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May 24, 2008 - No Agenda
01:22:29
32: Benefits Supervisor Sleeping
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Time Text
In a world where two guys who wear comfortable shoes meet to speak, Armageddon must be near.
Time once again for No Agenda.
From the manor in southwest London, I'm Adam Curry.
And I'm up here in rainy Northern California as our weather turns weird.
I'm John C. Dvorak.
Yeah, you've been bitching about it all week.
You know, wind and rain, and we've had nothing but beautiful weather over here, more or less.
There was a low pressure that kind of apparently floated through and got somewhere near Denver and turned around and came back and dumped a bunch of snow on California.
It snowed last night.
It's almost June.
It's crazy.
In Tahoe, I guess, the grapevine down in L.A. It's been good here.
Today actually isn't so nice.
The first day that isn't fantastic.
There's a lot of wind, gusty wind, which is some kind of pressure system coming in.
But otherwise, it's been a beautiful week.
So you've been working on upgrading your cell phone, mobile phone, what's that?
No, I have this Vodafone, it's a dongle that you can plug into your Mac and I bought it when we moved into this house before I had internet access.
And it does about 700 kilobits where I live right now, but anywhere like half a mile further up the road it can actually do, it's HDSPA or whatever that is, so it can do like 1.5 megabits.
And it's from Vodafone.
And you have some kind of so-called unlimited fair use limit that you have.
It's wireless, right?
It's wireless, yeah, yeah.
It's 3G, basically.
And so you have some kind of limit for the UK, which I was just reading online.
Of course, this is from a year ago.
That fair use limit was one gigabyte per month, which of course is nothing.
That's like one day.
Well, I've looked at it.
It is just about one day for someone who surfs and has lots of media files.
30 is more like it.
But I really only need to use it for certain occasions.
And so now they have a new version, which is now just kind of like a memory stick.
It's no longer a dongle.
And it's USB. You plug it in, and that gives you, in the right areas, 7.5 megabits down.
I'm not quite sure what the upstream is.
I'll have to look at it again.
But it's cheaper.
They give you, I think you can get up to like 20 gigabytes per month if you're roaming in another country, which is where you really got screwed before.
I mean, I'm talking like 4 pounds per megabyte transferred in a foreign country.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, you check your email, and you're like, oh, that was 50 bucks.
So now that's become like $4.95 for a 24-hour period, up to 200 megs.
It's better, but it's still highway robbery.
But they didn't give me any notification.
I pay 45 pounds a month now.
They can actually get me to pay them more, $60 per month, to get this new bundle.
But they didn't offer it to me.
I'm looking at the commercials.
I'm like, wait a minute.
I've got an old plan here.
Yeah.
So I'm trying to figure that out.
We'll see how helpful Vodafone is.
My wife and sister use...
We were just about to talk about that before we started the show.
They use Zsa Zsa.
Are you familiar with Zsa Zsa?
Never heard of it.
JulietAlphaJulietAlphaHotel.com They give you a little address book.
You prepay.
I think it's like automatically they deduct $25 from my PayPal or something.
And if you make a phone call, you enter the phone number, and you hit call, and then it will call a designated phone that you specify, so it can call your mobile phone, your home phone, or your office phone.
And then it'll say, one moment, no, actually it says, one moment, Zsa Zsa's connecting you!
And then you hear the phone ring, and then your caller ID shows up on the other end, and they answer, and it's a very, very cheap phone call, like a penny a minute or something.
Or a tenth of a penny a minute.
And if both phone numbers that are calling each other are registered with Zsa Zsa, then it's absolutely free.
So they both have an account and they talk for hours for free, which with British Telecom, the amount of money they talk, it could easily be 800 or 900 pounds a month if they were just to get a basic rate plan.
Well, that sounds like a winner.
Yeah, it's good.
And the quality is good because, you know, basically they just connect different networks.
So they'll look at whatever, you know, whatever's available in London, whatever deal they have, I guess whatever interconnect exchange, etc.
Sometimes I think it must be VoIP because one out of every 20 calls has a little bit of an echo or not echo, it has a little bit of a delay.
But everything else, it's almost like a pure, regular phone call.
They bought Jangle, or they didn't buy Jangle.
They bought the remnants, the team, or whatever.
You know Jangle, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So they went out of business, or something like that.
Do they have that service in the U.S.? Jaja?
Jaja?
Yeah, it's a U.S. company.
It's J-A-J-A? No, J-A-J-A-H dot com.
J-A-J-A-H? Yeah.
I think Sequoia's an investor.
Huh.
Yeah.
It's cool.
Well, you know, because I use disposable phones.
I use a track phone, as a matter of fact.
For your mobile phone, you mean?
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Isn't that Jaja for mobile phones?
Is that what it's for?
It's for any phone.
But you have to initiate the call on the web.
So you can do that in a mobile browser.
You can do a bookmark.
How is that better than Skype?
Well, you know, first of all, I think the quality is better.
The quality is better than Skype?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's better than Skype.
It's a real phone call.
You can hear that you're connected through wires, not through IP. It's not...
It makes a difference, huh?
Look.
What are you going to say?
The customer's wrong?
Yeah.
I'll tell her.
Honey, you're wrong.
Go back to using Skype.
She hated it.
She's like, I tried to get her on Skype first.
She's like, oh, the headset sucks and I can't walk too far.
You know, I tried the Skype phone.
Yeah, but the Skype to phone thing, I call you all the time on Skype to phone and it works great.
But it's not as cheap as you think.
Zsa Zsa is much, much cheaper.
Maybe a tenth of the price.
Now, Skype is not all that cheap.
So you think it's a SIP thing?
SIP? No.
No, no, no.
They have termination at the exchanges or whatever.
That's a big business.
I don't know a lot about it, but it's a huge, huge business.
And so they just buy up millions of minutes at preferred exchanges.
And some of these exchanges are interconnected with backhaul.
That's basically their business.
It's just making the connections as cheap as possible.
But I think most of it is POTS. Interesting.
Okay, well, I'll check it out.
Yeah, marginally interesting.
Well, I mean, you know, I probably have seen, if I saw the logo, I'd probably say, oh yeah, those guys or something.
But it's like, you can't try everything.
They've been around for a while.
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking.
Yeah, for my wife, it works perfectly.
I never use it.
I'm just a sucker.
I use AT&T on my cell phone all the time.
Geez.
Yeah, well.
You know, one of the things we've done at the Dvorak Ranch is that we've all gone to using, besides, well, nobody else but me uses the prepaid burners, you know, the cell phones, your disposables, but For regular long distance, we've all gone to calling cards.
Well, here's the problem.
Here's my specific problem.
Because I live and work in two separate countries.
So obviously it would be much cheaper to use a U... And of course I have a U.K. number over here.
And lots of people actually have the U.K. number.
But here's what happens.
When someone needs to get a hold of me...
Let's face it, the only reason you're going to call me on my cell phone is because you actually need to speak to me and I want to talk to you because no one else calls me.
I don't get business pitches or anything.
It's real.
Are you soliciting the public to just call you at random?
No, please do not.
So, you know, you can do, you can get these centralized numbers like Grand Central or whatever it is that Google bought.
And I looked into that.
And so you can route your phone calls around, no problems.
You give people one number, and then if you don't answer this phone, it'll automatically transfer to the other phone.
That's fantastic.
I find Grand Central to be highly annoying.
I'm just talking about the basic concept, that I can have one number and it'll ring me on where the phone's essential.
The problem is text messaging.
There's no routing facility for text messaging.
There just is none.
There's a business.
Let's start one.
It's a huge business.
You have individual pieces of software that can do it.
There is a way to actually...
For instance, I would take my U.S. mobile, connect it through Bluetooth to my Mac.
I've looked into all of this.
And if a text message comes in, then the Mac will actually reroute it and send it out to the other phone.
But it's a pain in the ass.
It's not handy.
And let's face it, the text messaging, I probably use the phone for that more than for voice calls.
I noticed that in meetings.
Thanks, buddy.
Highly appreciated comment.
So, at least you're not sitting there doing your email like most people.
Wait until the new iPhone comes out.
Then meetings will be much more fun.
You know, it reminds me of going to the, you give speeches.
This tendency, by the way, is extremely, I think, negative, which is you go give a big speech.
It depends on the group.
