Grading Recent Commercials, Part III: The Potpourri Edition

We put a bid on a house last week and it was accepted earlier today.  We're in attorney review, and the next blog post will tell more about how all that jazz works out.  For now, let's blow off some steam by grading some more recent TV commercials.

As always, commercials are ranked on a standard grading scale, from A+ to F, where A+ is Ivan Drago and F is Tommy Gunn.

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Commercial #1: Why So Woman-Focused?


Sometimes, I look at a commercial and think: this is such a good idea in general, why do you make me not want to use your product so much?  This is true for commercials for most chocolate bars, TV dinners, and products used for cleaning the house, where I watch the commercial and wonder fuck the heck the advertising agency (no, most likely the client) was thinking.

I'll be honest: I am a manly man, and I love chocolate bars.  I occasionally eat TV dinners (even, gasp, "diet" ones), and I get my ass up early every Saturday morning and clean the apartment because I like to clean.  (No, I do not wear French maid costumes while doing so.)

So whenever someone (whether it's Dove chocolate or Bud Light) markets a product toward one gender only, I generally assume that they're okay with not doubling their sales.  We've become a society that despises both "girl talk" and "bro talk."  There's a way to get your product sold without catering to only men or only women, and if you're smart enough, you'll find it.  No matter what, the end consumer is smart enough to know when they're not being spoken to.  And this brings me to Angie's List.

Angie's List is a subscription service that exists in a number of metropolitan areas, which allows users to view and contribute to comments and rankings regarding local services, such as contractors, plumbers, housekeepers, etc.  It's like TripAdvisor, but because you're paying for the service one might reasonably assume that the comments are vetted and are of higher, more objective quality.

FWIW, I think Angie's List is a fantastic idea.  As but one example, there's this new generation of first-time homebuyers (and I am one of them) who are used to going on the Internet in order not only to find answers, but we also have the expectation that, among several answers, we should be able to determine which answer is "best".  Where past generations would typically ask family or neighbors for a plumber recommendation, we would rather determine which plumber in town gets the most positive five-star ratings.  We are the most empirical generation ever, and Angie's List speaks to this need by providing the raw data.

I've watched several of the Angie's List commercials (one is above), and all - except one - is clearly not only designed for women, but is overtly and (I feel) offensively designed for women.  The one above has a female narrator who hired a housekeeper who whistles an annoying tune, but is so good at her job that it's okay.  After she's done speaking, there's another narrator voice (again a woman) who pitches the service.  Oh, and everything at the end of the commercial is pink.  And almost every other Angie's List commercial is like this.

So I'm just going to say this, and move on to the next commercial.  Angie's List is not a tampon.  It is an excellent idea with mainstream appeal and many men would pay for it if it didn't make them feel like they were picking out window treatments.  Men need plumbers, too.

Grade: F, for Feminist, because that's clearly what I am.

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Commercial #2: Smart People Like Animals, Stupid People LOOOOOOOVE Them

If you're like me and you don't deal drugs in East Baltimore, you also don't pre-pay for your cell phone.  You probably sign a contract with your cell phone provider and upgrade your phone for free every couple of years.  This is because you have a credit history - not a good credit history, but any kind of credit history at all.  I suppose lots of people do like to use burners, though, and RadioShack indeed has an ad for that.

In the below ad, nothing important is said.  It's just a male bulldog and a female cat, talking about stupid stuff.  You shouldn't click on the link to the video below, unless you want to lose brain cells.  It's hard to understand how anyone could possibly pay attention to this for more than a few seconds, but I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here and tell you what the commercial has going for it:

• The characters use Southern accents, which makes sense because the South has 31% of the money that the North has and burner phones are cheap.
• It features quirky animation, which at least grabs your peripheral attention.
• The conversation, while complete nonsense, is vaguely sexual, which is peripherally attractive to some people.
• It has dogs and cats, which OMG are sooooo cutttteeeeeee...

Obviously, I hate this commercial.  But I imagine that, like Sarah Palin, it's effective for the people it's supposed to be effective for (if this makes sense).  I'd personally rather have a two-year contract, but I also don't have to worry about Detective McNulty, so bully for me.

Grade: F

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Commercial #3: What Detroit Got Right

I often critique car commercials, both because cars are awesome and because cars are super-expensive, which necessarily makes the art of selling them more important than would be selling, say, a set of Tupperware or something.  Over the past decade, no car-maker (domestic or foreign) has faced a tougher road than Chrysler. Their line of passenger cars and minivans has been notable only for its design flaws, poor quality, and lackluster look.  Compared with the other "Big Three" automakers - Ford and GM - Chrysler has certainly been behind the pack leaders for quite a while.  So I, like you, was astounded to see the following commercial during this month's Super Bowl, and as a result I have to analyze it a bit.  Below is the extended, two-minute version, which you can't find on TV anymore:

What I love about this commercial is the following:

1. The dialogue: Somehow the voiceover work for what I think is a luxury car commercial sounded edgy, brash, and blue-collar, and all the while matched the essence of the commercial - namely, that Detroit (and its cars) are resurgent, and we should all buy one.  Usually if you strip away just the wording of a luxury car commercial and repeat it to yourself out loud, you'll sound like the douchiest douche that ever douched.  Not in this case.  The lyrics (and yes, this commercial had lyrics) told a story, accentuated by the phrase "to hell and back," which worked better than 99.99% of any of the curse words I ever used, and effectively communicated what the Chrysler 200 stands for.
2. The voiceover artist:  A 59-year-old gruff-looking freelance voiceover artist from Michigan was the voice you heard in this commercial.  He sounded perfect; he sounded like Detroit.  He sounded like the kind of guy who's spent every Friday night following his Cutty Sark with an unironically-consumed PBR.  He sounds like he belongs to an autoworkers union and actually works hard.  He sounds old and wrecked by cigarettes and angry, and (here I'm conjecturing a bit) that's how we should feel when we think about Detroit and the sad stories it contains. 
3. The car: Black was a good choice for the color.  It looks sleek.  I'll wait for Consumer Reports to recommend it first.
4. The cinematography: We needed to physically see Detroit in this commercial, and this commercial managed to capture a city in two minutes in the same way that David Simon captured Baltimore in "The Wire."  Gritty, tough as nails, sad but defiant.  Short snippets worked way better than a smaller number of longer shots would have.  It was like being taken for a ride.
5. Eminem, and specifically the strategic use of his 2002 hit "Lose Yourself" juxtaposed with a gospel choir: Holy shit, that was really cool.  The "Lose Yourself" beat alone is often enough to prompt riots.  The gospel remix, particularly in the empty worndown theater, had spectacular dramatic effect.  Not thrilled with the last ten seconds of the commercial - Eminem doesn't sound like he's from Detroit - but that's a minor quibble.

So, in general, I loved this commercial.

In cinema, when I think of how music can interplay with cinematography and dialogue, I always think of Scorcese.  The scene from "Goodfellas" where you see how the crew got killed one at a time, to the tune of the piano coda to Clapton's "Layla," is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen.  It's both jarring and beautiful, it outlines death in all its brutality, and the music blends with the camerawork to create a coherent experience.  It's the scene in the movie that people talk about the most, and with good reason.

I realize that we're talking about a commercial here.  It's obviously derivative to the type of feel and musical juxtaposition that Scorcese (and others) have been using for the past twenty years, and it's also impossible to provide much of the same context in a commercial's timeframe (even if the commercial clocks in at over two minutes).  But it gets an A for effort, for being memorable, and for being extremely well thought-out.

Grade: A

Buying a First Home: Tackling the Biggest, Semi-Dumbest Expense Ever

I'm gonna buy this place is what I said,
blame it upon a rush of blood to the head...

The floods is threatenin'
My very life today
Gimme, gimme shelter
Or I'm gonna fade away 

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The woman and I are in the market to buy our first house.  We're not buying one of those rinky-dinky RV's, nor are we buying a mere double-wide trailer.  No, sir.  We're pushing all of our chips into the middle and buying a full-blown, brick-and-mortar, suburban New Jersey single family home.

Since we started looking in earnest a couple of months ago, we've entered more strangers' homes than in our entire lives combined before this point.  We've opened cupboards and medicine cabinets, inspected toilets and furnaces (this was mainly me), and had the incredible experience of spending a few quiet minutes contemplating what our future lives would look like in each of these houses.  On the other hand, we've also walked into houses where the current owners were not only home, but actively showering.  We've been duped by houses that back to major highways (this is a major no-no), we've walked through vacant lots and knee-high drifts of snow to enter houses that repulse us, and been so tired of the process that we've decided to take an entire week off from discussing house-hunting and have witnessed each house we've seen fall into a blurry haze where it's impossible to tell one from the other.  (Oh wait, that was the past two weeks.)

