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Idle essays

The long, slow death of journalism

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This may not be visible to those of you who view the New York Times Magazine online, but today the Times downsized the magazine’s print version in a big and ominous way. They’ve cut the trim size (the issue’s physical height and width) and, to accommodate the smaller pages, have switched to an eye-straining smaller font with display type that at one heading level looks weirdly smaller than the body type. The effect is…well, depressing. It’s another symptom of the demise of print journalism, a development that does not bode well for a healthy democracy.

They’ve also upgraded to a “brighter and more contemporary color palette.” {gasp!} I woke up this morning with the remnants of a migraine that started two days ago and is only just clearing. Today’s brighter and more contemporary cover consists of a stomach-flipping, brilliant, sulfuric ochre that bleeds off all four margins, with black type against a window of Day-Glo magenta: eyeball-grating! At first glance, it actually caused physical pain. No exaggeration: I still can’t look at it without making my head hurt more. In fact, as we scribble, I’m ripping off the cover, folding it so I can’t see it, and hiding it in the trash.

When a magazine starts out with a large trim size, shrinking it to the dimensions of an ordinary newsstand publication doesn’t sound, on the face of it, like a big deal. But lemme tell you: a publication like the Times Magazine builds much of its appeal through its visual presence and its tactile effect on readers. The magazine was physically pleasing to read and to handle, and that is why one is willing to pay to have such a thing delivered to one’s home. This fact is not understood by management, particularly when management has no comprehension of journalism or graphic design and is interested primarily—one might say solely—in the bottom line. These bozos fail to grasp the idea that when you diminish the magazine, you may save money on production costs, but you lose readers. When you’re already hemorrhaging readers, you can’t afford strategies that drive away those who have stuck with you through good times and bad.

While I was working for Arizona Highways, the publisher decided to save dollars by cutting the trim size and, worse, by going to a cheaper, thinner paper stock. Save money? Yup. Stupid move? Oh, yeah!

Highways was the pre-eminent regional magazine in the country. It also was one of the premier photography publications in the world. For a certain type of landscape photographer—the sort who hauls a hundred pounds of large-format gear 15 or 20 miles into the bush, eschews Photoshop, and rarely if ever does a set-up shot—it was a go-to market that could make a career. For readers around the world, it was a window to the American Southwest and a nice little dream factory. For the state of Arizona, it was the mother lode of tourism.

Cutting the trim size meant they had to cut the size of the photo reproduction. A spectacular scenic looks a whole lot less scenic when you shrink it a quarter-inch or so all the way around—surprisingly so. Cheesying down the paper quality meant ink on one side of a sheet would show through to the other side. This annoyed the photographers, so much so that the real heavy hitters, who did not need Arizona Highways to make or break their businesses, quit submitting their work.

Overall the magazine’s quality dropped markedly: markedly enough to be noticeable to readers. Circulation, which at one time reached every country on the earth but one, went into free-fall. It had been dropping; now it plummeted.

Two editors in a row walked or were fired. The second, who pretty clearly was hired to ride the publication into the ground, fled before it could crash. Highways is still being printed, but no one understands why. Its days may be numbered in the single digits. They were numbered in the first place, but the numbers were surely reduced when management decided to cut production quality.

Hey, guys. Give us NEWS! Give us QUALITY! Real readers don’t want infotainment. We don’t want Play-Nooz. And we’re not gunna pay for junked-up products. If journalism were still journalism, maybe it would survive a little longer.

Mormons to the rescue!

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Thank heavens! Just as SDXB is about to leave town, abandoning his feckless daughter (let’s call her Pauline, as in “Perils of…”) to deal alone with AHCCCS (Arizona’s ungenerous answer to Medicaid), the Department of Economic Security, the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, another pending eviction, the usual array of angry creditors, and several flying phalanxes of lawyers, an angel has stepped in to pick up the reins while he’s gone.

Somewhere along the line, incredibly, Pauline managed to make friends with a nice Mormon girl, who has taken an interest in the current flurry of perils. She has accompanied Pauline to DES and otherwise helped out. Even more incredible: this lady has galvanized the LDS Aid Society to come to Pauline’s rescue! They are on their way to her house as we speak to pack her up and get her out of there, and not only that, they’ve found a place for her to stay! 

