Can we all agree it’s time to rename “reality” shows? Maybe we should call them “reality-derived.” Or “based-on-a-true-story TV.” (Hmmm. Clearly we’ll need something catchier.) We need something, though, because the men and women who work to craft these programs have toiled behind the scenes for too long. They need to stand up and claim credit.

Now, true, some of it is clear. If we’re very alert we might catch the work of the sound editor, adding a dot matrix sound to an inkjet, or a dialtone to a cellphone (or pomp and circumstance to Donald Trump’s every entrance.) The eagle-eyed amoung us may notice how, as a participant makes an observation, during the course of a few sentences (s)he may seem to occasionally change outfits, hairstyles and locations. (A favorite on The Real World.)

But the “loggers” who record this data, the writers who re-arrange it, and the editors who make it all happen — where’s their love?

Or look beyond the craftspeople who gather the raw materials and begin to shape a finished product. Good effort, but let’s not forget the folks — also un-sung — who work to shape the events themselves.

I’m not talking about casting, desiging tasks/challenges, or other components. I’m talking about the people who step in and say “Nope, reality just ain’t good enough.”

For example, take a look at our friend Jeff again:

Not there; look at his hair. That, my friends, is a little something we hometrosexuals like to call “product.” Unless these islands have a salon we don’t know about, it seems a stylist has dodged out from behind the green screen and helped out.

No big deal, you say? Fine. I’ll agree that we all want to look good, even when we’re ostensibly stranded on an island. But you’ve gotta admit this next one gives you pause.

In the last episode of Survivor, competing players had to swim out and retrieve a life ring, then bring it back and throw it on a pillar.

Here’s on overhead shot of the first two competitors, Tom and Jeff, with Tom down-frame, holding the ring, and Jeff blocking his path to the targets:

Now, we’ll allow that they have a helicopter, glider, or perhaps even a UAV for the overheads. But look at the next shot that’s intercut in the scene a few seconds later:

Obviously, that’s tight in on Jeff, waiting for Tom to bring it. But hold on a second. Look back at the frame above. Where is the camera that’s shooting Jeff?

Another: here are the next competitors, Annoying Girl 1 and Annoying Girl 2. First we see them headed out, upper left:

Then, a moment (30 frames, ~1 second) later, we’re in tight:

Two seconds (65 frames) after that, we’re overhead again (note the clear blue water, nothing is submerged except the device that launches the rings):

Obviously, time has elapsed between these shots; that’s the whole purpose of editing. That said, there is no chance in hell you could capture all of these, then get out of range of an overhead, all in one take while leaving no wake.

Which is why, again, I applaud the people behind the scenes. That includes the directors and producers who mandate the pretty shots, the camerapeople who capture them…

…and the body doubles who make it all possible.

Whilst I was Googling for some potential Big Print Bank billboard images, I came across an article in the Sydney Morning Herald discussing two guys who had made this wearable television ad. Obviously, I think it’s a fucking terrible idea. As if we’re not bombarded by invasive marketing messages as it is?

Worst of all, the article was so obsequious. So I just couldn’t resist adding a few comments.

The human billboards

by Kate Cox, 23 November 2003

Dork 1 and Dork 2.

It takes selling your body to a whole new level.

Two young Sydney entrepreneurs and best mates have come up with an innovative marketing scheme: canvas vests with built-in mini televisions that show moving advertisements.

The world-first concept has already been sold to Telstra and was unveiled last night at the Rugby World Cup final – with “Telstra girls” turning heads in the T-shirts.

Veeran Naran, 28, began developing the idea – and a company, Channel Zero – while working as a graphic designer and editor for large sporting and entertainment clients.

“The 25- to 31-year-olds market, in Australia especially, are not at home watching television, they’re at pubs watching television and people,” he said. “So I decided to put televisions on people.”

Two years in the making, the “TelePAK” is powered by a lithium battery and run by DVD, meaning the screening time is unlimited and the interactive “program” can be changed by the model via remote control.

Mr Naran’s best mate, 29-year-old former geologist Ben Perry, looks after the business affairs.

The company’s “fusion between a bag and a T-shirt” (and rather large fashion statement) is the latest marketing ploy following the use of Vespas, cars, moving billboards and pavements as advertising mediums.

It is attractive to advertisers because there is no parking needed and it is moveable and immediate.

For consumers, it is interesting rather than evasive – and it is humorous. For the wearer, it is lightweight (about two kilograms) and generally fun – and they can finally co-ordinate their outfit with whatever’s on TV.

Plans are afoot for involvement with the Sydney Festival and the men are also in discussions with large corporations for campaigns during next year’s Athens Olympics.

The second prototype is expected to have more features. “It’s going to be out of this world,” Mr Naran said.