Of course, if you have a, you know, a mature group that, you know, is not necessarily so plugged into the computer, it's ridiculous.
But you go to a, like, if it was any kind of a Web 2.0 crowd and you gave a speech to them, nobody's looking at the stage.
Even worse, they're twittering each other and they sit in little chat rooms and make fun about the speaker.
Yeah.
And so you can't get any good laughs from any sight gags.
If you were a prop comic, forget about it.
And so everyone's all hunched over their laptops and they're typing away as you're trying to talk.
And it's not even that they're taking notes.
They're just talking to everybody else in the place.
You know what this is, John?
All of this shit started when schools let the kids call the teachers by their first name.
That's when all this crap started.
That's a good old cranky comment.
Well, you might as well take it back one step further where the kids were encouraged to call their parents by their first name.
Oh, boy.
We lost a lot of ground there, didn't we?
It was really bad.
And it's still creepy, by the way.
If you go to somebody's house and you've got some kid, you know, some eight-year-old calling your father Frank.
I know.
Isn't that crazy?
Do your kids call you dad?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I've noticed that.
It is really creepy when you hear that.
The first thing that goes to your mind is, are you stepfather?
Yeah, well, that's one.
And, you know, we're calling the mother, you know, Margaret.
Margaret, can I get something to eat?
I'm hungry.
Yeah, that is weird.
I mean, it's just like, whoa.
In Dutch...
Well, what are the parents...
By the way, what are the parents thinking by encouraging this?
Do they think it's cool?
Is this some sort of a liberal thing that you would...
You want your children on this unusual first-name basis?
Do you think that's still happening?
Because it was kind of a big thing in the 70s, I think, when a lot of that happened.
I don't think it was ever happening a lot, but I think it does still happen.
Yeah.
Well, in different languages such as Dutch, German, French, you have a formal way of saying you.
In English it's just you and hey you, right?
But in French it would be tu, or you could say formally it would be vous.
And in Dutch it's either je or u, and German also has its variant.
And Patricia still calls or still addresses her parents in the formal way.
Which is, of course, she's from 1918, I think.
Yeah, it's going to go her well.
It's an easy joke.
You know, the funny thing is about that two versus vu is that if you start talking conversational...
When I was a kid, we were taught that even with conversational French, you never use the two unless you really knew somebody.
Really knew the person, yeah.
You're shacked up with them, basically.
Yeah.
If you've had some kind of intimate contact.
But nowadays, it seems to be encouraged.
Have you noticed this?
Yeah, I was talking to someone else about that the other day, and I think it is because of English culture seeping through the entire world, where in English, you've got drama, you've got movies, you've got all kinds of media, and it's just you.
All of it is you, you, you, you, you, and I think it's just so much easier, and it seems to be ebbing away.
What, the vous?
Yeah.
Yeah, the formal way of addressing people.
Yeah, I guess you sound like an old fart, you know, if you still use it.
Unfortunately, I don't speak enough French that I can make that transition that easy.
So I've been doing this thing in the mornings for Dutch radio, for this Arrow podcast.
It's the name of the radio station.
And so on this show, I get to talk to ministers of parliament, which is pretty cool.
And I get to talk about, you know, like the fucked up traffic.
So I'm enjoying these conversations.
But most of these men, and many of them are women actually in the Netherlands, are younger than I am.
They're like, you know, mid-30s.
And so the first thing I say when I get them on the phone or if I meet them face-to-face is, you know, can we just...
It's called tutoyeren.
Can we just...
Use the informal way of addressing each other.
And they all say yes, of course.
Yeah, that's the same as saying, can I call you Bill?
Not quite the same.
That's one more step.
Oh.
That's after I kiss the ministers.
That's when I get to call him Bill.
Okay.
So it's not exactly the same.
Not exactly the same.
Because that middle element that you're describing does not exist in English.
No, it doesn't.
No, it doesn't.
We either go from, you know, Mr.
President, or can I call you Bill?
Yeah.
And there's nothing in between.
Yeah.
No, you may not call me Bill.
Stop calling me Shirley.
So, there is one thing I wanted to bring up.
I'm sure you've heard about it.
Go back to this story.
So, you ask them about this, and then what do they say?
Oh, sometimes they don't know what to say, depending on what I ask them.
Holland has a whole bunch of interesting issues.
The main one being the multicultural society integration of Muslim immigrants.
And then the other one is basically traffic.
If I boil it down, those are the only two things that people talk about all the time.
And no one ever does anything about it.
They don't talk about the weather like they do in the UK constantly?
Yeah.
No, it just sucks.
They all know it's...
You live in Holland, man.
You're like six feet below sea level.
You kind of get fogged in a lot.
You get used to it.
So, no.
And they talk about other things.
Football.
Oh, yeah.
Well, everybody's got to talk about football.
Well, we had a big-ass match here.
Well, actually, not here, but in Moscow.
The Champions League.
Manchester United-Chelsea thing?
Yeah, it was a great, great match.
They must have aired it in the States somewhere.
It wasn't a great match.
It was the same boring old game, and they had to have a shoot-off at the end.
It was a great match.
What are you talking about?
After they played the 90 minutes, they had an extension of 30 minutes.
Any goal would have won the match for that team.
The English boys against each other?
Are you kidding me?
It was a great freaking match.
Unfortunately, penalty kicks is basically a lottery.
Anyone can win that.
But it was a great game.
Did you watch it?
You didn't watch it?
Come on, don't give me that shit.
Nothing like a nil-nil tie.
It wasn't a nil-nil tie.
It was 1-1.
No, let me give you some more.
So the guy on Chelsea's side, what's his name?
Frank Lumpard, who scored the one Chelsea goal, is like, this was a real emotional moment.
His mom died like two weeks before this of pneumonia, and no one knew if he was going to come to the team, and he scored, and they had that beautiful shot.
It was high drama, John.
They had that beautiful shot of him looking up at the heaven and saying, this one's for you, Mom.
I mean, it was beautiful.
It was great television.
It was a great game, you know, The crowds didn't kill each other.
It was in Moscow, which was interesting.
Well, that's one of the reasons the crowds didn't kill each other.
Normally, they would have.
No, I disagree.
I think it was a good match, and everyone was tired after the 30-minute extension of the game.
And the teams were just strong.
I thought it was good.
I liked it.
Yeah, no, I'm glad that a lot of people liked watching that game, you know, and they talked about it.
I think we even blogged it because I have one of my...
Ed Campbell is a huge...
Soccer fan?
Soccer fan, which, you know, makes me wonder about him, but except for that one Piccadillo.
He's...
She does most of the work.
But I'll tell you, at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, you could hear a pin drop in the middle of the high street of Guilford.
You know, everyone had already gone home.
Everyone was home early.
You know, the game didn't start until like, you know, quarter to 8.
And everyone was, you know, no one was on the street.
It was completely empty.
Quarter to 8 in the morning?
In the evening.
In the evening.
It started quarter to 8 in the evening?
Yeah.
And then one time the game was over at 10.30 and it was quiet?
Yeah.
You're talking about Guilford at night?
As though it's a jump in place normally?
Is that what you're saying?
Dude, you should come down to Guilford at night and see what's going on.
Oh yeah, the Voodoo Lounge, the new place, Dusk.
Are you crazy?
Guilford is quite the place to go clubbing and drinking.
Within limits.
There's no London.
But yeah, for Surrey, absolutely.
Huh.
Yeah.
A lot of messed up kids on Fridays and Saturdays and Sunday nights.
Yeah.
My recommendation for that is Iceland, but it's not a story.
Which is, well, it was recently named something, Iceland.
It was named the...
Best place in the world to live or something like that.
Not best to live.
I think it was at least stressful or something like that.
Well, that's because everything's free.
And there's no one there.
There's no people there.
There's a quarter of a million people.
It's the size of a good...
Of Guilford?
It's the size of Guilford, yes.
It's the size of Guilford.
It looks beautiful.
Vanessa from the UK office is there this weekend.
She and her boyfriend were going to Iceland.
I'm like, why?
She says, I've never been there.
There's nothing much to do.
Two days, you're done.
But you eat a lot of puffin.
Oh, that's right.
We talked about that, didn't we?
Yeah, puffin.
And then the thing I always tell people, go to the wool shop at the airport.
And that's where you buy your sweaters and blankets and stuff.
Because it'd be cold there.
