Starbucks closing 600 stores a good start

News that Starbucks is going to close about 600 stores and lay off 12,000 people over the next year in the United States is obviously going to be hard on the people who work there, and my sympathies go out to them.

But fewer Starbucks stores? Now there’s a trend I wish would catch on over here.

Quite frankly, I wish Europe would give Starbucks the boot. For good.

I know Starbucks-bashing is old hat, that websites dedicated to hating them have been up for a while and that… damn, they’re everywhere, OK? Just might as well get used to the fact that there will always be a market for pretentiously named, overpriced coffee that tastes like battery acid strained though a lumberjack’s socks.

But it’s not just how much of a degrading experience it is to drink coffee from a paper cup, nor even how mountains of garbage are vomited out their back doors every day.

Having lived here for so long and Germany until a couple of years ago have been spared the Starbucks invasion, if not its equally foul, expensive, disposable imitators, it was only on forays to London and back home to Vancouver that it really hit me just how all-pervasive Starbucks is. Their outlets seem to be everywhere. On some corners, it’s possible to see two or three of them in your field of view. Like noxious weeds or rats, they fill every niche, every corner of a once diversified and vibrant cityscape which once made the feel of each city unique. Now you arrive and see the same thing at the airport as you do downtown, strewn garbage and all.

I guess expecting Starbucks to go away is as pointless as wishing McDonald’s would. But you can always dream, sipping real coffee from a real cup somewhere else.

Asking questions of beauty in Paris, city of women

Back in early February after our long weekend in London, I mentioned that we were headed to Paris in the Spring. A commenter who is also a poet pointed out that London is usually seen as a man’s city, Paris a woman’s, and that he was interested in seeing my take on Paris as opposed to London.

In the meantime - a week or so before we left - A Guide to the Pretty Women of Paris was published. Written by the French foreign minister’s speech-writer, it caused a bit of a stir in feminist circles because it points out where to find the city’s most beautiful women according to age, manner of dress, income level, where you might catch a good view up their skirts, where to find the best-looking legs…

That shred of the lingering adolescent in me was tempted to grab a copy as soon as we got there as a bit of a lark, maybe check out a quarter or two to see if any of it had any truth, but I’m glad I didn’t. Around noon on our first day there, I’d already come to the conclusion it must be more joke novelty than guide.

Unless you’re blind or have a fetish for the morbidly obese, it’s impossible to walk more than a block or two in Paris without coming across a woman who is worth much more than a passing glance. It is full of well-dressed, attractive women of every age and race.

So it’s perhaps fitting that a city whose reputation celebrates the ultimate in feminine beauty should be hosting an exhibition entitled Femmes du Monde - The World’s Women.

The artist Titouan Lamazou spent six years collecting photographs of women in some of the most remote recesses of the planet, using those photos as a basis for portraiture in pencil, charcoal, pastel and watercolour.

Like the life-sized photo of a Mongolian woman sitting in her yurt, the images tempt you to step in and learn more about who they are, what their lives are like, where they’ve come from and where they’re going. A Sao Paolo garbage-picker who became a fashion model, a lone female UN soldier on an African peacekeeping mission, an Australian Aboriginal artist, refugees, factory workers, strippers, prostitutes… All are given equal weight with not a whiff of judgment on their choices or maudlin pity of their circumstances.

Saving the best for last, the exhibition hall terminates at where the concepts of idealised feminine beauty, freedom of choice and the market collide: our mania for plastic surgery and the phenomenon of the Real Doll - made-to-order life-sized male masturbation aides which sell for $8,000 US apiece. If you’ve never heard of the Real Doll, I suggest you click on that link.

On one side, a collection of photos of about 20 women - some pre- and post-op - from Calí, Colombia, the South American capital of surgical silicone.

On the other, a wall-sized photograph of the inside of Real Doll’s factory, their lifeless, spread-legged, open-mouthed female effigies suspended on a curving track along the ceiling like so much quartered beef at a slaughterhouse.

The best for last because the questions are almost screaming at you: Is the Real Doll the pinnacle of beauty that every woman should strive for no matter what the cost and no matter what the risk to her health? Or are the silicone breasts, suctioned hips and trimmed-back labia these women carry around the ideal for Real Doll? Which is the model for which?

