"The View From the Phlipside" is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY. It can be heard Tuesday through Friday just after 8 AM and 5 PM. The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program. Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moments notice. WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed. You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com. Copyright 2012 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see? Drop me a line and we can talk.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
"The View From the Phlipside" is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY. It can be heard Tuesday through Friday just after 8 AM and 5 PM. The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program. Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moments notice. WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed. You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com. Copyright 2012 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see? Drop me a line and we can talk.Program scripts from week of August 5, 2012My 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. Anti-Piracy Follies
OK here’s our new nominee for dumbest media story of the year. If there is a better example of missing the point I’m not sure what it is.
If you’ve rented a DVD of a movie over the last 5 years or so you’ve probably seen the anti-piracy message that has been included on many many of them. It’s supposed to be this trendy edgy look that manages to come off looking like a leftover from the ‘90s that includes lines like “You wouldn’t steal a handbag”. Handbag? Really? Underneath it all was this fairly loud energetic music track. All to remind you that stealing someone else’s work without paying for it is piracy and a crime.
Well the folks who made that video stole that music.
Sounds too stupid to be true doesn’t it? But it is. The composer, Melchior Rietveldt, was paid by a Dutch music rights group for the music to be used one time. It has appeared on at least 71 commercial DVDs sold in the Netherlands and around the world. Rietveldt went to the folks at the agancy in charge of paying him royalties for his work and got stonewalled. So he went to court. It took 6 years but the courts have agreed that Rietveldt deserves to be paid.
What astounds me is that the companies who put together the DVDs all know better. Every one of them has a legal department and the first question that any legal department is going to ask in each case is “Do we have the rights to this?”. At some point somebody flat out lied to a lawyer. And that’s NEVER a good idea.
The original anti-piracy piece was to be used during a local film festival. By an anti-piracy group that you would assume knows where the lines are in their own particular area of alleged expertise. So I guess the real question becomes how are we supposed to take these people seriously ever again? I’ve said before on this program that I fully support the rights of the artist to be paid for the use of their work. You would think first in line with that sentiment wold be the folks of the anti-piracy community.
Just amazing.
Future of E-mail Microsoft is confusing me. And this at a time when my feelings for the giant from Redmond Washington were on an upswing. I’ve been using Windows 7 on my home computer for about half a year now and I really like it. Unlike some previous upgrades they’ve managed to increase the number of good features on the operating system while keeping the number of new innovative annoyances to a minimum. So that’s good.
When I saw that they were trying something new with their e-mail client software (known simply as Hotmail to most of us) I was feeling good enough about our relationship to swing over to the new Outlook.com and take a look. And that’s where the confusion began.
This is being touted as the future of e-mail. Now that’s an interesting concept because e-mail looks a little long in the tooth these days. The current crop of teenagers pay it no attention whatsoever. At the same time it really hasn’t changed much since I started using it two decades ago.
So what’s new and exciting over at Outlook.com? Well I’m not quite sure to be honest. I don’t believe I’ve ever had a Hotmail account which is kind of astounding given that at one point I had no less than seven email addresses. Some friends performed an intervention, I’m better now. But I do have a Windows ID so I was signed right in. And what I found was essentially a better looking version of a bunch of Gmail/Google functions. In fact my Outlook.com email account IS my Gmail account! I get a calendar that looks like Google’s and a Contacts list like Google’s and Sky Drive which is basically the same as the newly renamed Google Drive formerly Google Docs. It’s sharp looking but I’m not sure I see the “future of e-mail”. I see Microsoft finally catching up to Google but that’s as far as I can go. As always its nice to have all your primary information available in one place. I’ve never used it but I’ve heard people praising Outlook for years now. So it seems like it ought to be a logical extension of the franchise. Maybe I just need to give it a little more time.
At the moment I’m a little miffed that Google is ending it’s iGoogle web service this fall which has been a mainstay of mine for years. Plus the boost of happiness over Windows 7 means that Microsoft will get the temporary free pass on this one for a little while longer.
Tiny Troll Controls
The ongoing war against online trolls has taken another step. It’s a tiny step and a rather unconvincing step but it’s slow progress in the right direction. A direction toward the end of anonymous commenting.
YouTube is the less than courageous corporate giant (YouTube is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Google-plex) that is taking the tiny, timorous step towards a little more civility on the Internet.
If you’ve ever scrolled down into the comments section of a YouTube video you know what I mean. If you just watch the video and then click away I’d personally recommend you keep doing exactly that. 99% of all comments fall into one of two categories. The first is the “That’s so cute/cool” category in which you will find mindless repetitious compliments. The second is the “I hope you die” category which is filled with mindless repetitious hatred. Both are a waste of time and bandwidth but the second is of greater concern.
Inevitably the second is posted either under the name Anonymous or a screen name designed to shield the mouth breathing moron from being revealed as well the mouth breathing moron that he or she is.
YouTube’s baby step is to ask users to consider using their Google+ identity when commenting or uploading content. It doesn’t seem likely that our mouth breathing friends will do so but it’s a step in the right direction.
Personally I would simply end anonymous commenting. Flat out. And all user names would have to link back to some firm identity. That way if someone goes completely over the line (like death threats which appear far too commonly) there is some way to track them down. I know that some folks will shout “Freedom of Expression” at me but I will remind you that such freedom comes with some expectation of personal responsibility. You want to call some one names you need to the intestinal fortitude to back it up.
Sure there will be people who will get around any rules you create. But the harder you make folks work at being bad the more of them just give up and walk away. Let’s try taking a real step towards lowering the population of idiots online.
Call that the View From the Phlipside.
