In discussions of the iPad, I’ve seen comments along the following lines:

The only problem is getting consumers to understand what being open means…and care. Where Apple’s iPad will be restricted to running approved applications from the iTunes App Store – a business model that has raised flags when Apple’s app overlords blocked popular, rival apps from their store (most notably, Google Voice) – the model has proved incredibly successful for the Cupertino-based company. The iPhone OS is the most popular smartphone OS in the world with Google’s mobile Android OS trailing further behind.

This article actually takes a more critical look at Apple and the iPad, but I hear it more frequently from Apple-boosters that point to the fact that the iPhone came out of nowhere and became the number one such-and-such in the world. I’ve fallen in the same trap by referring to Apple’s entry into the smartphone market as “domination” without the appropriate qualifications.

The rise of the iPhone is nothing short of phenomenal no matter how you look at it. It’s done wonders in terms of getting people to talk about smartphones and getting people to demand more from their smartphones. It’s not inconceivable that, given time, they will be the worldwide leader. God help us all. But right now, their marketshare is not remarkably impressive and is only a couple notches above that of the Macintosh computers. There are two big differences, though. They’re not just “losing” the desktop marketshare wars, but (a) they are being dominated by a single entity and (b) they’ve not demonstrated the ability to climb out of their hole in any meaningful capacity. In the case of smartphones, neither of these really apply. The smartphone market leader, Nokia, is losing ground quarterly and right now their OS only controls half of the marketshare. So they’re not in Nokia’s shadow on smartphones the way that they are in Microsoft’s on desktops and because the market is so segmented, they’re not losing out on application development nearly as much because developers can’t just develop for one platform and then call it quits the same way that they can with desktops and Windows.

So there’s reason to believe that Apple can eventually get there, if that’s what they want. In the world of desktops, they’ve simply decided that OS marketshare isn’t that important. When they had the opportunity to release their OS generically, they passed. That seems similar to their plans with the iPhone except that with the iPhone there is even less incentive to because they already have strong enough market presence and buzz so that application developers are falling all over themselves to support it. So it seems likely that they will keep pressing forward, though it’s starting to seem less likely that talk of opening their OS to multiple cell carriers is going to come to fruition.

It’s notable that they dug in their heels with AT&T with the iPad. That doesn’t mean that they won’t open the iPhone up to Verizon and others when the time comes. It’s possible that the plan is to open up both the iPhone and the iPad eventually but during a product’s release it makes sense to go with a single carrier. But it does demonstrate that for all of the complaints about AT&T, Apple does not appear to have any regrets. The model worked for them even if it came at the expense of marketshare. To be blunt, all of the optimism about Apple opening up the iPhone is based on the belief by Apple people that (a) opening it up would be a good thing and (b) Apple does good things.

But right now, they are only domination a specific place in the market: Extensive mobile web using non-business consumers within the United States. The business market is still dominated by Blackberry and though perhaps fleetingly, Nokia and their Symbian OS has a strong margin in the worldwide market. The problem for Nokia is that their attempts to break into the US market in a meaningful way. All of their connections with carriers on dumbphones has surprisingly failed to translate into high-profile arrangements for smart phones. And even internationally they’re faltering.

This provides a great opportunity for Apple and its competitors. Symbian’s fall, unless it’s reversed, will provide a tremendous void. There is a vacancy for a standard. My head tells me that it’s unlikely that a device as limited in variation as the iPhone is going to be able to fill it. It seems far more likely that Google’s Android, which is not dependent on a single manufacturer or limited variation of form factors, seems well-positioned to do so. Or it’s possible that with the release of Microsoft Windows Mobile that they will be able to apply the formula that won the desktops wars to smartphones as well. Or perhaps Nokia will rebound and figure out what they’re doing wrong, assisted by the fact that other manufacturers use Symbian as well. Or RIM, which follows a formula most similar to Apple’s, is just flexible enough to gain more ground in the consumer-grade market. My nightmare, of course, is that none of this will happen and that people will simply accept the iPhone as the standard simply because it is already perceived as being such.