Do you realize what a miracle this is? Pauline has no, zero, zip credit. She has been evicted from three houses for nonpayment of rent, one of which had its garage door busted down by the Repo Man, who wished to drive her car back to its rightful owner, the lender. She can’t even get a checking account: SDXB had to get her a savings account at his credit union, and to do that he had to sign on it. Only a saint would even think of renting to this woman. 

And…well, I can tell you for sure: a nice Mormon girl is about as unlikely a friend for Pauline as you can imagine.

For SDXB, this is the best news that’s come along in weeks. Make that months. Since there seemed to be no way to get her into another house, he was about to look into trying to get her and the kids into a homeless shelter (although he expected the rabid, possibly homicidal ex-husband would use the opportunity to nail permanent custody of the brats), where she would have to camp until he could get back from Texas and waypoints.

Let’s hope these women do some serious proselytizing and maybe even convert Pauline. LDS provides exactly the kind of social network that a feckless, generally abused soul like Pauline needs. And they promulgate a highly functional way of thinking that Pauline has failed to imbibe during her forty-two years. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that the shock of her injury and total financial and social collapse has finally gotten her attention. Maybe she’ll be open to learning a new way to structure her life…something that will work for her and for her children.

Personally, LDS is not my cup of tea. But for some folks, it has a great deal to recommend it: solid values, clean living, a powerful social network, and an ethic that fosters steadiness and responsibility. IMHO, Pauline would benefit enormously from the influence of this group.

Image  by Philipp Spinnler: 
Statue of the Angel Moroni, Berne Temple, Switzerland
Wikipedia Commons 

The attack of the midnight skulkers

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Augh! What a day! 

One of several low points has been an ant invasion. They’ve established a beachhead in the kitchen, and now they’re strategizing ways to take over the whole house.

This morning while I was cooking up an entire package of Costco sausages, the better to have a frozen stash of cooked food, I opened the dishwasher to grab a pair of tongs, and yipe! the washer was alive with ants! Since I hadn’t run the washer the night before, they thought they’d found their own Ant Costco. 

Heh. Gives new meaning to “big box store,” doesn’t it?

This, on its own, was not difficult to deal with: turned on the dishwasher, tracked the little troops to an opening under the kitchen door, sprinkled the threshold and the area around their entry with boric acid, and mopped the floor with vinegar and laundry detergent. I thought that would bring a stop to that.

Wrong!

This evening I fall asleep in front of House, M.D., wake up around quarter to ten, stumble into the kitchen to let the dog out, and yipe again! My feet get bitten. The floor is swarming with more ants than I have ever seen in my entire freaking life!

This time they’re not in the dishwasher, but they’re just about everyplace else. They’ve packed themselves into the dog dish, which the dog had licked clean hours earlier. They’re lapping up invisible stuff from the floor, which I thought I’d scrubbed clean in the morning. And most interestingly, they’re not marching in the usual antsy line but are wandering all…over…the…floor. They’ve strolled right in over the boric acid, and they’ve spread out over the kitchen floor in an even living blanket. 

And they’re not brooking any interference.

They’re only in the kitchen. They’re only on the floor. The garbage is in the garage, but they haven’t found that. 

I hate bug spray. And I especially hate bug spray inside my house. But pushed to the wall by an army of marauders, I locked up the dog in the back room, threw open the doors and windows, turned the fans to “high,” grabbed the Raid, and applied it as lightly as I could manage to the writhing floor.

Yuch, what a stink! Nauseating.

Ants in retreat, then I got to mop the floor. Five times. Three times with detergent; twice more with Simple Green. 

That got up most of the stink. It’s still pretty gross in there, though. Of course I can’t leave the doors and windows open all night—this is the big city, after all. 

We’ve got worse home invaders than a tribe of ants. This afternoon—another high point of the day—two workmen showed up to hang the gutters on M’hijito’s house. God, what refrigerator do these characters climb out from under? They both sported a fine array of combined prison and professional tattoos. Neither was a guy you’d want to meet in a dark alley (or even a brightly lit alley), but one of them was a very creepy-looking dude. And in the course of climbing around the back of the house, they got a good eyeful of the kid’s elaborate computer equipment, clearly visible behind a set of eminently vulnerable French doors.

Damn!

Well, fortunately the roommate’s car was parked in the driveway, he and the girlfriend having absented themselves to Singapore. I remarked to the men that I was expecting the roommate and his girl at any time, and in fact was surprised they hadn’t come home from their college classes yet. And as they were leaving I indicated I was going to wait around for the young people.