Well, no, they got this great, you know, they got these weird sheep in Iceland that look like, they're from, they look prehistoric.
They're creepy looking.
Really?
And they, you know, they got big Rastafarian curls hanging down.
They look like something, they look like they washed in and always look wet.
And the wool is waterproof and it's a very, and it comes in three colors naturally.
There's a black sheep, a white sheep, and a brown sheep.
And so they can make colorful sweaters without even dyeing them.
Hardly colorful, but brown.
But that shop at the airport, at least when I was there, was the best shop in the whole...
They're like long-haired sheep.
I'm looking into some Google Images now.
They don't look that crazy.
They look kind of creepy when you see them.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm scared of sheep.
Do they taste good?
I didn't have any sheep.
All they eat is puffin, it seems to me.
You know, all these countries that we've talked about before, I have this one or two thing.
I was talking to my wife the other day about some countries that eat yak.
And I realize that of all the meats I've had, I've never had yak.
Where does yak typically grow?
Well, it's in parts of India.
There's one of the Indian cuisines.
We're doing a book on spices because, you know, we have this...
Yeah, you got the spice shop, right?
And so I said, we got to break down the...
We, she's doing all the writing.
I said, we've got to break down the cuisines of India because a lot of people don't realize when they go to, especially Americans, to a lesser extent the English, but Americans in particular, don't realize that there is no Indian, you know, when you go to an Indian restaurant, you're getting an eclectic when you go to an Indian restaurant, you're getting an eclectic mishmash of who knows what that has no connection to
You know, these dishes have no connection because they're from the various cuisines and it turns out that there's about, depending on how you break it down, either four major cuisines or something like 18 cuisines.
In India.
And they're all very different.
They use different spices.
They eat different meat if they eat meat.
And it's radically different in every way.
So this is interesting.
So I went to Wikipedia, of course, the authority.
No mention of India.
The yak is from Tibet, Mongolia, Central Asia, Himalayan region.
No mention of India whatsoever.
Yeah, I think it's the northeastern cuisine that my wife isolated as eating yak, although I'm sure an Indian listening, that's not true!
We eat a lot of yak here, dammit!
Or they don't eat yak, but the research so far, but we're going to run this by some natives, of course, unlike some people.
They look pretty prehistoric, these yak.
Yeah, yeah.
I wonder what they taste like.
Prehistoric.
Like some really old meat.
Oh, you can milk them, too.
There you go.
Tea is made with yak milk.
Awesome.
I wonder what that tastes like.
It's probably like a goat.
They probably have a distinctive taste.
Yeah.
Although it just could taste like beef.
It could be just, you know, progenitor or who knows what kind of flavor.
Aren't they close to the bison family?
They look like them.
A little more like bison.
Bisons, you know, you could pass off a bison meat for cattle.
You know, if you did it right.
Hey, something new.
Bison has a distinctive flavor, but if you did it right, you could convince somebody it was just a piece of beef.
Hey, I just found something new.
The Google Image Labeler.
Oh really?
What's that?
It just showed up on the search.
Welcome to Google Image Labeler, a feature of Google Search that allows you to label images and help improve the quality of Google's image search results.
Cool.
How does it work?
You'll be randomly paired with a partner who's online and using the feature.
Over a two-minute period, you and your partner will view the same set of images, provide as many labels as possible to describe each image you see, receive points when your label matches your partner's label.
Cool.
It's like a game.
The number of points will depend on how specific your label is, and you'll see more images until time's run out.
What is this, like a game?
Well, look, I'm looking at today's top pairs.
Zippy and Yonatan have got 2,650 points.
But the all-time contributors, which includes Zippy as number two, is GoSpeedGo.
What is this number here?
It's 24,266,100 points.
What is this guy doing?
He's just hanging on...
This is unbelievable.
So people are doing free work for Google.
Yeah.
Oh, do it, John.
Do start labeling.
Oh, man, that's cool.
So I've been matched up with someone.
Already?
Yeah, we don't have the partner suggested to...
So I got like a Chinese girl.
I put girl.
Hold on.
I want to label.
Oh, matched on girl.
50 points.
Bing, bing, bing.
Okay, now I see like royalty.
It's crazy.
They've turned working for Google into a game.
How crazy is that?
Unbelievable.
Those guys are smart.
They're geniuses.
They really are.
This looks more Indian.
I don't know what that is.
You know where they got this idea?
Battleships?
No, they got the idea from those guys doing the porn, doing the captions.
Oh, Hot or Not?
Like that?
You know, where you join up and they say, here, tell us what this CAPTCHA is, and you're basically working, and they'll show you porn.
And then the CAPTCHA is actually used by spammers to crack all these, you know, CAPTCHAs that keep cropping up.
Oh, that's right.
Yeah, I remember that.
Yeah, I remember that.
Oh, that's crazy.
Well, I'm not going to help them anymore.
Go away.
You're not going to help them anymore.
I'm done helping you, Google.
But I want to know who my partner is.
How come I don't get to meet this person?
That's kind of cool.
What a great way to meet someone.
It could be lies.
Maybe there is no partner.
They're just trying to make it seem more social than it is for these poor lonely guys out there that would sit around doing this to the point where they'd have 24 million points.
Guys like GoSpeedGo.
It's just the whole thing's a scam because my partner here wants to pass.
I just passed.
Maybe I was your partner.
I don't think so.
No, I just went away.
All right.
So...
Well, maybe it's possible, and maybe you are.
I think you should be able to choose your partner.
Did you get the Cypress?
No.
Okay.
So, anyway.
Financial Times, two days ago.
By the way, my partner's obviously a dud.
Your partner can't come up with anything good?
No good labels?
Quitting.
Quitting.
Anyway, go ahead.
Financial Times.
I'm sure you heard about this, about Moody's, the ratings agency.
This is the funniest thing in the world, John.
Okay.
So, of course, the premise here is that Moody's rates funds and bonds and gives them a status.
All of our listeners, I'm sure, at one point have heard the AAA status.
And so they raided all these CDOs, which were these investment vehicles or debt vehicles that were backed by these bogus mortgages, by these subprime mortgages.
And they basically raided, we talked about this, they raided them AAA status.
Right?
Yes, it was a scandal.
Okay.
They have come out now, a year after their investigation, and they know how it happened, that they gave out a AAA rating to these bogus investment vehicles.
And guess what it was, John?
Um, interns?
A software coding error.
Oh, bullshit.
Don't you just love it?
Can they actually get away with that bullshit?
What coding error was it?
Oh, an unfortunate one.
Apparently, an unfortunate one.
And they knew about the so-called software coding error for a year before this news came out.
A year!
What kind of a software coding error is there here, possible?
Well, they were supposed to receive four notches lower, which would mean that they should have been a triple B instead of a triple A. Which, of course, would make sense, because they're probably closer to a C-, or maybe a double D. Well, double D is another problem, but it's neither here nor there.
Especially if it's not here.
I've got some downstairs.
But can you believe that?
Front page.
And you don't hear about it anywhere.
No one's talking about it.
This is one of the actual reasons of this shit happening.
Is this fucking ratings agency.
Now they're going to investigate standards and pores, I guess, or whatever.
Yeah, definitely.
They have to.
They'll probably have the same database issue.
We had the same guy.
We hired that same coder.
And he came over here and screwed us, too.
Isn't that crazy?
Coding error.
Yeah, it's coming apart, man.
All of the shit that we've been talking about is happening.
In the UK now, remember they made that $100 billion commitment to all the banks and the government would swap the bonds for their bad debt?
That has now been inflated to $200 billion.
It doubled overnight.
Wow, that's a lot of money.
That's a humongous amount of money.
That's 200 billion pounds, right?
No, no.
I'm doing the conversion.
No, so total is like 90 billion pounds.
So it's almost, it's 200 million, essentially.
And Gordon Brown is about to get kicked out.
I guess they can't really kick him out.
He's, you know, people are calling for his resignation.
You know, very important municipality.
now what is it uh area crew is it you know um they had a local election and uh the conservatives landslide win and you know everyone's like brown has to go they're already talking about his successor it's bad news well you know that country screwed up Well, we have more space.
Yeah, it's cool to follow the news about the Hillary Obama stuff over here.
Yeah, people that don't know this, essentially Hillary's called for the assassination of Obama.
That's not exactly what she did.
