1381 Chris Christie's New Job

You know by now that fake moderate and famous traffic expert Chris Christie has no chance of becoming President.

But don’t feel too sorry for him.  He has a new job all lined up.  

Exorcist.

Non-sectarian exorcist.

Yes, the governor of New Jersey is perfect for the part. He has no clerical training.  He’s big.  He’s tough.  He’s intimidating when he’s angry.  And he doesn’t much care for demons… especially those in his own administration, those evil spirits who caused the traffic problems in Fort Lee, of which he knew nothing, nothing!

Think about it.  Think about Mia Farrow, frail and delicate, as the female lead in “Rosemary’s Baby.”

Could the demon she was carrying withstand a tirade from Chris Christie.

Instead of all the rigmarole to exorcise, all Christie would have to do is glower a little in the direction of her belly.

If need be, he could threaten and bully.  But you have to see things from the demon’s point of view.  If you were it, would you want to tangle with this guy?

Nah.  You’d fly away, heading for Skokie or Denver.  You would be thinking “Who needs this (bologna?)”  

There are few full time exorcists left.  Usually the church sends a priest with some training. And only when the person asking has undergone rigorous examination by experienced and learned investigators.

Is there a market? Do some research.  Open up the classified.  Or click on the on-line Yellow Pages.  Go to “E” and see if you can find an exorcist.

Nobody there.

Christie would be a natural.  

Granted, there isn’t a lot of call for this kind of skill.  But in his spare time, he could found a for-profit school and conduct classes.  He could write his memoirs as a celebrity demon banisher.  And if need be, he could make a few extra bucks by advising traffic engineers on the side.

Plus exorcism is a whole lot easier on the nervous system than politics.  Christie wouldn’t have to have people worrying about his weight or his general health.  He wouldn’t have to lie on job applications if he’s convicted of anything.  And he wouldn’t have to worry about Governor stuff like defunding education, busting unions and attending ribbon cutting ceremonies.

Best of all, he would again be beloved and effective.  There is no downside to this.

And Rosemary’s baby could become a historical drama. A little something PBS to show during its fund drives.

Shrapnel:

--The latest trial of the century starts in New York today. Drug company executive Gigi Jordan, 54, is charged with murdering her 8-year old son two years ago and describes it as a mercy killing because her “...husband was abusive.”  So let’s get this straight: the way to end abuse is kill the victim?

--Henry Kissinger says Iran is a greater threat than ISIS.  He may be right.  But no one’s paid attention to him for 30 years, back when he was only 60-something.

Grapeshot:

--After an initial mad gobbling sale, the newly introduced Apple Watch is going to be the company’s biggest flop since the “Newton.”

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2014

1380 Mike Bloomberg 2.0

Elvis is back in the building.

When you work for Mike Bloomberg, you come to realize that some of his decisions have a shelf life… a “use by” date.  So it really wasn’t a huge surprise when he announced he was retaking the helm of his company even though he’d often said he wouldn’t.

It’s not going to happen until the end of the year, but his mere presence in the building changes the dynamic.

The man hates titles and has none.  Neither did many of us back in the 1.0 days.  Now, nearly everyone does, or at least will for the next few months.  We’ll see after that.

Doesn’t need a title.  Wears his company i.d. tag… but under his tie.  Everyone knows who -- and what -- he is.  And everyone knows who makes the decisions.

So when he started hanging out in the company’s gargantuan headquarters on Lexington Avenue, people kind of got the idea he was back.

Then one day, his desk appeared in the fifth floor newsroom. In the thick of things.  Just like the old days.

Oh… he was “only going to spend a few hours a day…” there.  Right.

What, then, does the future hold?  

A few days past, Bloomberg told the Wall St. Journal that things “mostly” won’t change.

Check the shelf life stamp on that one.  He’s an entrepreneur and a builder and he has more ideas in a week than most of us have in … well, much longer. He has the money and the clout and the spine to implement them.  And he gets bored when things don’t move.

Won’t change?  They already have changed.  The President is back in the White House.  The Supreme Court is in perpetual session and “congress” has become irrelevant in the mind of every human being who takes a paycheck there and all 300,000 + terminal- dependent users.

You can’t be a big player in today’s financial world without a Bloomberg Terminal.  And renting a terminal shows you have “arrived.”

The business has grown exponentially since Mike became and then un-became Mayor Mike.  But there is an eventual saturation point.

