DIFFERENT TIMES.Well, they got Raines. His most noisome former employee, though ecstatic, insists the "battle isn't over." No, not till Sulzberger sells the New York Times to the noisome former employee's current boss.

With Joe "Whitewaterloo" Lelyveld stepping in, we can safely predict these developments at the paper:

• Seventeen-name bylines.
  
• An eight-month-long, front-page investigation of Hillary Clinton's book tour.
  
• Further resignations at the Sports desk when a reporter allegedly filing from Shea Stadium turns out to have actually watched the game on TV. (Suspicions will first be aroused when WB network reports a 25 percent ratings lift on the night of the game.)
  
• Guilty White Liberal Out; Gutless White Liberal In.
  
• Maureen Dowd still sucks.
  

COUPLA WHITE GUYS. Someone writes to The Corner to explain why affirmative action is bad for persons of the minority persuasion:

What I always wonder about is whether the "diversity" applicant gets all giddy because they have that singular requirement. "Woo hoo, I could get this job because I'm Black (or Asian, etc.)"! And when they get it, do they then wonder if that is indeed the reason? Can't say I'd feel too comfortable in that job...

Well, with black unemployment rates over 10 percent in the Bush economy, I'd say their comfort levels would be wobbly in any case. These days a lot of people need jobs, asshole, and needing a job is not the same as needing a haircut -- if you let it go, instead of looking mildly unfashionable, you'll look evicted and emaciated. If deliverance from impoverishment involved some kind of government get-over, I'm sure even an enlightened ofay such as yourself would avail it.

Elsewhere where the Kleagle soars, James "Get Down" Lileks sniffs contemptuously at a cartoonist's in-jokey shout-out to Aaron McGruder, author of world's-angriest-black-children strip The Boondocks: "One of the strips that made people’s eyes cross had a white character signing an angry letter 'Aryan McCracker, Whitesville USA.' Ho ho! I remember looking at that and feeling very, very tired. Turns out it was a little private joke with Aaron McGruder, who does Boondocks. Get it. Aryan McCracker, Aaron McGruder? Got it. But if you don’t know that, well, it kinda looks like Rastus Washington, Nigraville, or Kikie Yiddovich, Hymietown."

It makes one ashamed to have forgotten the long history of persecution white people have had to suffer. Aaron, apology to Jimmy this instant! And we will now watch a film to sensitize us to the plight of Jimmy's people. It's called 'Birth of a Nation.'"

To help keep white hope alive, make donations to either of these horrible sites, either at their Tip Jar, or at their Cracker Barrell.

(Deep breath.)

For the record, I am of Caucasian extraction. And I'm not into wiggerish poses and whatnot. But some outrages are so blind-deaf-and-dumbass that my inner Freedom Rider goes Hulkshit.

THE KIDS ARE, IN THE MAIN, ALRIGHT. Matthew Yglesias responds to Kevin Drum's posts (geez, maybe I should expand my circle of imaginary friends?) about whether or not The Kids Are Alright. They agree that they are, but MY points to unsettling data showing that most of us old farts think kids now are worse than ever.

No further linkage needed: I'll just break this down old-school, pro- and con- stylee:

Oldsters who think the kids are not alright are motivated to a large extent by jealousy. 'Twas ever thus, but kids today have it pretty damn sweet in terms of lifestyle choices. The sexual revolution is a settled issue (the libertines won). The odd Columbine aside, pursuance of an alternative lifestyle is free and easy to an extent not even imaginable to my generation. I see youngsters gothed-out, punked-out, prepped-out, and gay to the max, and while they may be crying bitter tears inside, I see little evidence that they're getting their asses kicked on a daily basis, which is what outre teens and preteens would have had to expect back in the day. (I speak only from a Blue State perspective; I expect in the Red Zone life goes pretty much as it did in the 19th century, only with SUVs and professional wrestling added.)

Plus they have wicked cool technology to play with. Tech is fine, even grown-ups like it, and these chillins is growing up at the zenith of its golden age.

