You might already know that I have a book that “launches” this coming Wednesday.  It’s about the stuff I learned in 30 years of being an ad agency guy and radio copywriter.

The book has a Facebook page, and its own website as well.  Those will serve as an ongoing Second Edition.  So my intention is to never release a new version of the book, or a Part II, but to use the website as the home to every chapter I come up with that didn’t make it into the book before I sent it to the printer.

To that end, it would make sense for an advertising book that talks about the Super Bowl, to have some kind of commentary on Super Bowl advertising.

It’s with that in mind that I excitedly tell you about my panel of Monday Morning Quarterbacks.  Commentary on the Super Bowl commercials from people who actually know stuff about marketing and advertising.  The panel includes Larry MacInnis (Creative Director for CHUM Radio in Toronto), Mike Kryton (Creative Director, AXE Productions in Edmonton), Mark Kaplowe (owner of Kaplowe Studios in Connecticut and the most familiar voice in North American car dealer advertising), and oh yeah… Seth Godin has a thing or two to say as well.

That’s a partial list, and I’m recruiting other members along the way.  We’ll tell you what ads worked, what ads sucked, and you get the bonus of knowing that the people sharing their opinions with you have serious street cred.  (Larry and Mike are among two of the most decorated and celebrated ad men in Canadian history.)

Our Monday Morning Quarterbacks weigh in on – surprise – Monday, February 6th.  You’ll find their comments and be able to join the conversation at whatwasthatnumberagain.com.

It seems to have become a regular thing that I have joined the CTV News family for a weekly commentary on the week’s events; I usually appear on CTV News Channel, Saturday mornings around 11:10 Eastern Time (although the piece airs nationally).  I’m going to make an effort to post the highlights from my notes and the conversations with the anchors each week after the piece airs.  This is the first attempt.  My time on CTV News Channel is markedly more lighthearted than what’s below; I hope you get to catch it sometime.

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STORY:  Justin Trudeau calls Environment Minister Peter Kent “a piece of sh*t” on the floor of Canada’s House Of Commons during Question Period.

First, my position on this issue has nothing to do with an exchange that Justin and I had on Twitter (and on this blog) back in March of this year, or with the fact that he still owes me the beverages he promised.  I’ve been in broadcasting since 1981 (Justin was 10).  Never once in those 31 years did I curse on the air.  Were there subjects I was passionate about?  You could say that.  After all, I was in the middle of reading a live weather forecast for my area – an hour or so outside of Manhattan – when out of the corner of my eye, I saw a second plane hit a second tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.  I didn’t curse in that moment, simply because one doesn’t curse on the air.  And if I could be restrained in that moment, Justin Trudeau could certainly have avoided leaping to his feet and having “piece of sh*t” immortalized in Canada’s meeting minutes for all eternity.  Please don’t let anyone give you any excuse other than it being a carefully orchestrated piece of Trudeau Theatre.  It was, I might add, executed brilliantly, including the mock apology afterward.  If you know anything about Justin Trudeau you have a very strong hunch that he fully intended to use that word, fully intended for the media firestorm afterward, and milked it for everything it was worth.

Come on, Justin.  Most Canadians view “Question Period” as a room full of angry monkeys flinging feces at each other as it is – we don’t need you to try and make the analogy more real.

I think that’s a point that needs to be made as well, because I think it escapes most Canadian politicians.  I know that during “Question Period”, you folks think you’re earning your pay and showing Canadians how hard you’re working in holding the other side’s feet to the fire.  The truth is that “Question Period” is the time when you disappoint us the most, and when most of us realize our emperors have no clothes.  It’s when we realize we elected a room full of people we thought were going to look out for us, who then get to Ottawa and essentially turn the Government into a day care.

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STORY:  Just two weeks after a media frenzy over having a search and rescue helicopter pick him up from a fishing vacation to take him to a photo op, Canada’s Defence Minister Peter MacKay is under fire for ringing up a hotel bill that averaged $1452 per night during a conference, in a hotel where his staff had rooms that cost less than $300 per night.