In case you weren't aware, buying a home is super serious.  If you buy a car and it stinks, you probably have lemon laws on your side and even if those fail you, you're only out a (relatively) small amount of money.  Additionally, someone else might think your car stinks less than you do and purchase it from you, thus cutting your losses a bit.  If you buy a home and it turns out that any of the following is true:

• The sofa in the living room was hiding a giant hole leading to the basement;
• The above-ground pool leaks incessantly and will cost thousands of dollars to replace;
• The neighbors are knife-wielding psychos, or even worse, from Staten Island;
• The bathroom walls and doors are paper thin and everyone in the house gets to hear everything that goes on in there;
• Your basement is infested with house centipedes (or, as I like to call them, "Hellbugs")
• The previous owners were involved in a ghastly murder-suicide incident and haunt the house, constantly throwing pots and pans around the kitchen in the middle of the night and drawing in blood on your walls...

Well, sorry, bub.  You better hire yourself a damn good contractor or exorcist or something, because you have just made a terrible decision with a four hundred thousand dollar price tag attached to it.  And don't worry about the price, because you'll be spending the next thirty years paying it off.  (As a morbid aside, I only have an 88% chance of living another thirty years, which - at my most pessimistic moments - is an oddly comforting thought.)

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It says home is where your heart is
But what a shame
Cause everyone's heart doesn't beat the same
It's beatin' out of time

This is not to say that I'm not super excited about buying a home: I am.  Buying a home is lots of fun, if you are the kind of person who likes to pore over reams of data (again, I am).  Comparing and contrasting homes (or trying and failing to do this; see below) is fun; budgeting is fun; going to open houses is fun; and - although we haven't negotiated a price yet - negotiating prices is (for me) always fun.  I guess you could say that trying to figure out the whole puzzle is fun, because - either through choice or competence level - no one in the industry is equipped enough to tell you everything.

You can work with a realtor, but they don't know a whole lot about mortgages.  Mortgage brokers know a lot about mortgages, but don't know a lot about the law.  Real estate attorneys are supposed to operate with your best interest in mind, but may be in cahoots with the realtors and the mortgage brokers.  The Internet is a goddamned minefield of inaccurate information when it comes to buying a house - some of the information is so outdated (i.e., greater than three years old) that it might as well be tailored to a completely different planet.

I shall call this planet Earth: 2006, or Bubbletopia.

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Open doors so I walk inside
Close my eyes, find my place to hide
And I shake as I take it in
Let the show begin


I'm too young to remember 2006, but - from what I understand from stories told to me by my parents and real estate agents - it was a glorious time when every American felt rich and consequently needed to "upgrade" their primary residence.  Thanks in part to permissive lending policies and lack of regulatory control/taking a deep breath by, well, anyone, everyone who wanted to buy a house was able to, even if they could not afford it.  Hell, even if they had no income, they could buy a house, as long as they were willing to lie through their teeth about having an income.

I do have one relatively fuzzy memory of 2006.  I had recently inherited a smallish sum of money from a relative who passed away, and my dad and I had considered taking some (actually, almost all) of this money and putting it as a down payment on a townhouse.  The conventional wisdom at the time was that housing was a fantastic investment, that homes were guaranteed to steadily increase in value, and the only reason we put the plan on hold was my decision to begin graduate school in Boston in the fall of 2007.  Had we gone ahead and done this, we could have been easily approved for a home that I would have bought at the very apex of the modern era's most insidious housing boom, and I would be crying into my Spaghetti-O's right now in a home I would both (a) hate and (b) be unable to sell.

What is there prohibiting us from making the same, terrible decision in 2011?  I suppose we can be comforted by the fact that the Great Recession of 2008 has ended, and the US economy at long last appears to be improving.  Both of our jobs are secure, and home prices have fallen so far over the past four years that it's reasonable to say that what we can buy at $400k is - historically speaking - a great value.

But the market forces that influence why a house costs what it does are so damned variable.  If you buy a Honda Civic, like I did a few years back, you pay a price that is easily comparable to the Toyota Corolla, the Hyundai Elantra, and other equivalent models.  It's actually quite easy - especially when buying your second car - to compare these models against your priorities and make an informed decision about which is "best."

When attaching a value or a price tag to a home, however, you hear vague terms like "updated kitchen" and "great school system" and "not in a flood plain."  That updated kitchen is great, but how do I know the contractor who put it together wasn't baked out of his mind when doing so?  I love the idea of a great school system, but what happens when the current superintendent retires and is replaced by the former superintendent from someplace horrible, like Middletown or Camden or something?  And "not in a flood plain" means that there's a statistical improbability - not an impossibility - that the house will flood.  When the Great Hurricane of 2029 absolutely tears up the entire Jersey Shore and turns everything within 50 miles of an ocean, river, or other meaningful body of water into a freaking Duck Boat tour, you go ahead and complain to your insurance company, because you, my friend, are boned.

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Take that look of worry, mine is an ordinary life
Working when it's daylight and sleeping when it's night
I have no far horizons, I don't wish upon no star
They don't think that I listen, ah but I know who they are

I am the kind of person who likes to manage risk, and who prides himself on his ability to master risk intuitively.  As a result, the prospect of buying a house scares the living shit out of me sometimes.

You have every right in the world to tell me to shut the fuck up.

But as with every major life decision, many calculated risks need to be taken in order to pull this off.  First-time homebuyers will find themselves poring over many different types of minutia - IRS regulations, mortgage yield spreads, and budget calculators - if and only if they are smart about the decision.  And the magnitude of dollars involved in a home purchase is a really unique thing.  For instance, at some point over the next few months, I will walk into a room carrying a dark leather briefcase with several stacks of hundred dollar bills inside.  (I already know which briefcase I'll carry, and I am contractually obligated to wear a suit and dark sunglasses while I do this.)  After taking out a single Benjamin and lighting a cigar with it (because, at this point, why the hell not?), I shall sign over the money to the bank and they will consequently trust us with a mortgage worth more than both of our combined net worths.  (Do banks send hitmen?)

So that's my "home buying overview."  Depending on how interesting this is to other people, I'll periodically update over the next four months with our progress toward the ultimate goal: a two-story beer bong at the Housewarming Party.

I just hope it turns out better than the last Housewarming Party, where I consumed many questionable substances and threw up in the sink at 3 AM.  And I'll let the blog-reading public define "better..."

Don't be Silly, Adrian Peterson: Grading Recent Commercials (Part 2)

Since the post I wrote about two weeks ago cutting apart some TV commercials was well-received, let's move on to a new set of snark.  Again, all commercials are graded using a standard rating scale, where A+ is "The Godfather, Part II" and F is "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes."

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Commercial #1: The One Commercial That Gets the "Smarmy Dude, Hot Chick" Trope Right

If you are like me, you watch tons of football.  In fact, I watch so much football that (a) sometimes I spend the equivalent of a workday sitting on the couch watching football, and (b) sometimes I watch football games where I know nothing about the teams at play.  Division 3 football, high school football, you name it, I'll watch it.

(I'm writing this during the BCS Championship game, though, because I hate both the University of Oregon and Auburn University with equally fiery passions.  The University of Oregon is douchey, in bed with Nike, has annoying uniforms and a not-deserving-of-pretense pretentious fan base.  The school barely cracks the top 100 in the nation academically, and you'd think it's fucking Yale if you listen to its students enough.  Auburn is a bunch of backwoodsy, incestuous assholes who have no academic standards, love Sarah Palin and have a quarterback straight out of a terrible '80's movie about cheating in sports.  Both of these teams, and all of their respective fans, can choke on the same Chicken McNugget.)

At least in professional football, most of the commercials are really, really stupid.  The NFL assumes that a big part of its fan base consists of Neanderthal males, and appeases this demographic by presenting lots of commercials for domestic light beer products that are designed to state man's superiority to woman (usually using third-grade humor to make the point).  I hate these commercials because they're not subtle and they actively lead the people with money in their pockets toward hating the product being sold, but that's not my point here.

My point is that the NFL itself, who probably knows more about the commercials being shown during its games than anyone else, has turned this system on its head with a quirky and extremely funny commercial for its NFL Mobile product.  I submit for your approval the following:

A few things to note about this commercial:

1. The dude is extremely smarmy and the girl is extremely good looking.  This is a trope, it happens a bunch in commercials; the goal here is to attract the attention of loser-like, ugly dudes, by instilling a brief millisecond of hope that they, too, might score a babe one day.  (Sorry, ain't happening.)
2. There's actually a plot to this commercial; girl walks into the water.  Dude checks NFL highlights.  Girl (Adrian Peterson) walks out of the water and Peterson - who must have a FANTASTIC sense of humor because he allows himself to be made fun of often in commercials - putting a towel around his helmet, speaks in a girl's voice, "You're imagining me as Adrian Peterson again, aren't you?"  Cut to the punch line of the entire commercial, guffaw guffaw, the end.