Paranoid? Mebbe. SDXB’s house was burglarized by just such gents, employees of a moving company who overheard that he was going to stay at my house the night of the move-in. Never put an NRA sticker on your vehicle: it advertises that you have guns in the house. Fortunately, he’d left his armaments at his mother’s place, but they stole a beautiful old zebrawood bow and his collection of machetes picked up on various military assignments around Latin America. It was clear they were after weapons—except for his wallet, which he’d left on the kitchen counter, that was all they took. They must have been surprised to find all the Goodwill and yard sale junk he’s accrued over the years.

Then there was the landscaper’s laborer who stole a bicycle out of my garage. He came back the next night but couldn’t get the second one, which was locked, out the door, so he just removed the front wheel and made off with that. And the yard cleanup guys who took advantage of an open garage door to steal my tools. And…well, one could go on and on. 

Image: Meating-eating ant lapping honey, by Fir0002/Flagstaffotos 
whose website and galleries are not to be missed.
Reproduced under the GFDL free documentation license  

How to keep the customers coming back

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Awesome customer service! That’s how a small business keeps customers coming back in the door, year after year. And it’s the way a specialized hardware store beats the big boxes.

• A human being answers the phone.
• Employees treat customers as they would like to be treated themselves.
• Skilled workers really are skilled.
• People go above and beyond the call of duty.

Doors in progress
Doors in progress

While we were renovating the downtown house, I stumbled across an amazing windfall: in my neighborhood, a great old house on horse property was being demolished to make way for a cluster of McMansions. The guy who was pulling it down had salvaged the doors: two sets of huge solid mahogany French doors, a matching single back door, and a solid mahogany front door. I grabbed the entire lot, including all the hardware, for $300. 

These magnificent pieces of workmanship now reside at the little house downtown, where they have transformed the place. 

The hardware, as it develops, was all made by Baldwin, one of the most expensive lockmakers on the planet. All of it except the front door’s lockset was in perfect working order. The hardware on the front door never worked right, and the level handle on the interior flopped down like a broken paw. And, as it also develops, Baldwin locks are very hard to repair: not just any locksmith can work on them. To complicate matters further, the hardware dates back to about 1950.

A couple of months ago, the deadbolt broke. I called a locksmith whose name I lifted from Angie’s List while the Phoenix-area list was still free. He came by, looked at it, and said it was beyond his ken. He referred me to an outfit called Anderson Lock and Safe, and said if anyone could fix it, they could. 

Amazingly, these folks will send a locksmith within an hour or two after you call. Even more amazingly, they have a whole crew of locksmiths who seem to know what they’re doing. Soon we had learned that the deadbolt was broken because Eric the Fly-by-Night Contractor had installed the strikeplate wrong, so the bolt was hitting metal; eventually that’s what broke the lock. As for the handle: that was a challenge. A spring on the inside had worn out, and Baldwin no longer made such a spring.

One of the men took the lockset apart and showed me the complicated interior. It was fashioned, he said, like a Swiss clock. All the interior parts were hand-milled. Today, even Baldwin uses mass-produced parts, to keep costs down. Although a Baldwin lock sells for upwards of $300, no one makes anything like the lockset we had. He estimated its value at around $400; his boss thought it was worth more like $700.

This guy repaired the deadbolt, fixed the strikeplate, and got the handle to sit horizontally, but without the spring it had to be manually placed in position. It didn’t really work: it just looked like it sorta worked.

Then along came Bila the Painter. He needed to remove the lockset so he could sand and refinish the outside of the door. He couldn’t figure out how to get it off, so I paid to have Anderson come over and remove it and then paid again to have them come back and reinstall it.

In the course of this project, the handle ended up flopped back down again. Pretty quick, Anderson sent over Bill the Locksmith. This guy, who seems to have the best time in the world playing with locks, took everything apart, did some more repair work on the thing, but said he couldn’t fix the handle without a spring.

I said, well, the other guys had said that spring is no longer being made.

True, said he, but he figured there had to be something like it somewhere. He promised to keep an eye out. He went off. M’hijito and I gave up.

So yesterday the phone rang out of the blue, and there was Bill the Locksmith! He had found a spring he thought would work in the lock. So I threw on some clean clothes and raced down to meet him at the house. 

Half an hour or forty minutes later, lo! The lock worked, the handle stood cheerfully at attention, and the entire assembly operated like new!