I have trouble with this story because as I said a couple of weeks ago when “Choppergate” happened, I’m a MacKay fan.  But what this story has done has removed any credibility that Canada’s federal government will ever have in being able to question corporate executives about lavish spending.  If Peter MacKay can pay $1452 a night for a hotel room, then Fred’s Garage can write off a $34,000 kitchen makeover for the break room.  If Peter MacKay can have a military helicopter serve as a personal taxi to take him from photo op to photo op, I can write off a stretch limousine to take me to Grand & Toy for a box of paper clips.

Mister MacKay, $1452 a night is what Charlie Sheen pays for a hotel room.  And that’s AFTER he’s trashed it and had to pay for the repairs.

Know why Canadians don’t get particularly upset about these stories?  Because it’s just the latest chapter in our belief that Government exists to screw the little guy.  They steal our money (although they call it taxation), and then waste our money on things that we could never afford for ourselves.  And it’s become such an accepted part of the way things are done that individual incidents of abuse don’t really add much to the overall size of the pile.

News flash for many in Ottawa:  YOU.  WORK.  FOR.  US.  Not the other way ’round.  Every penny you spend is OUR MONEY.  It’s NOT yours.  You can NOT use it as you please.  When we get angry with you for having wasted it on something stupid, remember that it is, in fact, a reprimand from your employer, and take it as a warning that you’d better not make the same mistake a second time.

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STORY: Former NHL player Mike Milbury is alleged to have walked out onto the ice during a youth hockey game in Massachusetts and in his role as Assistant Coach of his son’s team, roughed up a 12 year-old boy from the opposing team who’d been in an altercation with his son, and threatened him.

During his playing career in the NHL, Mike Milbury was never known for having the sharpest skates on the ice, if you know what I mean.  If you want to look up the defining moment of Milbury’s career, you won’t see video of him scoring the goal that won his team a Stanley Cup, or making the play that won his country a gold medal at the Olympics; you’ll see him climbing into the stands to beat up a fan.  To paraphrase my old friend and Yuk Yuk’s comedian Jim McAleese, Mike Milbury was the kind of player who would be awarded a penalty shot and dump the puck in the corner.

If I’m a parent of a kid in that league, I’m demanding a restraining order that Mike Milbury not be permitted near a sports facility of any kind until he’s completed some kind of anger management or counseling program, and that’s at a minimum.

Related articles

• Justin Trudeau hurls obscenity at Peter Kent in Commons (thestar.com)
• Mike Milbury Charged With Assaulting 12-Year-Old Hockey Player [UPDATE] [Mike Milbury] (deadspin.com)

The story hit on  Wednesday, after Justin Trudeau jumped to his feet in Canada’s House of Commons during “question period” and called Environment Minister Peter Kent “a piece of sh*t”.

I found it amusing that many of my friends in both social channels and legacy media who were giving Trudeau a pass, were the ones who had criticized US VP Dick Cheney years earlier, for pulling Senator Patrick Leahy aside on the Senate floor and telling him privately to go do something to himself that is likely physically impossible.

I’ve always been kind of fond of Justin Trudeau; in fact, we had a fun exchange back in March.  And for the record, he still owes me the beverages.

Here’s Chapter One

Here’s Chapter Two (which has little to do with Justin and more to do with those supporting his position)

(I’m posting this because I wanted to offer context for my December 17th appearance on CTV News Channel discussing the issue.)

Related articles

• Uproar after Justin Trudeau hurls four-letter obscenity at Peter Kent in House of Commons (news.nationalpost.com)
• How Justin Trudeau’s four-letter obscenity marked new low in Commons’ behaviour (news.nationalpost.com)

Short post, but I wanted to say “thank you” to a Toronto radio station for being absolutely brilliant.

There are only a couple of stations I listen to; it’s tricky for me, because I have friends that work at pretty much every station in town, so listening to one sometimes makes me feel like I’m shunning friends on another.

This morning, listening to Erin Davis (one of the truly great women in broadcasting) and Mike Cooper (one of the two or three reasons that as a child, I decided I wanted to get into radio in the first place), I heard them plug a new contest – the “CHFI Trip A Day Giveaway : Pay It Forward Edition”.