Naturally any class of people observing a separate class that has it good where they had it bad would feel resentful, and most people of whatever age have a hard time recognizing that trait in themselves. So the default judgment for fossils is that the kids are irredeemably spoilt. Add to this tendency the number of naysayers who just don't approve of the lifestyles the youngers are free to avail, and you can easily explain the hostility now directed against them.

On the other hand: it is also true that the young are more poorly educated than their forebears, both by schools and by experience. They don't know much about history, which is to say they don't know much at all. And I'm constantly amazed by the sense of entitlement among young people of my acquaintance. Even if a good or a service was available to me as a kid, it was not a sure thing that I would be granted it, whereas it is today inconceivable that any family that can by any means afford it would deny their kinder cable, video games, rad clothes and accessories, etc.

This is not an indictment of the kids, but of the materialism of our age. There still seemed to be, in my youth, a general feeling that to overindulge the young materially was to do a disservice to them, whereas today none but bitter pundits take that tack (and I cannot believe that, if Bill O'Reilly has -- shudder -- spawned, his offspring are not more splendidly arrayed than Solomon in all the gadgetry and couture our civilization has to offer).

This does not make young people worse in themselves, but breeds in them a false understanding of causality. It is good for the young to expect love and respect as their due, because within their family units (and, if it is not totally fucked up -- and I'm not saying ours isn't -- their society), it damn well should be. But to expect the wealth of the earth as theirs by right is nuts. And the ahistoricism of the new breed, inbued by shitty schooling, removes from them any sense that human life is cyclical, that what goes up must come down, and that what they experienced today may not necessarily obtain tomorrow -- in other words, you can't always get what you want.

As the present oldsters (our wealthy and powerful avatars, anyway) lays axes to our economy, how will our juniors cope with the resulting diminishment of reasonable expectation? One shudders to think.

Finally, I call it a wash and vote in favor of the up-and-comers. I have two nephews, one entering college, another entering high school. They are great kids, and I defy anyone to tell me otherwise. And I'm amazed at the small-souledness of folks who actually have kids of their own (doesn't everyone, these days?) and still say theirs is a lousy generation.

WHAT'S RUNNING THROUGH MY HEAD. "Joe McCarthy's Ghost," The Minutemen. "Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts," Bob Dylan. "The Groover," T Rex. "Pictures of Matchstick Men," The Status Quo. "Workin' Cheap," Waylon Jennings.

Sometimes in sequence, sometimes all at the same time.

Sometimes it's fun to have a rich inner life, especially if you can't afford an iPod.

A DOG'S BREAKFAST. In this morning's gibberish, endorsed by the Ole Perfesser, one Frederick Turner proposes that liberals (or is it boomers? Hard to tell here) are as "full of fear" as citizens under a Soviet tyranny, except the tyranny is not of the government but of their own wrong and evil ideas. Key words: Berkeley, new class, British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Stalin's Moscow, Eustace Tilley. Words appearing in quotes: "scary," "going along," "coming out of the closet," "pukka," "The Big Chill." He also calls Michael Kinsley a George Bush supporter.

"It's not what you know, but who you know, so the greatest terror is to be shunned by the in-group," says the author of these knock-kneed nellies. "And this is where the fear comes from." Yes, far more brave to support the tiny, lonely voice of truth coming from the little-known and underfunded Republican Party.

While Turner is incomprehensible from the admittedly narrow perspective of common sense, he is clear as a bell to students of the particular kind of propaganda in which he deals. This specimen follows Storyline 1D: "Liberals are all nervous nellies with bad constitutions, like in "Mallard Fillmore," and conservatives are fearless seekers after truth." In this case, as frequently, Storyline 1B ("Liberals run everything and keep us down") is availed as a sub-theme. 1D and 1B would seem not very compatible with one another -- how did such abject weaklings take over a mighty nation? But these guys habitually ram them together nonetheless.

Personally I liked these guys better when they were bitching about Eisenhower and fluoride in the water.

