I received two forwards today. While the first was of the run-of-the-mill ‘if you don’t send this to ten people in the next 1.4 seconds, you will die in a wheat-threshing accident’ variety, the second made me stop and think for a moment.

You’ve probably received this one: Apparently to stanch the flow of blood from the gaping wound that is your wallet after a fill-up at the gas pump, we can simply stop purchasing gasoline from the two largest conglomerates, Exxon and Mobil. The message advocated the supposedly simple act of purchasing gas from alternative sources, forcing those major conglomerates to drop prices.

Full disclosure before I get started: I don’t own a car. I (by choice) rely on public transit. The price of gasoline affects me much more peripherally than most.

Economic axiom in support of said e-mail
Simple supply-and-demand would dictate that as demand for one company’s product dropped sharply, that company would need to drop prices in order to sustain a certain level of purchase from its customers.

Say there are two gas stations which are identical - save the fact that one is an Exxon station and the other is Joe’s Fill ‘Er Up and Go - on opposite sides of the street. If on a given day these two stations typically split customers 50/50, and suddenly Joe’s was taking customers 90/10, Exxon would drop its prices below those of Joe’s to create a vacuum in the demand, driving business back to its own station.

Common sense in opposition to said e-mail
The only problem is that gas is a fungible commodity, in the sense that there’s only a certain amount supplied to your city’s stations, and that amount supplied is, for all intents, the same as the stuff supplied to any given station’s competitors. Thus, once Joe’s ran out of gas, it would purchase fuel from its competition, either through wholesale channels or from the Exxon station itself, in order to keep pace with the sudden demand.

The supply chain of gasoline isn’t that wide, and must go through certain large conglomerates to make its way to the United States - as this country is based, nearly entirely, on foreign oil. Those large shipping corporations would either a) be owned, wholly or in part, by large gasoline-vending corporations such as Exxon or Mobil, or b) would most likely show favoritism to large-scale clients, such as Exxon or Mobil, over a local joint like Joe’s.

Ruminations on the scope of said e-mail
I think this forward hit home mostly due to the fact that barrels of crude have reached record prices not once, but twice, this week. As I write this, the price of a premium gallon in Chicago has hit a mind-blowing $3.89 a gallon for premium. And, like I disclosed, I don’t even have a car.

Bring on the ’70s-style stagflation.

Disclosure number two: Then again, I don’t have a degree in economics and I think I slept through most of microecon in college. Feel free to tell me I’m wrong.

</rant>

Song of the moment: ‘Fahr’n,’ Absolute Beginner. I was turned on to Absolute Beginner years ago by a friend who lived in Germany - and now has a German wife - but these guys are freakin’ funky. I have literally no idea what they’re saying, since apparently it’s near-impossible to rap in German. The words are just too long. So they chop them up, use slang and use this strange nasal delivery that wouldn’t work were I able to understand the lyrics.

Do yourself a favor and check out the album Bambule (Remixed). Apparently it’s much better than the non-remixed version.

Back in the wayback days - May of this year, I think - I attended a professional conference at which a man named Jason Pearce gave a presentation on blog technologies, Flickr, wikis and other such new media nonsense.

So it’s only fitting that yesterday I turned to him for advice. And not only does he send information on the CSS tag {position: absolute} - yes, thank you, I know that syntax is incorrect - but he gives beatnikindustries a shout on his site.

This is a man who signs his e-mails jasonpearce.com. He knows what he’s talking about - learn from him.

[Correction, 11:31 a.m., August 30, 2005: Jason’s site is jasonpearce.com, not .net as previously reported. See comments.]

I had a conversation yesterday that piqued my interest. I was walking out of a training session, discussing my former involvement with sixosix magazine with a classmate, and it turns out she’s pretty much doing the same thing we all are: trying to figure out just what the hell is going on. You can use your own definition of what I’m talking about, since I’m mostly interested in what’s going on in the general case.

