Month: October 1998

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Traffic

I was driving to Huntsville, Ontario the other day. I had a meeting scheduled at 10:00 a.m., so I had to leave Kitchener by 6:00 a.m. It is still dark at that time in this neck of the woods. I get in my car, stop by at the nearest Tim’s for a coffee, and I’m off. I’m thinking– at least there won’t be any traffic. Poor deluded me: the highway was crammed with cars.

What happened? Did I miss something? A hurricane? An alien invasion? Amway salesmen?

No, just people heading off to work. This is insane. It is six in the morning. It is dark. It is not fun getting up at six– your body wants to stay in bed. Yet, here they are, thousands of people, all racing around in their cars as if they were going somewhere interesting.

I stopped for a second coffee in Guelph. It is now 6:30 a.m., and the Tim’s is packed. There is a line-up.

Has our society gone berserk?! People are getting up at six in the morning, getting dressed, going out into these giant mechanical beasts, and racing to the coffee shop. I think they’re doing it just to annoy me.

I used to get up at 6:00 a.m. sometimes in the summer to go fishing. Now, I am not, by nature, an early riser, but there was one compensating charm. It was quiet and there was no traffic on the roads. I drove to a pier in a small village and dropped my line into the water and actually took pleasure in watching the nearby towns quietly, gradually, wake up. After an hour or so, you’d see people walking around, getting into their cars. By 8:00, there would be a few more fishermen, retirees who didn’t feel strongly enough about catching anything to want to get up any earlier.

This is sane. This makes sense.

But nowadays– 6:00 in the morning and the highways are full. There are delays. There are tie-ups, traffic snarls, enraged drivers pounding their dashboards. Racing, racing, racing— where to? That’s the bizarre thing. There are so many cars on the road at all hours of the day that you can’t go anywhere anyway. You just sit there in traffic, waiting, waiting, waiting. This is madness.

People— stay home! Don’t get up. Don’t get on the road. Don’t line up at Tim’s at 6:30 a.m. for coffee. Stay in bed. Sleep. Ignore the alarm. Quit your jobs. Join a religious order. Work at home. Spend more time with your families. Just stay off the roads.

I do have a solution. It’s so simple, I can’t believe that nobody else has thought of it before now.

You have to understand that we really do have lots of roads. There are millions of miles of roads. They go everywhere. Some of these roads are 16 lanes wide. That’s plenty. We don’t need any more. We also have enough cars. Everybody has one. That’s enough. So the problem is, that too many people are putting their cars on the highway at the same time. And you know the crazy thing: we let them! We have this big traffic jam in the 401 and people are moving about an inch an hour and somebody else wants to get on the highway— and we let them! This is insane. Let’s work it out. We need to tell these people, “sorry, there’s no more room.” It’s simple.

First, we figure out how many cars can be on the highway on any given day before we start getting traffic congestion. Then we convert this figure to what I call “driver miles”, which is, the number of miles people can drive on a given day before exceeding the capacity of our highways. In other words, at a certain point, we can calculate that we have no more driver-miles left– there is no more space on the roads. Then we take the driver miles and share it out with all the drivers of Ontario. Maybe we put a little computer in everybody’s car, with a cell-phone and a modem. And that’s it. You can only drive your allocated driver-miles on any given day. When you’ve used them up, you have to get off the roads. You’ll have to stay home. And no company will be allowed to fire an employee just because he had to obey the law and stay home. This will make the law popular with workers, if not corporations. But then, there’s a lot more workers than corporations anyway.

Simple, isn’t it? Of course, people who don’t need all of their driver-mile credits can sell them to other people if they want to. Or, you could save them up and one day make a really big trip.

And the biggest advantage of all: when you make your trip, you will actually be able to go somewhere.

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Clinton Clinton Clinton!