Yeah, please do.
who haven't heard what happened when she was in a meeting with some journalists, editorial board.
It was some small little paper in a really small little town.
But they had it.
They were filming it, or somebody was, and they got the audio and the video of her saying the following after she was asked, why don't you quit and give up because you're not going to win?
And she says, but I haven't been mathematically eliminated.
And she goes on and she says, look, my husband didn't win his nomination until June 22nd.
So why should I quit?
And besides, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June.
And so I don't see why I should quit.
She has gone on to repeat this several other times without using the assassination word.
Right.
And so it was like, so that was picked up immediately by the media.
Now, the thing that I was thinking, and of course, you know, she says, oh, she's so sorry, and she didn't mean anything by it, and she was sincerely apologetic.
I don't think she actually did mean anything by it.
I think it's just dumb, you know?
Well, no, but here's what I'm thinking, even taking it beyond dumb.
She had to be thinking about it.
She had to have in her mind to make this assertion or to even bring it up.
It had to be in the back of her mind thinking, you know, Obama could get killed.
I mean, he could get hit by a bus.
I mean, there's a million things that can happen.
I don't think she was thinking that way.
She was thinking about it or she wouldn't have said it.
That's the way I'm looking at it.
But isn't that always the case?
I mean, I've said myself, you know, Ron Paul is still only one heartbeat away from the nomination.
I think it's more than one.
I don't know, man.
He's like about 40 heartbeats away.
No, there's no one else left.
He's the only guy left.
If McCain keels over...
Well, he's only one heartbeat away.
Actually, it probably applies more to McCain just dying of old age.
Yeah, exactly.
But anyway, so that's the story.
And so now it's become a big scandal, and it's put her in a situation where she's now completely screwed herself.
She won't get the vice presidency.
She's going to have trouble running in 2012.
I mean, these little things, you know, it's like that Howard Dean guy, you know, screaming, you know, yeah!
Kind of thing.
It just sticks to you.
So now you're going to revise your prediction?
What the Hillary's going to, you know, no.
I'm going to stick with the possibility that there could be something weird.
I think this didn't help.
In fact, I think if I was going to take Betts right now on who was going to be the Democratic nominee, I would not take any Betts.
Or I'd probably take Obama.
It kind of depends on how they spin this, right?
I think there's two things that have to happen.
Because I'm really enjoying following your analysis and truly believing that the Clintons will exert so much power over superdelegates and whatever needs to happen in Florida and all this stuff.
And then, you know, the appeasement stuff against Obama.
So, you know, clearly she slipped up.
She's doing all the Republicans' work for them.
So, it could kind of blow over.
You know, something...
New could crop up.
I mean, we've already forgotten Reverend Wright with this thing, right?
So there's still a lot of time.
Yeah, it did up the ante, and anything can happen.
I mean, Obama, though, has been so...
I mean, he doesn't say anything, if you listen to him.
He just...
And the way we should be looking at this, you know, just a very slow, kind of a monotone.
I mean, he sounds...
He's eloquent, but he's getting to be boring, you know?
It's like, can this guy say anything at all?
He says nothing.
And he's pompous, and I think it's going to start wearing thin after a while.
By the time the November election goes around, there should be two or three comedians copying his cadence, which is just horrendous.
Has Saturday Night Live not done anything on him yet?
I don't know.
I stopped watching.
I'm sure they're doing everything on a weekly basis.
I'll have to watch it.
I haven't watched it Saturday Night Live for three or four months.
I haven't watched it in maybe a year or so.
And I haven't seen, you know, there's got to be some comics that are nailing this guy because he's, and he never says anything.
He just, you know, talks about change.
He doesn't have anything, he doesn't have anything of, there's nothing specific.
It's just this rambling, buying the sky crap.
Who's financing him?
It's not just all little people making donations on the web.
Who's financing, you know, the Obama campaign?
Wall Street?
I don't know.
It's got to be Wall Street.
I don't know.
I'll have to look into it.
It's got to be Wall Street.
There hasn't been much on it because the media has jumped on.
All the right-wing talk show guys are talking about this.
Actually, a lot of the Democrats are talking about it, which is the media has just out and out subscribed to Obama.
I think there must be some hatred of the Clintons because the Clintons were really never media friendly.
And so they're just on Obama's side.
In fact, there was one of the weirdest shows on television is on CNBC or MSN. I think it's CNBC. It's called the Interviews or Conversations with Michael Eisner.
Yeah, I've seen a couple of these.
He's not a great interviewer, but it's compelling to watch just because it's him.
No, he's absolutely terrible at it, as a matter of fact, because he's trying to be everybody's friend, and he's kind of creepy as an interviewer.
He is.
He has that Steve Ballmer kind of facial expression, you know what I mean?
Yeah, and it's like he's doing job interviews or something.
Or it's shitty, it's really crappy dinner conversation with your boss kind of thing.
Yeah, right.
So he had, but he did have one of his old buddies on the other day.
And I just, first time I've seen the show for a while because it's on some weird hour and it's hard to catch and I'm not going to record it.
Because I hate to come back from a vacation going, oh, I'm filled up with this, you know.
So he had Jan Winter.
Rolling Stone editor, the original founder, right?
And he was just out and out and says, you know, yeah, no, we're just backing Obama.
The whole publication is just Obama.
We put Obama on the cover, and we did this and we did that.
We offered something to Hillary early on, but she said no.
So we're just behind Obama.
And I'm thinking, what is this magazine?
They're behind Obama.
And I think the media in general is behind Obama, and that's what's giving him this big boost.
It's very typical, though, isn't it?
I mean, the media everywhere is basically claiming him the winner, and with this latest Clinton...
Gaff.
Gaff.
That's the word I'm looking for.
So I'm just looking at OpenSecrets.org actually does a pretty good job at tracking all donations.
So I'm looking at everything over $2,300.
And I don't see any...
I don't really see any Wall Street companies in there yet.
Well, they're coming in general.
That's when they give money to both sides.
Hmm.
Hedge.
Interesting.
Well, clearly not the whole country is behind him.
Only a part of it, just looking at the primaries.
Well, no.
The problem is that he hasn't won any of the big monster states with the exception of Illinois, which is his state.
Right.
And I'm getting reminded of...
My dad was a big Republican.
I'm sorry, big Democrat.
He's never a Republican.
He hated the Republicans.
But he always was lamenting, I remember, for years after the elections were over, he was always lamenting the fact that the Democrats ran Adlai Stevenson, who was a...
He was described by my father, and apparently most of the people in the Democrat Party, as an egghead.
And they ran him twice in a row.
And he was like Obama insofar as that he kind of intellectualized a lot of things and had a really outstanding speaking.
He was an eloquent person.
But it was also the same kind of thing.
It was kind of slow and ponderous and it gets on your nerves after a while.
And in fact, John Kerry is in the same camp.
So the Democrats keep throwing up these throwbacks to the era of people that could do speeches.
There's a term for these guys who do these eloquent speeches in front of a large crowd.
They keep bringing these guys in instead of some plain talking person.
Well, it's show business, right?
I mean, Bush is at the complete opposite spectrum, and so everyone makes that comparison, but the fact of the matter is there is a middle ground.
Today.
Aren't the rules that you can only donate a maximum of $2,300 to a presidential campaign or in these elections?
There is a maximum number.
It's like $2,500 or even less or $250 or something.
I'm looking here.
It's like Susan Adelman, who is the president and CEO of Tivoli, Inc., which is a software company, I think.
So she's donated three times $2,300.
Isn't that illegal?
I don't know.
David Adelson, who's from the University of Oklahoma, has donated five times $2,300.
I see people donating $3,200, $4,600.
I thought there were limits on this stuff.
There is some sort of limit.
Now we're going to have to do our research on the next show, which is annoying.
Because I gave Ron Paul what I thought was the max, was $2,300.
I thought that's all you could do.
Well, I think maybe these have to do with events.
When you buy a seat at a table or something like that, perhaps, there might be some way of getting around it.
Hmm.
Interesting.
Well, so that's not exactly, you know, tons of donations from, you know, small people.
This is like rather significant donations from multiple times, from people who can afford it.
Yeah, well, they can definitely afford it.
In fact, they're cheap.
Let's see here.
Maximum political donation election.
$2,300 per election.
The current maximum limits for these offices are $2,300 per election, it says.
The current maximum candidate donation increased.
