Monthly Archive for June, 2007

Page 3 of 13

What Magazines Do You Read?

Published on June 26, 2007 in Baby Boomer, Empty Nesters, Entertainment and Money. 6 Comments

The Chicago Tribune asks is staffers every year to name their favorite magazines.
(Registration necessary – ARGH)

It’s becoming a rite of summer: Every year we ask each other what periodicals we’ve been reading, and then we ask you. Every year we argue about what makes a good magazine and why we rush to pick up certain titles or swipe them from a neighbor’s desk. We urge each other to try something new, and we smack our foreheads when a title bubbles up that we’d completely missed.

This year we’ve been paying special attention to media on the Internet. Most magazines have a Web presence, but we’ve picked out five sites that offer something special, something more than the same content we read in print. Take a look and see what you think — and please tell us what’s on your personal magazine rack these warm summer days.

I like to skim the women’s magazines that my wife gets, Golf for Women, Redbook, and Martha Stewart Living. She gets a boatload of craft and knitting magazines too that I ignore.

Here are the magazines that I read pretty thoroughly during the course of a month.

  • Esquire
  • Car and Driver
  • Forbes
  • AARP
  • Stuff
  • ESPN
  • Maxim
  • Consumer Reports
  • TV Guide
  • Islands
  • Money

Parade, American Profile, and Relish come with the newspaper and I read those too.
Here’s some of the more unusual magazines the Tribune news staff looks at along with their comments.

  • Granta. Combine fiction, fine photography and collections of essays, and what do you get? Brilliance, if it’s Granta.
  • The New York Review of Books. This ancient, much-revered and now iconic magazine is still the gold standard for serious cultural criticism.
  • Blueprint. From the Martha Stewart empire, her latest guide to personal style puts an emphasis on easy step-by-steps.
  • Juxtapoz. The “lowbrow” art bible for those who love artists on the pop fringe.
  • Paste. Too young for Rolling Stone but not young enough for Blender? Then Paste probably speaks to you.
  • Lincoln Lore. With the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth looming in 2009, where better to get the scoop on the 16th president than this quarterly publication of the Lincoln Museum in Ft. Wayne, Ind.?
  • MAGIC. Because magicians are so secretive about their craft to begin with, it’s appropriate that this monthly glossy is not available at a newsstand or library – it’s only sold at magic shops and through subscription.

Out of the entire list in their article, there are only a handful that you would consider mainstream. But I give them credit for at least being open enough to try something new from time to time.

What magazines do you read?

Just a Holy Crap! Post

Published on June 26, 2007 in Technology. 6 Comments

IBM has devised a new Blue Gene supercomputer—the Blue Gene/P—that will be capable of processing more than 3 quadrillion operations a second, or 3 petaflops, a possible record. Blue Gene/P is designed to continuously operate at more than 1 petaflop in real-world situations.

more

UPDATE: Petaflop

petaflop.jpg

I Like Working With Smart People v2

Published on June 26, 2007 in Empty Nesters and Entertainment. 3 Comments


We have an ongoing battle with a web designer. Yesterday she sent an email that on it’s face was not logical.

My colleague replied that she was being illogical and backed it up with stats.

I sent an email to him saying that her response must be frustrating for him.

He responded:

S’ils n’ont plus de pain, qu’ils mangent de la brioche.

I tried to teach myself some French phrases a few years back, but the only thing I recognized was pain for bread.

So I responded, “If they don’t have bread, let them manage with jewelry?”

He responds asking if I have never had french pastry. I then recognized brioche as something I had see in boulangeries. (French bakeries)

I gave up and put the phrase in Babelfish. It translated If they do not have any more bread, that they eat brioche.

That was a big help. So he told me,

Babel Fish apparently apparently sees brioches as if you tried to translate
“Moon Pie”

He sends me to Wikipedia

That was close to crossing the line between smart person and smart ass.

I checked it out and of course, it’s, If they do not have any more bread, let them eat cake.

Well, duh, except all I’ve ever heard is “let them eat cake.” So I read the context found out that she may never have even said that, and to the contrary she wrote:

“It is quite certain that in seeing the people who treat us so well despite their own misfortune, we are more obliged than ever to work hard for their happiness. The king seems to understand this truth; as for myself, I know that in my whole life (even if I live for a hundred years) I shall never forget the day of the coronation.”

I’ve seen her cottage in the country. If I didn’t have bread, I would have paid her a visit to along with my countrymen.

UPDATE: surfing last night, I came across this phrase Non calor sed umor est qui nobis incommodat. Since Babelfish won’t translate Latin, I tested him,  he got it.  Replying that our local weather people would say  “Yep – shore is hot – like walkin’ thru a sauna.”

Shop at Wal-mart, Help Ms. Alice Buy more Art for Bentonville.

Published on June 24, 2007 in Money and Shopping. 16 Comments

Putting a world class art museum in Bentonville, Arkansas is wrong.  Alice Walton can buy any piece of art she wants and she is determined to move some of the world masterpieces to Bentonville.

Slowly and methodically, Ms. Walton has paid top dollar at auction and through dealers for the best paintings, drawings and sculptures she can find by artists like Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, George Bellows, Marsden Hartley and Charles Willson Peale.

She is certainly determined: her bid for the Durand from the library’s collection outstripped one made jointly by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art.