This photo doesn’t do the room justice and is actually a little blurry because I took it furtively. But if you’re headed to Paris and would like to see the exhibition in person, it is in the Musée de l’Homme just a stone’s throw across the river from the Eiffel Tower. Due to popular demand it has been extended several times.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

The brother who speaks my language

It doesn’t matter how many months - or, lately, years - it’s been since I’ve seen my older brother Gordon, we always greet each other the same way.

One of us will say, “Hi, how the fuck are ya?”

The other will say, “fucking great, man” and we’ll give each other a bear hug.

Then we’ll step back and the next thing one of us will say is Well. That was never five minutes just now.

Anyone witnessing this or any other exchange between the two of us could be excused for thinking we’re more than just a little bit daft, because if each of us has his own particular set of quirks and foibles, stir Gordon and me together for a while and a whole lifetime of slang, sayings, even our own rhythm and cadence kicks in, and nobody else really gets it.

One of the main things we get into is adding the suffix -age onto everything. Length, for example, becomes footage. So to ask, “how far is it to…” we would ask, what’s the footage to get to….

It can sometimes get to ridiculous extremes. Damn, I’m hungry. I need some foodage, and maybe some drinkage too, at which point we silently call a truceage and cut out the crappage before we drive each other around the bendage.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a lot of it stems from late-1960s to mid-70s pop culture and television, which coincides from the time Dad bought our first TV ’til Gordon left home to go to university.

If someone’s having trouble opening something, we’ll say really fast just jiggle it a little, it’ll open. Try it. Justjiggleitalittleit’llopen. It’s from an episode of I Love Lucy.

Greetings can also be Hey Goob or Hey Goobah, which comes from Gomer Pyle, USMC. From goober we get goobernatorial, a play on the real word gubernatorial, which as Canadians we always found should refer to something stupid anyway. How goobernatorial is that?

If we’re playing a game and it’s the other’s move, we’ll say itchy goom, something our Dad mis-heard when we were telling him we were watching the TV game show It’s Your Move.

Have some crispy french fries, cousin Cesspool is a set phrase we throw in when offering any type of food to the other. It comes from a misunderstood TV commercial for Crisco Oil.

If we see or hear something stupid, idiotic or just a little weird, one of us will say eww, ginchy. Ginch is a derivation of that classic Canadian slang term for underwear gaunch.

To ask the time we’ll say time diddehhh? - drawing out the second syllable for some reason. We can also ask the time in French, but instead of the simple Quelle heure est-il? we’ll say Quelle heure est-il maintenant ou pas? adding the nonsensical now or not? at the end.

We also invert many things so that they sound French, but aren’t. A CD player will be a player de CD, a paper bag a bag de paper, a hockey stick a stick de hockey and so on.

To say excuse me we say Scoozay-mwah, see-voo-play, that is all my French to-day.

To offer milk to the other we say Would you like some Millek with your Fillem? I was the one who introduced that, because I had a teacher in Grades 6 and 7 who used to prononce film as the two-syllable affectation fill-em.

A helicopter is not a helicopter, it’s a hobbidy-cobbidy, a knife is not a knife, it’s a kaniffy, McDonald’s isn’t McDonalds it’s Flap-doodles but the latter is more Gord’s and I just adopted it.

If you noticed the Monty Python reference in That was never five minutes just now, that’s just scratching the surface. We both know the entire repertoire inside-out, dragging up snippets of skits and sometimes whole monologues to fit various situations. If death comes up on the panel the high point of the Dead Parrot sketch will be played out, if one of us says Could be the other will say, Could be, could be taken on a holiday, and any reference to Christian religious ritual one of us will start reciting the monologue of how the Lord sent an Angel to comfort Victor for the weekend, and entered they together, the jacuzzi.

Here endeth the lesson.

Well, not quite. Because if all this stuff and nonsense has you thinking we do it because we have nothing at all to talk about and it’s just filling dead air, that’s not it. We know how much is too much, had tons to discuss and argue over and contemplate and laugh about, and had been doing for an entire week despite my being ill for half of it, before he left yesterday for London and then home.

