The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Hee hee….I’m watching Letterman as I write this, and he’s playing “Know Your Current Events” with some woman from Dallas. Letterman cracks, “How ’bout them Cowboys!” and what sounds like six people in the audience bother to applaud. America’s team. Yeah, right.
(By the way, what’s with the parade of Bush Administration people on Letterman’s show lately, anyway? It strikes me as slightly odd that Lynne Cheney and Colin Powell were guests on consecutive nights.)
I don’t know if I’ve ever heard more dishonesty from an NPR guest than what I heard from a guy named Tim Searcy on yesterday’s Talk of the Nation. (As of this writing, the link to the segment itself isn’t working.) Who is Tim Searcy? He’s the Executive Director of the American Teleservices Association – – which means he’s the Telemarketer-in-Chief.
This guy was incredible. He kept spouting the nonsense about how the telemarketing industry will lose two million jobs over this, which is an absurd figure, really; and he seemed to know how absurd it was, because he kept bringing up sympathetic imagery, pointing out that it’s single moms and minorities who are doing the calling. Here’s why he was so dishonest:
:: Little mention was made of the sorts of calling that will still be allowed. Non-profit organizations can still call, politicians can still call, and the big one that doesn’t get mentioned: companies with whom you have an established business relationship can call. And that last one is pretty hazy, because it doesn’t take much at all to establish a “prior business relationship”. You know all those forms you sign when you buy any appliance bigger than, say, a toaster? Those will establish business relationships. And what else might, I wonder? If you subscribe to TIME Magazine, does that mean you have a business relationship with AOL-Time-Warner? And if so, does that mean that you’re open to calls from all of their respective marketing departments? I’m not entirely sure, to be honest, but I have my suspicions.
:: Business-to-business calling isn’t going anywhere, either.
:: I can’t speak for other locales, but the telemarketing firms in Buffalo are always hiring, not just for outgoing cold calls but for research calls (I’m not sure if these will be forbidden by the List), and for collections calls (which are subject to regulation that is separate from the Do-Not-Call List), but also for inbound customer service calls. Believe me, the call centers aren’t going to be locking the doors anytime soon.
:: The Do-Not-Call List applies to specific phone numbers, not to families. So if you’re signed up, and you move in two years and therefore get a new number, guess what! You can get called again. And believe me, they’re going to be on top of it. Especially since the List is set up so that there is a lag period between when you sign up for the List and when they have to stop calling you. People move a lot in this country.
:: Finally, the “We’ll lose two million jobs” argument. That would pretty much double the number of jobs lost in the current economic morass, wouldn’t it? Does anyone really believe that the Do-Not-Call List will do more damage to the telemarketing industry than has befallen manufacturing in general in this country? What a doltish argument.
What was most depressing was that host Neil Conan made no effort to challenge this guy on his numbers. Good Lord. I love to listen to NPR, but sometimes they really do bend over backwards to be nice, and it’s annoying when they do. (Granted, I did not hear the entire show, so I may actually be wrong on this point. When I get a chance to listen to the whole segment, once it’s available, if I’m wrong here I’ll retract.) One caller in to the segment did challenge the numbers, and this Searcy guy very nicely dodged by saying something like “That’s wrong on so many levels“, and then retreating to “If you support this list, you are objectively pro-tossing the single mommy on the street” nonsense.
I’m not sure what Matthew Yglesias is referring to here, but I suspect he might need to pay a bit more attention to the TV that’s on Sunday afternoons, as opposed to Sunday mornings. Turn off the C-SPAN and watch some ESPN, Matt!
I assume that Brian Williams, when moderating the latest debate amongst the Democratic presidential candidates, referred to the eleven men on a football team, by which he undoubtedly meant the eleven players who are allowed on the field at any one time. This is why teams will get penalized if they happen to have twelve men on the field while a play is in progress, and why in a city where the fans are especially loud and rambunctious in the stands, the phrase “The Twelfth Man” is used to refer to them.
(By the way, anyone who pays attention to football sooner or later gets to see Steelers head coach Bill Cowher’s head nearly explode as he takes exception to a referee’s call. By far the best was some years back when his Steelers got flagged for twelve men on the field, when they really only had the specified, and legal, eleven. He got a photograph of the play in question at halftime – – football teams take huge numbers of photos of every play, for coaching analysis after the game – – and then he proceeded to track down the offending ref and stuff the photo down the guy’s shirt. It was a classic moment. Cowher got fined pretty heavily, if memory serves. I think that game might have been against the Vikings.)
UPDATE: It turns out that Matthew probably knew what he was talking about, and Brian Williams muffed the analogy. In his opening remarks to the debate (official transcript here), Williams said: “We have an extraordinary field of Democratic candidates, extraordinary, for one, for its size. We are one short of an official NFL roster at 10.” So, he was clearly trying to allude to eleven men on the field, but he mis-spoke and allude to the actual roster, which is actually 53 men, if memory serves. So I didn’t catch Matthew in a funny error after all. Bummer.
In exactly three years, I will meet the age requirement to be President of the United States. My campaign begins now. I know that 2006 is not an election year, but there are ways of dealing with these things.
First, I am taking donations via that PayPal link so I can buy a clone army, which I will use to….
Rhos Dirion from the col west of Twmpa. (Locations in Wales.)
Someday I want to travel to Great Britain, so I can see all the locales associated with Arthurian legends and the Celtic legends that preceded them, such as the Welsh Mabinogion. I found an incredibly nifty photo gallery of Welsh locales here.