MORE ON THE WATER ENGINE. Editor Downs is on the hydogren car case, and forwards this bit from Mother Jones, May-June 2003:

Using existing technology, hydrogen can be easily and cleanly extracted from water. Electricity generated by solar panels and wind turbines is used to split the water's hydrogen atoms from its oxygen atoms ... According to the administration's National Hydrogen Engergy Roadmap, drafted last year in concert with the energy industry, up to 90 percent of all hydrogen will be refined from oil, natural gas, and other fossil fuels--in a process using energy generated by burning oil, coal, and natural gas. The remaining 10 percent will be cracked from water using nuclear energy.

A recent MIT study also points out that we're a long way from an emission-efficient method of producing a practical hydrogen car engine.

On the other hand, the Administration is talking about earmarking funds for hydrogen power research -- interestingly, "through partnerships with the private sector," not with spoilsports like MIT. So the current means of extracting hydrogen energy could be rendered moot. I'm not a science guy, to say the least, and don't know the state of the tech. I could spend some time with these guys and find out more, getting to the bottom of headlines like "Air Liquide Signs Hydrogren Contract with Chevron in the United States," but life is short. Our President talks out his ass about a lot of stuff, so I'm inclined to disbelieve him, but I suppose this could be an exception.

What I would like to know is what kind of mileage and speed this 1972 hydrogen car got. The government showed some interest in that project, too.

SPEAKING OF GENERAL CANARD #37: Andrew Sullivan goes on about how liberals who support affirmative action think black people are stupid. In support of this slur, he quotes one of his better-known fellow-nuisances:

Mickey Kaus once described those liberals who simply assume the permanent neediness of minorities as "Bell Curve Liberals," people who would never admit it but have internalized the notion that minorities are simply dumber than the majority.

That's an interesting term Sullivan is appropriating, seeing as he's always been a big booster of the grotesque, race-baiting "Bell Curve." His official bio proudly states that, as editor of The New Republic, Sullivan " stirred controversy with... the first publication of Charles Murray's The Bell Curve..." And every once in a while he hauls the book out in support of himself, e.g., "The convergence of a global economy, a technological surge, and a meritocratic education system have all contributed to an inexorable and irreversible transition to greater inequality. his was the point most memorably made in Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's much-maligned and misunderstood book, 'The Bell Curve.'"

Let's see. Sullivan likes "The Bell Curve," yet explicitly associates it with "people who... have internalized the notion that minorities are simply dumber than the majority." What do you suppose he's trying to tell us?

I HATE POP-UPS SO MUCH that this is what I'm gonna do:

• Never patronize another credit-card company, discount travel agent, or boner-pill merchant of any kind, ever.
  
  
• If I do ever patronize any such businesses, in the part of the application where they ask where I'd heard about their services, I'll write, "I counted all the pop-ups according to industry and found yours had the fewest pop-ups per user of all comparably-priced boner pill merchants."
  
  
• If I find out who invented this shit, I will make a brittle and humorous statement about them in my weblog, which is read my millions of my imaginary friends.
  

End emission.

THIS MORNING'S WADE THROUGH THE FEVER SWAMP. The Ole Perfesser has a long'un about Iraq etc. Unlike those evil bastards at the Times he's always harshing on, the Perfesser does primary research: "My waitress at dinner was a Kurd, who reported that relatives in Northern Iraq (she hadn't been back for a couple of years) say that things are much better since Saddam's fall." Indeed. Heh. More butter over here.

He also recycles General Canard #37 -- that liberals are really condescending to the people about whom they claim to care. "We want a peaceful, free and prosperous Iraq," forthrightly states the Perfesser. "Claims that Arabs are somehow incapable of that sort of thing seem a bit dubious to me, especially when they come from people who call themselves 'progressive.'" Then, elsewhere in the same article, he talks about the Arabs as if they were retarded children. "As Osama says, people (especially Arab people) tend to want to back a strong horse," he quoth. "So it's important to look strong." And get a whiff of this:

Both Iraq and Israel are currently tests for the Arabs. If they can't achieve a reasonable degree of peace and freedom here, if they sink back into theocracy and thuggery, then it's going to be easy for the rest of the world to give up on them -- as the "progressives" already have -- and say "what can you expect from the wogs?" as it turns a blind eye to another generation of dictators' brutality.