So Ms. Walton is outbidding the MoMa and National Gallery.  If they were smart, they would just loan her some of the works they have in storage.  There is a finite selection of world class art, to move it to a place where the masses cannot see it is dumb and selfish.  Apparently art critics are raising a suitable uproar, as if it will do any good.

Other than an infectious and personal dislike by these writers for Ms. Walton’s approach, the barely hidden implication in their written words is that metropolitan areas like Seattle, Washington, Forth Worth, Texas, and St. Louis, Missouri — places that people will visit — are more natural and deserving destinations for high art for our public American masses outside of New York.

This is elitist nonsense on a major scale.

It’s not elitist, it’s pragmatic.  Museums need to be built where the people, especially children, have access to them.  Many children visit their first museum as part of a school field trip.

So Lenny Campello is taking up Ms. Walton’s cause.

 Bentonville’s next door neighbor, Fayetteville (population around 67,000) is the home to the 420-acre campus of the University of Arkansas (the only comprehensive, doctoral degree-granting institution in the state). Their enrollment has more than 14,600 students (more than 12,000 in undergraduate programs) and a diverse student population with 650 international students representing 86 countries.

Well, as they might say in Bentonville, Whoop-de-doo.  Maybe within 150 miles they will have a couple million population? This justifies moving some of the finest art in the world to Arkansas?

It doesn’t take a futurist to predict that this area will see a major urban growth in the next few decades, and when it does, it will be grateful to the vision of Alice Walton, which is perhaps a throwback to that of the moneyed folks who a century earlier built the collections that she now shops from.

Campello argues that this area is underserved when it comes to the arts.  Won’t argue with that, but Carnegie had a much better idea when he funded over 2500 libraries across the country.  If Ms. Walton or her advisors had some imagination, they could come up with a better way to spend her billions to benefit more people for a longer time.

Just Call Me Mr. Trendy in a Normal Tone of Voice

Published on June 24, 2007 in Money and Technology. 7 Comments


As usual, I am on the bleeding edge of a trend.  I have fun submitting stuff I run across to Trendhunter.com, which has put me in the top 25 trend reporters in the whole friggin’ world!

Imagine my pleasure when a report from Away With Words, says Audeo…

is targeting baby boomers with a slick direct-mail campaign featuring this stubble-jawed, multiply tattooed fellow and three other equally unconventional spokespersons, including a man in a business suit, a black eye, and a swollen lip. The message: “You’ve always experienced everything life has to offer. Why stop now?”…invites us to “test drive” a “sleek, stylish, and discreet” product.

Turns out, I already have this product.  As a matter of fact, I have two.

They are advertising hearing aids. I sure can identify with their models. NOT.

Because nothing turns off a boomer like intimations of geezerhood, Audéo carefully avoids taboo words like hearing loss or, heaven forfend, deaf. Instead, it invites us to “test drive” a “sleek, stylish, and discreet” product. We’re not getting old; rather, “a full and active life” may have interfered with our perception of “subtle but crucial high pitched sounds.” Wear your Audéo proudly: it’s “a sign of life lived with intensity.”

Here’s a news flash for you Audeo. Boomers aren’t turned off by hearing loss.  They just don’t like to admit it.  Does anybody, any age like to admit their senses aren’t in the normal range.  I didn’t like it when I found out a hundred years ago that I am (like 5% of all males) a little color blind.  Decades ago when I started wearing glasses, I was bummed.  I didn’t like it when the drugs I’m on effected my taste (bring on the tabasco!)

Well, OK, maybe that can be interpreted as being turned off.  But wearing hearing aids is a vanity thing.  I didn’t want to wear them because they are so obvious (I thought.)

In other words: you sat in the front row at a few too many Springsteen concerts, and now you’re paying the price, baby.

Yeah, right. It’s more like, you were under a car with no mufflers, you rode a motorcycle with no mufflers, you rode a go cart with no muffler and the exhaust pointed right at your right ear.  You hung around race cars with no mufflers.

Away with Words apparently has an issue with the price of $6000 for the hearing aids.  That’s what I paid without a second thought once I saw them and how relatively inobtrusive they are.  They are digital, meaning they will adjust to ambient noise automatically. They are not “ear pluggers” which allow no sound in unless it’s amplified. They are small. They don’t squeal.

Why shouldn’t I pay $6000 for hearing aids?

Will it work? I’d be the last to underestimate the vanity and profligacy of my generation. And with several hundred boomers turning 60 every minute, and 10 percent of the world’s population having hearing problems, there may well be a large enough customer base for Phonak to succeed with a luxury sonic prosthetic.

BTW: profligacy means spending extravagently, I had to look it up.  For a guy, this isn’t extravagent.  I haven’t dyed my hair all my life, I haven’t had manicures or pedicures all my life. No dermabrasion, no boob job, no nose job, etc.

I’ll give you vanity, but not extravagence.

The Audeo hearing aids come in a variety of colors with goofy names, but basically green, red, and whatever.  If they were smart, they would have come in colors to match hair colors to help disguise them, not make them stand out.  Although, if you wear your hear slightly over your ears it will probably cover most of my hearing aids.  Presently, I don’t, and in this picture, I am wearing my hearing aids.

So, Away with Words, your basis message message that this marketing approach is wrong is right.  But some of your observations are off the mark.

Next I need to upgrade my glasses. No, not that vain. I can stick with Lenscrappers.