My business travels continue, and frankly I just feel like eating richly and going to bed early, but the blog calls. In the three-plus years since we moved away from San Francisco to NYC, I can't say I've spent much time missing Bagdad by the Bay. I've got nothing against it, really, it just never quite took. One thing I'll give this town credit for, however, is food. Sure, NY has lots of great restaurants. But it also has lots of crappy ones. I've had more than my share of mediocre or just plain bad means in Manhattan. Never has that happened to me in this town. Even greasy spoons in San Francisco are delicious. I never understood how the food here could be so consistently good, but it's a fact. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by having a good meal tonight, in the XYZ restaurant affiliated with the super-swanky W hotel (on Microsoft's dime, spank you very Dutch). What the hell was it? Something like maple leaf (didn't get that part) duck breast with carmalized onions and brussle sprouts. Most delicious. And a chardonay to, well, at least groan for. Mmmmm.

As the meal wound down, I became aware that for the past 20 minutes or so two guys seated behind me were going on and on about the Super Bowl, something I care as much about as cataract surgery. At a point, I made a stretching motion so I could turn around and get a look at them. My first thought was, my God, they're gay, what the hell are they talking about the Super Bowl for? I wonder if my gay friends would consider that a slight, like caring about the Super Bowl was somehow mutually exclusive from homosexuality. On second thought, none of my gay friends could give a shit about the Super Bowl, I'm sure. But on reflection, it occurred to me, these guys weren't gay after all, they just dot-commers. I'd never noticed that before: the styling duds, the short-cropped goatee, the affectely hip tiny prescription glasses... Gay or SF dot-commer? Hard to tell. I think it's an even tougher call than gay or Eurotrash.

Fascinating piece in the NY Review of Books by Timothy Garton Ash titled "Anti-Europeanism in America," that my dad calls my attention to. It's long, so I've only scanned it and plan to print it and read it on the plane, but I thought I'd call it out to you all anyway before I forget. Quoting the intro:

This year, especially if the United States goes to war against Iraq, you will doubtless see more articles in the American press on "Anti-Americanism in Europe." But what about anti-Europeanism in the United States? Consider this:

To the list of polities destined to slip down the Eurinal of history, we must add the European Union and France's Fifth Republic. The only question is how messy their disintegration will be.

(Mark Steyn, Jewish World Review, May 1, 2002)

And:

Even the phrase "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" is used [to describe the French] as often as the French say "screw the Jews." Oops, sorry, that's a different popular French expression.

(Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online, July 16, 2002)

Or, from a rather different corner:

"You want to know what I really think of the Europeans?" asked the senior State Department Official. "I think they have been wrong on just about every major international issue for the past 20 years."

(Quoted by Martin Walker, UPI, November 13, 2002)

Statements such as these recently brought me to the United States—to Boston, New York, Washington, and the Bible-belt states of Kansas and Missouri—to look at changing American attitudes toward Europe in the shadow of a possible second Gulf war. Virtually everyone I spoke to on the East Coast agreed that there is a level of irritation with Europe and Europeans higher even than at the last memorable peak, in the early 1980s.

Oh, those wacky Japanese. This apparently is the latest craze. From Mark, tho no idea on the original source.

Pleased to see my collaborative weblog effort MarketingFix received a Jeffie for Best Marketing Blog from Jeff Jarvis, president of Advance.net (parent to CondeNet and other properties).
:-)

In November, I imagined an episode of The West Wing in which the whole Internet comes under attack. Mark thought it was a bit of an exaggeration to imagine the whole Net taken offline. Then comes this week's virus attack that has slowed down the for a couple of days all around the world. Scary times.

The weather: now there's an original topic worth blogging about, eh what? But, just to be clear, for those of you in other parts of the world where this may not be the case, it is colder than the balls on a brass monkey (as my step-father was fond of saying) here in much of much of the Widwest and Northeast U.S., I can assure you from first-hand experience. Here in NYC, it's in the 20s, going on the second week of consistently sub-freezing temperatures. Meanwhile, I've been traveling a bit, including Chicago and Detroit, and it's even colder there. In Detroit yesterday, it reached a high of 1 degree Fahrenheit (for you Euros, that's -17.2 centigrade).