Dammit Gord, great funnage. Sorry I was such a wreckage when you got here. See you this fallage.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

This site may harm your computer

Waiting for a flight at Hamburg airport early last week I sat down at an internet terminal and was about to drop a coin in before the nice man sitting next to me said, “take mine, I have to go and there are about 25 minutes left on it.”

I thanked him warmly and sat down in his place, immediately typing lettershometoyou into Google to see if I could find Adsense ads on my blog. You’ve probably heard that they’re out there, lurking on every wordpress.com blog. It’s the price you pay for free hosting, and no amount of whining is going to get wordpress to take them off short of your paying them to do so.

Problem is, if you’re logged in to wordpress.com you never get to see them.

So every once in a while I slip into the skin of Joe Regular Blog Lurker to try to find out how Google is making an even greater mess of my blog. Do they stick ads for jock itch powder next to posts about my mother-in-law? Blurbs for psychiatrists next to write-ups about psychos? Tart up my skiing posts with pitches for helmets and handbaskets and other crap I have no use for?

The list of hits Google chucked up had me scrambling for my camera. Not for what they said, but for the public terminal’s net-nanny warning label:

At first I thought they were referring to my blog. After all, even if there are no trojans waiting to ambush the unsuspecting visitor, there is a ton of stuff here people might find harmful. Fake news, accounts of deception and outright lies, denunciations of crap, transcripts of discussions with an underage female child concerning condoms, naked girls in newspapers, death and more death. I don’t know why I haven’t already been hauled before a judge as a menace to society.

Then I realised the warning was all about WordPress.com. How could it not be? The link is to wordpress, not lettershometoyou, which only appears in the description.

Maybe it was just a forewarning, because a few days later I and millions of other unsuspecting WordPress.com bloggers logged on to find our blogging universe turned inside out without so much as a ‘”hey guys, guess what? Big changes coming up tomorrow at 4pm Pacific Daylight Saving Time.”

Did someone at WP central hit publish instead of save by mistake before turning out the lights for the weekend?

I’m sure after a few months this will all die down and we’ll wonder what all the fuss was about, but in the meantime wordpress.com probably is harmful to your computer. Judging by the number of pissed-off entries on the forums, I’m surprised there hasn’t been a youtube video posted of someone throwing a laptop out the window frisbee-style in frustration. I don’t care what it looks like, merely uploading an image, for example, has become a mind-numbing chore, a multi-stepped process where once a couple of clicks sufficed.

This in an upgrade? Sure the savvy bloggers using wp.org had a go at it for a while, but given the huge drop in skill level between those bloggers and duffers like me using wp.com, didn’t they think to test it on a few hundred of us wp.com users who’d never seen it before? They could have run a little sneak-preview contest, choosing a hundred or so bloggers to run it through it paces for a month just to iron the kinks out.

Hell, maybe they did test it out on no-brain bloggers like me, I don’t know, but the way it was released reminds me of the time I bought a new desktop from Dell a few years back. The monitor was a new flat-screen model from the Korean firm LG, back when flat screen meant the surface was flat. The rest looked like an old-style monitor.

Anyway, the first one they sent didn’t work, so I sent it back.

The second one arrived three days later. It didn’t work properly either, so I sent it back, too.

The third one arrived a few days after that, and it didn’t work either.

So I phoned up Dell to complain - not for the first time - and asked them why they couldn’t ship me a monitor that worked. Their response? We can’t test the monitors as they come in, we just ship them along.

Fair enough, I said, but can’t they at least have someone switch it on at the factory? Twist a knob? Tweak a button?

Nööö, too expensive. It’s cheaper to ship them halfway around the world and have the consumer do the testing.

Happy blogging.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

BMW builds fake village, massive ramp to launch new car in the US

One thing Germany has no shortage of is small towns. Head off the Autobahn and into the boonies, your drive will be slowed down to a crawl every four or five kilometres as you pass through another Unterpickelfering, Tafelförderung and Stübenhockerburg. You can’t pack 80 million people into a country the size of your average Texas ranch and expect a wide-open road.

Nevertheless, the marketing dudes at BMW have decided they had to invent yet another German town in order to promote a line of new cars.

The town is called Oberpfaffelbachen and is supposed to be somewhere in Bavaria. They say they even have a documentary filmmaker making a film about it all to create on-line chatter about the new car launch, and by launch I mean that literally.

