wine industry mounted a massive PR blitz aimed at neutralizing Palmer, me and anyone else who dared look at the statistics. Brokerage analysts played their puppet roles well, mouthing corporate press releases and failing to look at the facts.

They were all treading water or floundering when the predicted glut hit in 2001. Right on schedule.

And every year, year after year, they pronounce the end of the glut. Only, no one ever uses the "G" word.

This year is no different.

Premier Pacific Vineyards, a Napa-based vineyard investment firm issued a rose-tinted report this week taking about the decline in "non-bearing" vineyard plantings and implying that, somehow, this was yet another harbinger of good times ahead and even hinting at shortages.

Bull feathers!

It's true that non-bearing acreage can help foretell future prospects. It takes a newly planted vineyard three to five years to begin production. But if you're savvy and take your own look at the stats, you'll see that the numbers reported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture don't show the flood of California wine ending anytime soon. It just shows that the insane rush to plant new vineyards has decreased from delusional to merely out of touch with reality.

The USDA's 2007 Grape Acreage Report indicates that non-bearing acres decreased from 47,000 acres to 43,000 acres. WhoopieDOOO! Sure, you can talk about a, 8.5 percent decline. But the REAL story lies in the acres still producing enough wine to keep the Two Buck Chuck tsunami flowing.

The last time that California wine production came close to a balance with demand was 1995-96 when the state had about 300,000 acres of bearing wine grapes. Feloniously optimistic projections about demand from pump-and-dump artists and those standing to profit from the expansion of vineyards created a planting spree.

The 2007 Grape Acreage Report shows California with 480,000 acres, the same as 2006. This comes despite vineyards being ripped out and grapes rotting on the vines, even in premium areas of Napa and Sonoma Valley.

The reality remains that California has, probably, two-thirds-MORE acres of wine vineyards than it needs, a good portent for regular wine consumers needing something to ease the pain of oil and real-estate prices.

More factors aggravate the situation for vineyard owners, the most important being a worldwide glut of wine which has helped boost the market share of imports from about 12 to 15% in the mid-1990s to about double that today.

Significantly, California crushed about 3.7 million tons of wine grapes in 2007, according to the USDA. At the current levels of consumption and imports, that's probably 750,000 tons higher than supply and demand would merit.

Wines wizards of unreality will respond that those overall numbers don't really apply to the haute-appellation wines of Napa and Sonoma. More bullfeathers!

This wine, Castello Da Vinci, is a negociant bottle, filled with a Bordeaux blend from Napa Valley's trendiest appellations. The highly, highly respected winery that made the wine sold it for more than $100 per bottle. But they had 30,000 gallons of it they couldn't sell. So it was shopped on the bulk market for about. Some of it ended up in the Castello Da Vinci bottle and sold for $25. About $5 of that went for wine. Another $3 for the label, bottle and all other costs.

Napa is not immune no matter how must they protest.

DISCLOSURE: Castello Da Vinci is my own wine, created by for a character in my current novel, Perfect Killer. Sourcing the wine on the bulk market confirmed everything I had known anecdotally about prices and the availability of very fine wines.

The Planets -- Book Review

2008-04-22T07:33:00.000-07:00

This is my original draft. The edited review was published in Barron's on Nov. 7, 2005.

The Planets, By Dava Sobel, $24.95, 288 Pages, Viking Adult, New York, ISBN: 0670034460

More imagination has been lavished on Mars than any other planet in our solar system -- from "War of the Worlds" to mass fascination with canals, and fantasies of little green men (and women, one must presume). I admit being caught up in that during the summer of 1967 which I spent as a budding rocket scientist at the Westinghouse plant in Horseheads, NY, hand-building solar flux measurement instrument tubes for the Mariner 6 and 7 Mars flyby satellites. It's a miracle the tubes worked, because my attention kept wandering off by a billion miles or so as I imagined what these pieces I had laid hands on would find when the Martian Canals came into view.

Dava Sobel's Planets resurrected all those archival memories in a daringly experimental mix of writing styles seeking to capture the feel of the planets rather than create one more scientific icecap of data lists and telemetry.

Sobel's first-person narrative of Mars, writing from the viewpoint of "Allan Hills 84001," a Martian meteorite found in Antarctica in 1984, works very well in leading the lay reader on an effortlessly educational jaunt that could easily have become a thicket of scientific jargon in the hands of a lesser writer.