I'm looking forward to my trip next week to the West Coast.

Here's another thinnly related observation about the Net: photos online are hard to research and poorly represented. I was listening to NPR and heard them say something about the Atlantic being frozen over along the East Coast. Cool. I wanna see what that looks like. I don't have cable TV, so I can't switch on CNN or The Weather Channel and hope to see such photos (besides, I'm working and the TV is in the other room), so I hit both of those media company's web sites hoping to find a photo. Weather.com is kind of hopeless, really. There are virtually no photos to speak of that I can see, just text wire stories as far as weather news goes, as far as I can see. That's quite lame, considering that the weather regularly makes some pretty spectacular visual images.

I found the photo above on the Boston Globe's site, but it's not actually affiliated with any story, it's just on the homepage with a caption, so presumably it won't be archived if you're checking this later than today. (In fact, I forgot to note the caption, and now, a day later as I edit this, the photo's gone. It was something about these being commuter ferrys on some river, though I don't know Boston enough to tell you what river.) Meanwhile, NY1 reports on similar freezing conditions on the Hudson. I still haven't seen photos of the frozen ocean, though, as the two photos I've found both of rivers. If you know where I can find a photo of the frozen Atlantic, please let me know.

First thing I'm a gonna do when I get my big fat paycheck from Microsoft for working by butt off the past several weeks is buy me one of these money counting machines, so I can count just exactly how much money I have. Counts 1,000 bills per minute. That should be fast enough.

Sister Sue points this out. Can you guess what it is? You might think so, but you're probbly wrong, as it's really an illusion of sorts. I heard about the same idea years ago. Inspired, really. User experientologists take note.

When I was a kid, I was an advid reader of Games Magazine. (Now I can't find a web site for them; anyone know if there is one?) My favorite section was something called "Eyeball Benders" (or something like that), where they would show cropped photos that you had to guess what they were. Give it a try.

This is pretty cool.

Telecom expert buddy Brent Schimke just alerts me to this New York news:

"As a reminder, starting February 1, 2003, all phone calls in New York City will require the use of '1' plus the 10 digits for the call to be completed -- even calls within the same area code. This dialing plan change is a mandate from the FCC on all telecommunications companies in New York City."

I'm not sure exactly what he's quoting, but he's the expert, so get those fingers flexing.

Wish I had more interesting stuff to write about, but still busy, busy, busy. This seems useful, anyway.

That should be a word, but it's not. Some 174,000 pages on Google seem to think it's a word. I do, too. I know just what it means, and I can't think of a good substitute. An "immersive advertising experience" would be, in the example I'm using in a piece I'm writing, the Salon Ultramercial, where the visitor to Salon has to watch several pages from one advertiser (e.g., Mercedes) before getting a 12-hour pass to the premium section of the site. It's an ad model a lot of folks (myself included) thinks makes sense. From the advertiser's point of view, the consumer is immersed in the ad. What is a better way to say that than an immersive ad experience, but for the fact that immersive isn't a word?

I opted in the end for "a commanding advertising experience." Blah.

UPDATE:
Mark, who repeatedly assures me he never intended to be a writer, it just worked out that way, points out:

Immersive isn't a word because the correct one already exists -- immersing, as in an immersing experience. Immersive doesn't exist as a word, just as absorptive doesn't.

Meanwhile, step-bro Jay writes:

Dude, call it "dependant content." Like cracker jax you have to eat all of actually get the prize. I'd explain more, but you've won a color tv and all you have to do is sit through a presentation about Florida Time Shares. Skip Intro.

Hmmm. Where were these guys when I had writer's block? "Dependent content" sounds good. Too bad the job is already done. "Immersing"... Besides it being right and all, I just don't like the ring of it.

I'm please to report that step-brother Jay's blog no longer sucks. Well, okay, it never quite sucked, but it was pretty sucky to look at for a while. He's fixed that now and expressed a new interest in making it fun to read.

Jay, as Elizabeth and Here I Type can attest, is a very funny guy, now at last trying to put that talent to use professionally (no, not just on the blog). Watch for his name in lights one day (flashing blue and red lights during his big prison break, perhaps). Meanwhile, click by once in a while (particularly if you have a masochistic obsession with really obscure music), or at least promptly enjoy this enlighting year-in-review kind of latest observation I lift from ggth.blogspot.com:

Top Ten Disturbing Cultural Trends:

1) Everything is an experience now, even carpet cleaning.

2) The struggle for the supremacy of soup, such that, people carry it with them at all times and bait those with inferior broth into sheepish admission of said soup's metaphoric potential to illustrate the randomness of the universe and their own shabby little lives. (See also Progresso Ads)

3) The hyperbolic comparison of one horrific event to another, more profound and poetic tradgedy. There is only one Holocaust folks.

4) Technology's ability to turn your life into metafiction, and not even good metafiction at that

5) Adoration Of The Golden Calf

6) "The newness of the thing amazed me"

7) Last minute clemancy

8) The reemergence of presumption

9) Our Nation's Young People believing they hold a patent on decadence and the chronicleing of its usage.

10) Turning nouns into verbs.

Rick Bruner is now coming to a city near you. I'm getting paid by Microsoft to tour the country (10 cities: NYC, Chicago, Detroit, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Dallas, Atlanta and probably Denver) starting Jan 21 through Feb 13. The event is free to attend, so if you're a friend or a fan, feel free to come on along! Check out details on ExecutiveSummary.com.

Fan-frickin'-tabulous! I just got a call from my credit card company. Suspicious activity on my account. Turns out someone was charging online porn and RealOne to my account! Gets worse. We then get iBill on the phone (a conference call with the credit card company security guy, thank you MCI). iBill processes payments to adult websites, among others. They call up my credit card number and they have my home address and correct email address on the account, but the transactions were not mine. I swear. Not that I'm prentending I'm above something like that, but not this time!

Full-on identity theft. Holy frickin' moly. Unfortunately, I'm so insanely busy at the moment trying to meet a huge deadline by Monday (with visits from step-brother Jay and Dad in the past week), that I can't even think about it. Identity theft. Hmmm. ARRRRGGGGG!!!!!

Meanwhile, I need to travel next week. Having what's left of my credit rating still at my disposal would be nice...

In this context, I wonder if blogging is such a great idea. He's got my fucking URL!!!

UPDATE:
The beloved wife sends a link for an ID Theft info resource. Thanks, Honey.
:-(

ANOTHER UPDATE:
I meant to speculate earlier whether it could be the other Rick Bruner. Or if not, whether he's worried, too. (I love the sound of "the other Rick Bruner" -- it's like "the other white meat.")

Mark points out this explanation for the theory of relativity using only words of four letters or fewer. I guess it's a good thing.

Thank you, Miki, for sending me something fun for the blog again. So, so busy, no time to find fun stuff myself for another couple of weeks.

Click through (requires Flash) and make Bush say dumb things (that he has actually already said before in real life) while wearing silly costumes. Fun for the whole family.

Hello out there. Sorry to be a bit quiet of late. Oh, and, uh, by the way, Happy New Year!

Usually it's not avoiding blogging because of work that makes me feel guilty but the other way around, but having let the holidays and New Year go by without note does make me feel a certain need to explain myself to anyone out there who considers him or herself a Bruner Blog regular: Simply, I've been uncommonly busy the last few weeks, a condition that's likely to last for at least another 4-6 weeks. After a long drought of consulting work, I presently am juggling four different projects. As I approach my second anniversary of Executive Summary Consulting, I'm beginning to recognize the cyclical nature of my work around this time of year, owing to budgets closing out and new planning cycles.

How good am I as a consultant? Well, yesterday I convinced a client to extend the deadline on a project another week, pay me extra to subcontract much of the work to another writer, and that in doing so I was saving him money and should be recognized as the hero I am. Get paid more to do less: that's my kind of work ethic. Life is good at the moment, if I survive the next few weeks and keep everybody happy, but I'm a Gemini, and we're so charming, so I'm not too worried. And lest you think it's all finesse and no hard work, I actually forewent a really good New Year's Eve party from the sound of it to avoid the next day's hangover so I could stay productive (and I must say I'm amazed a certain "reluctant Lothario" hasn't forced Nick to take that post down yet).

Meanwhile, turns out I'm also a somebody in the blogosphere these days according to two analyses.

Let's just hope this week is reflective of the balance of the rest of the year.