Side note, in the interest of full disclosure. I have no idea how I made it to my class Saturday morning, given that I was still at the Cubby Bear at 1:30, rocking out to Cracker, my favorite band of the last, oh, 12 years. Unfortunately, the pic I snapped of the band didn’t turn out. See above: it’s more of a night-vision laser show than a band onstage. But I digress.

To that end, she’s been keeping a journal for the last ten or so years, and plans to do something with it. What that thing may be hasn’t yet become clear, but obviously whatever may or may not be in her notes will be great fodder for a book.

If found this intriguing, as I’ve been keeping a running tab of interesting stories that could be used to flesh out characters, as a novel has sometimes been known to do. A few highlights follow.

Oh, you silly kids and all your hipster irony. The Washington Post reports on ‘kill whitey’ parties, where a DJ named ‘Tha Pumpsta’ screams, appropriately (inappropriately?) ‘kill whitey!’ into the mic to get the crowd moving. He does this in a hip, self-deprecatingly ironic way, of course.

Bad date stories. A friend recently told me about her worst first date ever, which involved drunkenness, the guy’s parents and a hair fetish. Classic.

Men who embody the word ‘irony,’ in a non-ironic way. For example, a man who works for the Cincinnati bus company who relied on me to guide him around the public transit system of an unfamiliar city.

I’m sure there are more examples. If only I could document the unintended idiocy of everyone.

Myself included.

Item to Be Pondered: Did I make up that fairy tale? I’ve had at least three comments - some posted, some in person - regarding the supposed nonexistence of the coffee shop that was Good. My earlier post ‘losing donuts, gaining yuppies: a fairy tale’ reference a coffee shop around the corner that moved to another location, four doors north. But these three inquiries, one of which came from my roommate, questioned the existence of this shop. For the record, the papered-up shell of where used to be is still there. Maybe I’ll snap a pic tomorrow. But apparently I live in my own fairy tale, where I’m the only one who can see Good.

Once upon a time, in a magical fantasy land just around the corner from my apartment, there was a coffee shop. And this coffee shop was good and quaint and had well-behaved customers and made a mean cappuccino. There were comfy chairs and a few well-thumbed copies of the Reader and a perky barista who smiled as she served the blueberry muffins. And it was Good.

But five doors away from the coffee shop of Good sat the mean, bad and derelict coffee shop, the kind that advertised fresh donuts - Made Fresh Daily! - but obviously bought them in a box, wholesale. The kind that made weak drip coffee for 55 cents a cup but sternly warned that There Are No Refills. And it was Forsaken.

But the worst part about the Forsaken shop was the customers: men with sunken eyes staring forlornly into the bottoms of their Styrofoam cups. It was like the waiting room of Hell. These lost souls weren’t yet in the fire-and-brimstone, eternal torment Hell, but were merely waiting for the door to open.

Big Yuppie Developer Man, who owned a controlling stake in a condo unit next to the coffee shop of Good, decided his prospective tenants wouldn’t appreciate passing the antechamber to the underworld every day on their way to the their jobs. See, the coffee shop that was Forsaken was connected to a train stop, where all the munchkins and elves would go merrily to their shoe-cobbling and merry-making places of employment.

‘Bad is the coffee shop that is Forsaken,” Big Yuppie Developer Man said thoughtfully. ‘The good residents in the magical land of Chicago-ton don’t need to be reminded of the bad things in life, just as long as they stay current on their leases. Woe to those who fall behind on mortgages.”

Using his influence, BYDM forced the coffee shop that was Forsaken into selling its property rights, just before brokering a move for the coffee shop that was Good. And to where did the coffee shop that was Good relocate? Into the recently-emptied space where men with sunken eyes stared forlornly into the bottoms of their Styrofoam cups.