But as of Q2 of last year, the most recent data I can find, the Symbian OS holds 50%, Blackberry 21%, iPhone 14%, Windows Mobile 9%, and Android 3%. In other words, the iPhone is closer to Windows Mobile than it is even the Blackberry. I’ve found Q3 numbers by manufacturer (from which you can inexactly get market position from OSes that are on devices from manufacturers that choose one OS and stick with it – iPhone and Blackberry, though not Android or Windows Mobile). Apple does better there, commanding 17%, but they’re still behind Nokia (40%) and Blackberry (20%). Notably, the Blackberry and iPhone grew at roughly the same pace between 2008 and 2009. So there is perhaps reason to be hopeful.

Security is a funny thing. On the one hand, you want to keep the bad people out. On the other, you want to be able to get in. This applies to passwords and cars. Fords often seem to come with punch-codes to get inside. I wonder if we’re going to start seeing more of that.

A recent topic around here has been the trustworthiness of cops. I think that relatively few cops will make something up to put someone they don’t believe to be guilty behind bars, but things like this are worrying and I suspect a lot more common. The good news for people like me (clean-cut, respectful to authority, no criminal record, white) is that I’m probably safe. It’s still unnerving.

Even though the stories themselves are dated and by today’s standards hokey, I find characters like Philip Marlowe charming in their own way.

Apple wants to sell TV shows to the iPad for a dollar. I wish them luck with that. As critical as I am of Apple on many things, one way that they really did everybody a service is by assisting in the transition of music from physical albums of ten to fourteen inseparable songs to downloads available at a cheaper price. Yeah, they came hobbled with DRM, but that was the baby step the record companies needed.

Speaking of Apple, David Coursey thinks “Just because I purchased an iPhone, doesn’t mean I elected Steve Jobs to rule my life.” He apparently didn’t read the contract. Having a manufacturer be the gatekeeper towards applications is all fine and dandy if you are on the right page. If you aren’t, however, you discover that it’s not a negotiation.

A part of me wonders if this sort of thing should be allowed to happen. It would be tough to write the law, but if someone creates a work and decides not to make it available to anybody, they should lose the rights to it. Creative minds and their bankrollers deserve to be compensated, but the point of such laws is to encourage the availability of art by compensating those responsible for making it. On the other hand, if you pass such a law, they’ll simply sell it for $1m a piece. So I guess it’s hard to have one without the other. On a sidenote, I can’t help but point out: $1.4m dollars that movie cost. That’s why I am pretty convinced that movie profits (far moreso than book or music) need to be protected.

Small cities are losing their luster. Those that believe everybody should live in Manhattan rejoice. The place we lived in Deseret nearly qualified as a “small city” as did the place where I worked in Deseret and in Estacado. They’re nice places, but large cities are where the jobs are. Even if you get a job offer in a small city, you would have to move knowing that your chances of finding another job if you’re laid off are more limited. I needed my job in Deseret in a way that I never needed any particular job in Colosse. The article also cites the problem that people often move to the small cities and want to pull up the ladder. I’m reminded of people that move to the exurbs of Colosse because of all the space and peace and quiet and then are shocked when others want to do the same and before you know it they’re having to build bigger roads.

Men are allegedly more aware of what arouses them than women. This fits into so many stereotypes as to be ridiculous.

The NCAA is seeking to implement what they’re calling The Tebow Rule. Tim Tebow is the Florida quarterback that put Bible versus on the eye-black below his eyes. Other players, including one at my alma mater, do the same with Bible versus. Some players put other things like their home area code, zip code, or school logo. The NCAA has decided this qualifies as “taunting”. That they came to this decision right after Tebow – a spectacular player – left is not a coincidence. I am more aggravated by what I perceive to be special treatment than I should be. A more benign explanation is that by waiting for the most high-profile player doing it to graduate, they’ve saved themselves accusations of being anti-Christian.

The Big Money has an article about how the private investigation business is suffering in light of the many ways that suspicious spouses can investigate for themselves whether or not their spouse is having an affair. It’s an interesting article made a little humorous by the front-and-center ad to take classes from Boston University to become… a PI. Tangentially, I would have thought that BU would be above such things.

Oops.

Toyota has been making the news lately in ways that I’m sure they wish they weren’t. As most of you know, it was discovered that they have a problem with their accelerators getting stuck. The actual frequency of this problem is under dispute as any accident involving a failure to break and involving a Toyota magically becomes a hardware problem rather than a driver problem, but things like sticky accelerators have a way of getting people’s attention. The media has been having a field day and the government is coming down hard on Toyota.

