Todd Stadler's blog

todd is still going off

I continue to remain appalled at America, but I'll let the politicians off for a bit. Which leaves, of course, corporate America.

A few weeks ago, I read an article in the Oregonian about the growth of businesses targeted at preteens, or "kids".

As usual, it's a bit of a challenge figuring out what exactly is the worst facet of America displayed in the article.

Option 1: The mother with two kids and zero control over them. She buys several pairs of $125 shoes for both of them every year and says that "people spend money on shoes and they're going to keep doing it, if their children are anything like mine". She also points out that her children already have the shoes picked out before they go shopping. And who is she to say no?

Option 2: The comically evil chief executive of Columbia Sportwear, a company that recently introduced snowboarding apparel for children ages 1 to 3. He says, apparently while rubbing his hands together and grimacing, "If the parent likes to have their kid look like a snowboarder, we want to have that stuff available", adding that "the nice thing about kids' apparel is that it gets outgrown. Kids can't wear the same jacket for three years in a row. We consider that to be a good thing"

Charming. Obviously the ultimate fault lies with the consumers who propagate these stupid product lines, choosing to spend hundreds and thousands of dollars so their brat^H^H^H^H kid can look just like mommy - only smaller! - even though they'll have no memory of it in a few years.

But what really worries me in this sorry tale is the attitude of the corporations. They want their sales figures to keep increasing, year after year. And they've tapped the adult and teen markets. So they create new market segments so they can make more and more money.

It's a familiar story in every industry. Geeks won't buy any more computers, so the sub-$1000 PC is born, introducing computing to a whole bunch of people who didn't need computers before they could afford them. Drug companies somehow figure they need more money than they made curing diseases, so they develop drugs to alleviate life's little problems and market them to everybody who feels a bit off.

But it doesn't take a financial genius to realize that increasing profits, year after year, won't last. It's not sustainable. Eventually, you've simply saturated the planet. But then, I suppose that's a problem CEO's can only hope for.

So all you consumers, you better go back to your bars, your temples, your massage parlors. Sigh.

running with the devil

I can't tell if I'm intrigued or appalled with the latest news that Elizabeth Dole may run for the Senate, hoping to fill Jesse Helms' seat.

As usual with American politics, the answer is likely: I'm both.

Assuming "Libby" runs, this will be the second recent case of a high-profile person (oddly, in both cases, the previously unelected wife of a major politician) changing her voter registration to a state where she doesn't live in order to win an elected position.

Politics reminds me more and more of professional sports. Not that they're both spectator events with a lot of pointless posturing. No, it's the free agent model I'm thinking of - no one seems to care where they're from or what their background is. If they're perceived as powerful and can do good for wherever they just moved to, then they're more than welcome to represent that place.

And of course, these carpetbaggers are always perceived as powerful because they're famous. More importantly, they're married to famous political power. So who cares what they know about the state, as long as they can bring home the bacon.

But then, I suppose that getting their constituents what they want is what good senators do. I just don't like that the two political parties try to pretend that it's about anything except getting more power for themselves, playing the American people as pawns in their little game.

But then, that's not exactly news.

And, sure, Mrs. Dole is from North Carolina, and I'm sure she knows as much about the state as she needs to, and so on. But it doesn't make me feel any better about all this.

why to never split infinitives

I'm reading Lapsing Into a Comma, a style manual of sorts that manages to be pretty entertaining in parts. I'm not given to reading normal style manuals, such as the Associated Press one, but when my friend Morgan read me some passages from this one, we laughed.

Mind you, nothing in this entry, much less this website (excuse me, web site) should be construed as adhering to this or any other style manual. But that should be self-obvious.

Still, I find myself learning a few tips on language, against my will. Oh, who am I kidding? I like grammar when I'm right. It's when I want to bend the rules that the prescriptivists really grate on my nerves.

One thing that made me laugh came in an aside titled "Arbitrary Capitalization", subtitled "After playing Chess, let's have a Turkey Sandwich", which read, in part, thusly:

To review, capital letters (aside from sentence beginnings, titles, up-style headlines and the like) are reserved for proper nouns. And you know how testy I get about lowercased proper nouns.

I must confess, by the way, that as a member of the Ironic Postmodern Generation, I tend to capitalize Grand Concepts, which usually translates to Concepts That Aren't Really Grand but Pretend to Be. This habit, annoying as it may be, has Nothing to Do with arbitrary capitalization.

I'm really glad he addressed that. I've been doing that for a while now, and I'm sure I picked it up while reading some slacker text, but I wasn't sure how widespread the practice was. It also warms my heart to know that even authors of style manuals do silly things.

badvertising

Some days, I find myself staring in disbelief at my daily newspaper.

Some millionaire is trying to single-handedly support the specialty hot air balloon industry, again.

Someone around Jerusalem is killing someone else, again.

And our country hasn't been completely flushed down the toilet, yet.

But I expect the news to be like that. It's when the advertisements appall me that I start to get worried. After all, these guys are trying to curry my favor so I'll buy whatever it is they're selling.

That's why this ad bothers me. I mean, who decided that a good way to sell pickup trucks was by presenting a poorly drawn scenario in which two people (who I assume are the dealership owners) shoot at each other?

I understand that the bulk of Oregon is not a green liberal paradise like my beloved Portland. East of the Cascades, things look more like my home state, with cowboys, rodeos, scrub brush, and the like.

But does that mean that a gunfight indicates a rollickin' good time? Or did they think the free "Hawaiian" shaved ice would cause me to overlook the homicidal overtones?

I feel like a stupid liberal in voicing this objection (and, truth be told, I probably am a stupid liberal), but I just wish that those who routinely protest violence in the media would do their best to keep me from seeing ads like this.