"The collision that launched my journey dug a hole in Mars several miles wide," Sobel's narrative explains. "Astronomers think they have identified that particular crater on satellite images of mars near a small valley in the southern highlands .... As a Martian from a heavily cratered region, I was acquainted with meteorite strikes and in fact, already bore a fracture scar from having been crushed and reheated in a previous impact."

From such easily approachable prose as this, we learn about the meteoroid, which arrived 16 million years ago complete with a payload of biological fossils and a chemical composition that mirrored the Martian surface.

Scientifically trained readers will find no new trove of facts, but Sobel's unique series of presentations offer the ability to understand and appreciate the solar system in an aesthetic and creative way. In addition, she creates for the reader a significant sense of context by weaving a James Burke-esque fabric of historical, political, mythological, and literary references.

Not everything in The Planets is a planet. The book begins with the Sun (a star) and ends with Pluto (an overgrown asteroid or perhaps a planetesimal). In between we have all the usual suspects along with a smattering of moons, rings and a wonderful detour through the age-old connection among geometry, astronomy and music.

Pythagoras, Sobel writes, was the first to connect "'geometry in the humming of the strings' and 'music in the spacing of the spheres'." She leads us through Plato's "music of the spheres" through the Copernican "ballet of the planets," and right into the work of legendary astronomer Johannes Kepler who, in 1599, "derived a C major chord by equating the relative velocities of the planets with the intervals on a stringer instrument."

She finishes off this thread with Gustav Holst's popular symphony, "The Planets" which presaged World War I when he wrote the first suite, "Mars, the Bringer of War," in July 1914.

This web of connections illustrates the remarkable breadth and depth of Sobel's writing and is sure to offer both the hardest scientist and the rankest amateur new and creative ways of looking at the night sky.

But not everything in Sobel's experimental writing quiver works. Or perhaps, more correctly, not everything will work all the time for every reader. Her literary references – Alfred, Lord Tennyson, William Blake, C,S, Lewis, Oliver Wendell Holmes and many others – frequently set the tone of the surrounding prose, as if Sobel felt bound to emulate their style and pacing. What seems poignant or significant in the short quotes can grow tediously anachronistic if continued for page after page. "Night Air," the chapter on Neptune and Uranus, was the toughest for me to read, but should be a hit among fans of Jane Austen.

This is by way of saying that, there will be readers who will like "Night Air" the best and my favorites the worst. Each of the chapters is well written, but likeability will be a matter of taste.

In a day of scrapple-sausage writing, ground down to the lowest common denominator and written to fill a financially budgeted number of pages, Sobel deserves credit for having the courage to experiment and her publisher for making that experimentation available to readers.

As a former scientist decades ago turned to writing, I particularly appreciated Planets because it hollows out some daydreaming space among the facts and fosters a sense of imagination and wonder -- a right-brained oasis that could have been lost under the avalanche of data and left-brained logic. Sobel shows the reader why the imagination to dream is at least as important as the ability to reach out and touch the stars.

A New Kind of Science - Book Review

2008-04-22T07:17:00.000-07:00

This review appeared in Barrons on September 2, 2002

The conventional wisdom in science is that complex systems and organisms can only be explained by equally complex rules and mathematics.

But regardless of whether one speaks of the behavior of stock markets and financial systems, sub-atomic particles, humans, apes or the very cosmos, scientists have developed enormously complicated mathematical models that fall short of anything other than "pretty good" most of the time -- and "pretty awful" whenever it comes to divining the inner workings of complexity.

Chaos theory, fractals, complexity theory and other promising paths have all managed to hit their own walls because, according to Stephen Wolfram in A New Kind of Science, simplicity is the prime mover of complex behavior -- and traditional math is the enemy of understanding this.

So instead of the conventional math and calculus of the past 300 years, Wolfram makes an excruciatingly thorough case that real portraits of complexity can be drawn only if one uses powerful computers to make billions and billions and billions of calculations -- in order to repeat very simple cellular automation rules.

To understand cellular automata, imagine a grid, like graph paper. Color in one square. Then to figure out which other squares to color in, apply this simple rule: a cell should be black whenever one or the other -- but not both -- of its neighbors on the same line were black on the step before.

After rule 90 (of 256) is carried out 50 or so times, an intricate, symmetrical pattern is produced. But after a few thousand iterations, the patterns appear to go completely random, producing pictographs with uncanny resemblances to leaf-vein structure, or crystal fractures, or animal ornamentation -- all phenomena which have been assumed to be results of very complicated processes.