I'll admit he's crafty -- by dropping that "as the 'progressives' already have" in the middle, he draws careless readers away from the clear implication that we may righteously consider Arabs to be shiftless wogs if they don't do like we tell them to. Crafty, however, is not the same thing as right, or even coherent.

POGO MEETS PEANUTS AT A RAVE. Click through some episodes of this comic strip. It's hot, young, and underdiscovered. When you read about it in Vice this summer and have yet to stake your cred, don't come bitching to me.

P.S. Don't tell Perfesser Reynolds -- it'll just upset him.

JACK'S CASE. My dear old friend Eva, who reviews theatre for Public Access Cable, invited me to see, on her comps, the Joyce Johnson play "Door Wide Open" at the Bowery Poetry Project, based on Johnson's letters to and from Jack Kerouac. Eva seemed to think I'd be into it.She remembered that as a young'un I had been enamored of On The Road and The Dharma Bums. I had, of course. But then I graduated college, and after availing deepest bohemia for a seeming eternity or two myself, for a long time I failed to see what was so hot about him, my memory of his prose being poisoned by the shabby streams of consciousness his example had unloosed among the zillion latter-day, junior-league Jacks by whom I was surrounded.

I was in a mildly more receptive mood tonight. A few months ago I caught Pull My Daisy on PBS, and through that tiny window took a fresh look at the Beats. Ginsberg I could never forsake. The loopy grandeur of his poems, with their little towers of Naropa and Newark and Lower East Side bric-a-brac building bravely toward heaven, touches me still. And I recall a reading he gave in Tompkins Square Park, at the height of The Troubles in the late 1980s, where he threw back at the kids that idolized him the epithet Die Yuppie Scum: "Look at me. I'm wearing a tie. Am I a Yuppie?" All class, that guy.

Kerouac in the film interested me afresh. He had a blundering presence, especially beside the epicene Larry Rivers. Listening to his voice-over, I could not get over the feeling that he was putting us on. He sounded too much like Fred Ward in Henry & June, playing the regular-guy Ahtist touched by Da Muse. What was this guy really about? I would have looked at his books again if I'd had them. Did he really have something, or was he the dress-down equivalent of Chum Frink in "Babbitt," selling the old "spill-o'-speech" to a more rockin' crowd?

The play at its start made me anxious, and I was glad that tight seating forced us to the bar, where I could drink Bourbon and lean my head wearily on my fist. The thing was done as a reading, with a younger and an older Joyce Johnson stand-in off to one side while a young man, who in speech and manner resembled George Clooney doing Frank Sinatra, read the Jack bits. Jack as an up-and-comer and Joyce as an up-and-come-into were boring as hell. I liked Amy Wright as older Joyce (I had seen her several times off-Broadway years ago, and to now witness her once-gawky stage presence softened and made elegant by age sold me the memory-play angle), but the two young players projected no electricity past their lecterns. Worse, the pacing was flat and the lighting somnambulizing, and the Kerouac epistles fell like marijuana-scented mash notes to the stage. I loved the music by David Amram -- yes, that David Amram, whose accompaniment on piano, gourds, and flutes was beautiful throughout -- but my heart sank when I noticed that there would be two acts.

But toward the end of the first act, around the time "On the Road" took off, things got better. Jack loosened up -- only to fall apart, as the play/recollection would have it, but the Jack-actor became more vivid, more human, and the words, as written and as read, began to make sense. As an author of love-scribbles Kerouac had been tiresome; as a drowning poetry star trying to explain himself out of his self-sprung trap, he was electric. And the young Joyce, lashing back at last at her ill-treatment and playing less the lovestruck executive secretary, showed some life as well. The second act was even better, notwithstanding a maudlin coda.