Maximum donation, blah, blah, blah.
Dude, I'm seeing all kinds of people donating multiple times.
This needs to be looked into.
And here's an area where there's 1,100 annual maximum donations allowed per individual.
Maybe it's a family of people and they're donating for their child, themselves, a husband and wife.
No, you have to do it by name.
You have to do it by name.
So it's this exact same name.
Every single time.
Over and over again.
Here, a husband and wife combo, I understand.
But here, Charles N. Alexander.
He's donated $4,600 on the 14th of March, $2,300 on the 9th of March.
Oh, these are state elections.
Okay, here it goes.
15 states, including Wyoming, have limits ranging from $1,000 to $5,000.
10 states allow maximum donation of $5,000 to $10,000, while 4 states have contribution maximums topping $10,000.
Okay.
And this is all primaries, right?
So these donations are going into various state elections.
Gotcha.
Okay.
So is Maryland one of those states, or Virginia?
It doesn't list them on this particular story.
Alright, okay.
Well, there you go.
Mystery solved.
Yeah, so you could have given a lot more.
Shit.
You know he would have been the frontrunner if only I'd given him a little bit more.
Yeah, well, it's too bad.
So, yeah, no, it'd be interesting to see who's backing these various people, but the big corporations will be backing McCain.
You can count on that.
Yeah.
Well, I'm with you, man.
I'm riding on the Hillary tip.
I still think that at the end of the day, the Democratic Party is going to say, holy shit, man, you know, we got to have someone who can actually, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe on a far outside chance with some luck and a little bit of tailwind, you know, keep our spot in the White House or get our spot in the White House.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I'm still of the opinion that Obama's not electable.
Well, he's electable.
I don't think he can win.
He just can't win yet.
Well, I just don't see anything changing.
I mean, I think this, unless he has something to say one of these days, except change, change, change, you know, it doesn't mean anything.
It's meaningless.
Change what?
Did Larry Lessig go into that Congress, Congressional thing that he was after?
I saw he just did a piece for the New York Times on orphan copyright stuff.
I don't know.
I haven't gotten a hold of him because he was doing something in Europe.
I don't know.
I'm going to have to track him down because I usually try to have lunch or something with him once in a while.
Yeah, because it was kind of sizzling for a while.
He wanted to do campaign finance reform or something like that.
Yeah, I know.
It was weird.
It was kind of weird.
I always say, you know, people don't get campaign finance reform and why it's never going to go anywhere.
Because they don't know where the money...
I mean, if you just analyze campaign finance reform, who gets the money at the end of the day?
The media does.
Yeah, it's spent on commercials.
So the media, if campaign finance reform ever came to pass, the only people that would really be screwed by it would be the media, the people taking all that money and running these ads.
And so if it ever got close to turning around, there would be all kinds of 60-minute reports and scandalous things about how campaign finance reform is unconstitutional and it's against free speech and it's a horrible thing and it's going to ruin the country.
And every place else they've done it has resulted in fascism and it's never going to happen.
What always amazes me is for the amount of money that is raised and is spent, and so let's say maybe 50% of the money is spent on media, I'm just picking a random number, because there's a lot of expensive consultants and all kinds of people who ride along on these campaigns.
Right.
But so let's say it's 50 to 100 million combined, right, between Barack and Clinton.
Man, they're making some badass TV commercials for that kind of money.
That's crap.
The absolute frickin' crap they're making.
Someone is stealing from them big time.
They're shit.
I mean, that's like Final Cut.
It's like Rev3 is making these commercials.
It's lame.
Not to say their programming is lame.
You get my point.
I mean, for that kind of money, you could have Spielberg making commercials.
I don't get it.
I know what you're saying because these things are terrible.
The problem is I think they're over-consulted and they're getting too conservative.
The commercials are uninteresting.
When moveon.org was doing this commercial, I don't know if they're doing it anymore because I haven't visited their site recently, but a number of years ago they had do-it-yourself commercials that were...
Done by the public using Final Cut Pro, but much of the public doing these are actually Hollywood directors.
And on their website, you can watch all these crazy commercials that were really nasty.
And some of them were actually quite funny.
And...
If that was implemented and actually went into major play so people could actually see some really poignant observational commercials rather than these stupid commercials that they run, I think it would be probably a benefit to these people.
But they're too conservative.
Nobody wants to do anything.
Obama won't say anything, what he really means about anything.
He just talks in generalities.
Hillary's...
If she ever does open her mouth, she sticks her foot in it like this Kennedy thing.
I mean, it's just two people are dull.
I have a different theory about those commercials, though.
I believe that they're probably actually highly effective and they probably are tested to death because they look very much like washing powder commercials.
And I think, you know, my theory is that in general, forget California and New York, everything in between, People elect their presidents the same way they do choose which washing powder they're going to use.
And those are bad commercials.
They're called detergent here in the U.S. Detergent.
I'm sorry.
You know what I'm talking about, though.
Those are horrible commercials.
Soap commercials, yeah.
So maybe that's what really works.
Lame-ass shit.
Everything else is art.
So I ran into something interesting yesterday.
I got a call from, I get called, people say, oh, I don't know, pollsters have never called.
I get called by pollsters all the time.
And, you know, I do what I'm obliged to do as a normal person, which is to give them bad information.
Of course.
But this case I didn't because it was a pretty straightforward poll, but I've never had this.
It was from Rasmussen.
And it seemed to have to do with, you can deconstruct the poll afterwards and figure out what they were trying to get at.
And, you know, they're trying to always direct it a little bit, even though this didn't have any trick questions by any means.
And this seemed to be a poll about where you get your news from newspapers or the internet, and how does it affect your judgment based on your age, insofar as who you'd vote for for president.
That's what I'm kind of thinking it was really about.
But the thing that was unique about it was it was the entire thing was automated.
I never had a...
There's no voice.
There's no person.
There's nobody calling me.
It's just a menu?
It's just a multiple choice menu?
Yeah, it was like a voice came on a woman's voice saying, if you were to vote for president today, would you vote for Obama, Hillary, or McCain?
Press one.
For Obama, press one.
For Hillary, press two.
That's expensive, too.
Well, it has to be on some, obviously some big computers doing the whole thing, because it also had forks.
Oh, you could go off and do a different survey?
Yeah, you could tell there was a fork every once in a while that would take you in a different direction because of one of your previous answers.
But the fact of the matter is the whole thing was automated, and I'm thinking, holy crap, they've institutionalized these polls now where it's not even anybody doing them.
They just program a computer, and then they push the button, and it starts calling everybody.
Yep.
So it's becoming pole mania in this country.
You know, when MTV, when I was there in the late 80s, early 90s, they did a lot of research.
And so, you know, MTV played music videos, but the research they did was traditional radio call-out research.
So they'd literally call a thousand people a day on the phone and say, do you recognize this song?
Yeah.
And they played the song over the phone.
And that's how they programmed MTV. They had no way or no money, really, to do research on music videos.
They just did audio.
Huh.
That's interesting.
Huh.
So, well, I'm not a big fan of necessarily overdoing the, you know, there's a moment where the public doesn't know the answer.
I mean, focus groups, and I think they're okay to do post-mortem analysis.
But to do stuff that's active, I don't think they're that accurate.
I think that, you know, this is what you hear...
The car companies, American car companies, have fallen prey to focus groups before they can make a decision, and many times it's a design decision.
And you can't have the public making design decisions in advance of a car being released, because the fact of the matter is that in some ways the better cars that actually influence other designs are art.
And it should be a professional designer who makes a decision, not the public, because the public will say, I don't know, it looks like, I don't like the looks of it, but that's because the look a year or two from now might be the hottest thing going, and if you'd ask the same question to the same person two years later, that says the best looking thing ever.
It's like a fashion thing.
I mean, you can't poll the public if you're a fashion designer doing dresses for the fall season, you know, six months in advance of the season.
They don't know about the color swatches and all the other kind of weird infrastructure stuff that takes place.
But that's all the fashion magazines.
The people who determine that are the editor of Vogue and Marie Claire magazine and...
Well, they make a judgment at the end, but they do these presentations that are kind of, you know, here it is, here's my collection, what do you think?
And then you can be destroyed after the fact, but at least it's not overanalyzed before they roll it out, and then they end up rolling out some milquetoast crap that has done interesting and probably five years behind the times, which is what happens when you do too much polling and you rely on the public to make your decisions.