In the 30 years I was in radio, I can’t remember working at a station that didn’t give away trips.  (Half the fun was that I usually got to go on those trips.  In fact, every Caribbean destination I ever visited was to host anywhere between a couple and a plane full of listeners who came to hang out by the pool while I did my morning show.)

But this is new to me, at least from a radio station.  Instead of winning the trip for yourself, you nominate someone else to win the trip, and tell the station why you’re nominating the person.  Then weekday mornings at 7:30, they announce a winner.

Don’t get me wrong – this is hardly the first time a radio station has held a “nominate somebody to win a prize” contest. But rarely is it done for this many prizes, and for a prize this big.

Nice work, gang.

Details at this link.  (If you click it, it’ll open a new window that will take you straight to the contest details page.  Also on that page, the “Listen Live” link, which I’d recommend clicking if you want to check out the best example I’ve ever heard of how this radio format is supposed to be executed,)

Advance warning: This isn’t so much a post as a meandering rant.  If you get all the way to the end and can walk a straight line, I applaud you.

I’m going to politely ask software developers to just go on vacation for a little while when it comes to social media applications and platforms.

Seriously – we’re overwhelmed, and we’re losing perspective.

I decided over the weekend that I would audition a few social media platforms that I’d been ignoring.  And while I’m not evaluating whether or not they work for you, I’ve come to the conclusion that for now, I’m pretty good with Facebook and Twitter, and the occasional dabble into LinkedIn and when I have the time, Google+.

I tried Foursquare for a couple of days and realized (largely with Tatiana’s help) that much like Facebook and Twitter, you get from Foursquare what you put into it.  I’m sure there are people who find tremendous benefit to using it, but I don’t know that it really serves my purposes right now.  I know a few people who seem to be using it a lot, and to me these are pretty savvy folks; so I don’t assume that they’d just flush a bunch of time on something just because it was shiny.  But right now, I’m spread too thin to be able to give Foursquare enough “I” to get any “R” from it (shoutout for the Scott Stratten fans).

The key for me was in having to explain to someone what these other sites do.  If the benefit was buried under too many layers of stuff, it didn’t make the cut.

I’m still going to try to figure out how to use YouTube effectively, and I really will get around to using Google+ sometime (Chris Brogan is too smart to be this wrong); but when it comes to the major social media platforms, I’m left wondering what other minutiae of our lives our social circles need to be in on, and what the hell’s left to invent.  I read today that there’s a new app/platform for the iPhone that will tell me what the best menu item is at the restaurant I’m visiting; I’m flabbergasted that there was a demand for this.

I went through what I’ve come to call a “self-imposed Twexile” a couple of weeks ago, that I’m slowly starting to come back from.  The idea behind it was simple: I’m writing two books (the first of which I’ll be telling you about very soon).  I found myself cursing a writer’s block one day.  On Twitter.  I was writing about my inability to write.  I started to think that every 140 characters I was typing into Twitter was 140 characters that wasn’t going into either of my books.

I realized I had gotten caught up.  I got sucked into the social media vortex where I started to believe that tweeting about work was just as important as doing work.

A couple of weeks ago, when the Klout people redid their algorithm, all the wailing and gnashing of teeth made me peek at my own score, and then start looking around at my friends to see who had suffered a similar setback – as if my new Klout score was going to somehow damage my book sales, or hurt my chances of getting invited to speak somewhere.

I started looking around online, and found people threatening legal action and trying to get the Federal Trade Commission involved, because of the damage that the new algorithm had done to their business.  No, I’m not kidding. These people are out there.  Look, if your business depends on your Klout score, you seriously need to re-examine your career path.  If you’ve ever joined a social network, or even simply tweeted something solely in an effort to have a positive impact on your Klout score, you need to step away from the screen for a while and remind yourself about what’s truly important in the world.

There’s become something of a cottage industry built around being a “social media guru”.  The irony isn’t lost on me that a number of people were calling themselves “social media gurus” until the term became the subject of well-deserved ridicule, then they too joined the chorus of people doing the scoffing and pretended they’d never considered having it put on their business cards.