Suddenly the space became bright and cheery. But some traces of the coffee shop that was Forsaken must have lingered in that storefront space, for the comfy chairs were replaced with cheap IKEA pseudo-ergonomic knockoffs and the cheery, smiling barista was replaced with a pierce-ed, tattoo-ed man who didn’t know a cappuccino from a double short, skinny, extra caramel, blended coffee with room for cream. Apparently the spirits of the coffee shop that was Forsaken were active and restless.

Believing the threat from non-attractive customers extinguished, BYDM was free to complete his dream of yuppie-fying all of Chicago-ton. The pixes and elves and dwarves and munchkins were free to sing and dance and play.

But I’ll be honest: I miss Hell’s waiting room. At least it had character. And those wholesale donuts weren’t half-bad, either.

It was a strange weekend, in that I was true to my new ideal of getting up early to be ‘proactive’ or ‘a go-getter’ or whatever smarmy adjectival phrase you want to assign to the idea that weekends shouldn’t all be spent sleeping and partying.

I was up by 7:25 and to a (non-compulsory) training class on Saturday morning. That was a good start, but I needed to make the streak last both days.

Today I was up by 7:10, ran errands in Evanston, was home by 9:30, stopped by a coworker’s house and went to the bar to watch Arsenal lose, all by 10:15 a.m. [Side note: Chelsea won on a horrible, sloppy goal that ricocheted off Drogba’s knee - a £24 million striker can’t kick the ball? - and just ‘happened’ to bounce in the right direction. Dammit.] However, when I was returning home yesterday, I caught a glimpse of the Thunderbirds, the Air Force’s pattern flying squad.

My obsession with the Thunderbirds goes back, way back, back when I wanted to be a pilot, back to the days of the Dayton Air Show, when my dad snapped a picture of the four jets streaking over us in formation. While the picture didn’t turn out, I’ve had this romanticized notion of what the image would look like - which, incidentally, is remarkably similar to the cover of nearly every air show program in existence - and I’ve wanted to get that shot ever since.

So I see these F-16s streaking across the Chicago skyline from the window of my train and feel like a kid in a candy store. And this kid in a candy store is also hopped up on blow and is about to see his first R-rated movie in a few hours, so you could say I’m pretty excited. ‘Tomorrow,’ I think. ‘Tomorrow, I’ll grab the camera and head down to the air show.’

Sunday day dawns, bright, clear and cool. I start reading ‘The Hours’ on the train to Evanston and, as I get to just that transcendent point where the words coming through my headphones fade to the level where I no longer hear Iggy Pop telling me he’s ‘the world’s forgotten boy / the one who searches and destroys,’ (oddly appropriate lyrics for a novel based on Virginia Woolf) and the words cease to be printed on the page but somehow tangible, I have a revelation about [insert personal revelation here, self-discovery nonsense, you get the picture].

The day’s starting strong.

But just before Drogba’s piss-poor, yet heart-rending, goal, I hear the Thunderbirds are not flying today, since apparently something fell off one of the jets during yesterday’s performance. I’ve been waiting for a year to see this effing show and now the team’s not performing? Arsenal lost? Today’s horoscope said change was in the air - that must be it.

Suffice to say I did still make it to the air show and, with the extra time I found on my hands that should have been taken up with the Thunderbirds, we took in a Sunday matinee. Maybe things would turn out after all.

Tomorrow: Can I keep my early-morning streak going? If you find me unemployed next week, you’ll know the answer.

Upside to the day: I did get some kickass air show photos, though. Look to the photo gallery in the upcoming weeks. With a 300mm zoom, I could see the facial expressions of parachuters.

Lately, there’s been a good deal of evidence leading me to believe the weighty claim that Journalism is Dead. Today’s headlines in Chicago provide another sparkling example.

The isolated incident.

The bottom front-page headline of the Tribune proclaimed the headline ‘And the customer service award does NOT go to …’, followed by a piece on a Comcast cable customer who was repeatedly abused and ignored by customer service, to the point where her name was changed to ‘Bitch Dog’ on her bill.

