The Rake Magazine

Month: October 2005

Oogle Vs. Google

They say you can judge a person by which section of the Sunday Times he reads first. On that basis, this readers is moderately schizophrenic. It depends, but if I’m running out the door, and don’t wish to lug the whole shooting match with me, I’ll normally extract the magazine, the week in review, arts and entertainment, style, and the book review. If I’m feeling especially ambitious, i’ll bring a long the A section. At that point, it becomes obvious that I am passively declining the value of travel, sports, and business, which I don’t mean to do, but you know.

Yesterday, though, was an unusually crazy day and I had time for just two stories– Deborah Solomon’s bizarre interview with George and Barbara Bush’s personal chef, in the magazine; and an A1 business story that jumped to the ballast tanks of the business section. The latter story was one of the more comprehensive I’ve seen about Google, particularly the business end of the business. That is, how an idealistic little search engine company that had the best search algorithms in the world had the chutzpah to recognize that that asset could be leveraged into billions and billions of dollars in advertising revenue. How’d they do that? By returning paid advertisements with every search, thereby targeting ads to people who are specifically looking for information that an advertiser wants to provide, and may be in the best position to provide. Of course, the serious dough comes less from Google’s results pages themselves, and more from the colonization of all editorial content on the web. Thus, anytime the word “soda pop” appears on any page on the net where Google is serving ads, a Coca-Cola ad runs in the gutters (not an actual example). I’ve mentioned before that this is a sort of reverse product placement: A writer might innocently use the word “Nike” in a story about basketball, and Google serves an ad from the Nike coproation that runs adjacent to the story. That would never fly in the world of print, because it would be seen as discrediting the story; being adjacent to an advert, we assume that a nefarious, human being with a suitcase of snake oil was responsible for the hard sell. Not so with Google; we apparently see it as a blameless mechanical pairing. The massive servers at Google out in California are merely reacting to editorial content, never directing it.

Naturally, since Google now sells more ads than almost any other stand-alone media company, they must grow or die. The Times article mentioned that Google is looking at ways to extend into other media, and it’s an interesting thought that doesn’t get teased out very much. In particualr, reporter Saul Hansell writes,

Now Google is looking to expand its advertising into even more places. It is testing a plan to buy pages in magazines on which to place text ads.

I imagine that would look something like this: My magazine will publish yet another lengthy, fawning story on Nick Denton, which will refer ad nauseum to the amazing blogs Wonkette and Gawker and Fleshbot. Before we go to press, we will make our issue available to Google’s search spiders, and Google will buy adjacency advertising on behalf of Nick Denton. Maybe this even happens at the printer’s FTP site, to aquit everyone at the magazine from any direct involvement. We merely hold apage oipen for Google ads that will be eelectronically zapped into place.

(One interesting tangent made clear by Hansell’s piece was that Google’s insight was that simple, single-format text advertising–very much an electronic version of a small calssified ad–is what’s dridving this revolution, not huge splashy brand-driven display ads. This may result in an aesthetic evolution in advertising–a return to narrative and text-based ads. In other words, ads that people read rather than oogle.)

Ironically, the business section of the New York Times which celebrated the history and the putative, profitable future of Google also printed a full-page paid advertisement (not adjacent, by God)–by Google, looking for exceptional job candidates. Google executives obviously knew the story was coming, and probably even knew when it was coming, and they exercised their good sense and business acumen by capitalizing on the ersatz hyperlink. All those thousands of servers, and still the human genius for the sales pitch shines through.

October 31, 2005
Raymond, Remembered

A phone call late Halloween night can reduce your head to nothing but a fat band of static, all desire creeping slowly down your body and leaking out the bottoms of your feet. This crippled world keeps pushing us further and further into our hiding places.

How much more can fall off this planet before it just floats free of its orbit and rolls off into the coldest, deepest reaches of space?

It’s hard to love breathing things.

We stood out there in the rain, up to our ankles in mud, burying that dog who had found his lucky place in the world, and who was every day a reminder of how much one beating heart can add to the complicated equation that is living.

The collar on the kitchen table. The photos on the refrigerator. The rumpled blankets in the corner. The strewn, chewable things. That hole in the ground.

I have had days and nights when a dog was the only lamp by which I could make my way through this world, when the adoring eyes of that one serious responsibility were the only solid indicator that I had any business being alive and provided the only certainty that I belonged. Every single day that you are tangled up and bound with gravity on this planet and can feel yourself beloved, necessary for even one creature’s happiness, is a gift.

Still, you never stop being afraid of the gray takeaway boys. They’re always out there in the night, sleepless, leaning on their shovels.

The music doesn’t work, even as a distraction, can’t stop all the feelings your head keeps forcing down your throat like a series of bowling balls. But, come on, listen to Al Green and tell me what you have against this world.

What choice do you really have?

You do have a choice, certainly. You have choices, options.

But for at least one more day you’ll open the blinds on another bruised morning and live.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.