Two events signaled a decisive change in the course of the Clinton Scandal and the impeachment proceedings. Firstly, CNN ran a little piece by a reporter who is actually OUT THERE covering congressional elections. He gently chided people who think that the Clinton scandal matters. He reported that the people are interested in Education, Health Care, and the minimum wage. Nobody is asking candidates where they stand on the impeachment, and Republican candidates are not advertising the fact that they are in favour of it. Could it be they have SOME shame? That CNN aired this report indicates the passing of a fantasy. CNN is not exactly known for their bold, independent analysis of facts. They tried to play up the scandal big time and now appear to have accepted the fact that most Americans just don’t see it as that big a deal, and regard the entire impeachment stuff as nothing more than partisan politics. In the latest poll, less than 11% think Congress should proceed with impeachment. That’s less than the percentage of people who think the Earth is flat.

Newsweek ran an article on the scandal this week that compared it to Watergate. It was a light, irreverent piece, that made it clear that there was no comparison. Watergate was about a lot of very serious criminal acts by the President and his top advisors.

Both magazines are playing to a very subtle thing: the winds of perception. What they are saying is that there is now a widespread consensus that the Lewinsky scandal won’t wash as justification for impeachment.

Something I’ve been saying since January.

* * *

Conservatives like to rant and rave about the Presidency sinking to a new “low”, as if letting tens of thousands of people die in Rwanda or Bosnia wasn’t a “low”.

* * *

Have you bought a magazine lately? Have you ever gone to a really good magazine store, where they stock everything? I walk down the display case, boggled. There are magazines on every conceivable interest, including “Feminist Lesbian Natural Healing Cyber Music Guide” and “Mollusk Interpretations for Franciscan Feminist Social Worker Anthropoid Researchers”. Is there too much information in the world? Is there such a thing as too much information? There is probably a magazine on “Information Overload”. I think there is: “Adbusters”.

You can’t keep up with everything anymore. You just hope that Time or Newsweek picks up the important stuff, and that TV movies give you the basic issue information that you need to make intelligent conversation at parties.

The Internet is like one of these magazine stores, except a hundred times bigger. A million times bigger. I think what will happen is that, after spending hundreds of years making new information, we will spend the next hundred years sorting information into useful categories and subsets.

***

They are everywhere now: cameras. Web-cams. Video-conferencing.

Some day-cares are now installing T-1 connections and “KinderCams”. Parents can check on their little ones through the internet, at any time during the day. Some people find this scary. They’re right. It is scary. We’ll deal with the scary aspects of it. It’s also great. As long as the workers know they’re being watched, I think it’s great. On the one hand, yes, we are being suspicious and cynical about people. On the other hand, we will know more. It is always better to know more than to know less. We may learn that we have been hysterically paranoid for all of our lives for no reason. Or we may learn that life is full of little complexities that are best left alone. Or we may learn that generally day-care workers do a good job. Who knows? We just learn. We have this voracious appetite to know and see and hear everything.

***

Shift Magazine printed a Q&A between some hackers and Senator Fred Thompson. It was pointed out that when the Volkswagen Company found a defect that would affect only three cars out of 8,500, they sent letters to every owner and recalled all of the cars in order to fix it.

Are you still waiting for your letter from Microsoft? Me too. Did you realize that the entire Internet can be brought down by hackers breaking into Windows NT computers? Is that a defect?

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The goal, in business, is to make money by convincing people to buy your product whether they really need it or not. Leaves, for example, fall from trees all by themselves. Left to their own devices, they rot into a nutritious mulch which is good for all things organic. Your local hardware store, though, convinces you to gather all the leaves with a rake ($14.95) and put them into plastic bags ($.35 each) so a garbage truck can hall them to a dump, where they are prevented from decaying by an insulating layer of disposable diapers ($22.75 per box).

There’s pretty good money in the trinket business. But you can do much better than that if you can make people pay to not have the benefits of the use of your product. So if you sell leaf-blowers, the idea is to also get into the earplug business. If you sell enough leaf-blowers, you may also see your sales of rifles and ammunition go up.

Bell Telephone has a similar scam. As part of your regular phone service, they list you in the phone book. This must have cost them a lot of money at one time, to type in everyone’s name and address and phone number. You would think Bell would have a little charge for it, on your phone bill every month: “Directory listing: $.25”. But that’s not the way it is. If you want Bell to NOT list in you in the phone book, you don’t NOT pay Bell… you pay more.

Bell has another service: Call Display. Now, you’ll notice that they didn’t offer you a chance to say if you wanted your number to be on Call Display. Oh no. That would be too rational. Your number is on display whether you like it or not. No charge. Isn’t that nice? Maybe not. Maybe that charge is included in your monthly phone bill. Actually, without a doubt, it’s included in your monthly phone bill. You didn’t ask for it. You didn’t want it. But you’re going to pay for it.

Well, suppose you don’t want your number displayed. Bell says, “Okay. We won’t display your number.” Then they give you a discount, right, because a “service”– displaying your number on someone else’s phone– is being terminated. Uh uh. Bell charges you extra. $5.00 a month. That’s like Mr. Leaf Blower coming up to your house and blowing all your leaves into the street. If you don’t pay, he blows all the leaves back. If you ask him to stop, he’ll say, “Sure, for $5.00.” Then he’ll try to sell you an ear plug.

Anyway, you bite the bullet and pay them $5.00 a month to not display your number. How’s that for business acumen! A few years ago, you didn’t even want your number to be displayed on people’s phones! You didn’t ask for it. Now you’re paying to not have it done. This is progress. This is customer service. Bell’s mission statement must read something like: “We will persuade as many people as possible to pay as much as possible for services we don’t provide.”

I can’t wait until they offer us “Call Un-display Display”– this service will show you the phone numbers of people who are paying $5.00 a month to not have their number shown on your call display. Does that seem unfair? Well, for an additional $5.00 a month, they will un-display your number from display phones that display un-displayed numbers.

I understand business now. I am going to go into business myself. I am going to gather personal information about everyone, including gossip and rumours, and post this information on a big web site. I’m thinking of stuff like “bad breath”, “an accident last year”, “two drunk driving convictions”, “looks ugly without his hairpiece”, “stands on the porch at 7:00 a.m. in his underwear to let the dog out”, “farts at movies”. It’ll be a lot of work, and I’ll have to start mostly with people I know. I will also offer $5.00 per tip for any information other people send me about people they know. I also intend to copyright this information, since the U.S. government is now intending to allow the copyright of collections of facts. So if I put all this information into a data base, nobody else can use it without my permission. I plan to keep lots of lawyers very busy.

Then I will offer a service to the general public. For $5.00 a month, I will take your name off the website. For just pennies a day. For less than the cup of coffee! Isn’t respect and public esteem worth this tiny amount?

Then I’m going to make even more money. For $10.00 a month, I’ll let you see the information about people who have paid me $5.00 a month to not show it to anybody! What a country!

I have a second idea that’s even simpler. For a mere $2.50 a month, which is less than half the cost of call display and some other service I can’t think of, only pennies a day, the cost of a cup of coffee or less, I will install a device on your phone that shows you the number you have dialed.

Or did somebody already beat me to this one?

I plan to be very, very rich.

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Health for Profit

Imagine your doctor telling you this:

Well, Bill, you have a very serious illness. In fact, if we don’t do something about it, you’re going to die. Fortunately, we have a cure. It costs $1 million. Do you have it? No? Oh, that’s too bad. Well, it’s been nice knowing you. Please give my best to your family.

Unimaginable, right? No doctor would ever say that. Never. What the doctor would say would be more like, “Well, Bill, we better make an appointment with our team of surgeons, anesthesiologists, oncologists, anthologists, and scientologists, and get you into surgery as quickly as possible so we can save your life.” Yeah, that’s more like it. The doctor cares about you. He is working hard to save your life. Nobody is going to let you die. Then all those doctors and hospitals would just send their bills to your insurance company.

In Canada, they would send their bills to the provincial agency in charge of health care (OHIP, where I live). There would be no need to check with them before hand: other than some cosmetic surgeries and exotic experimental treatments, pretty well everything is pre-approved. OHIP would then pay the bill. Done.