In the fashion industry, it doesn't work that way.
It really doesn't.
The people who are calling the shots are the leading magazines and actually the manufacturers.
The manufacturers...
No, I'm understanding that.
What I'm just telling you is that you could try to implement a public-first policy if you were like a big design house and do focus groups and then determine what should be in the collection.
You could do that and it would be a huge disaster.
Kmart probably already does that then.
Well, I suppose.
I mean, it's possible.
They probably do now that you mention it.
Walmart, too, I'm sure.
But maybe.
I don't know.
It's hard to say.
Those places are operated kind of like warehouses and somebody else's responsibility to move the goods.
But those guys have it easy.
I mean, they just look at the designs that, you know, they just look at what's coming out and they just copy it.
Yeah, well that's the business that it is.
That is their business.
I understand what you're saying about polling.
Besides the point of fashion industry, what I'm just saying is that there's this dependency on the public in advance of things that are changing.
I don't think the public is good at dealing with or predicting change and direction.
Steve Jobs, I think one of his quotes, I subscribe to a quote-a-day service or something like that, quote-a-whatever it is.
He said, if we actually made what the public asked for, we'd be bankrupt.
Yeah.
I think there's a lot to that.
It's like the Simpsons episode where Homer was given the design.
He was the head designer of the car company.
They said, do whatever you want.
We don't even want to see it until it's finished.
What does he wind up with?
I'm not familiar with the episode.
It's a good episode.
He winds up with this huge boat of a car that's got everything in it except the barber's chair.
It was just a disaster.
All the features.
All the features you'd want and then some.
Yeah, awesome.
So anyway, I think in politics they've really fallen prey to this sort of thinking, which is, you know, don't do anything, it might offend the public.
So you have these, and this started years and years ago, obviously, it's nothing new.
But I always remember, the most memorable example to me was, I think it was when Mondale, who seemed like the dullest guy in history.
He was vice president, wasn't he?
Yeah, then he ran for president and lost.
Against who?
McGovern?
Oh, no, no, McGovern.
No, no, no, I'm sorry, I'm wrong.
McGovern was never president.
So, I always like to refer to President Hubert Humphrey.
He ran with that woman, Ferraro, wasn't it?
Oh, Geraldine Ferraro?
Yeah, I think so.
I think it was Mondale-Ferraro, was that the thing?
It's like, you can't remember, I was thinking about this yesterday, yeah, Mondale-Ferraro, is that you can't remember these matchups, and I was thinking, who won last year's Super Bowl?
I mean, it was the Giants won the Super Bowl, but who did they beat?
And I was thinking about it, and I couldn't...
Right.
If you say the Denver Broncos, you're pretty much okay, too.
Well, yeah, 20 years ago, maybe.
So, anyway, you can't...
I know you follow soccer more.
No, I follow football.
I follow everything I can.
The important games.
I don't give a shit about any sport, but the important stuff.
You know, the big matches.
I'll follow that.
Do you want to watch the basketball finals?
I'll watch it.
I'll watch the finals.
I don't like it.
It bores me.
That's a game that bores me.
The Lakers and the Celtics are going to be fantastic.
It's a throwback.
But anyway, so Mondale, Ferraro, they go out and they give all these talks.
And then...
He's dull.
He's dull.
He's unbelievable.
Walter Mondale.
So he comes on after he loses.
He comes on the Johnny Carson show or wherever it was.
And the guy's a laugh riot.
I thought he had tons of personality.
He had one-liners.
He was quick on the draw.
He was sharp as a whip or just as a tack.
And he was just like, I'm watching this guy going, holy crap, I would have voted for this guy.
Yeah, but this time around, everyone has already been on the talk shows, and so we've seen their personality.
Huckabee killed on Jay Leno.
No, Huckabee's the funniest of the group.
Yeah.
The guy could be doing stand-up.
Yeah, he killed, but still, he's out.
Yeah, no, but these other guys, what we're still seeing with Hillary and with Obama and to a lesser extent McCain, we're still seeing a phony facade of a person that if this election was over and they came back on the same show, they would not be acting that way.
They would be different.
If either one of them was a totally different person.
You know what it is?
It's the difference between...
We're just having a conversation right here.
We're just talking back and forth.
People can tell the difference between that and a stump speech or whatever it is they're doing or being on Meet the Press.
Let the guard down for once.
Be fucking human.
They like robots.
They both like their Manchurian candidates.
The counter-argument to that, if you're one of the consultants, is well, that's what Hillary did in Sioux Falls or Sioux City or wherever she was when she brought the assassination up.
No, it's also what she did when everyone thought she was going to cry.
And that really turned her campaign around at that point.
Yeah, well she's one for two.
But, you know, if she just said, hey, look, Americans, dudes, dudettes, like, look, I know this gas thing is out of control, you know, I'm going to go fix that, you know, I'm going to take care of some shit for you, and vote for me.
It would work.
I think people are ready for that.
They're tired of all the screaming, and that's what the media has become.
It's just screaming, screaming, screaming, loud voices.
Well, that's kind of how Jesse Ventura became the governor of Minnesota with that kind of approach.
And how did that work out for him?
He got bored with the job.
It does seem like a pretty crappy job, doesn't it?
That's why, you know, he got it.
He got the job and he wasn't the worst governor they've ever had, I suppose.
I'll say at the end of the day, I mean, my hat's off to all of these people who are doing this shit.
I mean, it's worse than show business.
You know.
It's not show business?
Yeah, for ugly people.
No, but you go through a lot of shit if you want to.
I don't know.
I think everyone's pretty jaded.
We really need to sex it up.
We need to bring in some...
Like, whoever does Boston Legal, you know, they've got to start doing the coverage of this stuff.
That guy.
Is that Bochco?
Yeah, that's what's his name.
That's not Bochco, is it?
No, no, Bochco.
Bochco.
No, Bochco is...
Steven Bochco?
Somebody's dead.
He's not dead.
No, Aaron Spelling's dead.
No, there's some other one.
Whatever the case is.
No, this is what's his name.
The guy who did Boston Legal is the guy who used to do Ali McBeal.
Ali McBeal, yeah.
You know, that guy.
Right.
And he's good.
He's got a good sense of humor.
Hell yeah.
It was this great episode.
One of our guys from Tech TV worked for him for a while, and then he went on to Law& Order.
And I haven't been able to get a hold of him.
I think he just married some actress, so I guess he's screwed now.
What is that guy's name?
This has become the Google show.
And here we are on Google, Googling so you don't have to.
That's right.
You can sit in your car.
It's a new service from Google.
Click here to be attached to an audio buddy.
David E. Kelly.
There you go.
Yeah, David E. Kelly.
My friend is Luke Ryder, who now shows up, I believe, as Lucas.
Yeah, but didn't he marry with Ally McBeal?
Oh no, she's living with Harrison Ford.
I think Kelly might have married her.
No, no, no.
She's with Harrison Ford.
Oh, that's right.
Harrison Ford.
Lucky bastard.
She's a little thin.
No, she was.
Just her build.
I don't think she was anorexic.
I know, but when you're that thin on television, because television adds...
Well, in my case, it adds 100 pounds.
But in most cases, it adds a little weight to you because of the horizontal scan lines.
And if you look that thin on television, you must be really thin.
Yeah.
It's fashion.
Well, you know, I don't care.
What difference does it make?
So yeah, Kelly...
Yeah, he would be better than, but you know, he's like I said, he's obviously would be, he'd probably subscribe, he's probably on the Obama campaign.
Yeah, right.
Because he's obviously, if you watch his shows, you know he's like a liberal democrat, with some conservative leanings on specific issues, or he wouldn't have these highly entertaining conservative characters on the show.
So he's probably a libertarian that's thinking Obama would be good.
That's my guess.
There was a funny episode that aired here last night where Nantucket wants an atomic bomb.
And so they asked the firm to go sue.
Because the laws, they won't give them rights to buy plutonium or whatever else they need.
I never saw that one.
I've actually stopped watching the show.
I watched it religiously for his first two or three seasons.
And then I found it becoming, you know, they lost some of their better characters, and they moved their emphasis around a little bit, and the dynamics changed just enough that it's like, you know, Denny is too much of a, you know, he's...
Cornier than he ever was.
They did get him off the mad cow thing and moved him over to various other ailments, which was a plus.
