Positioning Statement

Here’s another technological marvel I haven’t had occasion to use yet, the global positioning device. The first reason is, as a friend of mine says, “as soon as I go out my door I consider myself to be on enemy territory.” Another reason is I almost never go anywhere that I haven’t been before.

But the GPS devices are out there and I have friends who think they’re pretty nifty. There’s one called “TomTom,” there’s one called “Garmin,” another called “Magellan,” and still another one called “Hummingbird.” I would think what you call a product like this could make a huge difference in its initial success.

So “Garmin” just mystifies me. What connection am I supposed to make? I think of Leonard Garment, who was a Special Counsel to President Nixon during the Watergate mess. Okay, most people probably wouldn’t make that connection but I don’t think of finding my way anywhere, except out of the White House, when I hear Garmin.

“Hummingbird?” Don’t they go by sense of smell or something? That may have worked to get to Gloucester, Massachusetts when there was a fishing industry, or to Berlin, New Hampshire when there was a paper mill running, but I can’t see it being much good now.

“TomTom?” I’d want to know who was going to be on the receiving end of my beats. I’m not sure my wife would let me keep drums in the passenger seat in the event we get lost, which I guarantee I would do if I missed a beat.

“Magellan” sounds promising but I wonder how many people realize that Ol’ Ferdinand never actually made it around the world. Wikipedia says that of 237 men who started out on the first trip around the world only 18 completed the trip and returned to Spain. There were about that many others who straggled back later one way or another later, but that’s not how I want our family trip to work out. Magellan himself was killed in the Philippines. No, that’s definitely not how I want my trip to The Cape to go at all.

I know there’s a whole industry out there devoted to “branding” so I would think they could come up with the name of an explorer who was able to finish the trip. Doesn’t that seem like a better idea?

Here’s one badly branded travel item, Amelia Earhart Luggage. It was an endorsement deal when Amelia was alive but once she disappeared somewhere over the Pacific in 1937 wouldn’t you think the market would have disappeared too? They were still selling Amelia Earhart Luggage in 1964. What was the slogan, “Amelia Earhart Luggage, when it gets lost it stays lost”?

Since this is America, and we always like to encourage entrepreneurship, here’s a couple of services that could become enormously successful in the hands of the right capitalist.

Lindbergh Baby and Child Care. Let’s face it, as Americans we have no historical memory so when people hear “Lindbergh Baby” they’re not going to recognize that there could be a problem, it will just be a vaguely familiar phrase that we can capitalize on. But between you and me, don’t hire a guy with a German accent named Bruno. I’m just funny that way.

Wiley Post Alaska Tours. Wiley Post was the first pilot to fly solo around the world. In these days when we have whack jobs attempting to cross the Atlantic in rowboats, on surfboards and using grandma’s china cabinet as a flotation device, what he did may sound like just another bit of flat out silly adventuring but back in the 30s, when he did it, it was a big deal. He’s mostly remembered now, if he’s remembered at all, for being the pilot of the plane that crashed and killed Will Rogers. Like I said, if he’s remembered at all. In any event, I am one columnist who will never be a customer.

On those rare occasions that I do find it necessary to leave the house, I’m pretty happy with the on-line resources like MapQuest, Google Maps, and whatever else. I like to be able to hold the directions in my hand, go over them a couple of times before I leave and I like to be able to look at them in groups of two or three rather than one at a time. It seems I’m always going someplace where the directions involve a sequence of, “travel .1 miles and bear left onto Whatsit Street.

Follow Whatsit Street for 2.2 miles.

Right onto Wherezit Road for .9 miles.

Right onto Imlost Avenue and drive for 10 miles before you admit you screwed up somewhere.

Of course this is New England so if there are road signs they’re hidden by a tree.

Y2K-2 This Time It’s the TV

Remember back in the late 90s when we were constantly hearing about how dangerous the Y2K computer bug would be? Many computers recognized the year’s date as only two digits, 1995 would just be 95. The fear was that we’d get to the year 2000 and the computers would all go kerflooie because some might get that it was 2000 and others would think it was 1900. Computers wouldn’t be able to communicate, we wouldn’t be able to communicate, power grids would shut down, there would be plague and pestilence upon the land.