The author proposes that the rules of cellular automata offer worthy answers to how we should approach the nature of the universe, the enigma of human consciousness and other lesser topics, like quantum physics and, finally, the ultimate fabric of reality: "All the wonders of our universe can in effect be captured by simple rules, yet this shows that there can be no way to know all the consequences of these rules, except in effect just to watch and see how they unfold."

In other words, things are a lot simpler than we thought -- but they can still be awfully unpredictable.

While some of the ideas expressed might be dismissed as the deranged babblings of a kook, or perhaps a genius with a frontal-lobe tumor, Wolfram comes with the pedigree of a visionary: He got his Ph.D. from Caltech at the age of 20, has a widely acknowledged career in particle physics and cosmology, found favor with such giants in physics as Richard Feynman and, as the writer of the much-admired Mathematica -- a program that aids scientists and mathematicians in making all manners of computations -- is a wildly successful software entrepreneur.

In the end, Wolfram's 1,197-page opus offers not a new kind of science but a new way of looking at science. True, many of the connections he makes are superficial or incoherent, but still intriguing. And this is a thought-provoking book with the heft of a cinder block -- making it the ultimate in heavy reading. It might even make for great vacation reading for some ... if you plan to take it along on all your vacations until 2005.

House of Mondavi: Book Review

2008-04-15T10:32:00.000-07:00

My original draft appears below. The edited review appeared in Barrons on Sept. 3, 2007.

NOT LONG AFTER the Robert Mondavi Winery went public in 1993, I found myself at a winery luncheon seated next to Bob and a few seats away from his wife, Margrit Biever. Salted among his usual ebulent pronouncements about food and wine were doubts about the wisdom of having gone public.

In my capacity then as founder and publisher of Wine Business Publications, the largest circulation wine trade magazine in North America, I had numerous occasions over the next four years to meet, talk and dine with Bob, his wife, his sons Michael and Tim as well as daughter Marcia, the Baroness Philippina de Rothschild and most of the winery's executives, board members and advisors.

During that time, Bob's upbeat personality darkened whenever matters touched on the wisdom of going public. In his 1998 biography, Harvests of Joy, he bemoaned the corporation's plummeting stock price and wrote: "We had taken an enormous gamble, one of the biggest of my life, and now it appeared to have blown up in my face. And worse was yet to come."

Just how much worse is described in excruciatingly immaculate but highly readable detail by Julia Flynn Siler in The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty, (Hardcover, $28, 452 pages, June 2007, Gotham Books, New York, ISBN: 978-1-592-40259-5).

This is not light summer reading by any means. Based on exhaustive research and interviews, each page is packed with facts and footnotes which, by dint of superb writing, manages to engage the reader and avoid the data brain-lock which would have plagued a less-talented journalist.

To wine country insiders, House of Mondavi offers no new shocking surprises: family feuding, jealousies, infidelities, eccentricities, extravagancies and excess have long been known and acknowledged along with the brilliance, drive and perseverance that made the Robert Mondavi Winery an icon to wine lovers and the broad shoulders on which Napa Valley wine stood.

What Siler has provided is well-documented structure, context and detail behind the gossip and the harsh family cruelties which eventually ran the winery aground and its quality into the ground.

After the obligatory recitation of ancestry, immigration from Italy and the too-oft-related fisticuffs between Robert and his brother, Siler digs into the multifacted perfect storm that wrested control from the family and into the hands of Constellation Brands, the world's largest wine company.

Siler makes it clear that some of the Mondavi's problems were not entirely of their own making, most notably the Phylloxera grape-vine epidemic of the 1990s as and the current wine glut. Phylloxera is a long-known pest which destroys grapevine roots and nearly wiped out wine production in America and France around the turn of the century. Various resistent rootstocks have since been developed, one of which -- AxR1 -- was heavily promoted to the industry by scientists at the University of California, Davis.

Despite the fact that significant evidence existed about AxR1's vulnerabilities, it was planted in nearly every vineyard in California. Then, beginning in the 1980s, the pest feasted on AxR1 presenting California vintners, including Mondavi, with the a multi-billion-dollar for the massive meal.

Vines had to be ripped out and replanted, creating shortages of wine in the early to mid 1990s. Urged on by easy financing, rosy projections for wine consumption growth and brokerage analysts eager to maintain a suitable environment for public winery offerings, vineyards were planted, over-planted and over-planted again.

By mid-1995, Wine Business Monthly presented data that showed a glut beginning around 2000 and that wine prices -- and winery margins -- would suffer from the oversupply. Barron's expanded upon this with major news reporting in 1998.