In the U.S., however, they would have to negotiate with your HMO or your insurance company and arrive at an agreed upon treatment plan. The doctor gets paid for doing surgery, not for keeping you healthy. He wants to do as much surgery as possible so he can retire early. But the insurance company or HMO wants to keep their money so they can pay it to shareholders and reward their top executives with mind-boggling salaries, private jets and country club memberships, and numerous vacations. They will do everything they can to keep from having to pay for your surgery. “Well, it’s not as if Bill is really all that well-liked anyway…”

Christian doctors, who hold an incredibly high regard for human life of course, charge only a modest amount, even if they know they could get a lot more. Ha ha.

The cost of medical treatment is a reflection of a number of factors, including scarcity and necessity. The U.S. has opted for a free enterprise model. Supposedly, all those doctors and hospitals will keep their costs real, real low, because they have to compete with each other for patients. So hospitals advertise the odd special: “New stem-cell leukemia treatment– was $350,000, but marked down, this weekend only, to $285,000. Folks, these are close-out prices!”

A kidney transplant can be a regular bargain at $120,000, if there are no complications. And that doesn’t include all the drugs you need afterwards.

Treating someone who’s been in a serious accident can cost $80,000! Just for a few hours in OR! That sounds a bit pricey for me. Couldn’t I try the emergency room at St. Mary’s? I hear they give coupons.

Well, where does the $350,000 come from? What exactly do you get for $80,000? Who gets most of the $120,000?

Well, look at a hospital. It’s got offices, computers, janitors, cooks, nurses, receptionists, presidents, vice-presidents, administrators, human resources staff, training staff, support personnel, vision statements, and so on. Some of the money goes to doctors, of course, and they’re probably over-paid (compared to teachers, at least), but they don’t get anywhere near the $350,000 total. I’ve seen some medical catalogues: hospitals pay big bucks for equipment that looks like it ought to be a lot cheaper. A little plastic tube costs $14.00. It looks like you could get it free at Wendy’s with a Kid’s Meal Cheeseburger.

Well, the reason these medical tools are so expensive is volume. They don’t make enough of them. I think everybody should own their own surgery kit. If they sold enough of them, the price would really come down.

Then we could just rent a surgery room somewhere, hire a doctor for, say, $250.00 an hour, and do the operation there. That would be true free enterprise. And why should only doctors have the right to do surgery? What if you knew somebody who was really good at it? I’ll bet the competition would really reduce the costs.

I’ll bet you could do the kidney transplant for less than $3,000. Instead of nurses, you could have your aunt or grandmother come in and tidy up, change the sheets, hand the instruments to the doctor, and count sponges. Instead of filling out ten zillion forms and arguing with your HMO, you could just give the doctor your car, or a year of yardwork, or your stereo.

A big, big problem is that about half of all the medical treatment in North America goes to terminally ill elderly patients. An 86-year-old guy with bad kidneys gets some heart pain, so we zap him into surgery and perform a triple by-pass. Because he’s old and weak, he’ll take about three months of constant care to recover. A week after he starts walking again, they’ll find cancer or something, and do some more surgery. There goes the family inheritance. So this guy worked hard for fifty years, got married, had kids, contributed to his employee pension plan, bought insurance, bought a house as an investment, scrimped and saved and invested and wasted not… only to get sucked dry by doctors in the last six months of his life. It’s like some kind of horrible, dirty trick they play on all of us. You think you’re getting ahead, but THEY, whoever they are, the holders of wealth in our society, get it all back from you in the end. Your children and your children’s children have to start all over from scratch. That sucks.

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The Sacred and the Weighty

A recent study reported that the more religious a person is, the more likely he or she is to be overweight. In fact, fundamentalists are kings of the hill– Southern Baptists weigh more than any other brand of Christian.

This is a shocking revelation, indeed. But it doesn’t surprise me. It could mean one of several things:

1. Christians have more food than other people. That’s not possible, because Christians give so much food away to the needy. So let’s rule that out.