I’m going to stir a few pots when I conclude here, but before the Internet, our circle of friends (and their friends) and our interactions with those people – THAT was social media; and when I was a kid, the ones viewed as “social media gurus” were usually the guys on the football team and the cheerleading squad.

I was hoping that we’d all outgrown our need to be “one of the cool kids”.

Related articles

• Why I Deleted Foursquare from My iPhone. Have You? (windmillnetworking.com)
• Does Klout Score Really Matter? (community.constantcontact.com)
• Your Klout Score Probably Just Dropped – Do You Care? (readwriteweb.com)

We all take them.

But when other people take them, we find it irritating.

Shortcuts, after all, are what allow the taxi driver to pull up beside the “No Stopping” sign, put on his 4-way flashers, and sit there.  I’m assuming there’s some special “traffic laws don’t really apply to taxicabs” clause that I’m not aware of.

In a similar vein, I get irritated when cyclists do things like ignore stop signs.  Sorry, but momentum doesn’t outweigh law, and your desire to keep moving doesn’t suddenly make you a pedestrian every time an appealing piece of sidewalk allows you to avoid your legal obligation to do things like signal your turns.  But then again, it’s just a shortcut.

Shortcuts are what allow politicians to ram through legislation that appeals to their party, without asking what it means to their constituents.  Never mind that the first time you passed something without asking me about it you broke every promise that got you elected in the first place; asking for input from the people who hired you would be cost-prohibitive or something, right?

Someone needs to explain to me where corporations get off concluding a job posting with “only applicants being considered for the position will be contacted.”  Hey HR people – that’s even more classless than the “thanks, but no” form letters you used to send without people’s names on them.  If you don’t have the time to treat applicants with respect, hire internally.

I think most women would pass out were they confronted with actual statistics about the number of men who “shortcut” past the sink on their way out of the men’s room.

I’ve talked before about how most radio stations use a technique called “voice tracking” (especially on overnights and weekends) which allow DJ’s to record a six-hour show in twenty minutes, so they don’t even have to bother with being in the building when their shows are on.  Ironically, these are the same DJ’s who love to tell horror stories about the big nasty company that fired their staff via a prerecorded message left on a CD in a conference room.

Now, also thanks to technology, I can have any one of a dozen automated systems send out a “Thank you” message anytime I get a new follower on Twitter.  (Hey, maybe I’ll throw in a sales pitch while I’m at it, so someone in Idaho can read about my great real estate listings in Brooklyn!)  Whew!  I know the six seconds it would have taken to express genuine gratitude would have been exhausting.

Shortcuts let us get away without having to do the right thing.  They make our lives easier by creating a second class of interaction that allows us to act exclusively in our own self interest, without having to even acknowledge that others exist at all.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve grown tired of a world built on shortcuts.  If you need me, I’ll be listening to this…

(Doesn’t hurt that the video is kinda cute.  And yes, you could certainly argue that by linking to someone else’s video instead of creating my own, I took a shortcut myself.)

Yesterday at the 140 Conference Ontario, I tossed out a couple of ideas that apparently resonated with a few people, so I wanted to share them here.  I’ll likely end up either rewriting or refining this later, but since most of what came out of my mouth was off the top of my head, I wanted to get it down and expand on it a touch before it went to that same part of my brain as “pick up more paper towels.”

The dirty little secret of the radio industry is that pretty much every station in North America (yesterday I was charitable and said it was only 90%) runs content on the weekends that is prerecorded, but done in such a way that it’s meant to sound live.

The practice is as common as having a little red light that says “On Air”, and in the business we call it “voicetracking”.  It’s been going on as long as anyone can remember.  I got my start as an on-air personality when I was 15 years old, because I deliberately erased a reel-to-reel tape with a voice track on it so that the station would have no choice but to put me on the radio LIVE that morning to do a Top 40 countdown show.  (To my friend Tarzan Dan, who recorded that voice track nearly 30 years ago now, my apologies. I don’t think I ever mentioned it to you until just now.)