House of Mondavi makes it clear that even as winery CEOs like Beringer's Walt Klenz and analysts for Goldman Sachs, Hambrecht & Quist and Nationsbank were touting "what glut?" the industry's shrewd operators who had no vested interest in maintaining public winery stock prices, were making their plans. Key among these was Fred Franzia, bulk-wine magnate, industry bad-boy and superbly innovative marketer.

Best known for his wines in a box, Franzia saw the glut building and as early as 2001 was buying glutted inventory from Beringer, Mondavi and others. One of Franzia's best known glut-baby successes was the now reknowned. "Two Buck Chuck."

But most other California wineries survived the same bad advice from analysts, financiers, IPO hustlers and other experts who knew better. Siler offers chapter after chapter describing what made the stormy seas fatal to the Mondavis.

To the delight of Napa Valley's eternally jealous schadenfreude addicts, House of Mondavi makes it clear that the men of Mondavi destroyed the empire with their devil's brew of arrogance, indulgence but primarily their pathological inability to put aside personal differences for the greater good of the enterprise.

Those interested in the intimate details of the Mondavi men's flaws will find them all here: Robert's driven perfectionism and infidelity; Michael's temper and arrogance, Tim's infidelities and the failure of professional managers, exceutives, psychologists to help any of the men recognize a greater good outside themselves.

I say, "men" here because Robert's daughter Marcia plays only bit roles in the book, reflecting her real-life involvement with an empire started and dominated by men playing out the masculine roles of traditionally Italian men.

In the end, House of Mondavi describes a man brought down by his own generosity. While the winery's 1993 public offering was seen as a way to pass the company on to the next generation and allow Robert to take some of his wealth from the company he had founded, it only accentuated the tensions among the founder and his sons and amplified their interpersonal flaws.

Siler offers a blow-by-blow account of how Robert and his sons were gradually eased out of the company, albeit with tens of millions of dollars in personal wealth. That might have been the whole picture but for Robert's generosity. Among his many charitable efforts, Robert had pledged more than $35 million to the University of California, Davis and another $10 million to Copia, a Napa wine and food center. All of the pledges were backed by his stock. Siler notes that when Mondavi stock dropped below $20 a share in 2003, Robert was essentially insolvent.

True to his generosity, Robert was unwilling to renege on his charitable obligations and thus ignited the final days of a Mondavi at the Robert Mondavi Winery. When Constellation Brands came knocking, Robert and his child eventually converted all of their Series B stock (which had been their anti-take-over protection) and sold it to Constellation.

According to Siler, Marcia received $107 million; Michael about $100 million; Tim, a little less than $59 million and Robert, about $70 million.

Worse had certainly come to worst for Robert. Siler describes the post-sale Robert as having suddenly aged, going from vigorous and far younger than his years to a shaky, wheel-chair-ridden man with hearing and memory problems more typical of people in their early nineties.

The final stories are yet to be written for Michael, Tim and Marcia, all of whom have started wine enterprises of their own. Only the coming years will tell whether they have enough of the right stuff they inherited from their father.

Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army: Book Review

2008-04-15T10:16:00.000-07:00

I review books for Barron's on a regular basis. Sometimes they assign me a book, sometimes I suggest one. While I am a registered Democrat and political moderate, they have never censored a review. Most of the time, however, I write too long and the reviews are edited to fit the space. Fortunately, their editors are very, very good and have never changed the meaning.

My honest reviews, however, have upset quite a few other people along the way -- mostly those on the extreme Right or, as in the case of this one, the extreme left.

What follows is my full-length review. The edited version appeared in Barron's on April 2, 2007.

Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill, (Nation Books, New York, March 2006, hardcover, $26.95, 452 pages ISBN:1-56025-979-5) aspires to be the definitive investigation into the growth of one of the largest private military firms in the world and an exhaustive catalog of its sins, especially as a tool for Bush Administration policy.

But as a cobbled-together amalgam of the author's previously published articles, rehashed pieces by other "progressive" journalists all embedded in a slurry of unattributed sources and one-sided quotation of politicos with an axe to grind, the book fails miserably as anything other than a moveon.org playbook for the 2008 presidential campaigns.

Instead of a steady march of organized facts from multiple credible sources which makes for solid investigative reporting, Blackwater offers layers of innuendo cast in obviously biased language which offer glimpses of Blackwater: in Iraq, New Orleans, Azerbaijan and elsewhere. No smoking guns here or even warm barrels, just 452 pages of poorly documented, mind-numbing minutiae wandering about in search of significance and lacking in overall coherence.

