See what the gang in marketing can come up with

We are enjoying a fish dinner, and I have declared there is no such fish as a scrod (standard New England pattah, after we have invoked The Lwad...) and she says "there is no Chilean sea bass either."

I was eating an Idaho trout, myself.  But the game was on.  I do not doubt my companion's authority.  She is the Me to me... I am only citing sources here because one does like to be accurate.

It is a Patagonian toothfish (and we are not supposed to be eating it just now.)  This is a pretty good technique for managing our wild food sources, isn't it?  If you want us to buy it, call it Chilean Sea Bass.  Need it to fall out of favor, and  it goes back to being Toothfish.  We never want to eat anything that makes us think of biting down on a tooth.

If you've taken a single American Studies or advertising class, you've heard about the Chevy Nova that wouldn't sell in South America because it means "Doesn't Go" in Spanish.  Consider the Citroen, national car of France, that probably wouldn't sell here anyway, just because it is French, whether it sounded like a lemon or not.

The best food marketing trick I know was to give it a French name once it is dead on on the plate.
Anglo-Saxon is for working animals; Norman French is for garnishing.  Mais oui.

During my childhood, we watched entire food commodities forced to advertise themselves.  Branding wasn't even the issue.  The industries themselves were up against it, and got together to beg us.  Please.  Milk, eggs, beef, pork, cheese... even SOUP is good food.  Please, please eat our food.  Last season's Mad Men had the team at Sterling Cooper trying to revive coffee when everyone else wanted to buy the world a Coke.  It reminded me of the Coffee Achievers campaign of the Big 80s.  Bowie, King/Queen of the Moment, with his crazy dilated eye... who doesn't want coffee if it makes my hair do that?



I think Cicely Tyson just suggested that coffee made her slap that guy.

Well, "National Coffee Association," you got your way, didn't you?

But WHY is there an app for that?

A scene popped into my head.  I don't know what to do with it, so I am going to thrust it on you.  2 kids in a darkened room, a Ouija board between them.  The pointer spells out L....O.....L.

One thing I have learned from our years on the Interwebs is that there really is an app for everything.  It took only 2 searches to find this.  It would have been one, but I did an image search first.

What's more stupid -- a ouija app, or a video of a ouija app?
I think right now you are trying to decide whether to read it wee-ja or wee-jee?  I'm sorry for forcing your hand this way.  It's ba-LOAN-a.

Other games the tattooed youth are now playing on their apps, instead of a basement rec room utility closet, as God intended:

Spin the Bottle
Quarters
Twister
Pictionary
Puff Puff Pass  now that's just a damn shame, just when we nearly have it legalized.  You have to be 17 to purchase this game.  Is that... appropriate?  Or just.... absurd?

We know the little ones love to smudge up our phones.  here are some apps you can buy rather than give them actual toys.
Marbles
Bubbles
Mumbletypeg!  sort of.   I guess you weren't going to buy your kid a knife.  Or a hoop and a stick.
Now I want you to look me right in the eye and tell me a yo-yo app is not the most idiotic thing you have heard today.  Et tu, Duncan?

I am working out the Amish doll app.  Apparently, we'll buy anything.

you have a whole month of nonsense posts like this to look forward to.  Maybe less IS more.

The Virgin Vault

lock up your daughters.  I am about to speak frankly on the Disney Princesses.

I have a 4 year-old girl in my life, who right on schedule has fallen for the Disney Princesses.  You may think, because you see them everywhere, that their films are available for the picking.  You may think that, unless you too have a 4 year-old girl in your life.  Long before the other girl in my life (now 17 and long past her princess years, if she ever had them) was born her mother began stockpiling the classic Disney videos.  Video was not "new," but it was still a big deal, and we teased her about hoarding. But she was already clued in to The Disney Vault.

You may recall it was Disney early on who fought the legality of videotape technology, and famously (bitterly) lost.  Well hell hath no fury like the  Mouse scorned, so they now make us work for it.  Buy now (at inflated price) or hold your peace until the next convenient anniversary, which will be conveniently timed to coincide with a drastic change in technology, so that you can re-buy what you already paid too much for.


Disney-dot-dvd-go-dot-com (so many domains... how fitting...) maintains the official release calendar.  Beauty and the Beast - available NOW, and for a limited time.  How limited, they don't say.  It's like the fever of an eBay auction.  Buy it now!  Buy it nOW!  Oh wait, it is not actually available now -- it is available TO BUY now, and available on November 23rd.

Want Sleeping Beauty?  Sorry, it already had its 50th anniversary vault opening.  Better luck when your child is in high school.

I don't know what I am complaining about.  Of course, "in my day," movies came out when they came out and you never expected to own them.  (Oh, you dreamed of it, all right, but you didn't expect it).  But I had managed to see Gone With the Wind twice before there were VCRs, and somehow slept through Mary Poppins countless times, even though it was released the year I was born.  I'm not crying a river for the poor kids who can't enjoy the princesses who kissed with their mouths open -- I am just saying Disney is playing a little hard ball. 

If they were a Hollywood couple, they would be Arielric.

Parents:  start a swap program.  We know you paid hard cash for your Disney flix -- this isn't like giving away a bag of Old Navy shorts to someone at the office.  But a lending library database, or monthly movie afternoon (kids on one room, keg in the other) is the best way to get through these tween years without giving in  to the schlocky "sequels."

A couple items to share on this topic.
1) The Problem with the Princesses
2) Saturday TV Funhouse


Now that's some satisfaction.

Accidental Pirate

I think my trail has gone cold.  In the fantasy where the Verizon truck keeps driving by my house, and there are strange clicks in the doorbell intercom (not really...it's a fantasy...) I have begun to peak through the blinds and determine that I am safe after all.

For now.

The Internet makes everyone look so professional -- even the commenters on my blog, who bother to open with a compliment, then link me to a vitamin regimen.  Have you ever gotten that junk mail with the hand-written envelope, and the post-it note attached to a "clipping" that says "Hey - how have you been, though of you when I saw this," and it's a...vitamin regimen?  Or the emails that are always convincingly from the same name as someone you actually write to (even when it is spelled KaryLou or Baxter) but it just a coupon for an over-the-border vitamin regimen?

Well this story is not really like that.

It starts with the production memoirs of Barney Rosenzweig, creator of much great TV in our day, and most bravely as the driving force behind Cagney and Lacey.  CandL is not great TV.  It is awesome TV -- in the sense that it shows us exactly who we are at a point in time, and in such a way that makes us both enamored of and horrified by it.  Like That Girl, or LA Law. And this is one great book about how all that went down.

As I read it, I wanted nothing more than to watch me some Mary Beth and Christine.  Choose your Christine.  Netflix delivers on requests like this, but they proudly present "The True Beginning," which are Sharon Glass episodes.  My personal feeling about Meg Foster's failure is that her eyes don't register on film.  It's like Cagney and Lacey and the Wolfman.  And Loretta Swit mostly plays Margaret Hoolihahn, but that pilot movie is shot through an angry feminist (sorry, we called them Libbers) lens that you really ought to look through for historical purposes, even though it is merely awesome TV and not particularly great.

I went trolling for a better score, and found a claim on the entire series -- PLUS pilot film, plus Meg Foster (ugh, FFWD right through that mess).  Did I dare?  Late Night, plus wine, plus a driving saxaphone theme song... yes I did.  It looks legit.  I promise you, it looked legit.

The package arrived some time later, covered in stamps and a chinese shipping bill.  and here... we...go.
Let me say - the claims were correct.  It is indeed all there, packaged in those color-copied boxes you find at the flea market tables (kind of air brushy, and mostly purple).  Complete?  You bet -- complete with the LA TV station bug they were recorded from.

Oh, Barney.  oh, Sharon.  I have sinned against you.  I didn't feel real bad, though.  I kept them.  I haven't even watched them all.

I would like my academic readership to consider floating a course on "The Great Debate: Career vs Family in the Dialogue of Cagney and Lacey."  It's fascinating.  And I think we know that the consequences are one makes you a drunk and the other makes you a shrew.

oh, ouch.  well, that stings more than a little.

The Decoy Museum

Well, obviously... it is a museum about ducks.  But before we get too deep into the wtf /what a country marvel of that, let's enjoy together the idea of a truly decoy museum.

Every little town, and certainly our midsized cities, could use a decoy museum.  It can be either breathtakingly neo-classic -- a Parthenon overlooking the rest of the town --  or one of those funky "used to to be a hair salon but now houses a collection of Victorian dollhouses (or worse).  Local people aren't going to go anyway, and tourists aren't coming to visit, so it doesn't have to be an actual  museum.  It's just nice to have a museum on the local website, and the brochures.  Realtors like it.

We've all done this -- mope around our cramped living rooms that there is "nothing to do in this town," and if we lived in The City (your pick), there would be symphonies, and theatre, and art, and.... we wouldn't go to them.

In all these planned communities we are building nowadays, with town squares and chess tables.... and I am not against them in principle.  Your town was built the same way, just more slowly, with better architecture.  As long as we are throwing up grids and coffee shops, let's throw in the decoy museum.   Greatest of All Sisters and a high school study group had to make a "model town" for some project (in the 70s, we were big on building models of things) and we labeled a box of Monopoly Hotels and Houses and glued them to a plywood tray (I say "we," because I could never turn down a project, even when it wasn't mine.  I had already done my math problem set, even numbers inclusive....).  We had a church and a hospital and a high school, all the things we thought a proper American Civilization would have.  I do not recall if we had a decoy museum.  I don't think even the Life board has a museum. (who knew)

But about these ducks.  "Through tours, lectures, demonstrations, special events, and a series of exhibits that range from single display cases to room-sized waterfowling displays, the Decoy Museum strives to communicate the heritage of Upper Bay decoy making to a national audience." 

2700 objects.  Not all ducks.  They got them a boat in there.  (In Havre de Grace, this is pronounced "boout."  And pronounced is pronounced "per-newnct.") 
Here's the narrative:  history, hunting, carving.  I admire that they don't try to take on more than is necessary.  Havre de Grace is the "decoy capital of the world," they say.  This may be like calling yourself an all-America City or  heart-friendly.  But I expect that if you have 2000 duck decoys in one place, you probably don't have much competition.  (said from the Russian Icon Capital of America)

If you do not live near the Decoy Museum, or will not be passing through Havre de Grace, as I was when I saw the sign but could not stop for ducks, be of good cheer.  America is large enough to accommodate many such collections, including

• Barnegat Bay Decoy and Bayman's Museum - Tuckerton, New Jersey
• Core Sound Waterfowl Museum - Harker's Island, North Carolina
• Refuge Waterfowl Museum - Chincoteague, Virginia (hobo ducks!)
• Ward Museum of Wildfowl Art - Salisbury, Maryland

Ok, so still a Chesapeake thing, I guess.  Where people do sort of sound like ducks.