Radio stations have two sets of customers: their advertising clients who pay for 30 and 60-second chunks of airtime, and the listeners.  The more listeners there are, the more the station can charge the advertisers.  Pretty simple.  Since the relationship works that way, it would make sense that radio stations would do everything they can to stroke the listeners and keep them coming back.

For some reason, radio decided once upon a time that wasn’t important anymore.

Ever try to call a radio station on a Saturday night or early Sunday morning to make a request, and found that the lines are all busy?

It’s not because lots of people are calling, or the DJ has a bunch of other listeners on hold. No one is calling.  The lines are blocked (or “busied out” as we used to call it), and I’d bet my last year’s salary that there’s no one in the building.  The DJ you were trying to call? Someplace far away from the radio station, because in that scenario they’re likely recorded; you’re listening to the computer play back a series of audio files that was programmed days ago.

Feel a little ripped off?  You should.  As far as I’m concerned, it’s one of the main reasons that the radio industry is under constant threat from new technologies; because it seems to me that as an industry, radio doesn’t really care about their relationships with the listeners anymore.  I have worked for programmers who seem to feel that as long as there’s something coming out of the speakers, their obligation to the listener is complete.

(Don’t even get me started about the place I worked where, when the morning news person couldn’t make it in, someone came at 4:30am to record the newscasts for the rest of the morning show.  Yup, the 8:30 news, recorded at 4:30 in the morning.  It happens.)

Radio stations started voice tracking for a simple reason: If a station plays 10 minutes of commercials and 45 minutes of music an hour, that leaves 5 minutes for the DJ to fill with talk.  So the station could pay him his massive salary to come in and do a six-hour shift, or they could have him record the 30 minutes of talking he’ll do in the six hours, and pay some kid seven bucks an hour to play the pieces in the right places.

Twitter and Facebook are, in my opinion, the first legitimate threats to terrestrial radio.  MUCH bigger than satellite radio, or even Internet radio with wi-fi chips going in cars.

Why?  Simple.

Let’s say a fire breaks out downtown at lunch.  The newspaper won’t have it until tomorrow.  IF the TV station decides to cut into whatever show happens to be running at the time, they have to find an anchor, find a reporter, get ‘em dressed, miked, to the scene or anchor desk, prepare the graphics, blah blah blah.  A radio DJ can go on RIGHT NOW and tell you it’s happening as soon as she finds out.

For decades, radio was able to hang its hat on being the fastest medium out there.

Then came Facebook, then Twitter.  And radio has never tried to find a way to leverage or compete with the power of a medium that is even more immediate.  It’s almost as if radio has shrugged its shoulders, shifted its eyes around and started saying “Sure, we’re not the fastest anymore, but uh… we’re… um… we’re the fastest one that plays music!”

The only thing radio has going for it now, is the words coming out of the mouths of the people who come on between the songs.  But for more than 20 years now, radio stations have been trying to cut back on talk.  I’m sure there’s a station in your town that touts “More Music, Less Talk”.  Problem is that radio people are usually too vapid to figure out that now, with iPods and Internet radio, their “More Music, Less Talk” slogan translates as “We play the music that we believe you’re too stupid to find for yourself!  AND we do it without some pesky human trying to make a connection with you!”

As a medium, Twitter and Facebook will now beat radio every time, because Twitter and Facebook offer me real-time connection with actual human beings who want to have conversations with me.  People LOVE talking to each other.  Listeners got tired of the talking on the radio because most of it was stupid, boring, and wasn’t designed to make a connection with the listener.

And THAT is what Social Media can learn from radio.  Because on 9/11, radio WAS Social Media.  It was radio stations giving up the airwaves to nameless, faceless non-celebrities so they could connect with other nameless, faceless non-celebrities.  Sometime afterward, stations stopped caring and went back to “More Of What We Decided You Should Like, And Less Human Contact”.

If you’re a rock and roll fan, go back in your favorite station’s Facebook page, their Twitter feed or the blogs on their website and see how long it took for them to tell you that the world’s most infamous saxophone player, Clarence Clemons, was dead.  My guess is you’ll find they didn’t say a word until the Monday following his death on the Saturday night.  Because in some cities there was, very possibly, no one in the building in between.