Early on, the author attempts to indict Blackwater for incompetence, or worse, by reconstructing the final days of the four Blackwater employees who were ambushed, burned and hung from a bridge in Fallujah. The indictment fails. Even worsh, Scahill's cartoonish descriptions of the men makes them into bumbling bafoons rather than offering the reader a moving, "Blackhawk Down" sense of tragedy and men betrayed.

Scahill's trite, political-hot-button phraseology pervades the book. To Scahill, Blackwater's founder, Erik Prince is, "a radical right-wing Christian mega-millionaire who has served as a major bankroller of President Bush's campaigns but of the broader Christian-right agenda." Some facts would have been helpful: religious affiliation, personal net worth, dollar amount of contributions. Perhaps Mr. Prince is all of these, perhaps not. But having the facts would allow a reader to reach their own decision, and having done that, could either agree or disagree.

Scahill's lack of attribution and the inherent weakness of his facts also destroy the book's credibility. He first writes that, Blackwater has more than $500 million in government contracts....:as one U.S. Congressmember observed, in strictly military terms, Blackwater could overthrow many of the world's governments."

This is a typical Scahill statement with no attribution. Which member of Congress? Observed to whom? When? All those pesky little details that a beginning journalism course requires for a C grade are notoriously absent in this book. With no attribute, one might conclude this was made up to fit the point.

Context is also lacking in that passage. Scores of other military firms like Sandline, Executive Outcomes and others have been overthrowing various world governments for the past 40 years according to Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry, by P.W. Singer, (2003, Cornell University Press). Unlike Blackwater, Corporate Warriors is a very well-written, even-handed, fact-packed and extensively documented work.

Whether this level of military power in private hands is a good situation or not is handled with Scahill's tritely predictable judgement that it is all evil. He conveniently neglects to balance the record by pointing out that, according to a number of sources including Corporate Warriors, the Bosnia intervention could not have succeeded without private military contractors.

And Scahill's $500 million figure? He never tells us over what period of time those contracts were granted. And while it's certainly substantial compared with the average family outcome (even for Greenwich or Bergen County), it's a rounding error in the $80+ billion annual budget for the current war.

The sort of facts that would have made Scahill's book credible and worth reading are the very sort found abundantly in Corporate Warriors which tells us that even before the start of the current Iraq war, "from 1994 to 2002, The U.S. Defense Department entered into more than 3,000 contracts with U.S.-based firms estimated at a contract value of more than $300 billion. And unlike too much of Scahill's book, that last figure from Corporate Warriors has a footnote with a the source.

The lack of sourcing and context plague every part of every page of this book. To call out each of them would require more words that it took to fill the pages of Blackwater. There is simply no way to determine what should be believed or not. For that reason, this book is a waste of time and money for the seeker of truth. For them, Corporate Warriors and a number of other books offer far more credible and documented writing which is not plagued by biased prose and overtly politically intents.

Scahill's political tunnel-vision also makes it seem as if the rise of PMFs began in 1997 with Blackwater. Contractors have been doing business with the U.S. government for decades, but it really began big-time with the hollowing out of American armed forces that started under President Bush's father and accelerated during the Clinton administration. There is plenty of blame for that to spread around both parties, but in his own partisan way, Scahill cuts Bill Clinton a big piece of slack, failing to note his policies which helped expand the use of privatized military. Those wishing to have hard facts about this are referred to Corporate Warriors.

In the end, Scahill utterly fails to make his case that Blackwater is the world's most powerful mercenary army as his subtitle claims.

Bogus Lawsuit Against Apple & Starbucks

2008-02-25T06:47:00.000-08:00

According to Apple Insider, "A Utah couple acting as their own attorneys have filed a lawsuit against Apple and Starbucks over the retailers' recent "Song of the Day" promotion, which offers Starbucks customers a iTunes gift card for a complimentary, pre-selected song download."

Yeah. Uh-huh. Problem is that I designed and implemented this system beginning in 1999. It became the basis of a number of products that grew into PocketPass and Tibanna.

The diagrams in the lawsuit look exactly like my system.

Can you say, "prior art?" Suuuuuure you can!

Independent Bookstores Politics and Taste

2008-02-22T12:54:00.000-08:00

Cody's Books, 0ne of the Bay Area's long-time and well-known bookstores, has had a hard time lately. Independents as a whole have had a hard time.