I just told you the entire story. ‘Wow,’ you would say. ‘That sucks.’ And then the page would turn. Ignoring the story in this case would turn out to be a great decision in this case, since the rest of the story tells you literally nothing. In the end, she cancels her Comcast service, and you’re treated to the requisite ‘that was completely inappropriate, and the matter is currently under investigation’ lines from Comcast representatives.

Journalistic insult becomes injury when the same piece - sanitized, redacted and slightly sensationalized - make the front page of the commuter paper, the RedEye. Now readers get even less of the story, under the headline ‘COM-CUSSED.’ Taken as an individual, isolated incident, this type of reporting is bad enough.

Which brings me to David Beckham.

The ongoing problem.

It’s Bend it Like Beckham and all that. Hell, I don’t even know if Beckham was even in his eponymous movie. You have this media-perfect god, complete with his stellar athletic skills, a pinup-gorgeous-former-Spice-Girl wife, multiple tattoos for that certain rebel je ne sais quoi and a level of scandal that approaches ’scintillating’ but never reaches Bradgelina strata, a man who was the figurehead of the much-ballyhooed metrosexual movement, and, with all these qualities, naturally he’s going to be exploited. He’s the most famous athlete in the world, trying to crack the tough nut that is the in-culture of American popular consciousness. To that end, three radically different magazines for radically differing demographics run virtually the same cover story on the man within a year:

Vanity Fair, July 2004: ‘Brand it like Beckham’

Details, August 2005: ‘Can King David conquer America?’

ESPN The Magazine, August 15, 2005: ‘David Beckham: All-American’

Don’t get me wrong: I love soccer. An Arsenal scarf hangs above my bed. I was up at 9:30 - 9:30! After closing a 4 a.m. bar the previous night! - to watch the first Sunday matches for the new English season last weekend. The problem is that America does not care. No one in a position to control media outlets, however, seem to have received that memo.

Magazines that deal with popular culture, as a rule, would not exist if they didn’t seek out the new and hot, giving juicy tidbits to their readers and solidifying their own existences as harbingers of cool. But after inundating a public both deaf and dumb to anything containing the word ’soccer’ for a few years to no effect, shouldn’t they give up? Go and cover the 25 most influential Hispanics or lung cancer or something.

So which came first to America: The Beckham or the brand?

On killing journalism.

So either way you stack the deck, either in the short-term or in a year-long meta-study of magazine publishing, we’re screwed. Then again, Christopher Hitchens restores my faith in journalism occasionally.

</rant>

I’ve been trapped in ‘contemporary conference commons’ for the last few days, after entertaining high-level dignitaries like the mayor of Evanston - and a seemingly interminable number of undergraduates who would like nothing more than to get drunk, not listed to longwinded presentations - since last Thursday. It’s now 3 a.m., and I’m waiting for the car that will whisk me off to O’Hare for a flight to San Francisco.

By the numbers.

648: Number of photographs taken.
352 (approximately): Number of undergraduates running around like, well, college kids.
3: Number of daily newsletters written, edited, proofed and printed solely by yours truly.
0: Number of alcoholic beverages consumed.

It’s really that last number that troubles me so much, considering what I do consists of a) inane conversation, b) photo of said poor conversationalist, c) awkward attempt on my part to escape, repeated a goodly number of times. Just to add some spice to the mix, sometimes I take photos of old men and children. A glass of Scotch would be more than welcome.

Songs that keep me sane: ‘Intro,’ Martina Topley-Bird, and ‘E-Pro,’ Beck. It was decided that in order to survive the final slide show - which I’m missing! I’m leaving early! Ha! - and its mundane subject matter, good songs were necessary. Dave and chose ‘Intro,’ a funky little number that sounds like a mushroom-addled Nina Simone, and ‘E-Pro,’ which is simultaneously accessible to the average undergraduate while remaining delightfully nerdy and elitist. Ah, subversive PowerPoint presentations.