Afterwards I thought, isn't it odd that the young, confident lovers were boring, but the embittered, conflicted fellow-travelers following the caravan of Beat unto its apocalypse were interesting? But no, no it isn't. We appreciate, or claim to, the life-affirming sweep of the Beats, and of course their big "yes" is very exciting and supplies some sparks -- but what became of the tinder to which those sparks was set is more interesting, at least when you've achieved an age greater than that of the young post-Beatniks gathered at the Bowery Poetry Project to witness this evening's event. "Yes" gets you to the door of life, but once you pass through there are a thousand wet blankets waiting to descend upon you, and you have to come up with a more nuanced strategy to keep going -- especially if you want to keep that little spark of "yes" alight. Kerouac, after some entertaining struggles, went home to live with his mom. I won't say that Joyce Johnson's mordant postscripts are as inspiring, or even as valuable, as Kerouac's death-plunge. Yet her careful reflection of his glory finally made Kerouac real to me again.

Was his failure preordained or preventable? Older Joyce makes a comment about this in the play. In Kerouac's case, I think the point is moot -- unless you want to believe that a rage to live is nothing but a folly to be avoided, and I'm not prepared to go all the way down that bleak alley -- not yet, anyway. Is Jack's case less edifying than those of great novelists who negotiated their way through a thousand disappointments and ended with some calm and quiet in old age? Well, what cases would those be, in America? Twain? He died raging. Hemingway? Blew his head off. Fitzgerald? Dead, drunk. Washington Irving, James Fennimore Cooper? I like those guys, but given the farther shores our literature has managed to reach via the aforementioned parties (and many left unmentioned), Irving and Cooper might as well have never gotten out of the blocks.

A lot to chew on there, and quite some time to pass before it's digested. I will say that Kerouac is more impressive to me now than when I walked into that theatre. As is anyone who tries anything like what he was trying. Assuming, perhaps unfairly, that there is anyone.

LILEKS ON WOMEN:

"Tonight we blame a friend of my wife's, a charming lass -- no, she's not a lass. Nor is she a colleen, a frail, a skirt, a broad, a womyn, a twist, or any other synonym. Nor is she a gal. 'Person' doesn't do the job -- please. When we're all shave-skulled automatons in white jumpsuits we will all be Persons. Not until. We really need a new gender-specific word for people who come over to pick up something, stay for two hours chatting with your wife and delighting your child, leave you with a stack of reading material, and listen to you expand on the politics of David Lynch on the way down the stairs."

One word? How about "woman"? (Or, if we have room for a few modifiers, "terrified woman buttonholed by lunatic while trying to escape friend's house"?)

James Lileks -- a man's madman!

HEADLINE OF THE MONTH. "San Francisco Fed Chief Says Vegas Economy Performing Well" -- Las Vegas Sun. Seven come eleven, snake eyes watching you.

THROUGH BEING COOL. Over at The Corner they're still talking about young conservatives, and posting their missives, in which the Tory tykes tell how hip they are. Sample: "By the way, I was a skateboarder for most of my life. I never wore a blue blazer. It was all of my rich girlfriends, who were extreme lefties, that belonged to the Country Club." Rawk on, dude!

Their obsession is understandable. This conservative redoubt, chaired by Jonah "Check out my Simpsons references" Goldberg, is increasingly devoted to redefining Cool in its favor. And why not? They have the country's politics in a headlock, and so have leisure to worry about whether the kids think they're alright.

Let 'em. Youth culture (see entry below) is wholly manipulated and corrupt, and it hardly matters by what guerilla marketing channels the underaged are approached. Truth and bullshit can each be as easily dressed in rad gear. A fixation with fashion is appropriate for posers, though unsuitable to higher minds.

One's experiences teach the lessons that form one's politics. So long as suburbanites devoid of any higher interest than cheaper gas for their SUVs and lower rates for their second mortgages comprise the bulk of the electorate, it is these concerns that will determine our future course. Bush is manipulating both these aforementioned factors to his advantage, and his triumph or defeat will rest on the persistence of their success unto the next electorial showdown. Our politics then are guided not by great issues but by the cynical calculations of well-placed spinmeisters.

How cool is that?