–George Orwell, “Reflections on Gandhi”

October 31, 2005
…Like Something Thrown From The Furnace Of A Star

Soon enough he’d find himself behind the wheel of a parked car again, the location as inexplicable to him as it was irrelevant, the sound of gravel still rolling in his ears. A dark little patch of the world, the moon something he was vaguely aware of, a far away place where he wished he lived in an Airstream trailer and floated each night above the formica tabletop, playing solitaire.

He wouldn’t be able to find the right song. Communication of any sort would be out of the question. There would be things crouched just behind his eyes that he was determined to avoid forever.

He might well sit for some time mulling that curious phrase: Out of the question. He would, you can be sure, come to no conclusions. Though he was something of a specialist in conclusions (even, or perhaps especially, spectacular ones), he hated them all the same.

All the same: there was another one. If he allowed himself to sit still long enough the language would tie his head in knots he might never untangle.

If he made any kind of choice –however insignificant– in this state of mind, he would regret it immediately.

State of mind.

His mother, who had kitchen cupboards full of canned tuna fish, had recently said to him on the telephone (he was paraphrasing): You look up from your knitting and another world has been swept away or smashed to pieces. It breaks your heart.

He supposed she was right. Yet shouldn’t he have felt ashamed to find a sort of consolation in the thought that somewhere at that very moment a train had likely come off the rails –not metaphor, but true catastrophe, with body bags heaped like cordwood on the embankment?

In response to his mother he had said: These days contagion seems to arrive by the strangest damn delivery mechanisms.

To which his mother had replied: I don’t know what you’re talking about.

I don’t want to argue with you, he had said, which was the truth. What he had meant, though, was this: Birds.

Wherever it was he would soon find himself, he’d recognize that he was a couple weeks away from tacking another year onto his age, that he was almost certainly more than halfway through his life, and he would wonder whether he really felt up to completing that journey, which he honestly knew better than to think of as any kind of a journey.

Most days lately he supposed the answer to that question was no.

He might encounter a bell tower looming across the fields, and upon investigation discover that this tower was now empty.

He might think: Not the cold ground, but the consuming fire. Not the slow decomposition, but the swift conflagration.

If he was lucky, and still willing to look for such things, he might see, far out in the country, a steaming white horse rolling on its back in the moon-jeweled frost; a horse that, though obviously very much alive, appeared nonetheless to be on the verge of burning, trembling at the very threshold of combustion.

The monastery is quiet. Seconal

drifts down upon it from the moon.

I can see the lights

of the city I came from,

can remember how a boy sets out

like something thrown from the furnace

of a star. In the conflagration of memory

my people sit on green benches in the park,

terrified, evil, broken by love–

to sit with them inside that invisible fire

of hours day after day while the shadow of the milk

billboard crawled across the street

seemed impossible, but how

was it different from here,

where they have one day they play over

and over as if they think

it is our favorite, and we stay

for our natural lives,

a phrase that conjures up the sun’s

dark ash adrift after ten billion years

of unconsolable burning? Brother Thomas’s

schoolgirl obsession with the cheap

doings of TV starlets breaks

everybody’s heart, and the yellow sap

of one particular race of cactus grows

tragic for the fascination in which

it imprisons Brother Toby –I can’t witness

his slavering and relating how it can be changed

into some unprecedented kind of plastic–

and the monastery refuses

to say where it is taking us. At night

we hear the trainers from the base

down there, and I see them blotting out the stars,

and I stand on the hill and listen, bone white with desire.

It was love that sent me on the journey,

love that called me home. But it’s the terror

of being just one person –one chance, one set of days–

that keeps me absolutely still tonight and makes me listen

intently to those young men above us

flying in their airplanes in the dark.

—Denis Johnson, “The Monk’s Insomnia”

October 30, 2005
Piling On

Like the class weakling kicking sand in the face of the vanquished playground bully, some Democrats are now tut-tutting about the “far right” torpedoing Harriet Miers. “She deserved her day in court,” Mark Shields reliably repeated last night on NewHour, David Brooks in a pink tie smirking nearby. Understandable that the left was cautiously optimistic that she might have become a SCOTUS turncoat, but we really feel bad about missing out on some of the more interesting questions she might have been asked by our fine elected representives in Congress. Like: “So have you ever actually been inside a courtroom–say even a municipal family court?” Or, “How do you feel about the President of the US placing personal loyalty above the welfare of the nation he supposedly stewards?” (Good followup: “To your knowledge, has the president fired Michael Brown yet? Or, for that matter, anyone in his entire administration, ever?”

October 28, 2005
Uh, Yeah: Times Edition

Neglected for almost a week: In last Saturday’s NYTimes, you might have been sidetracked by MoDo’s salvo in her brief but incandescent public catfight with JuMi. I wasn’t; I noticed that the easy-to-overlook, irenic Nick Kristof wrote at length about why we all should fear a capricious indictment (or two) from an off-the-rails independent counsel, because, you know, remember the hateful playground pushing that happened the last time a president was impeached? Aside from the fact that I don’t even know where the goalposts are now, or whether they even exist, because they’ve been moved so far and so frequently by the moral relativists on both teams, I found it somehow consoling that Kristof is able to rise above it all to suggest that an indictment (or an impeachment) would be a bad thing for the nation, and that it is the voters who should exact revenge:

Absent any very clear evidence of law-breaking, the White House ideologues should be ousted by voters, not by prosecutors.