And here, for fans of William Wordsworth, is Tintern Abbey:
Via Bookslut, I discover more fuel for my never-ending hatred of Entertainment Weekly.
Following Sheila‘s instructions, I went over to this writer’s blog to leave a note of encouragement. (And I was sufficiently impressed after a dip in her archives that I added her to the blogroll, so say Hello to Sarah Jane Elliott, a writer-to-be from Canada.) It seems that Ms. Elliott had a story rejected by Realms of Fantasy, and needs some good words. Fair enough.
Except that she indicates that at least she got the yellow rejection letter, not the “Blue Form of Death”.
At that point my head thudded upon the table, because my most recent rejection — for my “Snow White” retelling, the one that just poured out of me a few months back — was from Realms, and it came on the Blue Form of Death. I’m taking this to mean that the story didn’t even make it past the first reader at Realms.
Of course, another clue was that the Blue Form of Death lists a handful of probable reasons for rejection, among which the phrase “it simply didn’t stand out” was highlighted. This kind of irritated me, in that it tells me absolutely nothing. “It didn’t stand out” is semantically the same as “We found ten or twelve better stories that were indisputably better than yours”, which is pretty damned obvious since I’m looking at a rejection slip.
I am probably in a minority, but I simply don’t want an editor’s half-baked thoughts on why they’re rejecting the story; those thoughts, given as they always are in a total vaccuum, are of no use to the story at hand and they provide no real lesson for the stories that are in the offing. So I’d much prefer to leave it at “Thanks for the submission, but we can’t use it” and send me on my way. I want a “Yes”, or I want a “No”. That’s it.
Now, if you want to give me a more detailed reason, fine. (Weird Tales does this nicely.) But the Realms approach — “We can’t take time to tell you why we don’t want your work, but it could be this, this, this or this”, with the appropriate “this” highlighted — is rather bogus. But I suppose it’s better than the Asimov’s rejections, which I am told are more like this: “The vast majority of submissions here suck, and yours is probably in that number. Here are some reasons why most stories suck. Have a nice day.”
But even that is small condolence, because — guess what — my baseball story is currently at Asimov’s. I can’t wait.
Regular readers of this space will also be familiar with my quixotic obsession with my ranking on the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem, and specifically my bizarre obsession with my ranking as compared with that of blogger William Burton, whose blog stubbornly refuses to fall much lower than it is right now despite the fact that it has gone un-updated for almost eight months now.
Well, today I checked and I now outrank William Burton. I am currently a “Marauding Marsupial”, and my rank today is 403rd on the Ecosystem. William Burton is 506th. Huzzah! Let there be milk and honey throughout all the land, and let us sing with the voices of angels!
Here are a few interesting things I’ve found out and about Blogistan today, in a lefty-political vein:
:: Michael Moore answers some of his critics’ objections. (via Oliver Willis)
:: John Scalzi on dishonesty in the current administration. This sums up a great deal of how I feel about things right now.
:: Matthew Yglesias has some thoughts about Presidential succession. This one’s not particularly lefty, but still interesting in a wonky kind of way.
:: I was wondering how long it would take Gregg Easterbrook, who seems to increasingly blend good writing with a bizarro-world view of reality, to migrate his fixation on Hillary Clinton’s byline from his Tuesday Morning Quarterback columns on ESPN.com to his TNR weblog. And the answer is: today.
Regular readers of this space will know that I make no apologies for my never-ending love of the show Friends, which begins its final season tonight. For those not keeping track (i.e., those poor deluded souls who think that Survivor is interesting), this year will be an abbreviated season for Friends: there will be only eighteen new episodes, with the balance consisting of classic episodes chosen by the fans. I don’t know about that particular aspect of this season, since the show’s been in syndication for several years now, which means that pretty much any episode can be guarateed to show up within a certain time frame, and since the show’s first four seasons are now on DVD. But yeah, I’ll end up watching those reruns anyway, because not only do most of the shows still make me laugh, there are some that even make me tear up.
How do I hope Friends goes out? Well, I hope they don’t lead up to some big “capstone” moment for the show, the way MASH kind of had to. For my money, the best finale episodes of long-running TV series were the ones for Cheers and Star Trek: The Next Generation, both of which managed to tell stories that delved deeply into the shows’ early, foundational years but also didn’t feel the need to draw some big conclusion to the proceedings. When both shows ended, you still got the feeling that the next day, Sam would show up to open the bar and that the Enterprise would go on exploring the galaxy.
I hope that Friends doesn’t do a MASH-like finale, with the characters each going off to some fate totally separated from the others. (Yes, we know that Joey will, since we know he’s moving on to a spin-off next season, but that’s it.) The MASH finale had to be that way, because it dealt with the war ending. Probably the most maligned finale episode ever is Seinfeld‘s, and with good reason: while I loved the idea of putting these incredibly shallow and narcississtic characters on trial for basically being themselves, the actual execution of the idea ended up not being very funny. And the finale of The X-Files was a really good episode, but it was handicapped by coming at least a year after it should have (and probably two years, really).
Unlike the writer of this MSN article, whose reading of psychological baggage into Friends is a lot creepier than anything in the show itself, I don’t really have much of an opinion on specific things that must happen in the final season. Generally, I think Ross and Rachel should end up together, but I don’t need a big wedding for the two of them in the finale. I don’t need to see the entire gang break up, with Chandler and Monica moving to Chicago or some such thing. Basically, the show’s writers have done exceedingly well for nine years now; I’m willing to go along for a tenth.
(But there must be a final cameo for Janice. Maybe she and Gunther can end up together?)
The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer