Carpet Deodorizer - Just Say No

So I took a few hours this weekend to give Hespos Central Command and Official Bachelor Pad a thorough cleaning. I vacuum regularly, of course, but the carpet in my living room was starting to get that faint odor that you typically smell when you visit your grandmother. So I figured I'd get a can of Carpet Fresh to take care of it. Big mistake.

While I was cleaning, I sprinkled some Carpet Fresh on all three carpets in my apartment and let it sit for about 20 minutes. Then I broke out the vacuum cleaner.

This is no ordinary vacuum cleaner. I bought it right before I got downsized at Mezzina Brown. It cost something obscene like $500, has a true HEPA filter, and not one but two motors. In short, this vacuum cleaner is bad ass.

I'm reasonably sure I got up all the Carpet Fresh, in addition to whatever dust and microscopic beasties were lurking in my carpet. Then my girlfriend came over to hang out. We were sitting on the couch and I casually removed my shoes and socks at one point. A couple hours later, I noticed a burning sensation on the bottoms of my feet. I'm not the type to get all weirded out by stuff like this, so I dismissed it - until it was time to go to bed. By then, I felt like I had walked across hot coals.

In fact, the burning sensation kept me up for most of the night. I washed my feet off several times, but my feet still felt like they were on fire. I checked the label on the Carpet Fresh - I don't have the exact language handy, but it said something to the effect of, "If rash occurs, discontinue use."

Huh? WTF? Shouldn't they make this stuff reasonably safe? I'd hate to think what might have happened if I had a young kid or something. If I had a toddler, I'd probably be playing with him on the rug, giving him horsie rides and whatnot, and the next thing you know he'd be screaming and yelling from carpet deodorizer burning his skin.

Hey, I'm the first guy to say caveat emptor when getting an unexpected surprise from a recently-purchased product, but shouldn't the FDA or another of those three-letter governmental organizations open a can of whoop-ass on anyone who sells carpet deodorizer that burns your feet when you walk on it?

Da feets are feeling okay now, but that's the last time I let any of this carpet deodorizer crap into my apartment.

Ralph Nader - The Liberal Vote Sponge

That sucking sound you hear is Ralph Nader's candidacy absorbing much-needed liberal votes. While Nader is preparing to wring those votes out into the sink drain of plurality on election day, I can't help but think we need a solution to this ongoing problem.

Despite a very popular grass-roots campaign that aggregated so many "don't run" comments and drove them directly to Nader's exploratory website, he's decided to run again. Despite nearly irrefutable evidence that Al Gore would be our president if Nader hadn't ran the last time around, and that the Bush presidency was more damaging to Nader's causes than a Gore presidency would have been, Nader is running anyway. I can't help but agree with the suggestion that Nader's simply doing it to provide a publicity platform.

Okay, so the guy wants to showboat again. The question remains...What should we do about it if we want to avoid a similar election dynamic this time around?

Maybe we could fight fire with fire. If Nader will once again attract the disaffected liberal vote, maybe we need a vote sponge for the disaffected Republicans. Even without the benefit of the Green Party line on the ballot, I still think Nader will still siphon off enough votes to cause concern for the Democrats. So what's Ross Perot doing these days?

Perot has the potential to erode votes from two traditionally Republican strongholds:

• Militia kooks who think Bush is too centrist - Of the four people who still fall into this category, 75% of them will probably not turn out to the polls without wearing tinfoil hats to avoid being picked up by Illuminati spy satellites.
• Rich, conservative retirees who want to preserve their personal wealth at any cost - In short, the AARP. The AARP will likely throw their support behind Bush anyway, and since retired folk have the spare time to read all the direct mail that comes their way, including AARP election day reminders to vote Republican, Perot won't likely make a dent here.

Hmmm...Maybe Ross Perot won't be able to match the awesome sucking power of the Nader campaign. So who might be able to give us a hand here?

Bob Dole? I can't help but think that this guy has sponge potential, especially if we give him a broadsword, a Viking helmet with horns on it, and a strong motivational speech about unfulfilled destiny. Get him on the ballot in enough states and he'll soak up enough votes on name recognition alone. At least he'll confuse the hell out of the AARP, which will probably once again get at least 97% of its membership to the polls.

Ralph Reed? He could represent the Sarlacc Pit into which disaffected Republicans could cast their votes, never to be seen again. Goodbye Republican fundamentalist Christian power base.

Steve Dallas? This Bloom County right-wing institution could wrap up the aging frat boy vote, while simultaneously crafting a funny post-election story. Heck, I'd go to the election night campaign party just for the grain alcohol alone.

Hmmm... Perhaps this requires additional thought.

Goodbye, Sex in the City

Tell me that post title isn't going to be the most popular of the day...
Anyway, it's not as if I'm a typical he-man Sex in the City hater. I remember watching the first couple episodes because I thought the girl who used to be on Melrose Place was kind of cute. I thought it was a reasonably good show, but I can't help but equate Sex in the City to the opening band to the Sopranos' headlining act. Not that I consider myself a big fan, either. (I can't seem to remember which one is Miranda and which one is Samantha.) But anyway, to continue the concert analogy, the Sopranos can't take the stage until Sex in the City wraps up its act and leaves the stage. Even if you sorta like Cheap Trick, you might try to boo them off the stage anyway so that Aerosmith can take the stage sooner. That's kinda how I feel about Sex in the City. Great stuff, but thank God it's over because I need my Sopranos fix.

Distractions, distractions

In one of my early journalism classes at Washington & Lee, I learned about the obligations news media have to the public in the U.S. Among these was the obligation to maintain financial health and independence, such that the media remain free from the influences of people, groups or governments that would seek to effect editorial change with money. What effect does media fragmentation have on this critical obligation of the press? Could it be one of the reasons why distractions like Boobgate, the Martha Stewart trial, the Lacie Peterson case and the like have been out of control lately?

While our political system needs a free and responsible press to operate at its best, I wouldn't be so naive as to believe that our economic system shouldn't also play a significant role. The founding fathers realized that the invisible hand of capitalism would lead the press toward a balance of what the public needs to hear (public affairs) vs. what they want to hear (human interest). But could the founding fathers have envisioned the proliferation of media and a huge increase in the number of media options open to the average citizen?

Sustaining a television network was easy when there were only three of them. Now that there are more media channels than ever before, the networks have seen their audiences defect to cable, the Internet and other channels. In order to preserve the current model, individual media outlets have to either cut costs significantly or do what they can to stave off declining viewership. If you are, say, CBS, you'll probably opt to emphasize the latter, as would most broadcasters. This means more distractions - the types of things people want to see - as opposed to the "boring" stuff that people need to see.

American Journalism Review editor Jill Rosen wrote an article about the balance of hard news and celebrity worship recently. The article presented a balanced view of opinions on the subject, but it failed to deal effectively with the media theory behind the whole concept, IMHO. Broadcast outlets have only a limited amount of bandwidth. That is, in a typical news broadcast, the news team has only a half hour to devote to the most important stories of the day. If you happen to be a citizen who has time for only one news broadcast that day, your perceptions of the national agenda might be distorted if that news broadcast opts to run with the Michael Jackson case as a lead story instead of news about Iraq.

This effect is exacerbated when broadcasters are under ratings pressure. The invisible hand of our economic system moves broadcasters with decreased audience share toward doing whatever it takes to increase ratings. That means more shots of Janet's boob, more celebrity weddings and divorces, and more crap that no one needs to know. While we have more news outlets open to us, the natural diversity of opinion that would result from fragmentation is stifled because the viewing public is more apt to tune in to the celebrity junk and less so to sit through public affairs reporting they might think is boring. In short, there's more places for alternative points of view to come across, but increased pressure for each of them to appeal to the mainstream due to economic pressures.

What can be done about this? Part of me thinks that interactive channels can help. What if, instead of clinging to the broadcast model, American chose their news themselves? What if they used tools like advanced web browsers, e-mail, RSS feed aggregators and others to pull together the news that most interests them? We could experience a renaissance of the marketplace of ideas.

However, it's not as simple as that. Interactivity is required - not just between news channel and consumer, but inter-consumer as well. If I, as a news consumer, miss something important, I need the input of my friends and fellow cyber-citizens. If citizens can become aggregators and disseminators of news, we might be in good shape. Dissemination can happen through e-mail (e.g. - "Your friend James sent you this article you might be interested in...[link]"

We can see this principle in action already. Audiences have flocked from TV to the Internet, with a desire to self-select interesting content and avoid the mainstream at the core of this movement. Blogs and other tools that allow for easy aggregation of news are helping to increase diversity of opinion and agenda, while simultaneously making it easier to find news.

We can only hope that the system is self-correcting. If the broadcast model continues its dominance, I fear that we'll be prompted to think we have more choice when the exact opposite is true.