Channel Zero finds the people willing to advertise on their bodies and assists with the creative campaign.

“We believe we are revolutionising outdoor marketing. The advertising market is flooded with creative wallpaper so that people are blind to the message. With this, people will know it is there – not only is it completely different, but it has sound too. People love it – they want to take it home.”

IMDb is looking to hire. Since they’re an Amazon subsidiary, clicking the jobs link will take you to the Amazon page. There you’ll find this:

2-Pizza Team Leader – Personalization and Site Automation, #04-011898
The data mining and personalization team at Amazon develops the algorithms and website features that help drive customers to the website, and helps them find highly relevant products[…] Join us and innovate in earth’s largest experimental laboratory.

Two observations. One, I like that they think of themselves as experimental. Amazon has been leading the charge in e-commerce, and I hope they do keep innovating. But the interesting thing is that job title: a “2-Pizza Team Leader”? What’s that? Well, as it happens, I read an interview with Jeff Bezos a few months ago and I recall his explanation: if you can’t feed a team with two pizzas, then it’s too large.

Nice to see he wasn’t kidding. Of course, if I were working there it would mean I’d have to be on a team with maybe 2 other people, provided at least one of them had a big lunch.

The Register has reported that “actress”/”singer” Jennifer Love Hewitt is now ready to begin a crucial part of adult life:

Actress Jennifer Love Hewitt has decided to behave like a grown adult now that she’s turned 26 — she finally plans to do her own laundry.
[…]
“It’s time that I learned to do my own laundry, I think. Twenty-six just feels very grown up.”

The following is a public service announcement.

If you see Ms. Hewitt, approach carefully so as not to startle her. Then do your part for humanity. Speaking slowly and clearly, let her know that most operating manuals for washing machines fail to mention a crucial step in getting clean clothes: visual verification of detergent adhesion.

Advise Ms. Hewitt that once the tub fills, she should dunk her head in the water and look to be sure each item of clothing is getting cleaned. An uninterrupted stretch of 3-5 minutes should do the job.

Then go find Paris Hilton.

I was tempted to title this post “Bring It On”, but Arbusto has forever ruined the phrase, no? Anyway, due to a very special request, I have now enabled comments for all of the ’05 posts on jsp.org.

We’re having a little experiment here. By all means, feel free to make use of the facility to call me out or to show me that sweet, sweet e-love.

Or both, as the mood strikes you.

I spend most of my time in two rooms. One is my bedroom, which is dominated by, aptly enough, a bed, with books on every available flat surface. The other is “the Lab,” which is dominated by computers (presently 5 towers and 2 laptops) and has paper on nearly every surface.

I decided a few days ago that at least one of these rooms should be in some semblance of order. So, slowly, I’ve been sorting through the files in the Lab.

Now, I don’t want to give the impression I’m a packrat. I’m not, but I do have a few bins of the “I’ll deal with that later” sort. Sometimes much later. Thus far, I’ve found:

• A notice from the District Court of Iowa that I hadn’t cashed a check sent in 2001, and I could get a new one if I executed an indemnity agreement by 15 Oct 04. (Indemnity agreement still attached.)
• Nearly a year’s worth of unread National Geographic: Adventure magazines. (Thank you, Salon subscription!)
• A map of Athens, with various things checked off. On the back: a ton of notes, and the formal and informal spellings of my name in Greek.
• Random ticket stubs, including from an Ani DiFranco concert (Sept 04, MSP) and “The Producers” (May 04, Melbourne)
• Postcards from the L(afayette) Ron Hubbard birthday celebration in Sydney. (A riot, let me tell you.)
• A “free month of DVDs” discount card, valid only in the UK.

And that’s in the newer bin! Maybe after I get some of this stuff cleaned up and recycled, I’ll take a picture of my newly de-cluttered workspace. Hmm. Might not want to look for that one for a few months…

Happy 25, B-don.

Hope you get like a nice bike or something.

For the last few days I’ve been reading the official “GM FastLane” blog, usually written by vice-chair Bob Lutz. The site, like other corporate blogs, is an interesting experiment in direct interaction with the public. Here, the best part of many posts is the comments, where GM backers and detractors fight it out.

I love that Lutz will take the time to respond to comments, and the man clearly has passion for his field. But I don’t know that his site will become a part of my bookmarks, because he also tends to fall back to marketing-speak. Take a recent post, Best in Class? Taste for Yourself.

He starts out by quite rightly noting that it’s silly to select a car based upon country of origin:

First of all, just as with cigars, wine and gin, you are making a potential mistake if you are basing your decision solely on country of origin. Sure, reputation plays a big role, but check it out carefully, and go drive, or sip, or puff, and then decide.