After you’ve wired all manner of users in the US, and gone overseas to expand further -- a frequent strategy for American business -- the customer list eventually will stabilize.  After all, how many people can spend 20 grand a year on this machine?

So Bloomberg LP has been reaching out in other directions.  Improving the also-ran television programming, buying or starting new services, acquiring a major magazine.  But there will have to be more.

And there will be.

Shrapnel:

--Who hasn’t president Obama alienated?  Remember that huge outpouring of enthusiastic voters in ‘08 and the not so huge but sufficient outpouring of voters in ‘12?  Well, outpourings and enthusiasm die faster than morning glories.

--Obama is too liberal for the conservatives. He is too conservative for the liberals.  And while he faces unprecedented opposition in congress and in the lockstep conservative media, he still has never shown any backbone.

--The latest offendees and who can blame them?  Some Hispanics -- once a large part of support. The issue: the president’s decision to put off immigration reform until after the midterm elections.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2014

1379 An Endorsement from the Grave

Celebrity lawyer Robert Shapiro once was pretty well known by sports figures and sports fans.  But it wasn’t until he joined OJ Simpson’s “Dream Team” that the rest of us heard of him.

He didn’t have the courtroom bravado of a Johnny Cochran.  He didn’t have the academic creds of an Alan Dershowitz.  But he was a steady hand in an unsteady case.

While Shapiro still practices law, he’s probably best known today as the face of “Legal Zoom” a company that has turned the rote of legal printing into an empire of homemade lawyers.

Zoom sells you the proper paperwork to make a will or start a corporation or a limited liability partnership or a trust account.

This last is where Shapiro’s company took a wrong turn.

In the email the other day comes a pitch for Legal Zoom.  The headline: “Robin Williams’ Estate Plan No Laughing matter.”  Click on a link and you get a blog entry by one Brette Sember, esq.  Ms. Sember points out that Williams, though suffering financial setbacks at the time of a suicide, provided for his children by creating a trust.

This is a pitch for you to do the same.  She never says let Legal Zoom provide you with guidance and paperwork.  But how can you not infer that that’s what she’d have you do?

Dear Ms. Esq:  thanks for the details.  Do you think Zoom can help us be like Robin Williams?

The stuff she says in the post isn’t wrong. It isn’t a direct pitch for business.  But it is offputting and another nail in Shakespeare’s coffin for lawyers.

You can write about the benefits trusts from now until forever without riding bareback on Williams or anyone else.

What Zoom has sent is a simply cheap, lowbrow, attempt to use the name of a beloved entertainer to drum up business.

Maybe Shapiro was asleep at the switch when this self serving nonsense was fired off. But what are the chances of that?  Maybe he has no control over advertising for the company he fronts.  But what are the chances of that?

This corner of the room has long believed and written that when Shakespeare advocated killing all the lawyers that it was only because the MBA had yet to be invented.

But maybe Will was right after all.

Shrapnel:

--Joan Rivers’ death at age 81 was no surprise, but it was a shock.  Hard to pick a typical one liner from Rivers’ river of superb zingers, but not impossible. “I’ve had so many plastic surgeries that when I die they’re going to donate my body to Tupperware.”

--Yorkville Endoscopy on Manhattan’s 93rd St. will have some talking to do about Rivers’ minor routine vocal cord procedure … the one where she lost consciousness and apparently the ability to breathe. The New York State Health Department wants to know what happened.  And so do her fans and her daughter.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2014

1378 The Two Faces of Transparency

Wait a minute.  How can something you see through have a face?  Well…

Before we get to that, let’s examine “transparent,” which, along with its variations and formations has become yet another of those overused words like “interface,” which has fallen out of fashion -- mercifully.

“Transparent” means you can see through it. Modern dictionaries allow that it is sometimes used as an antonym for hidden or secret.  But modern dictionaries are works of stenography, not instruction.  An antonym for transparent would be opaque.

So, let’s be hard shell linguistic conservatives and use the word as it should be.

If you’re transparent, I can see what’s behind you.  But I can’t see you.  Transparent is closer to “invisible” than it is to much else.

If you use the word transparent as a way of saying you operate in the open, you are lying. It means we can’t see you at all.

So when you say that, we hard-shells think you mean you’re hidden to the naked eye.  That’s face one.

Face two is just misuse.  Transparent does not mean you’re out in the open… it means you’re so sneaky we don’t even know you’re there.

Suggestion: use “translucent.”  That means we can see you, sort of.  We know you’re doing something but we’re not sure what until you tell us or until the partial opacity clears.

