Tag Archives: Bush

Marketing in the Plumbing Aisle at Home Depot – Bold.Powerful. – Performance Toilets

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Innocents in Plumbing

We have begun preparations for renovating our second floor bathroom. What better place to start than with a trip to Home Depot, list and credit card at the ready. Karen and I had already done some research online so we had a very specific stop to make in the toilet division of the plumbing department. We found our box right away, then my eye caught “Bold.Power.” on the end of an adjacent carton. What? Some marketing guru at Kohler has gone haywire or is just reflecting their own bathroom insecurities (desires?).

Kohler toilet box - Bold.Power.Is “Bold.” symptomatic of a narcissistic attachment to our bodily excreta? Or, are we supposed to feel “Bold.” when ensconced on the throne? For the males in the crowd, are “Bold.” and “Power.” supposed to call forth some new fulfillment from the vertical position? Perhaps we have been satisfied too long with the simpler idler pleasures of this position? Or maybe, we are supposed to elide these doubly emphatic periods into BoldPower, bringing back to mind the “shock and awe of the Bush years? Maybe there is an interpretive hint in the upper left corner of the box, “Virtually Plug-Free” and “Clean-Bowl Rinse”. With these kinds of assurance from marketing imagery, we will never again have to call on prune power.

So, having momentarily sated my amusement with the wondrous conjugation of corporate marketing prowess and nature, we wheeled our new toilet out to the car and a quick trip home. Though even this seemed fraught with questions about my Power. – Karen wondered aloud several times whether this box was really going to fit into our little Corolla. With a little huffing and scrunching, it did.

The Global Leader in Performance Thrones

When we got home and we carried the box into the front room, I studied its end panel a bit more closely.

Kohler- leader in performance toiletsI had hit the jack pot. Our choice for a throne promises to be “The Global Leader in Performance Toilets”! Who needs Moses when you can forever trash all of those embarrassingly ineffectual plungers.This update of 19th century engineering innovation achieves the holy grail banishing those blockages that cause such frequent finger pointing in every household.

Not only that, but ours is also “Powerful”, “Comfortable” and “Fast & Easy”. Really, the promise of this last claim seems to stretch credibility. All of my future visits to the loo will not be tests of my core strengths, every visit with come right along with speed and no sweat. I can leave my iPod Touch elsewhere because I will be done in less time than it takes tio bring up the WiFi. Unfortunately, this promise is about an entirely different Fast and Easy. The marketeers at Kohler have mixed messages to different audiences on the same end panel.This is a pitch to plumbers about how installation will be Fast and Easy.

Nevertheless, casting my eyes to the bottom right I feel reassured that I have purchased “The Complete Solution”.

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Remarks on President Obama’s Speech on Accepting The Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo 12/10/2009

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President Obama’s speech on accepting the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 2009 has generally been reviewed in the US with much glow about its rhetorical heights and appreciation of its depth of thought. I did not watch Obama give this speech. Instead, I turned to the text which I could read at my leisure and without the speechifying fireworks that Obama has clearly mastered.

Although I seem stuck in a reflexive backward glance towards the eight disastrous years of Bush II whenever I evaluate Obama. I am still amazed at the enormous moral and practical abyss we fell through in those years. Obama brushing his teeth in the morning is reassuring in contrast. Nevertheless,  it is worth looking a bit more closely at what Obama did and did not say here. Much has been said of his straight forward assertion that violence is necessary and even useful in a world inhabited by human beings who seem almost genetically predisposed to killing each other off. And, with the invocation of Martin Luther King and the discussion of just war theory, he covers well worn territory, though it is cheering to have a sitting US President talk in this fashion.

There is much to applaud in Obama’s speech: control of nuclear weapons, assertion of human and civil rights, multilaterialism in conflict resolution and enforcement, denial of religion as a justification  for oppression of others.

But, we come to a significant claim, one that the US government has asserted for my entire lifetime,  and which the US media and populace would support:  “Whatever the mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.” And, Obama continues with the summary moral claim that underlies this assertion, “We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest – because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.” Continue reading →

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Bush – the worst modern President

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Since my entry this morning I have been thinking more about the Presidency and Bush. My knowledge of 19th century Presidents is a but spotty. Certainly the names Buchanan, Pierce, Johnson and Grant pop to mind as less than top of the heap.

But, for the modern era, post WW2, Bush is clearly the worst, most destructive President.

In the international sphere, we will be digging out from the morass of his crazed policies for a decade. This will most prominently feature the disaster of Iraq. A particularly problematic consequence of Bush’s policies is the increased militarization of our foreign and domestic security strategies.

On the home front, we have the staggering debt, degradation of civil rights and government practices, and lost time dealing with health care, infrastructure, income inequality, education, housing and more. I do not particularly hold him responsible for the global economic meltdown. That is really the result of a global infatuation for ” free markets” in which both US parties and numerous others worldwide have indulged themselves for more than three decades.

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Armies and Orchids – a new poem by Linda Larson

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Armies and Orchids

The little white posts
Stuck in the soil
Markers naming the orchids
At the flower show

Mimic acres of white crosses
Sturdy and upright
Over bones as fragile as
Ruby’s Dragonfly.