Most independents blame Amazon and chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble for all their ills. Their screeching fits of outrage against them is surpassed only by their raging at George Bush, but just barely.

They're in denial.

Independents are having trouble because -- with few exceptions (such as Powell's in Portland) -- independent book stores prefer to promote and sell books they think people ought to read. Rather than sell books people want to read.

People at independent book stores have set themselves up as arbiters of taste and politics.

The politics are always Left-canted. They can't understand why people don't want to by all 793 Anti-Bush screeds. Yeah, he's a dumb fucker, but he's also a lame duck. There's an election this year. somebody tell the anti-George folks. Get over it!

Their taste in books runs to highly, ultra-literary, thin little works written in an unheated garret. They turn their noses up at thrillers, romances and other "commercial" fiction. When they do talk about such undesirable books, their faces wrinkle into a look like a person who's just stepped in dog feces, or just caught a whiff of conversation from someone to the right of Fidel Castro.

If they want to be arbiters of literary taste and hold forth on intertextuality, they should get a position torturing undergraduates with obscure literature.

If they want to succeed as booksellers, then they need to realize they are merchants. They must market. They must sell products their customers want to buy.

Or they can remain in denial and prepare to go out of business.

e-Book Royalties - Publishers Screw Authors Again.

2008-02-19T07:15:00.000-08:00

It's all digital and costs fractions of a cent to deliver. So why do publishers want to be pigs and take most of the money from ebooks?

BECAUSE THEY CAN!

Then, of course, they'll lock it down with DRM and a proprietary e-book reader to make sure no one buys it! This is an intellectually twisted business.

"LITTLE, BROWN CHIEF Executive Ursula Mackenzie wrote to literary agencies last week, setting out its digital stall and echoing Random House CEO Gail Rebuck's proposal of a 15% royalty on e-books. It is a call that has already been rejected by Curtis Brown, whose Contracts Manager, Anna Davis, told PN: “We want to support publishers in what they are doing in this area and we accept its importance, but we do not want to agree to a royalty that we do not believe is fair. Yes, publishers have big set-up costs with digital, but once they are set up, the unit cost of producing an e-book is much lower.”

Rest of the article here.

Publishers, eBooks,and DRM

2008-02-19T06:21:00.000-08:00

Digital Rights Management sucks. DRM-- the long, trying-to-be-respectable name for encrypting a content file to cripple a consumers rights to their legally provided rights to Fair Use -- is the biggest single barrier to widespread e-book acceptance.

Specialized reader hardware is the second.

The user experience with an ebook needs to more closely replicate that of the dead-tree edition. This includes the ability to read on any preferred device from iPods to Blackberries The reader also needs the ability to highlight, print a certain amount of text etc., loan the book and " to resell it as used -- thus preserving copyright's well-established fair-use capabilities.

I realize I am at odds with most publishers, but the paranoia about piracy kills more revenue than it protects. But then, as you an see I have no strong or well-defined opinion about this.

Publishers must realize that whatever encryption they load onto a book WILL be broken. So why drive away 90% of your market to protect a book from the 2% who will steal it? It's called publisher logic.

Holmes on Homes: Good Man; Web Site Rips-Off Consumers

2008-02-17T19:43:00.000-08:00

I've enjoyed the Canadian home improvement show, "Holmes on Homes" in which contractor Mike Holmes fixes the screw-ups left by screw-up construction weenies.

So, I visited the web site to see if I could buy DVDs of previous seasons. Yes!

But when I checked out, I find abusively expensive shipping ripoffs! $21.46 shipping (UPS Standard) for a season DVD set that costs $30.99! A one-pound package!! (Canadian and American dollars are within a penny of being equal these days).

Needless to say, I canceled my order and feel I wasted my time registering an account.

I regularly order merchandise from Canada and the UK and NEVER have encountered such a disgraceful overcharging.

I've been a great fans Mike Holmes and his wonderful work and have considered him a person of great integrity. But for his site to rip off customers like this has certainly caused me to re-evaluate my opinion.

UPDATE:

I ordered the DVDs from Amazon just now. It cost me $4 LESS than the Holmes site. Plus, with my Prime account, I get two-day shipping FREE! So, the whole thing cost me $26.99 ... rather than getting ripped off for $52.45 -- almost twice as much!

My advice: watch the show. Avoid the web site. One day, if Holmes is as honest a bloke as he seems, he'll take his pneumatic framing nailer to whoever is responsible for ripping off customers at his web site. And if he doesn't stop this egregious cheating of consumers, then perhaps he's just putting on a good act.