Some are suggesting that the government is coming down particularly hard on Toyota because the government is, along with the Canadian government, a majority shareholder in General Motors. The more I think about this, the less sure I am that one has all that much bearing on the other. Maybe it plays a role, but there are other factors that play a bigger role. Namely press coverage and Toyota’s origin.

The press has loved the Toyota story because it’s Toyota, the number one selling automaker in the world. Not just that, but Toyotas are known for their reliability. If it were Jeep or Suzuki having problems, there would surely be coverage but I am not sure there would be nearly as much. While nobody expects Jeep or Suzuki to be dangerous, nobody expects them to be particularly reliable, either. Reliability is what Toyota is known for and thus that makes it a much more interesting story. It’s also a story because Toyota’s handling of the issue has been insufficient. My friend Rick, a longtime skeptic of “sudden acceleration” claims (and not a Toyota owner), believes that the media has gone out of control on this. Whether Rick is right or wrong, Toyota may have been thinking along similar lines and expected more people to be skeptical of the drivers making the claims. Or else Toyota just didn’t understand our culture and our media and failed to grasp how devastating this would be. Transportation Secretary Roy LaHood has said that the North American leadership was actually very responsive but they had trouble getting through to Japan, so culture may be an issue.

Regardless, the media sprang on the story and politicians of all political stripes love to capitalize on a good story. They especially love to do so when the villains fall outside their constituency. This is where Toyota being a Japanese company comes into play. The Democrats’ constituency is in Detroit. Not just in that the government owns a Detroit company but also because of labor relations and in the case of LaHood (a Republican) and Obama himself, it’s right in their back yard. Toyota builds cars in the US, but they’re not as much union factories (or what unions they do have are not as strong because they did not exist when the unions themselves were stronger). Plus… well… Toyota is foreign. This country has Ford people and Chevy people and some Dodge/Chrysler people, but Toyota owners may keep buying Toyotas but they don’t identify with the carmaker as much.

So, in addition to thinking that this would be less of a big deal if it were Suzuki or Jeep, I think that it would be less of a big deal with Ford or Chrysler even though they compete directly with General Motors.

This happens to be the perfect storm and Toyota, a company not used to making mistakes, is caught in the crosswinds. In a way I consider it unfortunate because, while I’m not quite as skeptical as Rick, I do think that this has been blown out of proportion both by an overenthusiastic government and Toyota’s handling of the issue. We’ve more-or-less decided to get a Subaru for our next vehicle, but at least a part of me is wondering if maybe I should be giving Toyota another look. While Subaru is having trouble keeping up with their inventory, Toyota may be really anxious to make whatever sale they can.

A while back (I’m too lazy to look it up), Web made a comment about how people complain about car dealers without any real appreciation for how small their profits can be.

He may be right about that, though I think that to some degree the dealers bring it on themselves. Not on a personal basis, but by the model that they work through. The negotiation set-up invites the sort of animosity that occurs. If you trust a salesperson, you are likely to get rolled over. Since determining that we were going to be buying a new(-to-us) car, I’ve had to do all manner of research in two different areas. Having to research different makes and models is unavoidable (and kind to fun, to be honest).

What I find most aggravating is having to research for the sake of getting the best deal that I can. I’m likely going to have to pay entities to find out exactly how much I should be paying for the car. Then I’m going to have to find out what tricks they will use to get me to pay more. Then I’m likely going to have to go to one dealer after another to try to get that deal. All along the way, I’m going to have to put on my best poker face to avoid giving them the impression that I am actually excited to buy the car, that I really want a particular make and model and color. Because if I let them know what I really want, I lose my bargaining chip. I’d end up having to get a color or something I don’t want just because it would be a harder sell for them. Or I pay more for one color car over another even though (with the exception of black paint and white) they all cost about the same.

The price-opacity is stressful and maddening. They know how much they’re willing to sell the car for (more-or-less), but I don’t know how much I should be willing to pay for a car (without help).

When it comes to used cars, this state of affairs is less avoidable. Since every car is a unique combination of year, mileage, and wear-and-tear, everybody is just winging it. Not so for new cars.

There are some no-haggle dealerships around, but they seem to be priced near where the regular dealerships are. I may end up going that route anyway just to save myself the hassle. But of course, I would do so knowing that somebody, somewhere paid less because they did more research or had a better poker face.

One of the things I find interesting is that two of the badges I know 0f with the most loyal following are Saturns (well, a soon to be former badge I guess) and Scions. Both are cars the fill (or filled) a particular niche, but I also think that part of it is that it’s much easier to buy a new one and come out of the dealership feeling a lot better about your purchase.

For those of you that don’t follow me on Twitter, I periodically collect links on interesting things. I’ve decided that in addition to the Randomania posts, I’m going to do periodic collections of links and post those, too.

MSN has a list of the 11 Most Absurd Food Myths. The problem is that three of these myths the article tags as “true.” Then you have three more that are indirectly true (ex. drinking water or not eating late at night does help lose weight when it results in a reduction of calories, which if often does). After that, you have one that’s technically true but not in a helpful way (sort of the opposite of the water thing), one that’s “not exactly” true, and three that are bona fide wrong.

Charlie Brooker does the best write-up on the iPad that I have seen to date.

The New York Times had a good piece on the IP ownership of Sherlock Holmes. That Sherlock is not in the public domain is an embarrassment to our IP law.

The Boston Globe makes the case that Trial By Ordeal was effective… but how do you know so long after the fact who was guilty and who wasn’t to make that determination?

A Financial Times article about dogs in Russia has been making the rounds for a while. I intended to write a post on it, but never got around to it. So check it out if you’re interested in dogs and/or Russia.

A few years back, the Internet was saved.

Radley Balko’s writing on paternity law is a worthy read for those that have found our own writing on the subject interesting.

In Japan, there is apparently a cottage industry of people called wakaresaseya, whose job it is to quasi-seduce somebody into a compromising situation that you can then hold over them. Clients include people that want cause for divorce and negotiators (political and business) looking for leverage. I discovered this from a Times of London article about such an arrangement going terribly, terribly wrong. I’ve vaguely heard of this sort of thing occurring in the US and it makes a fair amount of sense (though of questionable legality). It was also shown on Melrose Place, so we know it happens.

Speaking of TV and reality, I swear this was the plot of a cop show I’ve seen. I can’t for the life of me remember which one. The people I’ve discussed it with think that the TV plot came from some sort of similar plan, but I’m really thinking it was the other way around. It’s an ingenious way to have somebody raped, but it requires a… peculiar… mind to come up with it. More of a Hollywood mind. Of course, they caught the bad guy on TV and they caught the bad guy in real life, so it can’t be too easy to get away with. If they caught them in the same manner then we know that the Wyoming dude didn’t get the idea from TV because he would have known how to avoid that particular trap.

With all the news going on about the publishers raising the prices of ebooks, the discussion of how much ebooks and books should cost has been getting more and more attention. A lot of comparisons are made between the publishing industry, the movie-making industry, and the music industry. In my observation, people often align these different media too similarly. They are, in many ways, quite different.

The amount of money it takes to make a movie and the amount of money it takes to make a book, for instance, or a CD are exponentially different. Similarly, the investment required by the consumer to consume these different media are different as well. So the source of the value-added by the content-managers is different in nature from one to the next.

Movies in particular are an outlier. They require a huge amount of investment. Whereas I can talk blithely about how my entertainment choices wouldn’t really be hindered if the music industry went under, the same is very much not true of the movie-making industry. Albums can be produced by a guy in a garage at minimal expense but movies (well, except certain kinds of movies) can’t be. So the value added by the movie studios involves huge amounts of capital to produce the movie. The value added by the record industry has more to do with publicity and making sure the album gets heard. Well, I can find my own music. I can’t find my own movies if nobody has the money with which to make them.

Publishing is more like recording in this regard. I can find my own books. And like CDs, any joker can write a book and pay someone to edit it. But what “anybody” can’t do is make their book be taken seriously. As with CDs, except much moreso, one of the values added by publishers is that it at least theoretically meets a certain quality threshold by the fact that the publisher put their weight behind it. Further, the fact that the publisher put their weight behind it means that bookstores will consider carrying it. And if bookstores carry it, then consumers have reason to believe that it meets a certain quality threshold. If they go to some self-publishing archive, there is no such guarantee.

This guarantee is important because of where books differ from albums and movies. Albums and movies require minimal time-investment. A movie takes only a couple hours out of your life. A CD takes less than that and can be consumed while doing other things. Books, on the other hand, take several hours of your life. They can’t easily be done while multitasking. You can’t really do it while vegging. So when you’re asking someone to read your book in comparison to watching your movie or listening to your album, you’re actually asking something of them in addition to asking to be paid (assuming that you’re asking for that). So publishers and bookstores saying “this might be worth your time and investment” carries significant weight.

Also because of all of this, books live and die by reputation and marketing in a way that far exceeds that of movies and somewhat exceeds albums. Nothing positions a writer for success than already having been successful. If you write one good book that a lot of people like, the chances are far greater that your next book will do well. This is in contrast to one-hit wonders and the sophomore jinx phenomena in the recording industry. The publishing industry is also unique in that they sell not only (explicitly) creative work but also non-fiction as well. So you also have a series of books with success that rides on it being topical or written by a figure that is famous for reasons other than their writing. You do get some of that in the recording industry, though, with Lindsey Lohan and Oscar De La Hoya releasing records, but it’s not as prevalent as books written by Sean Hannity and autobiographies of famous politicians consistently reaching the best-seller lists.

Publishers then have two kinds of books, really. The first kind is those that they have to convince people to read. The author is new or unproven and/or it’s a memoir written by someone unfamous. These are where the publishers really earn their toll as the gatekeepers of quality and the salesmen of their authors’ works. Then you have the second group where the publishers have to pay millions of dollars upfront because the book more or less sells itself. It’s still worth it to Sarah Palin or Nora Roberts to go through a traditional publisher rather than try to rake it in all themselves through self-publishing and profile publicity because of distribution networks and publicity mechanisms already in place, but if the publishing industry were to completely crater, Palin and Roberts could still make money with their books fairly easily.

The problem with all of this as it relates to book pricing is that these books are all priced the same. That nobody has heard of my sister-in-law Ellie and has no idea if her self-published novel is any good does not earn anybody any sort of discount. Her book costs more than Scott Turow’s most recent. A lot of this can be attributed to economies of scale and all that. Once you have the printing press set up, printing out 10,000 copies doesn’t cost all that much more than printing out twenty copies. Printing out books one at a time, which a lot of self-publishers do, isn’t cheap.

This is where ebooks should provide some relief. It becomes easier to print limited-run books when you don’t have to worry about how many copies to print. If the book is not successful, the costs are relatively small. No excess inventory to deal with, among other things. Leaving out advertising, you pay the writer (or you don’t, upfront), you pay the editor, and you pay someone to package it (or the author packages it himself). These are all variable expenses where you can pay more or less depending on what your expectations are. If your expectations are small, you can get by pretty cheaply. And if it’s not successful, you can move on without being egregiously injured.

This gives publishers a degree of flexibility with new writers. Right now, they have to say “Try this book out, we think you’ll like it, and could we please have $20 for the honor?” That’s a tough sell on unproven writers. Especially when they can get John Grisham’s for the same price and even if they have not themselves read Grisham’s work they have at least heard about him and have reason to believe that he’s quite good. Instead, I wonder if a better pitch may be “You haven’t heard of this guy, but trust me when I tell you that he’s pretty good. In fact, we’ll only charge you a couple dollars to find out for yourself.”

It’s unlikely that, with this model, very much money will be made. But what it could do is build a degree of brand loyalty. People that like the ebook will then be encouraged to have a real copy of the book on their bookshelf. They may or may not take advantage of that. But if they really like the book, they’ll want the next book by the same writer. That book will cost more. So then you have two sets of readers. The first set that pays a marginal price for the first book to see if they like the author or like the series, then the second set that pays a premium because they already have good reason to believe that they will like it.

People will pay a premium for a product that they have strong reason to believe that they will like. They’ll do that before they will take advantage of free samples of things that they are not sure of. People can be extremely reluctant to invest (in time or money) in things that they have no idea whether they will like it or not. I have serious doubts that people will just continue to buy first-books because they’re cheaper. If that were true, everybody would stick with their library card and go to Half-Price Books instead of Barnes & Noble. People just aren’t that price-conscious. While this could be (and is) said as an argument against lowering the prices of ebooks, I don’t think that extends nearly as much to material they don’t know that they’re going to like and, in publishing, I don’t think that they’re quite as adventurous when it comes to investing $10 and several hours of their lives.

Entertainment is becoming cheaper and cheaper. It’s hard for content-producers of any stripe to command really high prices in the hopes that people will pay them just to evade boredom. The Internet has a lifetime supply of anti-boredom content. A single subscription to Netflix is enough for a lifetime of entertainment at the low price of $9/month. But people don’t gravitate towards these things because now they are choosing between entertaining things and when it comes to things that they know will entertain them, they’ll pay for it even while they could get less worthwhile or less convenient entertainment through a subscription or library card they already have.

What I’m proposing here really isn’t radical. The publishing industry already does it to an extent with hardbacks and paperbacks. They try to get the already-invested fan to pay more for a hardback while they let others try it out at a cheaper rate on paper back. I am merely proposing that ebooks should be a third variation on that, of sorts. An even cheaper way to get people hooked on their product.

Ordinarily, when people talk about what content-providers should do, such as turning a blind eye towards piracy, give their product away for free, or whatever else, I get a little skeptical. I point out that it’s easier to talk about what others should do when our livelihoods are not threatened by its failure. But this is a case where I am seriously considering putting my (potential) money where my mouth is.

Though I do a lot of novel-writing, I haven’t decided exactly what path I am going to take when I am wanting to take it to the next level. I’ll probably try to go the traditional publisher route simply because that’s the way to get the most people to read it, but I may not. If I self-publish, you can bet that I am going to utilize a whole lot of the ideas I’ve outlined here. I’ll probably plan a series of novels, the first I will practically (or perhaps literally) give away in digital form. I’ll basically consider it advertising for buying the hard copy and for buying the second book in the series. Depending on the level of success I have, each subsequent ebook will cost a little bit more. Anybody who doesn’t want to pay $7 for my third novel is free to try out the first at minimal cost in order to see if it’s something that they want to invest their time and money into. Given that I’m asking for both, it seems like a pretty fair way to go.

Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.

— Community poem based on the original Candidate for a Pullet Surprise, by Mark Eckman and Jerrold Zar.

The incoming admissions staff at the University of Waterloo have a problem with what they are seeing from their prospective students. Articles like these have been fairly common in the past fifteen years or so, and a backlash against some of the worst methods of teaching (especially the “whole language” nonsense and the idea of “open plan” schools) is slowly taking root.

Too little, too late? Can this be turned around? Working in my department at SoTech, where we “educate” the next generation of teachers, I am occasionally frightened by what I see. It is an open secret that our students are an average of 20 IQ points lower than the IQ of the next lowest-performing college. Our professors regularly give grades of B, or even A, to projects that would have been given a failing mark when I was in the fourth grade. One required test for the students, supposedly meant to ensure that the curricula for a grade-school position have been memorized to a sufficent degree, is passed by students “brute-forcing it”. To wit, they repeat the test some dozen times or more (there is no limit on how many attempts one may have, save that it may only be taken once per day and costs a set fee per attempt at the SoTech Testing Center), entering in random answers to multiple-choice questions until they eke out a “passing” grade once. “Prole Twang”, as Sheila would call it, abounds not only in hallway conversations but in classroom presentations. In the case of two african-american professors (who oddly enough carry bachelors’ degrees in “african-american studies”), it is actively encouraged.

It has been said that “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” The more time I examine the fields of teaching, and the more time I see the students passing through these doors, the more frightened I become that this could be true. It is a statement that many would take to be rude and demeaning. There are many good teachers employed in the world. At the same time, there are any number of people who entered the field of teaching because they believed it to be easy. There are a large number who entered the field because they lacked the mental acuity for other professions. Sadly, since “promotion” in the field of teaching is largely about being given older students (kindergarten/preeschool teachers are “promoted” to 1st/2nd grade, 1st/2nd grade teachers “promoted” to 3rd/4th grade, and so on) and the system mostly revolves around the idea of “tenure”, by which a teacher who has been in a system for a number of years can either be promoted or not, but never fired, the field has worked itself into the situation we have today: a large number of people expected to educate middle-school or high-school children about more advanced grammatical, mathematical, or higher reasoning concepts are the very people who repeatedly proved their inability to grasp the very same concepts throughout their own educational career.

