Program scripts from week of December 3, 2012
My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
Technology for Christmas
I have to admit that the Great American Activity this time of year is something that I absolutely can not abide. I’m just going to put it out there and I’ll deal with whatever backlash is headed my way.
I hate Christmas shopping.
Don’t get me wrong. I really enjoy shopping. In fact my wife and I trade the traditional gender stereotypes when it comes to shopping. She likes to go in, get what she wants and get out which is the traditional “male” shopping style. I enjoy window shopping, comparing prices and features and just generally making a project out of it. Except at Christmas. You see I hate crowds. You are all lovely people I am sure. But when we all get together in a bunch our less desirable personality traits begin to emerge. Plus there’s the added problem that when that many people all show up at the mall then you end up parking somewhere near Rochester. Which means I end up having no idea where I parked the car. Which just adds to the overall level of frustration.
So I think what is being tried at the Mall of the Americas in Minneapolis is a really cool idea. The super mall has a parking lot with over twelve thousand spaces. Now they have a text based system that will not only remind you of where the car is parked but also can answer any question you may have about what’s going on at the mall, all done in real time. You start by texting your location before you leave your car (all the instructions are posted throughout the parking lot.) Then later in your shopping adventure (and if you’ve never been to the Mall of the Americas let me assure you that shopping there is an adventure. That place is enormous) you will get a text message with the location of your car. All provided by actual live customer service reps right there at the mall itself.
Mall of the Americas says it has average over a thousand lost customers every year for a while which is why they added the text service. Our malls are smaller but I’d bet at Christmas time most of us would consider such a service to be a real gift.
It might even make me a tiny bit less grouchy this time of year.
Mail Privacy
Privacy is an issue that I’ve talked about many times before on this program. Privacy covering our personal information, privacy concerning who we are and what we do while we’re online. The reality is that none of this is particularly easy or clear cut.
For example - we all know that what we post on Facebook or Twitter or any other social media is pretty much public. There are some ways to control that but the reality is once you put it out there, it’s out there. Now I would imagine that most of us think that our messages on Facebook are somewhat more private (as compared to posts to our timeline). And most of us probably presume that our e-mails provide us an even higher level of privacy.
Of course if you follow the news you know that may or may not be true. E-mails between the former director of the CIA General David Petraeus and his biographer have had massive personal and professional repercussions for Petraeus and the U.S. Intelligence community.
But that required authorization from a court to violate the privacy, right? Well, it may not be as hard to pull off as we think. For example did you know that if the government wants copies of your e-mails from the last couple months they need to get a court order. But if they want to see your e-mails that are older than 180 days they don’t need any such thing. 180 days. So we’re in the first week in December, that would mean anything from this summer and before is pretty much fair game.
The issue here is that once again the law is trailing real life. You see we used to store our e-mails on our personal computers. Now more of us (for example if you use Gmail) keep our e-mail in the Internet “cloud”. The current law offers limited protection for files stored for more than 180 days on an online server. There is proposed legislation to change this but at the moment it doesn’t have a great deal of support.
It’s easy to sit back and think that our personal e-mail is part of our private life. It’s easy to think that we are protected by our Constitutional rights. Turns out it’s never that simple.
RIP Mr Food
There’s a very special place in the American mythos for the self made man. We love successful people but our mythology is really built around the person who starts with nothing and makes something out of himself. It speaks to potential, the American Dream that with a little luck and hard work any of us could be a success.
Two weeks ago we lost one of those great American success stories. Art Ginsburg passed away back in November. You probably don’t know that name. If you do recognize it’s only because of his obituaries. But you’ve almost surely seen him on TV and maybe even own some of his books. Art Ginsburg was better known to the world as Mr. Food.
Ginsburg was born in 1931 in Troy New York. His father was a butcher and that’s what Art grew up to be as well. The story probably would have ended there except that through a little bit of luck he ended up in the catering business. His success there led to a local TV station in Schenectady asking him on to do those little drop in bits that are a staple of morning television today. That grew into a syndicated program that at its peak had 168 affiliates.
Sure there was Julia Child and Graham Kerr but Mr. Food was different. He had no interest in showing off his arcane knowledge of exotic foods. Ginsburg was quoted as saying that “...chefs cook for other chefs, I cook for America”. That meant that he had no problem using canned soups or cake mixes along the way. The idea was to create good food that didn’t require stuff you couldn’t find in the average American home and to do it quickly and easily.
Along the way Art Ginsburg and his Mr. Food persona became a comfortable and friendly presence. Maybe you’d start with his stuff and go on to the fancy cooking but you could stay right there with him. Ginsburg wrote 52 cookbooks that sold over 8 million copies. He used to record over 200 episodes every year of his show. He remembered that cooking was about the food we serve our families not a culinary competition.
Along the way he became the great American success story. And yes, I’ve got to say it, Oooh, it’s so good.
Art Ginsberg, Mr. Food, was 82 years old.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
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