Yeah, yeah, opaque doesn’t have the stark snap of transparent.  But at least it’s not deception.

Transparency has donned the cloak of Orwell.  Someone tells you he favors transparency, you know he’s hiding something.

While we are on the subject of seeing through matter, let’s consider fashion.

A million years ago, when someone wore a see-through top, you pretty much noticed everything that was behind it.  That was the idea.

Wonder if you’ve noticed that there isn’t much of that around anymore.  Today’s styles are so revealing no one needs a see-through anything.

Dresses and tank tops are cut so low and the hems of tank tops are cut so high, you hardly need any imagination.  

You can appreciate anatomy -- male or female -- without having to know the size, shape or color of any particular body part.

Attention men: Speedos don’t come in 3XL for a reason.

Attention women: push up bras can allow you to do more with less, but practically hanging out of them is not attractive or appealing.

Let’s be completely transparent about these issues.  We clear on that?

Shrapnel:

--Here’s how to stop fights over airline seats.  Get the travel industry on the side of the passenger.  When Expedia or Priceline or any of the giants start refusing to book one airline or another, that airline will start listening to peoples’ complaints about seating arrangements.

--One company has designed a plane seat in which you can recline without interfering with the passenger behind you.  Think we’ll ever see these in mass production?  Read the full story in Business Insider.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2014

1377 September

It seems like it was only yesterday it was August.  Come to think of it, it was only yesterday.

Yes, here we are on the first of September, but for much of August we were getting a preview.  You can hardly tell the difference. Great September weather. Early.  The kind of weather about which people say “I could do with these conditions all year.”

Some hot days here in the northeast, but not Arizona-hot.  Some cool days, but not Yukon-cold.

Maybe the heavens are rewarding us for good behavior.

You have been behaving well lately, right?

No.  Me, neither.  So it’s probably not that.

They forget to read the calendar up there?  

Probably not.  Even if there is an “up there” and even if they read and have calendars.

Floods in the midwest and north of us.  Drought in the west and to the south of us?  Yet, here we are enjoying something like six weeks of really nice conditions, punctuated by an occasional downpour… the kind that comes and goes pretty fast.

But, of course, there’s more to September than just the August weather.

The kids are either back in school or soon will be. The nominal adult college students are back in class.  Well… back on campus and in the frat houses, private apartments and dorms.

And though reasonably modest up until now, the political campaigns will move into third gear.  That’s always a thrill.

But the big question remains: if August was September weatherwise, what will September be?

Today also is Labor Day, or Salute to the forgotten man or woman day.

The holiday is a salute to the American worker, to the men and women who built this country, to the men and women who fought for their rights as human beings in an era when they were considered farm animals or machines, who organized and then told capital "you can't do this to us.  We're doing the work.  We want our share, no more, but no less."

Recalling the good organized labor has done for disorganized labor:  the 40 hour week, paid holidays, paid vacations, a living wage, health benefits, a retirement plan.  All stuff your boss wouldn’t give thought to were it not for unions, even if there isn’t one in your shop.

Today, unions have become the enemy and are losing the battle to represent workers.  The ranks have been diminishing, the existing contracts have become law school examples of how to not get what you need or want or deserve.  Organizing efforts?  WHAT organizing efforts?  Handing out handbills at Wal-Mart is not what we used to call “organizing.”

You can summarize the reason for the labor movement in two words “bad bosses.”  American workers often don’t want unions as they clearly demonstrate these days.  But they needed them back then and they need them now, maybe now more than ever.  If you’re in a union shop, just think of how things would be without a wall between you and the Simon Legree or Torquemada who supervises you.  If you’re NOT in a union, you don’t need to think about it... you know better than the rest of us.

(Portions of this appeared previously in posts about Labor Day in 2010 and 2011.)

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2014, 2011, 2010.

1376 The Typewriter

The most valuable course I ever took in public school was typing.  In the eighth grade.

Mr. Corcoran taught us to never look at the keyboard.  And the typewriters we had, Royal office models, had   blank spaces instead of letters on the push keys.

He also taught us “never compose on a typewriter.” Write stuff out by hand and then type your paper as a presentation.

Mr. Corcoran is probably long gone.  But his lessons live on -- even the ones that were wrong.

Like most of us, I now compose on Google Docs and or Microsoft word.  And I look at the keyboard.

Word processors did not exist in those years. Today, there is no better or faster way to convert thoughts into type or fix mistakes.

But typewriters are making a comeback.  Or so it’s reported.