So what happened? Not much. Some countries spent oodles of money getting ready for Y2K and others pretty much let it happen without doing much at all and everybody got the same result. Nothing happened. Zero, Zilch, Zip, Nada. The world kept spinning on its axis and we’ve all pretty much forgotten Y2K and what it was all about. Ever wonder what would have happened if Congress could have pushed back the date change-over?

First off, you know they’d have done it in a heartbeat because the country wasn’t ready and the world wasn’t ready. There was a line of code in somebody’s Commodore PC that hadn’t been rewritten and that could cause the downfall of western civilization. You know they would have cooked up some scheme to delay the start of the year 2000; it’s just a question of how long they would have delayed it. This year we found out.

When the Federal Communications Commission decided to get broadcasters off the schnide and into digital transmission they set it up for February 17, 2009. It was an arbitrary deadline but the commission was tired of the Alphonse and Gaston routine of the TV industry. As February 17^th neared there came cries from the wilderness of, “Somebody’s not ready!” So after months of “news” stories and seemingly endless informational announcements on our local TV stations, Congress blinked and pushed the date of the transition back to June 12^th.

Some stations, not wanting to pay to transmit signals in both analog and digital – that costs money you know, decided to just go ahead and go digital anyway. You probably didn’t notice that. Other stations just changed the date on their transition to digital promos and kept those suckers running. You probably didn’t notice that either; by now they’re part of the landscape like bad furniture store commercials and file footage of people building the last Pontiac.

A few people have been affected. My mother-in-law, whose little bitty kitchen TV was built by the manufacturer of Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist TV wasn’t able to use a converter box for it. She has to go to work without seeing Matt, Meredith, Ann and Al in the morning. I believe that her heart will go on.

So what do we get with digital, usually high definition, transmission? Mostly it’s lipstick on a pig. It hasn’t made broadcasters provide better programming. We’ve got clear sharp pictures and surround sound of muddy fat people going through a nerf obstacle course. We’ve still got WHDH’s (Boston’s channel 7) news team looking like High School Musical – The Newscast. We’ve still got the “Runaway Bride” saga starring the meandering quarterback Brett Favre every late spring. There’s progress for ya.

One thing is different. They’re finding they have to cut back on the make-up on some of the faces we see. Make-up can do a lot for some people and for some of us even when they put it on with a trowel it would look like a bad patch job on a classic New England stone wall. But with HDTV you can tell when there’s too much. When the anchorwoman blinks and it looks like the garage doors closing… that’s too much… and probably an inappropriate color.

There’s also new opportunity in HDTV. Put all your money in industrial spray tans. HDTV is making people hit the spray tans like never before. Some people are way over-doing it. Take John Boehner, remember it’s pronounced BAY-ner, the House Minority Leader. He was standing next to a new bronze statue of Ronald Reagan at the Capitol the other day and he, Boehner, was more bronze than the statue. That’s too much. You could probably make a pretty good living just supplying him with spray tan.

Here’s a fun thing you can do some time when you’re watching the Sunday talk shows. Watch for a talking head to bring a hand up to his or her face. It can be pretty funny because they almost never bother to spray tan their hands. Just make sure you don’t have a mouthful of coffee when they do it because you’ll realize that they look like Muppets. Well dressed Muppets, but Muppets. It’s hi-tech fun brought to you with digital clarity in high definition so you can laugh at the talking head-igentsia after you’ve gotten so frustrated listening to them that you had to hit the mute button.

Oh, and if you didn’t get your converter box and the TV signals you were accustomed to disappeared on June 12^th don’t despair. You can still find out what’s going on via the internet, radio, magazines and, at least for now, newspapers. For entertainment there are still movies, books and music. My guess is you handled this crisis just like you did the Y2K bug. If it hadn’t been for the hype, you wouldn’t have noticed it at all.