I remembered this commercial - and what it was for - immediately, because it does so many things that are both unexpected and also demands a great deal of attention on the behalf of the viewer to comprehend.  Extra props for manipulating the shallow, sexist tropes that dominate the media marketplace for commercials shown during football games.  Kudos for NFL Mobile for a commercial that scores a touchdown.

Grade: A-

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Commercial #2: Mayhem, Like Me

If you watched "Oz" back in the day, you know character actor Dean Winters as the completely awesome Ryan O'Reily, the lead character on the show.  He's also been in a bunch of other stuff, including a recurring role on "30 Rock," but you most likely only know him as "Mayhem," the real-life manifestation of problems that can occur while driving.

In the above commercial, he represents one of the worst drivers in the world - the emotionally compromised teenage girl.  Several things are hilarious and effective about this commercial: the deadpan "OMG", the pink Dodge Durango with matching sunglasses, and the obviousness that - holy shit - there are a lot of terrible drivers out there and maybe you do need effective insurance to protect yourself.

This is the type of ad campaign that must have taken a great deal of patience (as well as balls, when you think about it) to pull off.  It, like the earlier commercial for NFL Mobile, requires an active viewer to get the point.  It essentially bets on the weirdness and comic quality being enough to draw people in, and to understand what the commercial is trying to sell.  It's a big swing, but it works, and it's resulted in one of the most memorable ad campaigns in recent memory.  The above video is, in my opinion, the funniest one of the lot.

Grade: A-

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Commercial #3: Where Smarmy DOESN'T Sell (a/k/a The Power of Likability)

Where Allstate hit a home run with its most recent ad campaign, one of its major competitors - State Farm - hit a dribbler down the third base line.  There might be people, somewhere in the United States, who actively like the following commercial, but I haven't met any of them yet.  (And yes, I've had many conversations with people about these commercials, and they ALL hate them.  Watch the below commercial at your own risk.)

The skinny of this commercial is as follows: douchebag pitchman walks into a cafe and talks about how great State Farm insurance is.  Holds the door for someone on the way in - that must have really sold Middle Fuckin' America, right there.  Speaks a couple of incredibly false statistics (e.g., "Discounts up to 40%"... yeah, right) as the camera nonsensically pans around the cafe while workers... do their jobs?  Not sure what the point of this pan-around is.  Camera cuts back to douchebag pitchman who spouts some more drivel about State Farm, all the while with very soft and boring music playing in the background.  Fade to red.

So, this commercial is extremely problematic.  First, the pitchman is completely ineffective.  He's too slight, too tenor, too... girly to get the job done.  He's not convincing, and insurance is such a saturated marketplace that false discounts aren't enough to get people to switch - they might get people to get a quote from State Farm, but once they see that the stated discounts are lies, and they are lies, they won't switch.  Anyway, where Allstate has Pedro Cerrano/President Palmer and Ryan O'Reily pitching ads, State Farm has My Big Fat Greek Pitchman (I would have also accepted the homeless man's Steve Perry from Journey).  So there's an epic fail right there.

Second, what's with the hokey nature of this commercial?  It seems corny and contrived.  The cafe setting doesn't make sense, and the pan-around doesn't do anything to help firm the message (if anything, it detracts from it).  Other commercials from the same ad campaign show the pitchman in front of a newsstand.  These settings all have something in common: they have NOTHING to do with insurance.

State Farm has clearly forgotten the cardinal rule of selling insurance products: the products themselves are so ugly, and people think so little about insurance in their day-to-day lives in the first place, that you've got to get really creative in order to sell them.  These commercials fail to accomplish this.

Grade: F

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Commercial #4: Selling Ford Cars to Girls

I'm going to take off my misogynist hat for a minute here and attempt to be objective.  Such a high percentage of car commercials are tailored to men (have you seen that Dodge Challenger ad with George Washington, the one that says in a voice over: "Here are two things that America got right: cars, and freedom"?  Holy smokes, that one might as well be sponsored by the goddamn Tea Party).  Additionally, Ford was in such a perilous market position just a couple short years ago, I feel that having a series of TV spots that are specifically designed for women is extremely unique, extremely daring, and I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up being extremely effective.

What I think Ford did, at a very high level, is the following: they realized that they would never beat Honda or Toyota in perceived quality (although, paradoxically, in some instances they have rivaled them recently in actual quality).  So they teamed with Microsoft to add some really cool multimedia features to the cars, and decided to focus their marketing efforts on the "Car is a Cool Toy" market.  Good call here - that's exactly how my generation thinks, for the most part.

This, I think, leads naturally to an ad campaign that's more or less designed to get women to go alone into Ford dealerships to buy cars.  (You might disagree with the basic premise of my argument, but before you fly off the deep end, remember this: if a commercial for Grands biscuits shows a black family sitting around a table eating said biscuits - and this is an actual example from a recent commercial - it is a commercial targeted toward the black demographic.  It's not racist - it is racialist, I would argue, and there is a difference - and commercials are allowed to target genders, races, etc.  In the quest for the almighty dollar, many baseline rules of American society do not apply.)

[NOTE: I can't find a Youtube link to any of these commercials, which means that I fail at blogging.  I wrote all of the above before searching because usually, I can find what I am looking for.  But you know the commercials I'm talking about: Mike Rowe of Discovery's "Dirty Jobs" alongside a typically-attractive woman, he talks her through the Ford car of note in VERY shallow fashion, and then she decides she doesn't want to drive her Camry or Civic any more.  To me, they're pretty terrible because they don't go into any detail about the car - but I'm a details kind of guy.  I could see these commercials working very well for the people whom they are intended for.]

Anyway, as I mentioned in a previous post about commercials, everyone thinks they're an expert when it comes to cars.  More than half the battle in getting someone to switch brands is to just get them to think differently about the product itself.  These Ford ads succeed in that you stop thinking about your car as a means of transportation, and start thinking, "Hey, this is cool, this is fun!"

And the female focus (no pun intended) is probably a really good idea, too.  Women must feel maligned in the super-macho car market - I've noticed anecdotally that so many car commercials are tailored toward men, and most of the ones tailored toward women are pedantic and assume women are stupid, which is no fair - and (in my male opinion), these Ford commercials don't do that as much as others do.  Whether this translates to more sales for Ford is an open question, but certainly something to keep an eye on.

Grade: C+

Look at this F**king Hyundai: Fred Grades Recent Commercials

I watch a lot of TV, and maybe it's because of what I do for a living, maybe it's my deep-down love of "Mad Men," maybe it's something else entirely, but I watch the commercials intently as well.  Usually I do so with a metric ton of snark, because everyone in advertising seems to think they're Don Draper these days when really they're Ted Chaough.  (That's very much an inside joke.)  So I figured I'd bring some of that snark over to this blog-space by rating a few TV commercials and explaining why.

All advertisements are graded using a standard grading scheme, where "A+" is the greatest advertisement ever (never seen it) and "F" is Volkswagen's 1997 "Da Da Da" campaign.

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Advertisement #1: Look at This Fucking Hipster meets Straightforward Korean Engineering

You've definitely seen this commercial during the holiday season; two scarf-wearing, uncleansed hipsters straight out of Park Slope shilling for - you guessed it - Hyundai.  Specifically, in the two commercials I've seen so far, the Hyundai Sonata (a stylish and highly-rated, if somewhat unassuming, $20,000 family sedan) and the Hyundai Genesis Sedan (an upscale, $35,000+ luxury sedan that gets 25 highway mpg and therefore would NEVER be driven by a hipster).

What I don't get about these commercials is the following: virtually nobody likes hipsters.  They're douchey, smelly, pretentious without meaning or purpose, and are unified solely by their complete absence of social grace. (Q: How many hipsters does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: ::exasperated smarmy sigh:: Don't worry, it's some number you've never heard of.)

Most people dislike most car brands as well (if Grandpa was an Oldsmobile man, by definition he wasn't a Ford man or a Chevy man), but sometimes a well-made car commercial can shift this pattern and effectively shift some of the market toward a brand.  Given this possibility, why put hipsters, whom nobody likes, into your car commercial, when you're trying to get people to purchase your car brand?

Look, I will concede that it is borderline acceptable to put hipsters in a car commercial if you're trying to market a car that hipsters would actually consider driving.  (This puts aside the obvious notion that, after spending all their money on organic kale, indie-rock CD's, and locally-sourced vegan tofu, most hipsters are flat broke, but still.)  A Honda Fit commercial featuring hipsters, for instance, would get a far higher grade than this campaign. 

This commercial misses the fundamental point that hipsters don't want family sedans or luxury sedans - they aren't GREEN enough - and those people who would purchase family sedans or luxury sedans don't want to watch a dude with an unkempt beard ring goddamn tambourines.  Thus, these commercials are terrible.  I smite you, Hyundai (although I do like the Genesis sedan).

Grade: D

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Advertisement #2: Can a Bank Be (Legitimately) Metal?

In my never-ending search for authenticity, I'm often extremely surprised at how many commercials fail at simply doing what they were intended to do.  It's like the ad executive or the client (yeah, probably the client) for most companies ends up deciding upon a commercial that attempts to make six different statements - and executes each of them poorly - rather than something that quickly and effectively makes one solid statement and plain sticks with it.

Over the past couple of years, Ally Bank has caught a reasonable amount of flak (entirely from parents of small children, who seem eternally incapable of putting their hormonal changes into context and remembering that kids don't matter to people who don't have kids) for a series of ultra-realistic commercials that involved an adult actor stealing from small children as a metaphor for what other banks do to their customers.  Supposedly the commercials were not even scripted, so the looks on these children's faces when their ice cream was taken from them was indeed real, which resulted in tons of pissed off parents who couldn't bear to see little Madison get her heart broken!  (I always chuckled at these commercials, because I hate kids and feel they should learn about endless disappointment.)

To paraphrase the governor of Pennsylvania, we've become a nation of wussies.  As a result, I appreciate Ally Bank's authenticity, which thankfully hasn't wavered in their latest daring ad campaign.  In it, a metal band wails upon things that they hate (seriously, the first five seconds of this commercial are some of the funniest I've ever seen in a TV commercial), and then ad lib into "But I really love my bank!"  And then hilarity ensues from there.

The best thing about this ad (in my opinion) is that - taking "metal" to its literal, counter-cultural definition - this commercial is legitimately metal.  In the same way that it was metal to love George W. Bush in 2004, it's metal to love your bank in 2010.  This commercial is not for everyone (I could see my parents - and yours - putting the TV on mute whenever it comes on), but for its target audience, it's extremely memorable.  So kudos, Ally Bank, for creating an advertisement that actually does what it intends to do.  However, your savings rates are piss poor, so I will not use you.

Grade: B+

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Advertisement #3: Short but Sweet (Really Sweet...)

Just to prove I have a heart, I've also become a big fan of AT&T's new Samsung Focus cell phone spot.  Only 15 seconds in length, it describes the product, shows the product at work in a way that should make it very clear to the end user how it works and how it can improve their life, and then cuts away to an extremely... well, cute pink cyclops alien that bats its eye and picks a flower.

My fiancee liked this ad so much that she said she wanted a stuffed pink cyclops alien for Christmas.  (This is the same woman who got me a stuffed yeast for Christmas because I've recently started brewing my own beer ... so, yeah.)  I searched the Internet for a while but couldn't find anyone selling a stuffed replica of an alien creature from a cell phone commercial.  But hey, at least I tried!

I think what this commercial proves is that cute will always have the capacity to sell (if, again, it's authentic).  Like any social interaction, a commercial has about ten seconds to bring what we in the research business like to call "emotional rapport" - that immediate sense of, hey, this person/commercial/widget is actually kind of OK and I really want to pay more attention to it.  It's not syrupy, it's actually more informative than anything, and as such it gets the job done.

However, I will stick with Verizon.

Grade: B

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 Advertisement #4: Why I Hate Luxury Car Brands, Especially Lexus

Holy crap... I mean, look.  I get that luxury car brands ONLY exist insofar as they can convince people with disposable income (and just as many people without disposable income) to splurge tens of thousands of extra dollars (compared with a non-luxury car) on what is essentially a means of getting from Point A to Point B.  As a result of this, these brands need to justify their value by essentially appealing to prospective buyers' vanity - that is, you NEED this $40,000 car because you DESERVE the best/you need to SHOW everyone how wealthy you are/you MUST compensate for your small penis/yadda yadda, etc.  

(As you may have already guessed by the tenor of the previous paragraph, I intend to drive my base-model Honda Civic to the ground, on sheer principle.)

However, each holiday season, Lexus seems to push the envelope on this principle to the brink of committing brand seppuku.  This year,  their pitch line on several TV spots has been: "Let's be honest; no one ever wished for a smaller holiday gift."  To disprove this claim, below I've attempted to create a list of perfectly reasonable holiday gifts that are smaller than a Lexus RX350 (curb weight 4,178 lbs):

• Diamond jewelry
• A fruitcake
• A charitable gift in the recipient's behalf
• A Shake Weight
• An iPad
• Scotch of the Month club
• A stuffed microbe
• A mature adult Holstein cattle (~1,000 lb)

Taking my tongue out of my cheek for a second, I understand that the commercial's pitch line is not intended to be taken seriously.  Commercial pitch lines, in general, are not (in a literal sense) serious.  But when Taco Bell tells you to "Think outside the bun," it's OK that it's whimsical and flip because Taco Bell sells $1 tacos.  When you're selling a $40,000 car, you need to hold yourself to a higher standard of seriousness, and Lexus' entire holiday ad campaign completely fails to meet this standard. 

As a result, these commercials have become parodies unto themselves.  (In searching Youtube for "Lexus holiday commercial," I found more Lexus ad spoofs than actual commercials.)  It would not surprise me at all to see Lexus lose ground this holiday season to other luxury brands - Lexus (and its parent company, Toyota) haven't exactly had a banner year in 2010.  If it happens in 2010, expect them to lose ground to Acura, whose "Season of Reason" holiday ad campaign, I feel, elegantly toed the line between "this is a luxury purchase" and "this is nonetheless a perfectly reasonable purchase," doing an excellent job of capturing the current American zeitgeist of purchasing luxury items, where possible, and where practical.

Grade: F------- (Not Edible for Human Consumption)

Political Centrism Will Work. Partisans of all Kinds Are Idiots.

(DISCLAIMER #1: I almost never write about politics, and I think this is with good reason.  When having a conversation about politics with someone, it helps to make it clear exactly WHAT it is you are talking about, and from what frame of reference it is you speak - otherwise, two otherwise intelligent people end up having completely different conversations with each other and pissing each other off.  In the format of a blog post, if something gets lost in translation, it is entirely my fault.  This makes writing about politics risky; however, given what's been in the news lately, and the reactions that folks have had to said news, I think that "the benefits outweigh the risks."  Keep in mind that possible side effects of this blog post include: nodding silently, realizing I am far more eloquent than you originally anticipated, realizing I am a complete idiot, and never wishing to speak to me or read what I've written again.  All are rare.)

Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I was one of the more intelligent kids in my high school days.  I wasn't a fantastic student, but I was good enough, and I ended up attending Rutgers (a better-than-average state school) as an undergraduate student. 

For the first three years of college, I worked a work-study job as a front desk attendant at the college gym.  Starting in junior year, a weird thing started to happen: I started to see people I went to high school with, specifically people whose academic abilities in high school I thought should have prohibited them from ever attending any four-year university (let alone a decent one like Rutgers) check in at the gym's front desk as students.

I could have had any number of reactions to this, but the reaction I chose was fairly pragmatic; I realized that (a) these high school classmates, whom I had rashly written off as idiots while in high school, were late bloomers, and likely had a completely valid type of intelligence that I couldn't myself understand because it wasn't my type of intelligence; and (b) more generally speaking, different people can take radically different paths toward the same ideal, or the same solution, and each path can be equally valid.

Taking this analogy one step further, I've come to the conclusion that my worldview (and yours, by the way) is fundamentally skewed toward the biases that have been ingrained in me (and you) since the age of about two.  This doesn't make me stupid; however, if I were to completely ignore this fact, and go about my adult business assuming that - for whatever reason - my worldview is "more correct" than yours, or "more correct" than some huge group of individuals who share a conceptual grouping (e.g., people of a particular race or people of a particular political persuasion)... well, I think that would make me stupid.

I think that most rational adults get this fact, and 95% of the time they implement it wisely.  People who have obtained even modest success in academia/business have undoubtedly encountered many situations where they have been struck by their own narrow-mindedness.  With time, they learn to adapt their actions, almost as if they are "scaffolding" against their own limitations.

But not when it comes to politics.  No, when it comes to politics - just like when it comes to operating a motor vehicle - everyone acts like a goddamned expert.  Even worse, perhaps due to the daunting scope of the problems that politics are supposed to solve, everyone seems to think that the solutions to these problems are obvious.  (As examples, "we just need to cut taxes across the board," or "we need to spend more on governmental services".)  Further, people seem to generally think that politicians of one political party have the "correct" solution, while the plurality of individuals who affiliate with the other party are completely "incorrect" (to be polite).

(If you disagree with the above statement, then you disagree with the basic premise of my argument so there's really no point in reading any further.)

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(DISCLAIMER #2, THE DISCLAIMER WHERE I DO A VERY POOR JOB OF EXPLAINING MY OWN POLITICAL BELIEFS: I am a registered Democrat, and when I vote, about 80% of the time I vote for Democrats.  (The other 20% of the time, I vote Republican.)  I find that this is the case mainly because I align myself with Democrats on social issues that are "must-haves" for me, and also as an athiest, I shudder at the forced values of the modern Republican party.  However, compared with the rest of my immediate family (who happens to skew very much to the left), I have some political views that can be described as conservative.  For instance, I don't believe in many gun control laws - I believe that people should be allowed to arm themselves to the teeth, if they feel like it, to the extent that they abide by the law.  Also, when President Obama compromised with Congress yesterday to pass a bill that included a payroll tax cut, I was so excited that I woke up my fiancee from a nap to tell her that we were likely, as a household, to gain an extra $3,XXX in take home income in 2011.  So I like lower taxes, too.)


To provide a (really terrible) illustration, below is a figure from a completely unscientific "Politics Test" from an online dating site (it's what popped up first when I Google searched "politics test"; leave me alone) called OKcupid.com.  I don't trust it at all, especially since one of the attributes I was asked to rate my agreement with was: "It should be legal for two consenting adults to challenge each other to a duel and fight a Death Match." - my answer on a 4-point scale from "Completely Disagree" to "Completely Agree" was "Agree," by the way - but nonetheless, here it is.  I am a centrist.  Make of this what you will.

Figure 1: I am socially liberal and economically moderate.

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So, getting back to me exposing a rather striking flaw in how most otherwise intelligent adults view the world. 

I don't know about you, but I don't vote for a candidate (especially for President) because I want them to follow an agenda that I agree with.  This is not to say that I don't care about their agenda - I do.  I vote for them because, after making a calculated judgment regarding not only the agenda they represent but also their intellect, psychological disposition, and overall readiness to assume office, my opinion is that they are the most competent choice to move the country forward in a reasonable direction.

This is why, when I hear the President getting so much crap from people on the left regarding selling out his ideals/his "vision"/his progressive agenda, it only takes me about 0.6 seconds to call bullshit.  Last month, Americans voted overwhelmingly in a way that indicates strongly that a progressive-left agenda is not currently viable for this country.  The truth is in the data, and the data - collected in aggregate, with 100 million-plus data points - does not typically lie.

Does this mean that the President needs to become a Republican?  Of course not, and strategically speaking, it makes a great deal of sense for him to point out the reasons why Republican leadership in Congress is presenting "suboptimal solutions" wherever possible over the next two years - politics is essentially a game of marketing, and the President will get re-elected in 2012 if he markets himself as being better than Republicans.  (By the by, I hope he pulls it off: I like the President, I want to see him get re-elected because I think he's a smart dude.)

However, it has become clear to me over the past two years of paying really careful attention that a divided government is itself an optimal solution, in the sense that it allows both parties to carry real weight in passing forth legislation.  I further believe that disagreeing with the previous statement is essentially saying the following: [DEMOCRATS/REPUBLICANS] are more correct than [OTHER PARTY], due to some developmental/dispositional/philosophical attribute(s) that no one has ever been able to determine but I know it exists because I don't think deeply about serious issues and I eat my own poop.  And this, well, I'm sorry, but this makes you an idiot.

Why can't it be that you agree with one political party more than another party, for reasons that you are able to explain rationally, but still have respect for the other party?  Why all the name-calling and generalization?  (More fundamentally, why do we only have two political parties in this country?  Err... that's a topic for a completely different blog post.)

As someone interested in how people behave in groups, I am fascinated by these questions, as I think they provide some really useful insight into how our minds work.  I don't know any of the solutions - I recommend John W. Dean's 2007 book Conservatives Without Conscience, specifically the chapter(s) regarding the study of authoritarian behavior as it relates to modern conservatism, as a useful point of reference for those who are interested - but I imagine insights can be constructed.

For now, I think it would really help America if liberals adopted a wait-and-see attitude and allowed the President to shift naturally toward the middle, because - if you believe, as I do, that everyone is at least "a little correct" - the best way forward is probably somewhere in the middle.  And conservatives, since you're pretty happy right now, if you could go ahead and explain these whole Jesus and family values obsessions to me, I'd really appreciate it, because I don't really get either of these things.  Thanks.

Jersey Shore Half Marathon: A Non-Athlete Attempts to Jog Quickly for Two Hours (Part 2)

NOTE: In Part 1, written about two weeks ago, I described the loveliness that is training for a half marathon road race.  In the post below, I discuss the race itself.)

I studied Social Psychology for a few years, and one of the coolest experiments I ever learned about involved these creatures to the left (i.e., marshmallows).  The experiments were simple and consistent; starting in the late 1950's, Walter Mischel and his colleagues would gather a bunch of four-year-old children in a classroom and offer them a marshmallow, with the promise that they would receive a second marshmallow - under the condition that they waited at least twenty minutes before eating the first.  Naturally, some of the children would diligently wait and receive their reward; others, impatient from the start, would be unable to complete the task and immediately start munching on the first marshmallow they were given.

In the years that followed, the researchers kept in touch with the parents of the participants to observe how they developed.  What Mischel and others found was quite powerful - the children who were able (at age four) to wait twenty minutes for a single marshmallow were rated by their parents as being better students, more well-adjusted socially, more communicative/verbal, and better able to deal with stress.  As they went through high school, their SAT scores were higher; they obtained higher levels of education, and they were less likely to experience drug addictions.  (I'd cite this if I had to, but I'm not an academic.  Trust me though.)

Because I am a bit of an elitist, I'm going to cherry-pick just one implication of this research and run (pardon my pun) with it.  To me, Mischel's findings suggest that the cognitive strength (or whatever you want to call it) required to put the body through just a shit-ton of intellectual-slash-emotional-slash-physical stress must either be ingrained in some of us, or alternatively developed at an extremely early at age through mechanisms I'm not sure anyone understands.  Either way, some of us "have it" and some of us don't, and that's fairly consistent throughout our lives.

Or at least that's what I told myself at mile 12 of Sunday's half-marathon, with the wind at my back only serving to make the day seem ten degrees hotter than it actually was, with the concepts of (a) hydration, (b) a ceasing to the dull ache in my feet, and (c) the finish line nothing but vague thoughts in the back of my mind.  I told myself I was crazy, but at the end of the whole mess I could at least say I finished a badass distance again.  Somehow, I got through - all things considered, about as quickly as I would have liked - and this is my story.


(NOTE: Four-year-old me would have eaten zero marshmallows, by the way; I can't stand them now, and I couldn't stand them then.  Twenty-seven-year-old me still eats 20+ Reese's Peanut Butter cups at a sitting, sometimes, so I'm not sure I would have come out ahead in a Mischel experiment.  Oh well.)

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Race day began partly cloudy, cold, and windy.  It was almost so cold that I considered wearing a long-sleeve throwaway shirt at the beginning (but ultimately, I decided against it).  I'm typically quite nervous the day before a race, but this particular morning I felt psychologically A-OK.

The set-up of the race was rather... prehistoric.  I suppose you get what you pay for when a half-marathon costs $28 to enter - there were no chips to attach to your shoe, so there was no chip time; it was difficult to hear the PA announcer pre-race; and the sweatshirt each participant received was clearly a throwback to 1992.  Seriously, it was practically a track suit (and, by the way, track suits look super comfortable - no wonder organized crime members wear them all the time).  I may purchase a mullet and wear this sweatshirt as my Halloween costume this year.

The course was also a tad boring, consisting of two concentric loops (the first about 2.5 miles longer than the second).  The toughest part of any course set up this way is the monotony; while there were many water stations, and the teams that manned them were full of enthusiasm, their vigor and energy did not make up for the miles in-between which consisted of nothing except scrub pine trees and the occasional road marker.  Particularly in the later miles, I'd wished there were more people on the sidelines cheering us on (but the finish line cluster was exciting to reach nonetheless).

My strategy was to run ten, 8:50 miles and then try to break it wide open into a near-sprint for the remaining 3.1 miles.  Per usual, I ended up feeling extremely strong through the first six (52:10, which was a little too fast in retrospect), but ultimately I slackened my speed to be right on pace at the ten-mile mark (1:28:30).  Again like always, the best laid plans of mice and runners tended to go astray - I bonked a bit toward the end, particularly in between miles 12 and 13, and my final 5k was completed in a decent but somewhat pedestrian 27:15 - my watch had me completing the race in about 1:55:45.  This was a full minute faster than my first half-marathon, and given the consistent 25 mph nor'easterly winds, I'm not about to complain about the improvement.  Still, I had hoped for more.

The music playlist on my iPod - set to shuffle all 33 songs - did not fail me.  The cooler, calmer songs tended toward the first half of the race, while I was able to rock out to the dulcet tones of Van Halen and Metallica in the second half.  This was serendipity, but I noticed it and mentally appreciated it in the heat of the moment.

And I was thrilled to have a greeting party, right next to the PA announcer at the finish (I could hear him at this point), consisting of my fiancee, my mom, and my cousin.  After I chugged about six small cups of Gatorade and water, and after the "oh-wait-am-I-gonna-puke" feeling passed, I was able to take inventory of the ravages my body endured during the race.

Two damaged toenails (one of them black - no worries here, some runners get them all the time), some very sore hamstrings and calves (which started to feel better after my mid-afternoon nap), and let's just say that showering at any temperature required copious amounts of Vaseline and moisturizer for the three days following the race.  All in all, I feel I came away with little damage.

The worst, though, was (and remains, unfortunately) the post-race cold.  Some runners routinely get colds after the race; some research I've read - and I don't completely trust this, but I'm passing it along because I think it makes a decent point - suggests that similar to how runners typically carbo-load before a race, they might also consider zinc- and vitamin-C-loading for a few days after the race.  On race day, I had a bit of a sore throat, but that isolated pain turned into a full-blown cold the day following the race; runny nose, stuffy nose, post-nasal drip, sneezes, coughs, itchy nose, watery eyes, headache, you name it, I've had it.  I'm just getting over it now; it's been the worst.

The night before the race, I made a joke to some friends (who don't run) about buying stock in Vaseline whenever I'm about to run a race... it should have been a joke about NyQuil.

***************************************

While I'm taking five days off from running to recover (mainly to recover my black toenail), the gratification that I continue to delay will eventually happen, in December - this will be a full month without any regimented training runs.  I plan to still run a bit, probably cross train a bit as well, but I do intend to take that month off from all structured exercise.  In between now and then is a Thanksgiving Day "Turkey Trot" half-marathon, which is unfairly named as 13.1 miles should never be considered a "trot."  You likely will not hear about the next race in this space... unless I am feeling very frisky about it.

I suppose all bets are off.

Jersey Shore Half Marathon: A Non-Athlete Attempts to Jog Quickly for Two Hours (Part 1)

Less than two weeks from today, I will run 13.1 miles in the Jersey Shore Half-Marathon in Sandy Hook-which-I-think-technically-is-Middletown, NJ. It'll take two posts for me to fully explain the process - the first one, which you're reading now, will concern itself with training for the race. The second post, which I'll write in two or three weeks, will be about the race itself.

This is no ordinary blog post about running, because I'm not your ordinary runner. I like to run, but I am not a natural by any means. I'm going to be brutally honest about what half-marathon training does to the average individual (since my athletic ability can be described charitably as average). And in the end, I will have hopefully explained exactly what this process does to a person in a way that makes sense to runners and non-runners alike. I feel that runners need to do a better job of understanding that not everyone in the world is a runner. Let me repeat that, with emphasis: NOT EVERYONE IN THE WORLD IS A RUNNER.

So, even if you don't give a shit about running, you might as well keep reading, if only for the references to Van Halen and elementary school kickball.

Most runners who write about running (either training for a road race or the race itself) make it sound like an incredibly soulful and transcendent experience. The miles on the pavement seem to melt away as they "goal-fully" stride their way toward the end of their long runs, or the finish line. They smile, and eat lots of carbs, and spend lots of money on the latest fad training gear, and upon reading the half-marathon training articles that they write, you can easily convince yourself that running 13.1 miles is doable - or, even, easy.

Running can be a lot of fun, and sometimes it can even be "transcendent"... I guess.  (I hate that word.)  However, having been through the process, anyone who tells you that training to race 13.1 miles is easy is a damned liar.

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Preparing to run a half-marathon, if you follow a reasonable training program, takes about ten weeks (from scratch). Each week consists of three running days, two cross-training days, and two rest days.  Rest days are seriously rest days; it's sometimes difficult to walk, depending on the number of miles I've run in the previous week.

The running days are broken down as follows:

Long runs: The weekend "long" run starts at about 3 miles in the first week and, for me, progresses to 12 miles (two weeks before the race itself).  Not all long runs are created equal.  With training, I can get my body to withstand the pounding of running about 10 miles fairly easily.  But somehow, for whatever reason, my internal organs revolt to the mere thought of additional distance with the fire of a thousand suns.  It becomes difficult to breathe; my legs not only ache but also feel as if they weigh a hundred pounds apiece; the skin irritation post-run is almost unbearable, and my mind begins to run wild.

I'm serious when I say that running is more a mental than a physical exercise - at some point, once any individual pounds the pavement for a certain number of minutes, the idea of running 10, 15, 20 minutes more than what they've already accomplished becomes completely irrelevant.  What people refer to commonly as a "Runner's High" is actually (for me) runner's ambivalence.  At some point I say to myself, you know, fuck it - I've been doing this for 45 minutes and I'm going to do this for 45 more.  That's a really long time and it's not going to help me to count the minutes anymore.  Might as well turn up this lovely Steve Winwood compilation on my iPod and get to groovin'.  (Just kidding about the Winwood.)

However, the runner's high/runner's ambivalence starts to break down for me somewhere north of ten miles.  At that point, as I mentioned before, my mind becomes my own worst enemy: I can't help counting down the minutes or landmarks until I am able to stop running, on some days (these are the lucky ones).  On the unlucky days, my mind begins to rationally explain to me why running so many miles is suicidal, and actually provides rational evidence - THROUGH LISTS! - of professional athletes who've died while playing their sport.  When it wants to be, my mind is a Wikipedia of tragic deaths.  I am incredibly morbid.

So that's the bad news about long runs.  The good news is that they work in increasing endurance... and also, they expand my taste in music.  These days it takes me about one hour, forty-five minutes to run 12 miles, and in that time I can listen to almost three entire albums.  Each week I plan my music in advance so that I save the most exhilirating songs for the very end.

By the way, here are songs that I can listen to while running that essentially guarantee I will not stop running for the duration of the song:

• "Right Now" by Van Halen
• "Whiskey in the Jar" by Metallica
• "Run Like Hell" by Pink Floyd
• "Kids" by MGMT
• "The High Road" by Broken Bells
• "Walk of Life" by Dire Straits
• "Long Road to Ruin" by Foo Fighters
• "Running on Empty" by Jackson Browne
• "Land of Confusion" by Genesis, followed by "Land of Confusion" by Disturbed
• "Silvergun Superman" by STP
• "The Ruler's Back" by Jay-Z
• "Roll With It" by Steve Winwood (just kidding... or am I?)

Pace/tempo runs: These are two mid-week runs that combine for roughly the same mileage as the long run.  Not much to add here, except that these can be deceptively tricky.  At least in the long run situation, you know that you're gonna be exercising for a very long time.  It's sometimes a huge tease to be able to say to yourself instead, "This is just four miles, just 36 minutes or so," and then your psyche pulls an Appalachian State on your ass and you end up having a terrible time for the entire run.

A pace run is where you run at "race pace" for the duration of the run.  A tempo run is where you run the first 25% of the run slowly, spend the middle 50% of the run slowly speeding up to slightly faster than "race pace," and then spend the last 25% of the run going slowly again.  I am terrible at slowing down for the last 25% of the run - I spend that time telling my haggard legs to go F- themselves and do the best I can to finish strong.  Someday, after I seriously injure myself, I'll read this and realize that this is probably why.

Cross-training days, for me, are typically spent on a stationary bike next to my fiancee.  That's right; spin class.

Spin class is a very interesting place.  My understanding is that different instructors take different approaches to managing a spin class.  This particular class is an hour long and I'd say only about 80% of the people who show up for this thing manage to finish in any condition whatsoever; maybe 25% of the total are able to ride fast for the full hour.  It's a boot camp-like environment, and what are supposed to be my "easier" days during training turn into situations where I find myself bike-sprinting 53 minutes into an exercise session.  It's hell, but it's the kind of hell where at the end of it you feel pretty damn good about what you accomplished.