Now you should pick it up again, because it's gotten good with John Larroquette.
Yeah, see, I find Larroquette not to be...
You know, I've just found Larroquette to be slightly annoying.
I think he's, as a comic actor, he's kind of funny, but in this role, I find it annoying to...
I find them to be annoying, and I can't say specifically why.
Man, I hope these shows stay around.
They're so expensive to make.
These shows are like two, three million bucks an episode.
Yeah, but they make their money on the DVDs, and the problem is, can the DVD business stay around and keep them going?
Yeah, probably not.
Well, syndication is really where all the money comes from.
The big money is syndication.
Right, that's why they have to do the show for five years.
Yeah.
People always say, well, five years.
What's five years?
Five years means the show is shown one day.
Every day of the week.
Every day of the week for one year.
That's the same as five years of, you know, once a week.
And then the other thing I'm watching is...
A lot of guys quit after five years.
They just quit the show.
Yeah, like Jerry Seinfeld.
He did more than five years, didn't he?
He did nine years, but I think James Caan on that Vegas show, which is actually...
It's a pretty good show.
I've seen that.
Yeah, it's a good show.
I like it.
It's got nice characters.
It's comedic.
But he quit the show after his five seasons and just left, as far as I can tell, his five seasons.
Dirty Sexy Money with Donald Sutherland?
You know, I can't watch that show.
Really?
Really.
To me, it's just unwatchable.
It's exaggeration, just a bunch of jokes, a bunch of gags, and it doesn't do anything for me.
I like Donald Sutherland.
I like him no matter what he does.
And to be honest about it, I do too, but in this role, I don't like him.
I think he's too creepy.
And, of course, as a pilot, I actually want to know what happened to Dutch.
I want to know what went wrong with his flight in his Cessna 172 that they keep showing at the beginning of the show.
CIA. Yeah, of course.
All right, John.
You got anything else?
Well, let's see.
Yeah, I do, as a matter of fact.
You know, there's a lot of interesting things going on in the wine world.
Besides the new sensational straw?
Oh, that's right.
We haven't gotten those straws yet.
Well, so it came out Thursday.
I haven't seen it yet in the stores.
I did go and look for it for the wine in the carton, which came with a straw.
I haven't seen it yet.
Keep my eyes out.
Well, once we get the straws in our hands, then we can use them with other liquids.
Yes.
Once we get our hands on a couple of those straws, sensory straws, that's what they're called.
They're using a lot of dye in wine nowadays.
Really?
Yeah, there's this one particular one called Mega Purple.
You can look it up.
But Mega Purple is used all over the world now, and it's kind of a proprietary formulation.
They claim it's made from boiled down wine or something like that, but nobody will tell how exactly.
It's some big chemical company or additive company or something like that.
And so you use this Mega Purple to...
Because, you know, ever since Robert Parker became the American who became the number one wine reviewer in the world and put the huge...
One of the things is that they have this thing called Parkerized Wines, which are wines that appeal to his specific taste, which are for big, dark, black, inky wines.
So now they're just adding this crap to all these wines, which apparently also affects the flavor in a positive way during a blind tasting.
But they're doing that in the barrel, not after it's in the bottle, right?
Well, no, you wouldn't do it after it's in the bottle.
It would be impractical.
But it's somewhere in the process, maybe during the...
I don't know where it's used in the process.
It's probably just before it's put in the barrel.
That would be my guess.
I don't know.
And this is happening with premium wines?
With, like, the stuff you and I drink?
Well, this is what the controversy is.
They say it's with under $20 wines that make them better.
I'd call that premium.
Yeah, you would.
$20, man, of a screw top?
Yeah.
But generally speaking, it's believed that the under $20 wines have it, and of course the cheaper wines would too.
But you don't know that the over $20 guys aren't using it in a bad year or whatever, because there's been an awful lot of wines over the last five years or longer that are just way too dark for their standing in society, as it were.
There are not wines that should be dark.
There's just not...
But that's determined by the color of the grape, no?
Yeah, the colors are extracted from the skins in the fermentation process.
The alcohol, for one thing, is a solvent and it helps extract some of these colors.
But what's the point if you can just dump this stuff in?
Anyway, it's a big scandal.
Nobody knows what to do about it.
I run into these wines every once in a while.
I'm thinking if I could come up with a test, but unfortunately, the product, if it's made from grape skins to begin with, there's nothing to test for.
Yeah, so there's no extra chemical or additive that you can...
So they're just basically taking dark grape juice and adding...
You know, they're doing what Patricia's doing.
They're just adding grape juice.
Maybe she should get into business.
I'm telling you, she's got an idea there.
She really does.
Wait until I lay those cartons on her, man.
She's going to love that, I'm telling you.
She's going to love the sensory straw.
Well, you know, she could do some ads for them.
Yeah, right.
They could probably move a lot of product in Holland.
Yeah, wow.
That's a market for you.
Well, you know, it's market.
I've been reading about the chemicals, the pharmaceuticals now.
All these patents are running out and all these drugs and they're trying to figure out how they're going to make money.
Have you been following that?
Yeah.
You know, they're trying to figure out how, not how they make money, they're trying to figure out how to continue to gouge the public.
Yeah, that's what I meant.
Get your wordage right.
Exactly, how to gouge the public.
Well, the same thing with copyrights.
That whole discussion is cranking up in the UK again, where the copyrights are 50 years still.
What is it in the States?
190 years now?
What has Disney pushed it up to?
It's actually, if you, it's 500 years after you die.
500 years?
No, you're kidding me.
It's like 95 years.
Isn't it something like that?
No, it's like 100 or 150.
It's some ridiculous thing.
I think it's like 75 years after you die, but you could die when you're 75.
So the thing of being copyrighted for 150 years, I think, is about what it runs.
And the irony of this is all of this copyright stuff in the States that was pushed forward by Sonny Bono, Cher's ex-husband, and he was mayor of Palm Springs.
Well, he was a congressman for a while.
He was also a congressman.
And the irony, of course, is he hit a tree while skiing and died.
You know, he was out there getting copyrights lengthened to pass the...
No, there is a joke there.
I mean, that's not it, but...
That's not it, but there's a joke there.
...pulp from the tree, which was going to be used to make paper.
You know, I don't know.
He died from a skiing accident.
So Cliff Richard is bitching about it again.
Because he's actually old enough that his first big hits are now going into public domain.
And he's unhappy about it.
He's saying he makes no money.
It's interesting.
Oh, he makes no money, huh?
Well, off of the royalties, no.
What difference does it make if it goes into public domain, if you're not making any money off of it anyway?
Well, I mean, not any money, not any significant money.
But, you know, I'm sure it's some.
Well, I'm a big fan of the public domain because it's one way, for example, if you're taking art history, you know, you have to, you can't even do an art history book nowadays and use any of the Picasso images because they're all copyrighted.
And so why are you supposed to teach art history without showing Picasso?
I thought that wasn't allowed.
Sorry?
I thought that wasn't allowed.
I thought that, oh wait, Picasso, of course, isn't a grandmaster.
Oh, wow.
Really?
You can't do that anymore?
The grandmasters are all way past the 150-year point.
I mean, no, you can't.
Well, I mean, people do it, but the point is that it's actually sketchy to be like, I couldn't do a book on Picasso, that's for sure, without getting permission from the estate.
And I'd have to get permission for each and every individual image.
In an art history book, you could probably get away with using a few images as fair use, And they're not going to do too much about it.
But if you did a whole chapter on him and you were just pounding these Picasso images on, especially if they were good-sized, you could get in trouble.
And it's ridiculous.
I mean, Picasso's been dead for God knows.
What difference does it make to him?
I'll take it even further.
I have a book called The History of Modern Art, and I'm sure you can get it somewhere online.com.
And it's a book that shows, I was turned on to it by an art dealer, a book that shows Picasso's paintings and then it shows pictures, photographs of his workshop and you'll see African artifacts like vases and statues and you'll see that he literally copied the African art.
And, you know, he abstracted it into his Picasso style, but he literally copied the designs of African art, and those were his paintings.
And you can see them one for one next to each other.
You see his workshop, you see the statue, you see the picture of the crazy-looking lady with a long neck, you know?
So, I mean, that's...
And by the way, I'm totally okay with that.
That's how art is supposed to work, right?