The centrepiece of the film is a 454-metre high ramp said to have been built in the middle of a farmer’s field, upon which a car will be sent shooting down like a rocket, and, presumably, into the waiting arms of eager American car-buyers.

With the dive-bombing US dollar making German cars that much more expensive for Americans, I don’t know how well that’s going to fly, but they’re so deep into the project, there’s no turning back. The film is supposed to be in the final production stages, but you can catch the trailer if you can’t wait for its release, and if you’re really into it, sign up for the Facebook page!

Yes, it’s viral marketing. Get a buzz going, you never know how far it will go.

All in good fun, I suppose. Yet somehow, I find this video clip of a farmer heaping great steaming piles of bullshit into a wheelbarrow to be a pretty accurate portrayal of the whole thing:

© 2008 lettershometoyou

10 things you can do with 3gb of free space on wordpress.com

Not too long ago, the top dogs at wordpress.com announced that every blog hosted there now has three GB of free storage space. Wow, 3GB! That’s huge step up from the 50MB they were dishing out up to then. Before, if you wanted anything above that, you used to have to pay for a space upgrade.

I started to have visions of what I could do with all that space, but because what I saw was pretty fuzzy, I went on the wordpress forums and asked how much other bloggers were using. Turns out they weren’t using any. Raincoaster, practically a grandmother in bloggers’ years with a huge amount of material accumulated on her blog, is using 0% of her available space. So is everyone else who bothered to respond.

I learned that even if you were to post the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, War and Peace, the complete works of William Shakespeare as well as the entire catalogue of stupid things George W. Bush has uttered since he went dry, it would still register 0%. That’s because they don’t count text. Photos usually don’t take much space, so unless you’re uploading bloat-sized 39MB jpegs from the latest digital Hasselblad, you aren’t going to use up much either.

So I thought maybe you too are wondering what 3GB of free space is good for. Uploading video is the first thing that comes to mind, but then it’s no longer free. If you want to upload your own video and have it stored on your blog like a photo instead of linking to youlube like everyone else does, you have to pay the $15 minimum upgrade.

With the price of Sloppaccino Slattés in a paper cup approaching five dollars, 15 bucks might not sound like a lot of money, but since video is practically the only thing that 99% of us are ever going to fill up that vast amount of free space with, tying its most obvious use to a paid upgrade is not offering free space.

It’s as if you’re out shopping for a piece of land upon which to build your dream shack, and the agent steps out of the car, turns to a stretch of turf and with a sweep of the hand says: and it also comes with free use of the sky, all the way up to Uranus!

Looking at him like he’s a blithering idiot, you say: …but I don’t have a rocket ship.

Well, Home Depot’s gotta sale on stepladders! Fifteen bucks!

So if you’re like me and still wondering how to bulk up that 0% into a figure you can be proud of, yet remain true to your everything-on-the-net-is-free / dot-communist roots, here are a few suggestions.

1. Upload your entire photo collection and store it on your blog, thus freeing up hard-drive space on your own computer. Since you’ll have to upload them one-by-one, please allow yourself adequate time. Quit your job if you have to.
2. Beg, borrow or steal that Hasselblad and start uploading. At maximum resolution, your 3GB is good for about 75 shots.
3. Write all your posts out in longhand Dear-Diary style. Then scan and upload them to your blog. Make sure you don’t scale for size, because you’ve got so much to fill.
4. Once you’ve posted about 10 hand-written entries, hold a contest to see who can best figure out your personality through your handwriting.
5. Feel vaguely smug.
6. Add your name to the list of barking seals clapping their approval.
7. Start to wonder if this isn’t some way to make wordpress.com look good to investors, without a lot of outlay on their part.
8. Confirm this.
9. Go watch the fun as other kids point fingers and say: The Emperors have no clothes.
10. Forget you even have the free space. I have. It’s not hard to ignore what you’ll never use.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

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How much is that doggie on the sofa?

I had great laughs this morning reading through B’s latest Eurotrippen post about the celebrity life of her dog, but it also got me thinking about a German TV show I saw on the weekend, which had an item about photos and copyright.