Tell a radio station they should take out the phone lines that run into the studio and they’d recoil in horror.  They’d stress how important it is to talk to the audience, and that it’s so important they need a $13,000 gadget that will put edited versions of those recorded calls on the air within moments of them happening.  The line blinks to let the DJ know there’s a call, and there’s a flurry of activity to make sure we talk to that one person, and hopefully use the call on the air if it’s funny or interesting enough, because “it’s important we let the listeners know we’re accessible, and that we care.”  But tweet your favorite DJ or try to engage them in a conversation on Facebook, and prepare for the crickets.  (Maybe it’s because you don’t need a $13,000 gadget to talk to someone on Twitter.)

There you go, Social Media.  There, somewhere in all that ranting and raving, are the lessons you can learn from radio.  In short, have as little in common with radio as possible and you’ll do just fine.

Found a tool that allows you to Auto-DM followers on Twitter?  Found a cool app that allows you to schedule a Status Update for a later time?  Congratulations!  You just became a person who is killing social media.  You just turned into what radio would call a Voicetracker.  Got a Facebook page that you use once a week to tell your “likers” about this week’s specials?  Way to go.  You matter even less.

Because without connections to other humans, without conversations that leave us room to care about each other, Social Media is just another medium.

Please, Social Media, don’t abandon the conversation like radio has done.

To say that Chris Brogan is a pretty smart guy is an understatement.  But I saw a new blog post from him on the weekend that left me feeling a little empty.

Not Chris’ fault – mine.

Simply titled “Discipline“, the piece deals with what Chris describes as “renewed vigor” on a variety of things, including a new fitness and food regime, and work on a new book that he was given six weeks to write.  Chris goes on to discuss setting up “the perfect environment” to reach your goals.

Now, I fully believe Chris is an industrious enough guy to be able to pull the book project off.  If anyone can, he can.

But what about the rest of us?  Chris is blessed with the ability to have had has passions transfer from his heart to his brain; perhaps more specifically, from his right brain to his left brain.  By living his passions every day, he’s been fortunate enough to be able to summon up those parts of himself on command.

Others among us aren’t so fortunate.

I think about Dan Hill, the legendary singer-songwriter who has written hit song after hit song for 40 years now, not only for himself but for others as well.  I think of interview after interview with Dan (including the one below) where he talks about a writer’s block that lasted nearly a year.  Dan found that his passion for songwriting came from his desire to win his father’s approval; when his father died, the spark that ignited his passion was gone.  If you check the interview (or click here if it doesn’t show up properly on your screen), you’ll hear it in his own words; and hopefully you find it as interesting as I do to watch someone talk about music with their Grammy Award sitting atop their piano.

So then what?  When you haven’t been fortunate enough to move your passion over to the more rational left side of your brain, what do you do?  When you write from your heart, how do you get started again?  How do you write, as Chris Brogan suggests, “2000 words a day” when the flame has gone out?

How do you schedule passion?

Interesting article in Billboard Magazine last week discussing the fact that Enrique Iglesias has broken Michael Jackson‘s record for the most #1 songs on Billboard’s Dance/Club Play chart.

I can’t imagine this is a “record” that Enrique was all that excited to hear about breaking.  It’s not a sales chart, it’s not even an airplay chart.  It’s based on playlists submitted by the DJ’s at various dance clubs.

Even a sales-based chart would be unfair.  Look at The Beatles, for example, with lifetime sales of 177 million copies.  Do you think that sales number might have been slightly higher if Beatle fans had been able to buy “Twist And Shout” on their iPhone the first time they heard it?  Instead, for many, getting your own copy of that iconic tune in 1964 might have meant driving an hour or two into town for a record store that might have a copy.

There are now millions of people, if not a billion or more, who no longer have to go to the record store  - they carry the record store around with them, and with the right combination of apps, can hear a song they like, identify it and own a copy of it in less than 30 seconds.

And look at that Billboard chart carefully, music fans – are you seriously going to try and tell me that “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” never hit #1 on the Dance/Club Play chart?  Same for “Workin’ Day And Night“, “Billie Jean“, “Off The Wall” and countless others?  And you want me to give this chart how much credibility, exactly?