Not because I feel inspired to go shoot someone and buy a cheap pickup truck. Because it's a really dumb ad.

what a short, nice trip it's been

Things I learned from Girlfriend Julia's recent trip up here:

• The

  
  not a bottler

  Portland Bottling Company is cool like field trips. Mere blocks from my house, this old (and old-school) building has large windows on one side that allow random passersby to watch the operations inside. I was reduced to childlike wonderment as bottles raced along tracks, caps were screwed on, and so on. I mean, you may think the Internet is all that, but you probably haven't seen a bottler in action.
• You can learn from homeless people - when it's hot outside, feel free to liberally apply water from the Benson Bubblers to most parts of your body, and fill up the cup you were so clever to carry along with you. You may look odd to that businessman walking by, but you'll feel much better than he does.
• Jan Svankmajer still makes my jaw drop and my brain sizzle.
• Portland may still be gaga over its

  
  not named desire

  new streetcar like some punk kid showing off his KISS lunchbox, but I still have issues with the thing. For one, I hope no one really expects to make dollar one off that thing. With more than half of its path in Fareless Square and a payment box inside the car that you have to push past other people to get to, I wonder why anyone would even bother trying to pay. Especially when the payment box doesn't take dollar bills and befuddles people with its Czech design (I owe you "$1,25"? What?). At least the coin-taking mechanism was rather cool, once we figured it out.
• You would think that watching meteors would be pretty cool, but then you would forget your possibly irrational fear of psychos running loose in the woods at night, with nothing more on their mind than killing romantic meteor seekers.
• Reason #237 why I like Portland: half an hour's drive from my house

  
  don't go chasing these

  
  just stick to the rivers

  brings you to the base of the "second tallest, year-round waterfall in the United States". Of course, that heavily qualified statement doesn't do justice to the majesty of water and gravity doing their thing. So I'll let my photos do all the talking and save you the two thousand words.
• You'd be surprised how much happiness you can make with jalapeños, tomatoes, cheese, frozen bread dough, green onions and cilantro. Not necessarily in that order.
• Wunderland,

  
  figure 1

  every time! As long as there's skee-ball, I won't even mind the little brats that are allowed to run free without reprimand from their uncaring mothers. Whoops, did I say that? Bad Todd. In spite of the glut of car-driving or mass homicide games they have, I still have to give them props for having a Pop'n Stage. What a wonderfully odd game! You have to dance on the tiny stage provided to "win". The only guy I saw playing this game was not only "kicking butt", he was exuding flashy style. Which might seem cool until you realize it's a video game and not an actual dance floor, and the guy's young male peers at Wunderland probably thought he was a wuss. Oh well. I think my favorite game this particular trip was the anonymous crane/ball game, because Julia and I figured out it was the best way to earn tickets. And more tickets means more Chips (see figure 1), which means more happiness all around.

bad news and good news

The bad news is, Bush recently celebrated six months of being President. I was rather surprised. I've already had four years' worth of anguished headline reading in the past 180 days. I can't believe how slowly this term is going. Sigh.

The good news is, I found some funny stuff on the Internet. These three random links caused me to forget, if only momentarily, the angst my government inflicts on me daily. Er, sort of.

Sadly, however, Bush will likely last longer than those links, so get clicking!

why did I think of this?

I bet they killed people with obsessive- compulsive disorder back in the Dark Ages. I just can't imagine peasants putting up with someone running around the hut screaming, "Ack! Everything here is just so DIRTY!"

have a water and a frown

There are many people in this country that are concerned about the health of its citizens, wondering why we have gotten so fat, and wondering what can be done about it.

Those people do not work at Coca-Cola.

While that statement may be self-obvious, I was not aware of the degree to which it is true until I was pointed to some pages on Coca-Cola's website by the good folks at Plastic. These pages detailed the war against water, that accursed liquid usurper, waged by Coke and one of its many mercenaries, Olive Garden.

However, Coca-Cola noticed the large influx of visitors to these pages, which probably weren't meant for popular consumption (unlike their tasty array of beverages), and quickly removed the pages, linked to here and here.

But lucky for you, I made screen captures of the deleted pages, so now you can enjoy Coke's corporate-speak, even if none of the links work.

I'm not sure what I find so striking about these pages. Is it that Coke is so powerful, it worries about water as a competitor? Is it the preponderance of odd jargon such as "positively influence a beverage decision", "campaign against water", "water incidence rate", or the seemingly sarcastic program name "H2NO"?

It's not as if I didn't know that restaurants - especially uninspired suburban chain restaurants that wouldn't recognize Italian food if they were in Italy - try to influence their customers to buy more crap. Or that Coke wants me to drink its products more.

And when you consider the profit margins on Coke, it's no surprise why. I mean, the stuff is cheaper per volume than gasoline, even though it's just tap water - yes, that self-same liquid devil! - plus enough sugar to sate your fat American tummy. It's not like it's sucked out from miles below ground and shipped half way around the world or anything.

So fine, they want to make money as the first article makes clear through the use of words like "retailer profits", "profit-producing beverages", and "money-making opportunities".

Or do they? After all, as the second article points out, what Coke is really concerned about is "increasing overall guest satisfaction", and avoiding "a dull dining experience". Golly, that sure says a lot about the pleasing-power of Olive Garden food, doesn't it?

Maybe I just hate being lied to or cajoled by a corporation that, in its unsustainable goal to continually grow at maniacal rates, has seen fit to push its product on a people too stupid to realize that it's not good for them in increasingly more aggressive ways. Yeah, maybe that's it.