Not only that, but he planed down part of the door frame that Eric the F-b-N Contractor had left crooked and sprinkled powdered graphite on the ill-fitting weatherstrip that Greg the Handyman installed. So, when M’hijito got home from work last night, he found a front door, deadbolt, and fancy lockset that actually work!

Says he, by e-mail:

This is most incredibly fantastic.

 

I am sitting here and I am very, very pleased.  It’s probably hard for someone else to understand the degree of my pleasedness.

Yeah. Absolutely. So that’s two people who will tell all their friends to use Anderson Locksmiths. One of them will broadcast that message to the population of the world. And that’s how small businesses can fight big box chains.

🙂

Good-bye old receipts, hello dinner

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As a compulsive expense-tracker, I drop credit-card receipts into a file folder after having entered the charges in Excel. After a few months, disposing of the resulting fat collection of paper can present a challenge. The wad quickly builds up to enough to choke a shredder, and besides, who wants to stand next to a shredding machine for an hour or so feeding old, faded credit-card receipts into the thing?

Typically, I burn a pile of them in the fireplace once a year. However, it’s only May and the junk receipts folder was full to busting. In hundred-degree weather, I don’t much feel inclined to fire up the hearth. Soooo….

You’ll only read it here, my friend! No other PF blog on the planet will clue you to this ingenious idea. 

😉

The Bookkeeper's Stove
The Bookkeeper's Stove

I have a charcoal-starting chimney, a gadget that allows you to light charcoal using just a couple pages from a newspaper. No petroleum products need apply! So this evening I wrapped the mound of old credit-card receipts inside a double-truck spread, crammed it into the chimney, and used it to set fire to a load of charcoal.

It’s working! Soon the coals will be ready for a steak and a fine cob of corn. And six months’ worth of credit-card receipts will be cremated and returned to their Maker, dust to dust, ashes to ashes, never to present a temptation to an identity thief. 

How many people on this earth at this hour can say they converted a mountain of junk paper into dinner?

 

 

Copyright © 2009 Funny about Money 

INSIGHT! Thinking outside the (digital converter) box

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When M’hijito was last over here trying to figure out why my TV won’t get the newly fully digitized version of the local PBS station, no matter how much rescanning we commit, he speculated that by keeping the Radio Shack TV antenna inside the ugly TV armoire, we can’t extend the antenna’s VHF arms long enough to pick up the new, weaker signal from Channel 8. He realized that if he held the antenna  up in the air and canted his body at a 75-degree angle in front of the set, gadget and corpus together worked to bring in a signal. Alas, though, this was not a practical, permanent solution…

He speculated that with a long enough coaxial cable, we might get it to work by putting it on top of the ugly armoire, except that my house being a bit on the vintage side, the armoire clears the unstylishly low ceiling by only about 22.5 inches, not enough to fully extend the rabbit ears and aim them up, down, around, and beyond. Besides, I have a set of puck lights up there that I don’t especially want to take down.

So I was somewhat annoyed: except for My Name Is Earl and House, I hardly ever watch programs other than those on PBS—and not much of those, either. I just don’t have time, unless it’s something I really enjoy. I’m certainly not going to pay for cable service to get high-definition delivery of shows that I don’t have time to watch and, in general, don’t care for. IMHO, cable is worthwhile for people who a) have plenty of time to sit in front of the idiot box; b) enjoy watching sports on TV; c) enjoy watching movies on TV; d) have kids who need an electronic babysitter; or e) some or all of the above. 😉 I don’t seem to fit into any of those categories.

This morning in a moment of idle boredom, I came across a hilarious video showing how to make a DYI television antenna. Wait! thought I: back in the Cretaceous, I used to be young and clever, too…and I never took “no” for an answer when it came to gadgetry. Trouble is, I’m just not thinking like a person who’s young enough that his voice hasn’t quite changed.

If the antenna works but can’t work inside or on top of the armoire, why does it have to be inside or on top of the armoire? Why can’t it be someplace else?

So I dug out an old, dusty TV table (so aptly named!), dragged it into the TV room, unhooked the co-ax cable and fished it out of the hole in back of the armoire, reconnected it to the antenna, and set the thing up on the table next to the armoire. It’s just flicking hideous, of course: ugly armoire, ugly antenna, ugly TV table. But who cares? No one ever goes into that room but me and the dog, who seems to have little aesthetic sense.

 Well, by golly, it works! All four of KAET’s digital channels come in loud and more or less clear.

Hallelulah, brothers and sisters! Four more channels with nothing on to watch!

Copyright © 2009 Funny about Money

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