To me, stories like this reek of someone’s ridiculous attempt to find a statistic somewhere that suggests our best days aren’t behind us; part of a desperate quest for relevance.  It’s not isolated to the music industry, though.  It’s more common than you might have noticed.  More examples?

Do you really think that Brandon Routh and the people at Warner Brothers did a dance of joy when they found out that 2006′s “Superman Returns” had passed “Gone With The Wind” to become the #114th-biggest movie of all time?

In case you’re not familiar, the movie industry is bold enough to keep ridiculously detailed charts on such things, with readily-available statistical breakdowns and analysis that make things fair and give us enough perspective to stay humble.

For example – according to the data available as I write this, the title of biggest-grossing movie of all time (in the US) belongs to “Avatar“, with domestic box office sales of $760,507,625.  Remember, it’s always “box office sales” that the media focuses on when they recap the numbers every Monday, so for the moment, we’ll do the same here.  ”Gone With The Wind“, clocks in at #115 with domestic box office sales of $198,676,459.  By that measurement, “Avatar” is the biggest thing ever, and you’d darn well better get a copy on DVD so you don’t miss out on that piece movie history.  Who doesn’t want to see the most popular movie in history?

Ah, but wait!  The industry makes sure we know that the number of theaters in America has doubled in the last twenty years alone (making new movies easier to see than they were when “Gone With The Wind” came out in 1939), and reminds us that movie tickets are nearly 30 times more expensive than they were in ’39 as well.  So there’s ample data out there to show, for example, that “Avatar” sold less than half as many tickets as “Gone With The Wind” did.  (You can stop spinning now, Mr. Gable.)  In fact, in terms of ticket sales, only four movies in the last twenty years even crack the Top 15.

Whenever we lose a Hollywood icon (think Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra), I often find myself wondering who will step up to fill those shoes, and being disappointed by what’s been left behind.

But this “quest for relevance” goes even beyond the entertainment industry.  How many times have you heard talking heads on television talk about “the worst snowstorm on record”, “the coldest winter”, “the biggest crowd” – much of which doesn’t hold up under the heat of statistical analysis?

We see people in the US protesting the staggering number of soldiers killed in the Iraq war, but seem to forget that it’s about one percent of the number who were killed in World War II.

I had a discussion yesterday afternoon with a friend who said that the Republican National Committee’s new website showing photos of Barack Obama on vacation with amusing captions was evidence that political discourse had reached an all-time low.  Really?  President Bush might look at those pictures of him with a Hitler moustache and disagree; and let’s not forget the kinds of things that were said in Thomas Jefferson’s day, that resulted in the Vice President killing the former Treasury Secretary in a duel in 1804.

It’s hard to argue that we seem to be trying awfully hard to matter.  We invent Facebook so we can show the world how many friends we have, how connected we can be, and actually have a little piece of the Internet that’s dedicated solely to our lives and our interests.  We make television stars out of ridiculous losers who lead mundane, if not insipid lives.  Routine daily events are referred to as “awesome” and “epic”, to the point where such words have now lost their meaning.

It’s not the fault of Enrique Iglesias that we’re in such a hurry to replace a gifted entertainer that we find any statistic we can that allows us to put a happy face on the state of entertainment; I think it happens because as a society, we simply need a hug.

Take a risk today; go out and try to do something truly memorable.

Related articles

• Katy Perry ties Michael Jackson’s record on Billboard chart (pbpulse.com)
• Box office heading toward record despite economy (canada.com)
• What the weekend box-office numbers leave out (salon.com)

No fair looking it up on Google.

This is an ad that is currently on the side of a building not far from my office.  I’ll save you clicking on it to get the larger image – the text under the “DNA3″ logo says, “It’s Who You Are.”

At first glance, you’re probably thinking perfume?  Wine?  Perhaps a hair stylist or line of beauty products?

Nope.  It’s for a condominium.

Look at it again, and I’ll let that sink in for a minute.  It’s for a condominium.

Dying for your comments.

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