Then he complains that U.S. automakers have not been recognized for making major quality strides. OK, maybe. But who has failed to recognize this? Consumers? No, it’s the evil media:

It’s largely because the general press in this country has fallen into a depressing but easy pattern of “foreign good, U.S.-produced bad.” They perpetuate conventional wisdom and don’t report the latest state.

Anyone else tired of this straw man? The monolithic “media” serves as a target for just about everyone these days, but it seems particularly weak coming from a company with a $3B annual ad budget. Could it be that GM marketing isn’t telling the story? Nahh. Must be Newsweek‘s bias. (Of course, we’re totally ignoring the question of which manufacturers actually produce in the U.S.)

Worse, Bob then tries to have it both ways:

In short, we are all trying to live down a reputation that was probably at one time deserved, but is no longer justified.

So which is it: there was much improvement made, but the media doesn’t report it, or there was “probably” a problem once, but you can’t recall?

It’s interesting to read what Lutz has to say from time to time, but I wish he was a little less constrained. I remember my friend Pech sending me a CNN story in which an (unnamed) Ford executive admitted that the Camry was a better product than the Taurus. Now that person would have a blog I’d like to read.

I’ve got these certain two pairs of heavy wool socks. They’re a sort of salt ‘n pepper combo of black and white. Nothing special. Even so, they make me smile almost every time I put them on, because I remember when I bought them.

I was in Oslo, Norway, and about to take a trip north to near the site of Lillehammer Olympics for some whitewater rafting. It was late Spring 2000, and I needed the socks to keep my feet warm on/after the rafting. (I also got a sweater, for after.) Sometimes I marvel at the young me who thought nothing of taking a detour in my European vacation and just jumping on a charter bus full of Norwegians, blissfully ignoring the fact that I had no clue what anyone was saying. (Though they were quite marvelous to me, and fortunately on my raft, the commands were in English.)

Socks are perhaps an odd way to commemorate an experience like that, but they fit into what I think is a pretty good philosophy: the only things you should keep are those that fall into the category of being beautiful, useful, or meaningful. If it’s more than one, all the better. (I’m counting these socks as two.)

Easier said than done? Perhaps. But as a guiding principle on what to keep and what to dump, I think it’s a damn good start.

Dear Young Ones,

Greetings from 2005. And congratulations! You’ve lived through a time of impressive social and technological change, as evidenced by your very existence.

I know it’s hard to imagine that your Gramps Gompy Granddaddy Grandfather was ever as young as 27, but it’s true! I might even still bear a faint resemblance to that handsome devil (quantum leaps in medicine willing.)

Anyhoo, I’m writing to you today because a few hours ago I came across a Website comment that advised Web writers against ever using profanity because it might be possible, Google willing, for you lot to later read those very words. Well, your Grandfather got a little hot-headed and snapped back a response.

In fact, it would be fair to say that ol’ JSP told that dude to “fuck off.” Does that shock you? I certainly hope not. (If so, you might want to avoid the racy pictures Grandpa posted every once in awhile!)

I know you grew up in a post-Ashcroftian era, where you ventured out with the expectation that nearly everything you did in public could be recorded in some fashion. Maybe you even did the recording yourself. That’s fine, just as long as you remember that those images — like G-pa’s website here — don’t represent the sum total of your being. They’re just snapshots, moments in time, incomplete records of what you decided to do then based upon your whims.

As I hope you know, you have to decide how to live your life when you’re doing it. If later you look back and wince… well, shit happens. (Oops, there I go again!) You’re allowed to evolve.

So go ahead. Have a strong personality. Make daring decisions. Take some risks. Curse sometimes, even! Far from condemning you, your grandchildren might just see you as a real person. And hey, if they don’t, you can always cut the little bastards out of the will.

All my love,

J

The foks at SCO, arch-nemesis of open source advocates everywhere, are spinning their notoriety to their advantage:

SCO Ranked #1 Corporate Query Site by Google. Based on billions of searches conducted by Google users around the world, the 2004 Year-End Zeitgeist ranks SCO’s corporate Website as the most searched site for the year. [link modified, they pointed it to the wrong page]

Wow, “most searched”… in this case, sounds like being “the film everybody’s talking about”:

(Australian release; cover reads “The couple everyone wants to be.”/ “The film everybody’s talking about.”)

My friend Debbie is a big fan of Owen Wilson, so when I happened across a story about him, I sent her the link. She replied, saying she checks her e-mail at the YWCA where she likes to swim, and because they had “super limited access,” she couldn’t read the story. So I pasted the text and sent it back.

The fun came when she replied. My eye caught on what looked like some odd justifiying in the automatically quoted reply:

> unleashed on the LAT's Patrick Goldstein last week. Note especially
> Wilson's subtle invocation of the threat of         , and contrast
> with Schneider's near-promise of      shed.