And so they shall. After the Bush Administration reverses the twenty-second amendment, and permits itself to run for election again in 2006.

October 27, 2005
Towers Repeating

Apropos of Pete’s comments yesterday, I have to admit I haven’t looked at many New Times papers in recent years. I think their impulse to be politically contrarian is a good one (which is a much different thing than being anti-liberal, but that’s a whole ‘nother conversation–of course, anti-liberalism usually IS more or less disguised conservatism, but not always) for a lot of different reasons, but the nationalizing of a sensibility and actual content is obviously troubling.

The Onion is, of course, in a class all its own and not really an alt-weekly in any meaningful way, although one could make an interesting argument that it is to alt-weekly print what Jon Stewart is to network news. I think their only opportunities for profitability are national ads (they get a few of those, but may be too edgy to get a lot more) and local listings ads (hence the expanded arts coverage). Editorially, they could never replace the City Pages of the world. As a business, they surely could, if the world of paper has any survivors in the next 20 years.

Alt-weekly news is some of the most vital journalism happening today (although not always the most entertaining or interesting, in my humble opinion–again, another separate question), but eventually I fear these big chains will follow the lead of even the most respected dailies (i..e. McClatchy) in quietly requiring mid-level editors to sit in on business meetings that are not about news but about news readers, not about what’s in the paper, but about who reads it. And, maybe more to the point, how much that paper costs (that is, the newsprint itself).

October 27, 2005
The Miers head fake

Would somebody please give this guy head so we can impeach him?

We weren’t cheered too much by Miers withdrawal from the Supreme Court nomination. It’s not as if Bush needed anything else to emphasize how truly out of his depth he is. I was always convinced the decision to nominate her in the first place went something like this:

Bush: “Karl, Dick, we’ve got to nominate someone for that big judge thing whatchamacallit. You know any good ‘ol boys who could completely tip the court off the edge of reason?”

Rove: “Dubya, I got my own damn problems here with this Fitzgerald guy. Can’t you do anything yourself?”

Bush: (Yelling down the hall) “Hey, Harriet, whatcha doin’ for the rest of your life?”

Cheney: (Stage whisper to Rove) “Evidently not.”

But, now that we’ve had our fun with Harriet, maybe we should turn our thoughts to those who’ve really paid the price for Bush’s incompetence and Rove’s treachery. In case you’ve forgotten, there is tape of Rove telling the Republican National Committee in January 2002 that the “War on Terror” would be the issue that would carry the Republicans to victory in the next election. Since the overthrow of the Taliban in Afganistan wasn’t going to take that long, they needed something else to keep up the image of Bush as the man to keep America safe.

So we get lies about WMD, the Plame incident, and a war that’s now killed 2000 American boys and girls, wounded and crippled another 15,000, and killed or wounded uncounted Iraqis. Does anyone still believe we did this for the Iraquis as opposed to doing it to keep Cheney and Rove in power?

The indictments that are probably coming down soon are already being positioned by the White House and their sock puppets as “technical” ones–ones that will probably be for perjury instead of the crime of outing one of our covert agents. We get a big laugh out of that, especially since Hutchison voted to remove Bill Clinton from office for just such a “technicality.”

But somebody’s keeping their eye on the ball, despite all the Republican pitches in the dirt.

Today Operation Truth released a new television ad. Watch it, please.

And would someone tell me how oral sex grew into an impeachable offense while all those flag-draped coffins are kept out of sight?

October 27, 2005
A Wish In The Wee Hours

If dogs could stand as small

as humans, and on their hind

legs, upright in a manner of speaking,

and if they could negotiate

the complexities of a phone

booth and had change,

or pockets for change,

and if you could still find

a functioning phone booth

in this godforsaken city,

I’d wish a lost dog would dial

my number entirely by accident

at four o’clock in the morning

and ask me to drive across

town to scratch its belly

and murmur consoling endearments

in the parking lot of a SuperAmerica.

October 27, 2005
Musing on the last two World Series winners

Say it ain’t so, Joe. The Sox beat me to it.

Next time I’m in Vegas, I’m putting $100 on the Cubs to win the 2006 Series. It’s their turn.

October 27, 2005
(Ironing) Bored with the Strib

I have to finish this so I can make the hubby a nice dinner

Probing every day for a new low in journalism, the Strib doesn’t let us down today.

One of my female colleagues brought this to my attention. Right before she vowed to call and cancel her subscription.

I never look at the life style section. This is why. Imagine you are a female reader and you run across this sentence: “Whether you’re tired of paying dry-cleaning bills or just want to impress your future mother-in-law, it makes sense to learn how to iron a shirt.”

Unfortunately, I never met my mother-in-law, but I can certainly tell from the way that she raised her daughter that ironing technique was not high on her list of qualifications to be permitted to marry into the family.

Irony, yes. Ironing, only if you have to.

One thing an iron would be good for, though, is cracking some editor at the Strib over the head. I don’t normally advocate violence, but in this case, I’d make an exception.

October 25, 2005