Ah, the clacking of keys… the strengthening of fingers.

Part of this is nostalgia, much in the same way vinyl phonograph recordings have again become a big enough niche to mean something.

But it’s also an expression of paranoia.  The hackers and the National Security Agency can’t tap into your typewriter and steal your secrets.

You don’t need passwords.  All you have to do is lock your paperwork in a drawer and chances are no unauthorized eyes will see anything they shouldn’t.

Some problems here.

First, few new machines are being made.  Brother has some electric models.  Royal has some manuals.  And some websites offer new-old stock models that weren’t sold back when they were common.  

Failing to find a new one at a good price, the next best bet is finding and fixing an old one.  These were relatively rugged machines.  But there are delicate innards. Keys break.  They get bent.  Typefaces wear out.

There are people who advertise they repair or restore here and there among the newspaper articles about the “last typewriter guy” in this or that town or city.  You could pick up an oldie at a garage sale or thrift shop and take your chances with getting it restored.

Ribbons are not as hard to find as you might think if you have a once-popular brand like Brother or IBM.

But here’s the real problem:  Even the lightest weight portable typewriters are about as portable as the original portable TV sets.  That is to say “not at all.”

And imagine the reaction if you brought one into a Starbucks or McDonalds or Barnes & Noble and started clacking away among the silent laptops and iPads.

I have a Swiss- made Olympia portable in the basement.  It in mint condition because in the school years (it was a high school graduation gift in 1959) it got very little academic use.  But that’s another story for another time.

Shrapnel:

--This is going to shock little girls-- and some big ones the world over. Hello Kitty is not a cat, she is a third grade girl. Take a look and see if you can see that.

--Imagine this: sometimes professional football players abuse their spouses and or children.  Completely unbelievable, of course.  But the National Football League is “tightening the penalties” for these phantom crimes.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments and your Hello Kitty votes to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2014

1375 Scam Unmasked and Admitted

The calls came cascading in.  One after another after another.  Seventeen of them in two days, all from the same number in Welch, West Virginia.

Sixteen of them, there was no one there or a hangup. Seventeenth time was the charm.

The caller was “Ed from Microsoft.”  Ed has that distinctive accent that comes from being born, raised and living in India.  Ed?

So Ed, I say, what department of Microsoft do you work for?

Instead of answering, he tells me my computer is infected and endangered.

So Ed, I say, you didn’t answer my question.

Ed is busily reading from his script.  He needs to take control of my computer so he can fix the problem.

Okay, Ed, so what department of Microsoft are you with?

Well, he says, we’re contractors for Microsoft and they hire us to find problems like yours and fix them.

So, Ed, what contractor and from where, please.

Back to the script.

So, Ed… keep talking.  But one more question.  Do you know what Interpol is?

Yes, he says.

“Well if I keep you on the phone long enough, Interpol will be able to trace the phony West Virginia number to the real number in Bombay and in an hour, there’ll be a cop at your door.”

Pause.

So, Ed… this is a scam, right?

Yes, he says.  But your Interpol, your FBI and your CIA will never find us.

And he hangs up.

So the scammer admits it.  And gets off the phone in a big rush because maybe, just maybe, the guy he called really HAS had Interpol alerted.  And maybe, just maybe, they WILL find him.

Some research.  Welch, West Virginia is an old town, population about two thousand. It’s tucked into the southwest corner of the state, a little over a hundred miles from Charleston.

Ed probably doesn’t know that, let alone have lived there.  His phone number is “virtual” which in telephone company lingo means fake.

What he probably DOES know is that you can’t block a call if your phone service provider is Vonage.  That’s probably also true of FIOS, Comcast, Cablevision, Time Warner, Magic Jack, Ooma or any of the other phone services that use the internet instead of the wires on a phone poll.

It’s a selling point for the antiquated and overpriced copper wire (and fiber optic) phone companies now struggling for your business.

Meantime, if you get a call from Ed, don’t answer.

Shrapnel:

--The latest stand down in the middle east is like so many recent US Supreme Court decisions. It deals with technicalities instead of getting to the meat of the matter.  And it’ll work just as well as those technical decisions the supremes issue.

--Burger King is going to Canada as many US conscientious objectors did during the Viet war.  But BK’s conscientious objection is to US taxes.  So it’s spending $11 billion to take a brave stand on a crucial issue, just ask them.

Grapeshot:

-Reminder… there are no mergers, just dolled up acquisitions.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WRJ 2014