A Time to Heal

It could easily be argued that I watch too much baseball on TV. Not successfully, but you could make a case. What with the Red Sox on almost every day, ESPN game coverage, Baseball tonight, and now MLB TV, I can finally get almost all the baseball I want to see. This has helped me to appreciate the competence of the people who provide Red Sox Nation with the coverage we get for 162 games every year plus, we hope, the post-season.

Baseball is tough to broadcast because it’s pretty much a seven day a week endeavor. Let’s face it, there aren’t that many people we want to spend 3 hours or more with every day. There is our spouse, maybe whomever we begat and perhaps one or two others, and that’s probably it. That may even be an overestimate for some.

The point is, three hours or so every day with the same person would get difficult. The fact that the Red Sox radio and TV broadcasters Joe Castiglione, Dave O’Brien, Dale Arnold, Don Orsillo and Jerry Remy are agreeable company is quite remarkable and, from what I’ve heard of the teams in the rest of North America, extremely unusual.

The New York Yankees’ John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman, and the Chicago White Sox’ Ken Harrelson are so bad I feel embarrassed for their families. How would you like to explain somebody in your household coming up with a phrase like, “It’s an A-bomb, from A-Rod?” Suffice it to say that if that were the best I could do I would deserve, and fully expect, to be denied by all who know me.

So here in New England we are quite fortunate with our broadcasters and we’ll be even more so when Jerry Remy is back in the booth. And props to Don Orsillo for doing so well with NESN’s analyst of the day. It can’t be easy constantly shifting gears to work with a new partner but Orsillo has done it with grace and poise to this point. But there is room for Don to improve his performance, and who better to tell him than a grumpy guy from New Hampshire?

1-If you have to give the pitch count can you promise to only do it once per game per pitcher? Only John Farrell, the Red Sox pitching coach, needs to know this number and I’m not sure we wouldn’t be better off if he didn’t know it either. He’s keeping track of it himself anyway.

2-Lose the stopwatch. No pitcher in the world is going to complain that the Red Sox spent 22 minutes at bat scoring five runs for him. These are all young healthy men. They can sit for 22 minutes and still function afterward. The guys who can’t do that are the pitching coaches with the little clicker in their left hand keeping track of the number of pitches their pitcher has thrown.

3-I know you graduated from Northeastern University, Don, but when did Yoda become an instructor there? “And diving for the ball is Lowell!” I don’t think the Force is With You when you say that.

4-Repeat after me, “every day.” This one’s not your fault. It’s rampant in a culture that will “utilize” what it could simply “use” because “utilize” is a polysyllabic and people think that it makes them sound smarter. The same goes for “on a daily basis.” This is a phrase that means every day, so you can just say, “every day,” and the world will know what you mean. Or maybe you drive from Boston to Providence by way of Hartford.

5-Don, just because they put a statistic in front of you doesn’t mean you have to read it aloud. I know baseball is full of stats and some of them can actually be meaningful to real fans and students of the game. The time you told me that “Rheal Cormier is the 13th winningest left-handed reliever in Philadelphia Phillies history,” went over the edge. With the possible exception of Rheal’s mother, who the hell cares? I swear that if someone handed you a sheet that said, “Rheal Cormier is the 13th left hander in Phillies history to get a vasectomy,” you’d read it.

6-“…he looks to first and to third, but doesn't throw to either venue/destination." Venue, Don? Destination, Don? You’re “utilizing” again when you could just “use.” You could end the sentence at “either.” You’re a pretty natural guy, Don. Using these phrases has become has become a habit, a crutch, one you do without.

While I’m forever grateful that we are spared the incessant inanities of, say John Sterling, or the sycophantic homerism of Ken Harrelson, I think Don could be better if he would just have faith that he can walk without his crutches.

And that’s what we’re here for brothers and sisters.

For Don Orsillo has been stricken with a disease that tears at his ability to talk without using his crutches. But you can do it, Don! You can rise up to your full potential and get through an entire broadcast without using your crutches. And then, with faith, you can get through an entire home stand without your crutches! And eventually if your faith, and creativity… lets just go with faith, is strong enough you may make it through a whole season without your crutches.

You can do it, Don! You can take that first step and be free of your crutches forever!