Orchids, deceptive,
Feed only on air.
A rich man’s hobby
Nonetheless, crosses

Bedecked, celebrating holidays
With bright, cheerful flags waving
Hello from those consumed
In battle, at War Meister’s

Command, Nightfire,
Simple Pleasures, Shoot or be shot.
Origami cranes,
Piled high at Hiroshima

Truman’s trade off in lives,
The Emperor’s Saffron Delicacy,
Pacific fang,
Its unspeakable retort.

Babies caught in the
Tiger’s Jaw of history, spat out
In its grinding wheel as
Fossils of one century

Name a blood-spattered
Specimen after Rasputin
Sorcerer’s Kiss, and I
When my ship comes in

As one day it must
Will name a red as deep
As pockets left by Hellfire missiles
For Bush’s war, Soldiers’ Dust.

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The Interrotron

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In a recent visit to the movies I picked up the FLM [Magazine] (Winter 2004), a product of Landmark Theatres, and found an article by Errol Morris, “13 Questions and Answers on the Filmmaking of Errol Morris“. It contained a bit of drollery about the Interrotron.

In The Fog of War and other Morris’ movies, the interview subjects stare straight into the camera while responding to a voice interviewing them from off screen.

Here is the text lifted without permission from the magazine’s website (http://www.movienet.com/fogofwar.html). I have attempted to maintain the design and layout. I did add the picture of the Interrotron from another source.

Q Is it true that you interview people using a machine?

A Yes, the (patent pending) Interrotron. It’s a machine that uses existing technology in a new and novel way. When I made my first film, Gates of Heaven, I interviewed people by putting my head right up against the lens of the camera. I would be talking to them, and it seemed as though they were looking directly into the lens of the camera, but not really. Almost, but not quite. Of course, they were looking a little bit off to the side.

Q Why? What’s the point?

A To create the first person. When someone watches my films, it is as though the characters are talking directly to them…There is no third party. On television we’re used to seeing people interviewed 60 Minutes style. There is Mike Wallace or Larry King, and the camera is off to the side. Hence, we, the audience, are also off to the side. We’re the fly-on-the-wall, so to speak, watching two people talking. But we’ve lost something.

Q What?

A Direct eye contact.

Q Eye contact?

A Uh huh. We all know when someone makes eye contact with us. It is a moment of drama. Perhaps it’s a serial killer telling us that he’s about to kill us; or a loved one acknowledging a moment of affection. Regardless, it’s a moment with dramatic value. We know when people make eye contact with us, look away and then make eye contact again. It’s an essential part of communication. And yet, it is lost in standard interviews on film. That is, until the Interrotron.

Q I don’t get it.

A I got tired of sitting so close to the camera. (In my early films, my cameraman would grab the back of my head and pull me back because you could see the side of my head in the lens. When he yanked me back, it often hurt.) And I started to wonder, what if I could become one with the camera. What if the camera and myself could become one and the same?

Q You’re losing me.

A Well, not literally. Are you familiar with Teleprompters?

Q Not really.

A Well, Teleprompters are used to project an image on a two-way mirror. Politicians and newscasters use them so that they can read text and look into the lens of the camera at the same time. What interests me is that nobody thought of using them for anything other than to display text: read a speech or read the news and look into the lens of the camera.







(image borrowed without permission from http://www.spin.com)

Q OK.

A  I changed that. I put my face on the Teleprompter or, strictly speaking, my live video image. For the first time, I could be talking to someone, and they could be talking to me and at the same time looking directly into the lens of the camera. Now, there was no looking off slightly to the side. No more faux first person. This was the true first person.

Q It sounds like Buck Rogers. Were people willing to tolerate this?

A I worried at first. Would it frighten people? Would they run out of the studio screaming? Who could say? I used it for the first time in Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. And it worked like a charm. People loved the Interrotron.

Q The Interrotron? Did you make up the name?

A No, it was named by my wife, Julia Sheehan. She liked the name because it combined two important concepts — terror and interview.

Q But doesn’t the device intimidate people?

A Oddly enough, no. It doesn’t. People, if anything, feel more relaxed when talking to a live video image. My production designer, Ted Bafaloukos, said, “The beauty of this thing is that it allows people to do what they do best. Watch television…” We often think of technology as working against the possibility of intimacy. But there are so many counter-examples. The telephone is a good counter-example. There are things we can say to each other on the phone that we would never say if we were in the same room. You know, “Being there is the next best thing to using the phone…” The Interrotron is like that. It creates greater distance and greater intimacy. And it also creates the true first person. Now, when people make eye contact with me, it can be preserved on film.

Q Have you used it much?

A Whenever I need to. I used it in a film that introduced the Academy Awards® in 2002. Gorbachev, Laura Bush, Iggy Pop, Al Sharpton and Walter Cronkite have all been on the Interrotron.

Q Did Robert McNamara like it?

A Well, you have to remember that we are talking about someone who has been interviewed a thousand times. He walked into the studio and said, “What is that?” I smiled and said, “The Interrotron.” He said, “Well, whatever it is, I don’t like it.” But then he sat down, and we proceeded to record over twenty hours of interviews. I guess he came to like it, too.



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