MUSCLEBOUND INDIE ROCKER SPEAKS TRUTH. A friend forwarded an excerpt from a Henry Rollins interview, taken by Michael Dean for a book he's working on and which will no doubt be worth reading, as is this Rollins fragment:

To do what you want to do, you have to be very tough. Especially in this day and age. Not tough like being insensitive, you have to be tough like Miles Davis who protected his art. He was very protective of that thing that he had, he was like a swan -- it's this very graceful creature but if you mess with it, it gets very pugnacious...

I think these days a lot of bands who do their first tour on a Privo bus with shiny new gear are missing out on a lot of things that will keep them in the game after the blush is off the rose. Because you never maintain your popularity -- everyone has an arc. Or ebbs and flows. Guys like Neil Young, they just keep making records and it's never like an up or down thing, it's like a high-tide, low-tide thing. He's just going to keep making records whether you buy them or not. Neil Young makes records. That's what he does... And those bands that were hydrogrown through the Clear Channel thing, they have no roots to the ground so when push comes to shove, they have no anchor.

I used to think Rollins was kind of silly, but these are not the words of a silly man.

SEE YA LATER, BOI. Matthew Yglesias is delighted that Avril Lavigne's "Sk8er Boi" will soon be a major motion picture. He loves Avril, and there I let him alone; de gustibus non disputandum est. But I have a couple of preemptive peeves against the picture.

First, there's the song. A nice piece of radio fluff, but what kind of movie will it make? A stuck-up girl (did ballet, dontcha know) turns down a boy in baggy pants, and winds up a single mom while the eponymous poser becomes a superstar, slammin' on his guitar. My sympathy is with the girl, of course, and I think it's a little creepy that the most noteworthy thing about the boi is that he's popular and rich. Doesn't anyone believe anymore that a heart can broken by anything other than a missed seat on a gravy train?

What seems like more of a problem is the pictoralization of a pop tune. It's rare enough to get that right in a video, let alone a 90 minute feature. I recall the video of the Kinks' "Come Dancin'." A nice tune, and the video has some nice bits, but one scene forever embodies the tendency of filmmakers to crush the life out of a good musical moment. In the bridge of the song, when the "Palais" that was the arena of the older brother's teenage romance, is no more ("The day that they tore down the Palais/my brother broke down and cried"), there's a nice Davies Brothers moment -- Ray sounds sad, and Dave smashes out power chords. It suggests sorrow, futility, and rage. In the video, we see at that moment the younger brother jumping gleefully on his bed, thrashing air-guitar on his tennis racket. It's rhythmically correct, but runs so contrary to the musical moment as to take all the meaning out of it.

When "Sk8er Boi" is all done up nice and Hollywood with James van der Beek and Hillary Duff, or whomever, can we really expect any better?

A NUCLEAR ERA, BUT I HAVE NO FEAR. Way back during the last State of the Union address, the President promised a billion-and-change to develop "hydrogen fuel technologies" that would lead -- here comes the concrete example beloved of speechwriters -- to the development of "clean, hydrogen powered automobiles." This was, as reported by Environmental News Services, the first mention by Bush in a SOTU of environmental issues.

I thought at the time it was a feint, in the midst of a war-ginning speech, to show that he was not all about blood and thunder. (As to the money, well, recent developments demonstrate that Bush is awful free with a public buck.) But it's beginning to dawn on me that the President had a larger agenda.

Pete Domenici (R, NM, and chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee) is promoting a bill to revive the nation's moribund nuclear energy industry. You may, or may not, remember the "No Nukes" movement of a couple decades ago that effectively shut down the proliferation of nuclear plants, partly by convincing insurers to charge sky-high rates on such facilities. Well, Domenici's bill would lower that hurdle by limiting the nuke-makers' liability, and even partially funding the development of plants with taxpayer money.

It is to be remembered that the hydrogen for the Bush car would almost certainly come from nuclear reactors.