It is one thing to have a teacher who cannot understand basic geometry, but can still teach a kindergartener how to count to twelve. It is quite another to find out that, fifteen years later, this same teacher is now somehow teaching a trigonometry class because they have, through the magic of seniority and tenure, managed to “fail upwards” to teaching the ninth or tenth grade.

A while back, Rob made a comment about dating fat girls. It was his perspective that it was a dangerous proposition because if they lose their weight, they would dump you flat.

Back when I was working at Mindstorm, there was a young woman that was a receptionist for a time. She was a bit pudgy, but she knew what to do with the pudge to minimize its impact and make it work for her in her own way. The consensus among the single guys I knew there was that she was cool and cute but they didn’t know if they would actually date her.

It was apparent that she put more than a little effort in her appearance. It was no accident that she found clothes that minimized her weight and she found a style that very much worked for her. It was probably not lost on her that she was a receptionist in a building 85% staffed by guys, some of whom made pretty good money and who were members of a group known for being less particular.

I think of the receptionist because she was what struck me as a romantic marketeer. She was out there to get the absolute best guy that she could get by whatever criteria she used.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. We all do that in our own way. If Clancy had met someone with all of my strengths but minus a few weaknesses who was just as into her as I was, there’s a good chance that she would have picked him. And vice-versa. I say “a good chance” because at some point I do think that chemistry takes a role.

But there is a group of people that takes it to the next level in a particularly cutthroat sort of way. The kind of person that, if they lost weight, would not hesitate in the slightest going for an upgrade.

Sheila talked of guys that are like this. Whereas guys that can’t afford to be too particular like to say that they would make better boyfriends to attractive girls because they will be more grateful to have an attractive girl, sometimes that’s just not true. Once they achieve one level, the next level up seems within grasp.

And the same is true of many women, including the receptionist. It was hard not to notice the extraordinary attention that she would lavish on what could easily be perceived as higher-status guys. Guys that were pretty much out of her league. But she would still entertain guys that were less desirable. I couldn’t escape the sense, though, that if she were ever with the latter and got an opportunity for the former, that she’d jump ship at the opportunity.

I could be wrong, though. It’s possible that she was just indulging the guys that I would put in her station and would never go out with them because she has what I would consider to be excessively high standards.

It’s hard to pick the marketeers out from the rest. Because people don’t let their own insufficiencies in the romantic marketplace keep them out of the game. Even ugly people would prefer not date ugly people. It’s something that ideally people move beyond. But a lot don’t. And when it comes to people that were in the lower circles of 6-12, there is a certain void in their self-esteem to fill. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the worst marketeers I know are people that were late entrants into the dating arena.

Valerie D’Orazio speculates on what DC might do as a potential sequel to The Watchmen. There may have been an opening for that when the movie came out, but I think the time has passed. We’re back to the only people who care about it are comic book fans and they’re likely to resist. Then again, they may resist in spirit but but it anyway. But if they do choose to go forward with a series, D’Orazio’s idea isn’t bad. The only exception is that it would probably need to be a prequel rather than a sequel so that you can include the characters that died in the making of the series. Plus, while I suspect I am more amenable to commercial follow-ups than most fans (I can ignore it if I don’t like it), I think that it is important to leave the ending on an ambiguous note rather than specifying whether the New Frontier read the article or not.

Having gotten that out of the way, one thing that DC really needed to do was capitalize on the publicity surrounding the movie by releasing new and original artwork. The series doesn’t have much in the way of splash pages with the main characters. There aren’t a whole lot of pictures of the individual characters that don’t have word balloons and whatnot in them. There is no clean image of the picture taken of the Minutemen and comparatively few of the Watchmen characters together. Further, by releasing a gallery, you can take advantage of the story without much fear of backlash from changing or sullying it. It wouldn’t be hard to get a whole bunch of artists on board. I would probably pay a pretty penny for it. It would be relatively inexpensive to make.

It they can sell galleries with Batman and Superman and so on where there are thousands upon thousands of great splash artwork, I would expect such a venture with Watchmen could be lucrative. Most of the upsides of a follow-up series with almost none of the downsides.