2. Christians eat fattier food than non-Christians. Again, not likely. The body is “the temple of the Lord”. Christians don’t fill that body with smoke, alcohol, or other people’s bodily fluids.

3. The Holy Spirit has an actual weight. Never thought of that before, did you? How much does the Holy Spirit weigh? Judging by looks, I’d say a good 40-50 pounds.

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Doris Day and the Post-Modern Era

Well, when did the world change? It changes all the time, but if you could pick a moment that defined the modern era, here’s my nomination: Doris Day turns down the role of Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate”.

Doris Day was a famous actress who made her name playing squeaky-clean “girl-next-door” roles in sex farces. Sound contradictory? Well, I was astonished to find out that Doris Day movies were considered quite racy in their day. Doris usually played an independent career woman who had a nice job and got into fights with a nice man, played by Cary Grant or Rock Hudson, who would eventually kiss her while she struggled for a second or two until she realized that she really loved the “big lug”. Then they got married.

Doris really looked squeaky clean. She must have bathed and scrubbed her face before every shot. I hated her.

I thought her movies were phony because they wanted to titillate the viewer, while pretending that everything was as innocent as a Tupperware party. Hollywood thought that putting Doris Day through a car wash in a convertible with the roof open was titillating. But then, they also thought Elvis was convincing as a doctor and Mary Tyler Moore as a nun. More recently, Meg Ryan played a heart surgeon. Tom Hanks as an astronaut? Demi Moore as Hester Prynne??

I thought she was boring. She and Rock or Cary would squabble and fight and argue and then wind up kissing on the couch. You were supposed to figure out that they had sex, sooner or later, but they weren’t going to actually show you anything. That would be immoral. Decent people assumed nothing happened afterwards, at least, not until they got married. Hip New Yorkers assumed that something did happen, because of the way she held her cigarette or something.

You know, you never hear the Republicans say something like, “Bill Clinton and John Kennedy are both disgusting because they cheated on their wives.” John Kennedy had sex with Judith Exner, the girl-friend of a mobster, and Marilyn Monroe, among others. But the Republicans never try to publicly draw your attention to the parallels between the two men. Why not? Maybe because John Kennedy only had sex when you weren’t looking. It wasn’t reported in the papers or used as grounds for impeachment, though a lot of reporters knew about it. And John Kennedy is still very popular. Many Americans still feel cheated by his assassination. Old films and video clips show a young, vigorous, smart man. Like Bill Clinton.

Doris Day movies were always brightly lit up, in the Hollywood manner, filmed on a sound-stage in a big warehouse on a studio lot with big phony backdrops. No shadows or natural earth tones here: everything was hard and plastic.

They’re driving down the coastal highway and he’s hardly even looking at the road. He’s arguing with Doris. I always wished he would suddenly panic and spin the wheel and — pfffttt– gone. End of the movie. The owner of the theatre would have to come out and explain to the audience: “Sorry folks– I don’t know what happened. We thought the movie would be two hours. What a tragedy. Well, go home, we’ll have someone else for you next week.”

Well, by the mid-sixties, squeaky-clean Doris was dying at the box office. Her films didn’t seem very exciting or daring anymore. This was about the time, you may recall, that Faye Dunaway made her very conspicuous debut in Bonnie and Clyde. Compare Doris and Faye.  Life Magazine published a picture of Ali McGraw, braless, lying in the grass in tight jeans with her legs apart.  You can see that one of them is completely out of sync with the times.

And then Mike Nichols asked her if she would like to play the part of Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. Mrs. Robinson is the wife of Benjamin Braddock’s father’s business partner. She smokes. She drinks too much. She gets Benjamin to drive her home one night and then flashes him. She later seduces him and they carry on a tawdry affair for several months. When Benjamin, sick with disgust for himself, falls in love with Mrs. Robinson’s daughter Elaine, she tries everything she can to destroy the relationship, even to the point of confessing the affair to her husband, and to Benjamin’s parents, and to Elaine. Bill Clinton did that too, eventually. But Benjamin pursues Elaine anyway and eventually wins her.