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Before 2009 turned to 2010, I'd never raced at a distance beyond 3.1 miles, and before I committed myself to run longer distances, I assumed that I never would.  I've spent some time this year thinking about what changed, and I think what happened was I finally understood that pushing oneself athletically can be useful and illustrative, for a bunch of different reasons.

If you select to judge by the rubric that defines elementary school games of kickball and high school pick-up basketball games, I have never been an athlete.  I've never been quick, nor have I ever been coordinated - my mind can tell my muscles to do something, and by the time my muscles react, it's next Tuesday.  However, I've found that I'm actually decent at running.  It's weird; it's one of the few things in my life where I find that if I put in the effort, the results end up taking care of themselves.  There is no worrying in the middle of a run (or a race) - there's just running, or racing.  There are no obstacles (or, for that matter, clients, although I fail to see the difference between the two).  Anyway, at age 27, I find that I'm in the best physical shape of my life, which is quite cool.

I think also that distance running has taught me a lot about hard work (and vice versa).  At some point in everyone's life, they realize that they can't skate by on talent alone and actually have to put in serious effort to make an impact on whatever they feel like impacting.  I feel like I was able to skate through college and graduate school, with a good deal of objective success, on some combination of moderately-hard work, lots of potential, and my ability to talk/write with very little prompting.  But it also feels good to push yourself to the brink (if you're one of those people who likes it, which is circular logic but really the only good way to explain why some people run full marathons and others eat Bon-Bons).

I can't skate by anymore, because my work demands so much of me intellectually and also it's the kind of work where if my heart's not in it, it would immediately show.  This year, as a New Year's Resolution, I decided to let that can-do attitude filter into taking care of myself physically, through running.  I can't believe it's almost October and I haven't failed on my New Year's resolution - by the end of the calendar year, I'll have run three half-marathons plus a 15K (9.3 miles).

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So this is training for a half-marathon, in short, and hopefully a bit of insight as to why a reasonable person would put themselves through so much.  In two weeks, the race wrap-up - I'll be brutally honest.

A Man's View: Weddings and Gross Consumerism

As a man, there are many manly things that I enjoy. I enjoy watching baseball and football on TV, going to the driving range, shanking tee shots, taking long weekend naps on the couch while watching golf, and going to the movies to see action flicks. I like to play poker and discuss current events. Very recently, I started brewing beer, which is a very fun (and surprisingly inexpensive) manly hobby to undertake. You get to drink beer while you brew beer, which is the kind of cannibalism we all should learn to love.

As observers of my life already know, I'm getting married in about 14 months. I'm typically private about these sorts of things, but I wanted to share a few thoughts I've had about the process. This is mainly for other dudes, no question; however, to the extent my fiancee doesn't kill me for sharing details, hopefully I can keep someone out there from being a stupid freaking idiot about the whole thing.

My first thought is that, while generally awesome, weddings have been spoiled by the same ultra-consumeristic bullshit that continuously pollutes our society. My future wife and I both agree that we want our wedding to be a kick-ass party; unpretentious, free-wheeling, occasionally random and the kind of overall environment where no one has to think twice about having legal (or semi-legal, or illegal-as-long-as-nobody-gets-caught) fun. We also feel like that kind of party does not have to put us into a lifetime of debt to happen. Lots of people that we know agree with this point of view, and good for them, because they're right. But a sucker gets married every minute, to paraphrase the great P.T. Barnum, and a significant minority of folks seem to think that the same principles that apply to their lives apply to their weddings - the gluttonous spending of money.

Now, I'll admit that compared with the average American, I have a very odd relationship with money. I track my spending religiously, I budget so that I can never spend more than I earn, and I'm damn near evangelical about saving being the key to eventual freedom from stuff like having a mortgage, having to go to work, and basically all the stuff that prevents me from spending all day smoking Cuban cigars which I will light with $10 bills. (NOTE: I wouldn't be supporting the Cuban economy; I'd be burning their fields.)

So I suppose I'm being a pretentious asshole by saying that, when it comes to wedding planning, it makes the most perfect kind of sense to not get wrapped up in all that, "But it's a once-in-a-lifetime event, and it's only seven thousand dollars for these incredible, Buddhist monk-created organic pottery centerpieces, and it's my fairytale, magical day!" bullshit.

Oh well, I'm a pretentious asshole. I'm also speaking common sense, and it's unbelievable how rare common sense is in the whole process.

I was watching the (mostly unfunny) humorist Dave Barry on MSNBC's great morning show "Morning Joe" a few months ago, and he mentioned something very funny (surprisingly) about paying for his daughter's wedding - it's like the whole system is designed to tell brides-to-be that their wedding doesn't have to be super-expensive, but if it isn't super-expensive, it'll suck. Thankfully, my fiancee hasn't bought into all that crap yet... but there's still 14 months to go. (I kid.)

My second point: it's amazing the extent to which the cottage industry completely dedicated to the wedding process exists these days. You wouldn't think that America is still in the relatively early stages of recovering from a terrible economic recession - hell, a near-financial meltdown - by reading Brides, the magazine that my fiancee receives each month, which is chock-filled with novel wedding planning advice (like the newest $20,000 dresses!).

In my life, I have the tendency to paraphrase common colloquialisms to prove my points. One of my recent favorites (which no one seems to understand) is: "Weddings are like assholes; everyone has one." What I'm trying, and failing, to say with this very profane comment is that creating a magazine (for instance) that caters to new brides strikes me as a very difficult thing to do.

By analogy, I subscribe to Esquire. By subscribing to Esquire, I'm telling the publisher of the magazine that I am the type of person who reads the magazine. By this, I mean that I am probably aged 25-54, college-educated, and have political views which lean to the left. I earn at or above the median United States income, and I'm at least willing to consider purchasing luxury items and new fashion styles. I care deeply about current events and politics, I enjoy postmodern writing, and I'm not against reading stuff that makes me emotional.

By comparison, the target demographic of Brides is the following: a woman who is getting married.

Lots of women get married, smart or stupid, old or young, rich or poor, conservative or liberal, backwoods-y or cosmopolitan, suburban yuppies and ex-convicts. Yes, that's right, weddings are like assholes - almost everybody has one. So, given the demographic wasteland that the magazine has to cater to, what the hell do you actually write in a magazine like this? How the hell does it make any sort of sense?

Now, I would know the answer to this query if I ever actually read the magazine. I'm just not certain that it's a manly thing to do, however, so I decided to run into the living room and ask the woman who does read it.

Me: "Hey, what do you get out of that Brides magazine?"
April (my fiancee): "What the hell do you mean?"
Me: "Like, if you were to tell me the one thing that reading the magazine does for you, what would it be?"
April: "Oh, I get lots of ideas from reading it. [pause] Why are you asking me this?"
Me: "I'm writing a blog post summarizing all the things that have been annoying me about the wedding planning process, and I just realized that Brides magazine doesn't really have any content at all. You confirmed it for me. It's like the perfect postmodern magazine; it's like Playboy. Nobody reads Playboy for the articles."
April: "Well, it's not like I only read it for the pictures; there are lots of hints about things like cool wedding favors and stuff like that. But in general, it's not about content for me, it's about helping me plan."

Which leads me pretty well, I think, into my third point, which is that the system works remarkably well for people who are discerning enough to know what is BS and what isn't, when it comes to planning a wedding. I'm beginning to realize that even if we adopt a very strict Keep It Simple, Stupid-type approach to wedding planning, there are still about 404* things to plan in advance of the big day. (*NOTE: This is if you believe the standard checklist from TheKnot.com, which seems to believe that every couple intends to have a $100,000, multi-cultural, multi-religious, three-day wedding celebration. I think we come in at about 150 items, given our conservative approach.)

I think that Brides magazine is a stupid magazine not because it isn't helpful (it is), but because it's incredibly homogenized (by necessity), and I'm the kind of jerk who needs popular culture to speak directly to me. This is entirely my problem, and in retrospect it's actually a pretty manly problem to have. (Specifically, the problem of a white male, aged 18-49  - to quote Homer Simpson, "Everyone listens to me, no matter how dumb my suggestions are." NUTS AND GUM, TOGETHER AT LAST!)

To digress a little, my personal opinion is that, compared with men, most women are fundamentally decent enough not to care about whether their popular culture speaks directly to them. This is the charitable way to describe womenfolk's fascination not only with Brides, but also with Cosmopolitan, a magazine I actually have bothered to read and find so ridiculously stupid/vapid that it leads me to the uncharitable way to describe it - that what Internet porn is for dudes, Cosmopolitan damned near has to be for some women: that is, an escape fantasy into a world of complete smoothness and lack of social hang-ups.

But to get back to wedding planning: there's something to be said for loving your day-to-day life so very much that you don't need "special" things (or that you only need them when they're financially reasonable to undertake). I am personally so proud of the fact that my fiancee loves me, our present life together, and the idea of spending the rest of our lives together, so very much that we don't need to spend through the teeth just to please a rich uncle or three. I can't help but think that those who choose to do so, do so in order to compensate for something that is lacking - either in their relationship per se, or in their relationships with their families, or in their day-to-day life. Not to be an asshole (OK, to be kind of an asshole), I've got 99 problems but that ain't one.

My perfect vision is hopefully a downright normal one. (I've spoken about it with my fiancee, and she agrees it's pretty cool.) It's a vision of me with my new wife and friends, playing "Rock Band" in a hotel suite at 1 AM, tuxedo undone, drinking an ice-cold beer from the bottle during our after-party. But that's just my plain and simple view of the world, and to get others to agree with it would be just plain evil. Even if I am right.

Why I Left Graduate School (Part 2)

(Author's Note: My original post on this topic, which I wrote in March of 2009, has received a modest bit of Internet traffic. A lot of this traffic comes from Google searches, likely from frustrated academics who wanted to read someone's thoughts at that difficult time. Because it's been a while since I posted in this space, I thought it might be helpful to revisit the debate - one that I know continues in the minds of many academics and post-academics alike - because it touches on many deeper concerns, both philosophical and psychological.)

In the fifteen months since I packed my bags and left academia for a very nice research-related job in industry, I've noticed a few things. The first is that I do not miss the rigors of academic writing; my writing talents (to the extent that they exist at all) lie solely in the realms of spinning the narrative, in the plentiful use of adjectives and in deconstructing the meaning of "stuff" from a big-picture level - they do not thrive in the compartmentalized facilities of academic research writing, with its almost computer-scientist-like attention to detail and linearity.

The second thing, very much related to the first, is that I now know better where my skills lie in general. I'm very much talented as a talker; I talk far better than I write and I love to socialize; on the other hand, I can wade in the analytical waters and I'm able to solve complex problems; I can engineer complex solutions to these problems because I can wrap my mind around complexity; and I severely lack patience but make up for it with overall positive demeanor and a "can-do spirit." We all deserve to know these things about ourselves - the fractal image of your personality as it appears to those around you is likely different from what you assume - and I've found that the best way to understand these things is to change your environment once in a great while.

The third thing I've learned, very much related to the first two that I've mentioned, is that completely changing your environment has consequences. These consequences should and must be weighed against the potential benefits of making such a severe life choice. In my original article on this topic, I walked around an issue that I think I understand better now that I've made the dive into industry - specifically, that in deciding to leave academia for industry, I consciously chose the near-certainty of financial prosperity over the slim chance of notoriety.

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Many people I know, especially the adults, aspire to be famous. I've had my share of fantasies in this regard - until quite recently, I've dreamed of waking up one day armed with a 97-mile-an-hour fastball and the ability to control it with laser-like precision. I would try out and sign with the New York Yankees, of course, and work my way quickly through their minor league system; upon making the big leagues, I would wear number 36 (like my boyhood idol, pitcher David Cone) and quickly make a name for myself as an example of dreams come true, the graduate student-turned-flamethrower.

This was my fantasy until about age 24. (NOTE: Lately, this has been supplanted by a new dream - one of winning millions of dollars at the Main Event at the yearly World Series of Poker. I find this dream only slightly more attainable than the previous one.) But dreams fade as time passes, as the clock very slowly ticks on your own life, and as you start to realize that although you are still young, there is constantly less time than before to make the impact that you wanted to make.

I am nothing if not a realist. This is why, when the inevitable article on NYTimes.com appeared, the one that featured the research that was once in my "academic wheelhouse" - the work of my former adviser, along with a former colleague, in a very specialized topic in which I've earned a master's degree - my major emotional response at that moment was actually one of pure joy. (I ran into the master bedroom, where my fiancee was about to fall asleep, and told her excitedly that I'd stumbled upon a very cool article involving people I knew by first name.)

But this was also the moment where I realized that my last best shot at fame, short of winning the WSOP Main Event or embroilment in a political scandal, had disappeared as a direct function of my own decision making. (NOTE: I should never go into politics; I've written too much. There's too much dirt out there. Even though I could see 50-year-old Fred really wanting to.) This karmic dissonance is something I'd like to explore further, because I think it helps explain why so many intelligent adults - whether they live in academia or in industry - spend so much of their waking time, to paraphrase the Primitive Radio Gods, "letting their money pay for living days awake but half-asleep."

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Regardless of what I wrote above, I love my job and I don't regret for a second my decision to leave graduate school and to move back home to New Jersey. I have a delicious work-life balance, and I do not dread Sunday evenings. I am paid meaningfully for my work, and doing work that I enjoy helps pay for a lifestyle that allows me a great deal of personal and experiential freedom. Simply put, my gamble on finding a job in the midst of a terrible recession worked, and worked swimmingly. (As a concrete example, next year I'm probably going to buy a pretty big and pretty nice house. Probably.)

Academics - and Ph.D. students, in particular - often take an extreme "longview" of life itself. (As I wrote last March, "Graduate students, because they're mostly young and extremely driven, always forget that their hearts will inevitably give out one day.") In retrospect, this is not as terrible of a thought process as I once thought (although I still don't think that way). However, even in exchange for ultimate knowledge, it is an extreme, almost immeasurable, sacrifice to earn almost no money during one's twenties and early thirties. It puts a person at a financial disadvantage that is almost impossible to overcome within the current human lifespan (one in which we retire before age 70), and because so many people out there are concerned about money, it almost self-selects the population of Ph.D's to be either (a) independently wealthy prior to entering a Ph.D. program or (b) completely oblivious to the concept of money in general.

But money, whatever its merits or inherent problems, is important. It's, like, really, really important - so important that as an outside observer, I have to consider whether item (b) is such a serious problem that it might in our lifetimes turn on its side what we've always considered to be "intelligence." For all the talk of grade inflation and the hyper-education of American society, we still live in a society where people (in New Jersey, at least) with only a high school education and skills in a meaningful trade can earn six-figure incomes well before age thirty. A tenure-track academic, if they are lucky, will hit that salary level some time between ages 35 and 40 (assuming a "traditional" academic path). This doesn't strike me as "fair," in its most basic sense, but if you're like me and you believe that people are generally paid what they're worth, it also makes an interesting statement about the value of academia in general.

Right-wing hemming and hawing aside, America is going to remain a capitalist society for the foreseeable future. Given this, money is going to remain important as societal incentive. Given this, I think we need to re-think whether advanced education, as it is presently constituted, is useful. Are Ph.D.'s receiving a lifetime benefit commensurate to their 5-7 years (at least) of low-paying indentured servitude?

(NOTE: If I weren't a lazy person, this would be where I would Google the pay differential between, say, Ph.D.'s in the social sciences vs. those with masters'- and bachelors'-level educations. I'm not going to do this, because I am lazy, but my educated guess is that Ph.D.'s do earn somewhat more per annum, compared with the masters'-level folks in a given field - but not by so much to justify the lost earning potential experienced in their twenties and thirties. These are the times when compound interest builds, so it kind of makes sense to make money right now.)

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This is just my opinion; it's highly analytical, and as a consequence, it's probably quite controversial. Life is not predicated by a 401(k) balance, to the same extent that it is not predicated by one's retirement; after all, if you're like me, you find it pretty pathetic when you hear people talk longingly for their retirement years. Waiting to have fun in retirement is like waiting to relax until Sunday night (if you're one of those people who hates Sunday nights). In fact, if there's one takeaway from this entire post, I hope it's that the frustrated academics who read this article realize that every work situation - academic, industry, the priesthood, whatever - has its pros and its cons, and that your happiness in that work situation is created (constructed, if I may borrow a phrase from the scientific study of emotions) by the extent to which your interaction between you and your work environment is a holistically successful one.

So, if your commute sucks, you're not going to like your job. If your boss sucks, you're not going to like your job. If your pay sucks, or if you find your work dull and boring, or if you're in over your head with work, you're not going to like your job. Do you get my drift? Liking what you do isn't about liking what you do - it's about proactively seeking a work environment where you're challenged, happy, well-paid, and well-liked, all at the same time. So the good news and the bad news, all rolled up in one, is that finding this sort of happiness at work takes exactly the same amount of effort as finding this sort of happiness in a relationship. As I observe other people, it is unsurprising that the exact same people who have little problems in the one realm have few problems in the other, and the converse - that people who can never be happy in love are never happy at work - is completely true as well.