Then I realized that was filtering at work. The proxy on the other end had blanked out the excerpt’s use of the words “violence” and “blood.” Now, I’ve had e-mail to certain domains bounce back entirely because I’ve used the word “fucking” (for emphasis, of course; juvenile work-around: fuc|<ing) but I’ve never had a message actually edited to remove words I put there. (Of course, to be fair, since Deb uses Hotmail, it would be essentially indistinguishable from any other Web page.)

But how can I be offended at something this delightfully inept? Truly, does this sort of filtering work on anything but sites that use filenames like PornyPornPic1.JPG? How cute! On the other hand, bad luck for the YWCAers who are interested in preventing domestic       or attending     drives…

I remember visiting a client’s house some time ago. As we worked in the downstairs office, the television sat in the background, blaring one of The Duke’s old movies. Nobody was watching it, so I asked why it was on. “Oh,” the woman said, “[her husband] loves John Wayne, and leaves it on so they know people watch it, and will keep showing it.”

This little encounter came to mind the other day when I was reading about IPTV, or television delivered using the Internet Protocol (like streaming, except it doesn’t suck.) Many people don’t know it, but the cable and telephone companies are expected to soon wage a massive war. As the CableCos have begun to offer phone service, the phone companies are investigating ways to deliver video over their own connection to the home. For a variety of technical reasons, IPTV is well suited to this.

While the tech is interesting, the implications for personal privacy are even more so. Consider for a moment how ratings are calculated presently: the A. C. Nielsen company picks families and (in most cases) asks them to keep a paper log of what the watch, or (in a few markets) installs “people meters” to do it automatically. Either way, these sample groups are then extrapolated to take a guess at what everyone is watching.

If that sounds sort of quaint, that’s because it is. In the traditional broadcast realm, my friend has no hope of getting his John Wayne preference recorded, unless he’s part of a Nielsen family. The IPTV approach, on the other hand, goes far beyond “viewing notebooks”: every time you select a channel, your cable box asks for that “stream” from the company server — at which point the service provider may record your request.

The privacy implications are stunning. From a technical standpoint, it would be trivial for your Internet/TV provider to read your e-mail, record your Internet searches, and even cross-reference it all with your TV viewing, then sell it all to, say, Acxiom (who are they?).

The ramifications are also strong on the production side. Imagine the implications for the news. Up-to-the-moment statistics, of the sort heretofore only enjoyed by QVC: “we killed with that Swift Boat thing, string it out!” or “people are tuning out when we cover Sudan, let’s shorten the international news block…”

Do I worry too much?

Not much to report. Spent the day in Ames, taking in the Iowa State Classic where my brother was running. Good work Jeff! He looked a lot like this:

…except he got his hair cut. That pic comes courtesy the front page of DePaulBlueDemons.com. Apparently they thought the combination of “Iowa meet, Iowa kid” a funny one.

After the meet, the family went to eat at La Fuente and then took in Million-Dollar Baby. (I highly recommend both.)

The other day, I was subjected to a showing of Taxi on a United flight. Not to be confused with the French film of the same name, which I enjoyed (due to the setting and companionship), this one features Jimmy Fallon and Queen Latifah.

I was talking to my brother about it, and he said that while he was first against the idea of Fallon in feature films, he soon came around. “Look at Rob Schneider,” Jeff said. “He did The Animal and we haven’t had to hear from him since.”

Well I got bad news, brother of mine. Schneider is back, and he’s pissed:

Patrick, I can honestly say that if I sat you your colleagues at a luncheon, afterwards, they’d say “You know, that Rob Schneider is a pretty intelligent guy, I hope we can do that again.” Whereas, if you sat with my colleagues, after lunch, you would just be beaten beyond recognition.

It reads like a personal e-mail, but it’s actually a full-page ad in Variety, according to this writer. (I’d love to give a first-hand scan, but Variety is hella expensive: $300/yr.) Schneider’s ticked that LAT reviewer Patrick Goldstein made a swipe at him:

The other [Oscar-]nominated films were orphans — ignored, unloved and turned down flat by most of the same studios that eagerly remake dozens of old TV series (aren’t you looking forward to a bigger, dumber version of “The Dukes of Hazzard”?) or bankroll hundreds of sequels, including a follow-up to “Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo,” a film that was sadly overlooked at Oscar time because apparently nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic.

You can see above that Goldstein mentions “a follow-up to Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo.” Oddly, Schneider completely misconstrues this as shoddy research:

For the record, Patrick, your research is shabby as well. My next film is not ‘Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo 2.’ It’s ‘Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo,’ in theaters EVERYWHERE August 12th 2005.

If Goldstein (mis-)used that title, I missed it. Just like I’ll miss you, Rob, when you implode in a supernova of suck.