You build on other stuff, and you copy, and you steal, and you emulate, and you aspire.
Yeah, that's how perspective became, you know, a big deal.
I mean, it's like anything else.
It's fashionable.
And artists, you know, see what other artists do, and they study it, and then they try to do it better.
But now you can't even reproduce pictures of Picasso.
That's pretty amazing.
Well, exactly.
In fact, all the artists from 1924 on, because that's where I think the number is right now for most copyright stuff, even though there's this, you know, you have to be dead 75 years thing.
But for the most part, most of the art that you can copy, put on, you know, use for calendars and just grab and use or use for decoration has to be pre-1924, minimally.
Which means that everything is impressionism.
So the only kind of art that anybody knows in the United States, because we don't get confronted with too much of the other stuff, because it was just so sketchy in how we can reproduce it without going through permissions places.
And there's a couple, luckily there's at least that's consolidated into one or two groups.
But the fact is, it's not cheap.
They're not going to give you the license for nothing.
And so it's like, well, should I do that?
It's going to cost me an extra $50 if I do it this way or if I do it this way.
It's free.
I'll go with the free thing and save $50.
And you end up just continuing to promote Van Gogh and Monet.
We're the safest guys you can promote.
There's a story over here that hit my radar a couple of times, mainly because the woman in the painting is British.
And this was a fascinating story a couple of weeks ago.
Lucian Freud is a painter.
And this most recent painting, he's 85 years old, sold for $33 million.
The guy's still alive.
It's basically a really...
It's not even Rubenesque.
It's like a fat lady, naked, lying on a couch.
$33.6 million.
And the guy's alive.
Who is the artist?
Lucian Freud.
Huh.
Sounds like a Botano style.
So...
Well, that's a pretty good one if you can get it.
But isn't that amazing?
Here's a guy who's actually alive.
Yeah, well, it's good for him.
At 85, I don't know what he's going to do with the money, but whatever.
But what is that about, though?
Why all of a sudden does a painting like that go into the stratosphere, which is close to Picasso prices?
Why does that happen?
That's baffling to me.
I mean, it doesn't sound right.
That's an awful lot of money to spend for a contemporary piece of art.
Well, that's why it was in the news, obviously.
Yeah, no, send me a link.
You just did.
I just Skyped you one, yeah.
Well, just check that out and see what's what.
It's just...
Gobsmacked is what I am.
Gobsmacked.
But that's aspirational, man.
Oh, that picture is terrible.
You couldn't put that in the wall.
You'd be so grossed out by it.
That's what I'm trying to figure out.
She's always a one giant breast.
And it's a British woman.
It's a British woman.
And she's done a couple interviews because, you know, obviously this painting sells for $33 million.
That's pretty interesting that it's of her.
$33 million.
The name of this piece is Benefit Supervisor Sleeping.
Yes, I think she was a Benefit Supervisor.
Yes.
It's like people have to check this.
I'm going to have to blog it and people are going to just have to go look it up.
Oh, wait.
Here's my opportunity to say, of course, you will find a link in our extended show notes which are maintained by the expert hand of Bubba Martin.
Yeah, Bubba will put a link in there to this thing.
Yeah.
That shows up on both Adam's site and the Cage Match, the Vorak site.
But isn't that extraordinary that that's happening?
I mean, that's inspirational.
That means any kid who actually, you know, hears about this story, but of course it's highly underreported, it's like, hey, wait a minute, you know, I could be a lot of things.
I could actually be a painter who makes good money and painting fat chicks.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the thing is that the Lucian Freud is a good example of an artist who you don't get to see his stuff much because it's all covered by copyrights.
And so you just, you know, it won't get in a lot of books.
It won't get in too many classes.
I mean, you have to go, if you're teaching art history, you have to go sneak a camera in or buy some slides from the museum.
It's just the whole thing is ridiculous.
But, you know, I understand it's important in the early going of work when it becomes popular, but I don't know.
I have mixed feelings about the whole thing.
I'm on Larry Lessig's side.
We're going to get Larry Lessig on Cranky Geeks, and we're going to talk about this issue.
About the art issue?
No, about the orphan copyright works, and about copyright in general.
Because I don't think people really understand how screwed up it got.
And, of course, they blame the internet for everything, but...
It's not.
It's Disney.
It's Disney.
It's Disney greed.
It's that freaking mouse.
That's exactly what it is.
But I'm sure other people would have wanted to go this route.
It's not just Disney.
Everyone sees that, okay, hey, wait a minute.
Like Cliff Richard.
It's freaking Cliff Richard.
And the guy's up in arms.
I can understand where he's coming from, but at a certain point, when are you going to do something that's good for the rest of the world, good for society?
I think it's important.
Good for culture.
Did I lose you?
No, I'm reading this piece.
It says in the 1980s, this guy's paintings were frequently sold.
They couldn't even sell them at auction.
Oh, of course not.
I just don't understand.
What's the trigger?
What happened?
What happened that this guy all of a sudden...
There was a big story in Holland the other day.
Wait, let's stop for a second, because people are going to have to definitely check this out.
Because it's like...
What is even remotely appealing about this picture?
It's not like a modern piece.
It's a...
It's just a...
It's a very fat lady.
It's horrible.
It's a big fat lady, naked.
Can I just say one thing?
Can I just say, John, please?
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, okay?
Yeah, but she's still fat, besides the point.
But fat does not equal horrible.
Look at yourself, man.
I'm not as fat as she is.
Well, I don't know.
I haven't seen you naked on the couch.
You'll get lucky next time.
And you never will, by the way.
I'll give you some of that grape juice wine and suck it through a straw and I'll have you out of your clothes in no time.
If you were this woman, I mean, it's not an attractive picture, let's put it that way.
It's not flattering.
Just because you're not into it, but a lot of people are into this.
Now, seriously, clearly a lot of people with a lot of money are into this.
Ah, brother.
Okay.
I'm just being fair.
Come on, just being fair.
I mean, I'm not grossed out by her.
I'm just like, okay, well, no.
I'm not grossed out by her.
It's a painting, for God's sake.
But the point is, it's just like 33.6 million?
I don't think so.
But what do I know, obviously?
I don't know.
Patricia might know.
Come over here.
This painting, you saw this painting?
Of the fat lady?
This one here?
You saw that, right?
Yeah, the Dutch paper.
Dutch paper?
No, no, no.
Yeah, I've seen it.
The English paper?
You don't know the story.
Okay.
Ask her what she thinks of it.
What do you think of it?
How much would you pay for that painting?
Yeah, no, I've seen it in the paper.
Come over here.
Come over to the microphone.
I've seen it in the paper.
Hi.
How much would you pay for...
Talk in the microphone.
How much would you pay for that painting?
Um...
Maybe $5,000.
$5,000.
$5,000.
But I know they paid a lot of money.
$33 million.
I know, I know.
Do you know why?
It was just a fat lady.
She says, just a fat lady.
Nobody knows why.
$5,000 seems a little high.
Anyway, okay.
We won't go into it.
I'm going to get a bunch of nasty notes from everyone who's put on five pounds.
I'm just saying.
I'm just saying.
There could be people who actually adore that.
But still.
Yeah, whatever.
So, I don't know.
I guess we can leave the end of the show on this baffling note.
The world has gone crazy.
We're going to hell in a handbasket, I tell you.
So we'll have to send a link to Bubba and then people can talk about it amongst themselves.
They'll have to do something.
Anyway, okay.
So I totally felt this show had absolutely no direction.
No, it was a classic.
This was the most no agenda we've ever had.
It just wandered.
But it had its moments.
It had its highs and lows.
But you're right.
We were completely...
There's no theme.
So it's going to be tough to title this one.
Well, let's do the title now.
Oh, let's see.
This is what we do after the show, Norma.
The Fat Lady Sings.
Something with Fat Lady Sings.
That would be right.
The, um...
I don't know.
Um...
Why don't we just call it, name it after this painting, which was the sleeping, what was it, Benefit Supervisor.
That's great.
Hold on, let me just see, is that what it's called?
Benefit Supervisor Sleeping.
Yeah, okay, that's it.
Benefit Supervisor Sleeping, that is now the title of the show.
Excellent.
All right, everybody, coming to you from the Curry Manor in Guilford in the United Kingdom, my name's Adam Curry.
And I'm John C. Dvorak here in a blustery and slightly wet Northern California.
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