Mike Nichols liked Doris Day. He wanted to save her career. He was convinced that this part would make her a star once again. But Doris didn’t like the part. She thought it was vulgar.

She had no idea of what an actress was supposed to be. She thought she was supposed to be a star, a personality, a celebrity, who did toothpaste commercials and appeared on Hollywood Squares and encouraged bored suburban housewives to immerse themselves in her little titillating– but never vulgar– dream world.

She was, by all accounts, a thoroughly nice, decent person, who let an idiot husband mismanage her career until he messed it all up and lost all her money. [Debbie Reynolds, and so many others, suffered the same fate.]

Mrs. Robinson was not her “type”.

So Ann Bancroft, whose career was also in the doldrums, got the part instead. And, of course, it saved her career. She was suddenly in demand again. She made lots of money and people remember her as a decent, if not outstanding, actress.

And Doris went on to obscurity, except for the occasional radio play of “Que Sera, Sera” — it had been recorded originally for the Hitchcock film “The Man Who Knew Too Much” in 1956. It means, “whatever will be, will be” which is about as dumb a lyric as you can imagine. Well, there’s nothing you can sing that can’t be sung.

On a personal note, I have occasionally confused this song with “Is That All There is?” written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and performed by Peggy Lee (1969), and a much better song. The German title is “Wenn das alles ist”, which sounds even more world-weary to me.

Doris went  into obscurity. I don’t know what happened to her. Is she dead? I’ll bet she became a recluse, like Mary Pickford and Marlene Dietrich and Carroll Baker… [She is a recluse, wandering Carmel, CA, apparently looking after stray animals.]

A&E’s biography was going to follow her special with one on Dinah Shore. If that’s not a bad sign, I don’t know what is.

[Updated 2011]

For the record: there is no such thing as a “post-modern” era. We are the modern era. I think some people like this phrase because it implies that there is something after progress that is not progress itself. [2011-02]

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Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend

DeBeer’s runs these ads– you’ve seen them. A lovely woman and a lovely man frolicking on a beach. The woman is lithe and lithesome, dancing… the man takes her hand and leads her up to the cottage. We understand this immediately. We know what he is going to give her: a diamond.

“How else can two month’s salary last a life-time?”

So says DeBeer’s.

“There’s a sucker born every minute.”

So says P.T. Barnum.

You’ve got this young couple. They are both just starting their careers. They have no money. They rent a small apartment. They drive a seven-year-old car that needs a lot of fixin’. They borrowed from mom and dad to buy a fridge and a stove and still do their laundry at the Laundromat. They are thinking of having a baby. They decide to get married. Yeah, that’s the order it happens in nowadays. So some stranger in a very slick suit, looking oh-so-much better off than they are, driving a leased Buick, wearing a Rolex watch, impeccably coiffured, as they say, comes up to them and says: “You should give me two months of your salary for a worthless piece of spackle.” And the girl looks into her lover’s eyes and becomes a little dewy and smiles and touches his hand and says, “Wow? You’d do that for me?”

He says, are you nuts? I’m going to give that money to an orphanage.

No, of course he doesn’t. Because the man in the leased Buick has convinced his girlfriend that he is not worth it, if he doesn’t turn over two months of his salary and accept the spackle.

Why doesn’t he just throw himself in front of a car? It makes as much sense. I’ll bet the hospital bill would also be about two months salary. And, really, she should be even more impressed– that hurt!

I’d like to see those ads on tv. A couple frolicking on the road– you only see their shadows. She goes up on her tippy toes to kiss him, then mischievously runs away across the road, while Vivaldi whines on the sound track. He runs after her but before he can get across the road, you see the shadow of a Mack Truck, and hear the screeching of brakes.

Then you see a shadow of a hospital bed, the leg up in the air, and she’s holding his hand and bending down. “St. Michael’s Hospital– where else would two month’s salary last a life-time?”