B’s photos are all her own, so she’s free and clear. But what if B didn’t have a dog? What if she had that twisted little idea in her head, but no dog to illustrate it? She could probably find a few pics of doggies dressed in leather and lace and weave a little story around them, right?

Sure, but she’d be putting herself in serious financial peril, not only for the obvious reason that a lot of photos out there have rights on them, but that there are websites out there dedicated to sucking you in to using their photographs on your blog and then turning right around and suing your sorry ass off.

The TV show profiles a couple who started up a little site dedicated to keeping birds as pets. They went a - googling for a few shots of common vegetables so they could brighten up a page on what to feed them. They clicked on one of the top results and found hundreds of photos on the Voldemort of recipe sites, the link to which I not only absolutely refuse to provide, I won’t even mention its name.

If you fail to look for the page that says they don’t give out the photos for free, and take one of their photos for use on your blog, the site tracks the photo’s new location and immediately fires off a bill to you for around €700 euro - or more than one thousand US dollars - per photo! Our pair of budgie boffins were asked to fork over €8600, and they are just one of hundreds the show says the site has already sued.

Since users are most likely to click on the top lines rather than wade through pages and pages of stuff, the shows says the site uses Google-bombing to game themselves into the top ranks of search results. And with more and more people getting into blogging for the first time without a clue as to its many pitfalls, their supply of fresh meat is almost endless.

The experts on the show say that if you don’t want to go to court and risk paying thousands more should you lose, there’s not much you can do besides negotiate the price down. After all, nearly a thousand euro for a fuzzy thumbnail jpeg is pretty outrageous.

So if you want to be like B, do what she does and use your own dog, your own camera, your own frilly clothes, your own electrician’s tape, and your own sofa. That way, the only mess you’ll have to clean up is a few hairs - provided it’s fully housebroken.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

PS: You can tape the show - schade, nur auf Deutsch - in repeat on Wednesday, February 20 around 2345, or Friday the 22nd at 0920 on HR (Hessischen Rundfunk) or simply watch it on the web via the link provided above when they get around to posting it.

PPS: Please see this excellent post on fair use from The Blog Herald, a blog on blogging.

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Cheaper by the dozen? Not in Germany.

Will someone please explain this to me?

I was out shopping this morning at the local supermarket. I had to buy whipping cream, so I went to the dairy case. I stooped down to pick up the only brand they had, and noticed the price was 65 cents for 200 ml. Since I had to buy a lot of cream, I wondered if I shouldn’t buy the larger, 500-ml carton next to it.

But, noticing its price of €1.79, I realised it was cheaper to buy five smaller cartons and pay €3.25 than to buy two large ones and pay €3.58.

What? I realise the price difference at around 10% is minimal, but shouldn’t there at least be a premium on smaller packaging? There’s more effort going in to make the cartons, fill, pack, warehouse and ship the contents, and at the end of the day, there’s more waste, more landfill, more energy consumed all around.

So just for laughs I asked the lady stocking the shelves why it was so.

“I don’t know,” she replied, giving me a strange look. “You’ll have to ask the buyer.”

“The buyer?”

“Yeah, the one who buys it for the store.”

“How can I get ahold of the buyer?” I asked.

“You can find the number on the internet,” she said, not trying very hard to hide her impatience with me.

Yeah right, lady. I can just imagine how that would go:

One ringy-dingy…. two ringy-dingy…..

“Hello? Is this Inedible Foods Corp? I have a question.”

“Yes, go ahead.”

“Well, I’d like to know why your cream costs more in big packages than it does in smaller ones.”

“For that you’ll have to talk to the buyer.”

(Insert pause for annoying 2-minutes Muzak.)

“Inedible Foods buyer, Helmut speaking.”

“Yes, I’d like to know why the large containers of cream cost more than the smaller ones do.”

“Well for that you’ll have to ask the warehouse guys, but they’re too busy, and anyway, they’d tell you to talk to the distributor, but they’re a private company, and anyway, if I gave you their number, they’d tell you to talk to the packager, who’d pass you to the wholesaler, and if you called them up, they’d say you’d have to ask the farmer, and if you talked to the farmer, he’d tell you to go ask some cow.”

“Yes, well I already did that back at the beginning, that’s why I’m here.”

© 2008 lettershometoyou

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