Here's where the environmental angle comes into play. There is a lingering fear among sentient humans of nuclear plants leaking radioactive waste, blowing up, and generally Chernobyling. The Republicans are countering the anti-nuclear meme with one more current and cheerful: the promise of decreased reliance on petroleum. As the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) nicely puts it:

In this false future, the nuclear power industry becomes an environmental savior... unless checked, the nuclear power industry will receive "clean air" credits under both state and federal legislation, which will help bolster its unbalanced books. It will produce hydrogen for clean vehicles, while producing more tons of radioactive waste with no viable disposal method...

You can read the White House's case for its "Freedom Fuel" initiative pretty much intact at Science Blog. NIRS is good on the counter-argument, as is this recent Village Voice article, which states that "Scientists have not yet designed a nuclear facility whose safety and efficiency trumps that of gas or coal."

Of course, that puts the anti-nuclear crowd in the position of arguing, however indirectly and unwillingly, for gas and coal, and we all know how dirty they are. That's worth a billion-plus in PR right there -- especially when you consider that select Friends of W will benefit from nuclear power protections. Cynicism, the ever-reliable Virgil in the Inferno of contemporary politics, suggests that the transfer of profits from Halliburton's fossil fuel cost centers to its nuclear ones will be fairly seamless.

I'm still trying to figure how the other touchy-feely talking point of the 2003 SOTU, AIDS in Africa, makes money for Bush backers while softening his image, but I imagine an answer will come soon enough.

CHUM FRINK. As a professional writer who has labored long in corporate vineyards, I have a special affection for, and identification with, T. Cholmondeley (Chum) Frink, the repulsive PR/ad man in Sinclair Lewis' "Babbitt." Frink, wrote Lewis,

was not only the author of "Poemulations," which, syndicated daily in sixty-seven leading newspapers, gave him one of the largest audiences of any poet in the world, but also an optimistic lecturer and the creator of "Ads that Add." Despite the searching philosophy and high morality of his verses, they were humorous and easily understood by any child of twelve...

Of course Frink is revealed in the end to be a self-loathing drunk.

So I am delighted to find that there is a prog-rock group called Chum Frink, and especially delighted that nowhere on their web site do they explain their name. Such restraint in the world of rock is rare and admirable.

CONTEMPT FOR THE PUNTER. I'm not the only ranter around who thinks his own bad customer service experiences are worth reading. Patrick Hayden is angry at his high-speed access provider, Speakeasy, for ripping him off. I'm not surprised. As recounted here, I got fucked over by NorthPoint (Outta business! See ya!) and Verizon (Service doesn't really work with Macs and screws up your operating system and mail agent! See ya!), in ways that were slightly different from those described by Hayden but fundamentally similar in that they reflect a growing trend of what I'll call contempt for the punter.

To reiterate, so many service companies make their long green from big clients that they don't think much about customer satisfaction down at the sub-millionaire end of the demo. Like a lot of things businessmen don't really care about, they respond to perceived problems in that area by sprinking some money and programs in places where trade magazine reporters might notice them, all the while leaving the basic problem -- systems designed to extract maximum money with minimum customer benefit -- untouched.

The "We don't use last names" response Hayden got from Speakeasy's rep is hilarious. And I expect that, should that piece of shit company remain in business (or become a wholly-owned part of some mega-corporation, as I suspect its owners are hoping), they will eventually institute a CRM program meant to address the problem -- meaning the customers' reps will give out last names, and lots of soothing baby-talk, but no better service.

As it happens, JP Morgan Chase appears to have fixed the problem they caused for me the other day. I say "appears" because in my discussions with them they left themselves enough rhetorical wiggle room to leave me on edge as to whether this problem is fixed for good, for a day, or what.

YOU'VE GOT QUESTIONS, WE'VE GOT ANSWERS. "SO WHY DO I CARE ABOUT THE NEW YORK TIMES STORY?" Because the movement for which you are an operative has always had it in for the Times, and the Blair mess (and the attendant Bragg pseudo-scandal) provides the proverbial shit that brings the proverbial happiness to the proverbial pig. "So why do many people consider [newspapers] more reliable than blogs?" I guess it will be a year or two before the average American is so stupid that he can't tell the difference between a major newsgathering organization with bureaus all over the world and deskbound link-peddlers with catchphrases, so I'll save my explanation for then.