Card trick: the marked pack

Wherever card games are played you are likely to find a pack of Bicycle League cards in use. If the game is Bridge most of the modern Bridge packs are one-way designs. Noticing this to be the case you remark that most packs of cards are secretly marked by the manufacturer and, while talking along this line, run through the cards, apparently studying the backs but really sorting them so that all the cards are one way except the A's which you leave reversed. Hand the pack to be shuffled, take it back and as you deal it face down you pick out the A's. There will be plenty of folks to offer you all kinds of money to teach them to read any cards from the backs. This stunt is quite sensational, creates good publicity and provokes a lot of favorable comment.

Withering TV

When I was a kid, I watched a decent amount of network TV. Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Mork and Mindy, Mash, etc. Plus Saturday morning cartoons. The TV was generally always on in the evenings. Mom and Dad watched it quite a bit.

Today, the only show that I intend to watch on network TV this season is one that I haven't watched yet: House, on Fox. I'll try to catch the replay of the debut this Friday, and then maybe watch it every Tuesday, if it appeals to me.

In my family of 6, we just don't watch much TV. We don't even have cable. The older boys will catch a Will & Grace re-run now and then, and during the weekend, my youngest sons will watch a football game during the weekend. My daughter catches Everwood on Mondays, if she's home. If the game is interesting, we might catch Monday Night Football if Bari's not vying for the TV.

I got involved in the comments dust-up at Jeff Jarvis' site over the racy Monday Night Football intro.

Jeff's in a snit because Michael Powell says that he's disappointed in ABC's decision to air the intro (a different post, here). The FCC has no business butting into this, says he.

I say: who cares?

This is about marketing and branding. ABC chose to alter the Monday Night Football brand by running an intro that offended some of its viewers. If I watch Monday Night Football, it's with my 7-year-old who loves football, and racy content isn't something he's allowed to watch.

Tony Dungy, head coach for Indianapolis, said that he used the occasion to talk to his 12-year-old son about it, but we parents don't want those occasions foisted on us. It feels like an ambush. It's like having your kid receive soft-porn email in his inbox. It's unexpected and unwelcome.

As the Monday Night Football episode demonstrated, it's not the maturity content of the show, but of the advertising and of the bumper promos, when our children watch TV that parents find objectionable. Commercials and shows should be on the same maturity level. But advertising (with orgasmic shampoo, etc) is what's killing what I watch with my younger kids, not the shows. I choose the shows, but I can't choose the ads. I would prefer it if the content providers/networks would say that everything during a given hour will be a certain level of maturity. But I don't think that will happen.

The government's answer to this is the upcoming Broadcast Indencency Act, but it's wrong because the standards for indecency are way too subjective. Government is never an answer.

Jeff has spent a life in media and critiquing TV. He calls those of us in the cheap seats who object to titillating promos "prudes."

Me, I call us "gone." I have a remote and it has an "off" button. In a period of ample choice for media and entertainment, I want control. So I'll walk from TV even more than I do now if I find it objectionable. When the content providers start bleeding money (and maybe they are now), they might change. But it'll be too late. The alternatives are too numerous and much better. They just give us an opportunity to explore those alternatives with each of these dumb programming decisions.

In the Pink

I wrote a while back that with advances in technology and with cheap international outsourcing that the only two things that can't be done by computers or by those in India for $5 an hour is what we create ourselves and what has to be done locally. Art and nursing care. Music and police work. You get the idea.

So I get my Wired magazine for the month and lo and behold there is an by a guy named Daniel Pink who says the same, only way better than I could:

- Scientists have long known that a neurological Mason-Dixon line cleaves our brains into two regions - the left and right hemispheres. But in the last 10 years, thanks in part to advances in functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers have begun to identify more precisely how the two sides divide responsibilities. The left hemisphere handles sequence, literalness, and analysis. The right hemisphere, meanwhile, takes care of context, emotional expression, and synthesis. Of course, the human brain, with its 100 billion cells forging 1 quadrillion connections, is breathtakingly complex. The two hemispheres work in concert, and we enlist both sides for nearly everything we do. But the structure of our brains can help explain the contours of our times.

- Until recently, the abilities that led to success in school, work, and business were characteristic of the left hemisphere. They were the sorts of linear, logical, analytical talents measured by SATs and deployed by CPAs. Today, those capabilities are still necessary. But they're no longer sufficient. In a world upended by outsourcing, deluged with data, and choked with choices, the abilities that matter most are now closer in spirit to the specialties of the right hemisphere - artistry, empathy, seeing the big picture, and pursuing the transcendent.

- Beneath the nervous clatter of our half-completed decade stirs a slow but seismic shift. The Information Age we all prepared for is ending. Rising in its place is what I call the Conceptual Age, an era in which mastery of abilities that we've often overlooked and undervalued marks the fault line between who gets ahead and who falls behind.

- To some of you, this shift - from an economy built on the logical, sequential abilities of the Information Age to an economy built on the inventive, empathic abilities of the Conceptual Age - sounds delightful. "You had me at hello!" I can hear the painters and nurses exulting. But to others, this sounds like a crock. "Prove it!" I hear the programmers and lawyers demanding.


First, what great writing. Second, what great thinking. And not just because I agree. The title of his article is "Revenge of the Right Brain," which is adapted from his new but not yet released book, "A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age."

I don't think it should be that people abandon their left-brained gig. But rather do both. Which is part of the reason I'm busy exploring all this painting stuff...

I once worked for 3 to 6 months at a stretch on software that I would sell. Afterwards, there was tech support to provide and upgrades and so on. My price on the software I would sell? Roughly $29.95. Depended on the software.

But I can paint and work for three weeks on a painting, the prints of which can sell for $19.95, and best of all - there is no tech support after the sale. I just need to work to be very good and I need to market it.

Smarter, not harder. And right-brained output is tougher for someone else to reproduce.

Some guy once said something like "Periods of tranquility are not periods of production. Mankind needs to be stirred up." Taking 3-6 months to produce anything, left- or right-brained, is a non-starter in our very fast world. We have to be prolific. And personal. And open, transparent, linked, a bit sensational, niched... But mostly prolific. Whatever we do, we have to do a lot of it.